The Celestial Steam Locomotive (The Song of Earth) (16 page)

“Hopho!”
 

The cry cut through his dreaming. In his agitation he lost control of a billion carefully constructed memory banks, which promptly dissolved back into the ether.
 

“Hopho!”
 

It was a real cry, a shout made by physical waves, and it shocked him. He slammed the door on his vast imaginary computer, commanding it to stay intact until he got back. He ran down the marble staircase, dreamed up by Fabel, into Eloise’s time-city, leaped into a transporter imagined by Awa, flitted through Trippata’s hyperspace to the terminal of Su.
 

He dismounted. An invisible hand was shaking his shoulder. He went through the ritual of decuerping. This was his own invention—a rapid way to return to the physical world.
 

“Hopho!”
 

The sense of touch returned and he felt a coolness against his back. He felt the hand as well as the shaking; it was warm. He heard the voice again: “Hopho, decuerp!” and he smelled the stink of the jungle. His mouth tasted sour. He opened his eyes. He was back in the physical world. The jungle cried. He heard it, tasted it, smelled it, saw it, felt it with the five senses of discomfort. He wished he were back in the plenum. Physically, he rose to his feet and, physically, slopped through the mud to the riverbank.
 

He saw the little boats. He lumbered down onto the beach, kicking at the dreamers recumbent on the mud, yelling, shaking them awake. Their eyes cleared and they began to climb to their feet. The shout was taken up by twenty voices.
 

“Decuerp! Decuerp!” They moved slowly and painfully, handicapped by a genetic defect.
 

The tiny boats drifted round the river bend in twos and threes—coracles, clinker dinghies, pinnaces. The thin cries of the babies came clearly across the water.
 

The crocodiles came too. They rose from the banks and glided into the water. They closed on the small craft and crunched them in long jaws. They tossed the babies into the air and swallowed them whole. The tribe screamed in despair.
 

Some of them struggled up the bank to outflank the brutes. Others waded out to create a diversion. The crocodiles cruised the deeper water, picking off the tiny boats as they rounded the bend, gobbling the living cargoes. The people wept and splashed. The boats were coming thick and fast now, twenty or more spread out across the river’s width. Some of them hit whirlpools and spun. Others, with tiny sails, reaped the wind and made sudden aimless darts to and fro. These were the ones that stood the best chance of survival.
 

Hopho waded out to intercept a schooner. On a broad reach it sailed directly toward him, pursued by a crocodile with a fast rippling wake. Hopho could see the occupant: a plump baby wrapped in a scrap of cloth, face scarlet and puckered with crying. It lay with its head against the transom, legs on either side of the mainmast. It squealed and kicked, and its foot became entangled in the threads of the self-steering gear. The sails luffed. The little schooner came up into the wind and stopped.
 

Hopho shouted and scooped at the water with cupped hands, trying to draw the boat nearer.
 

The crocodile nipped the transom, teeth like pincers, nostrils cavernous behind the baby’s head. Hopho dredged a rock from under the water and threw it. He was unused to physical coordination, and the rock hit the surface an arm’s length before him, splashing water into his face.
 

When he opened his eyes, boat and baby were gone...
 

Scenes like this happened annually between the years 143,306 and 143,624 Cyclic, throughout the short life of this great and imaginary civilization. It is of little importance in the sweep of history, although it remains forever the guilty secret of many generations of Cuidadors in Dome Azul.
 

Because the Cuidadors destroyed the civilization of the delta, unwittingly.
 

When the delta civilization is mentioned in present-day singings—which is not often—its people are referred to in the masculine gender. This is for convenience only, because in fact they had no sex. They did not carry the seeds of the Inner Think, either. And they were sickly; they lived, on average, a mere forty years.
 

The very existence of the tribe depended on their rescuing from the crocodiles each year a number of babies greater than the number of people who had died. Some years they succeeded; other years they failed. Sometimes older people had to sacrifice their own lives for the sake of a baby.
 

Sometimes the baby was not worth it.
 

Hopho was thirty years old and brilliant beyond measure. When he saw a baby approaching in a kayak he knew it was probably destined to be less intelligent than he. However, he also knew that he probably had only ten years left to contribute to the imaginative gestalt of the civilization.
 

He ran awkwardly upriver. Lergs was also wading toward the kayak, and Hopho sensed that Lergs’s chances of survival were poor. Lergs reached for the little boat with a fat arm. The water swirled nearby.
 

“Lergs!”
 

Hopho dragged the kayak ashore. The baby looked up at him with clear blue eyes and smiled. Hopho seized Lergs’s arm and felt the whole body jerk spasmodically as the crocodile tore at some underwater part. Hopho pulled, feet sinking into the ooze, and suddenly Lergs slid free. Hopho dragged him into the shallows.
 

Lergs was terribly light, and he trailed a cloud of red.
 

“Let me go, Hopho.”
 

“We’ll fix you up. Eloise is good with wounds.”
 

“No. Push me out. It’s better.”
 

“I need you for the gestalt, Lergs!”
 

Lergs smiled, a quick baring of teeth. “That’s the first time I’ve heard you lie, Hopho. Face the truth, friend, you’d do much better with someone young. Someone like Trevis. I’m just a muddled philosopher, but Trevis has a clear mind. He can trace the movement of galaxies for a million years into the Ifalong. With his talent, you’ll have what you want. You already have all the reasoning power in the rest of the team, and all the knowledge. Trevis has an instinctive grip of the Ifalong. With him in your team, there’s nothing you can’t do!”
 

Now Hopho spoke aloud, using a brief sentence culled from the grunts of the Wild Humans.
 

“I love you, Lergs, my friend,” he said.
 

It was a primitive statement, like death, and when the crocodile pushed its snout out of the water and took what was left of Lergs, Hopho did not object.
 

The little boats came on, borne on the snaking currents of the big river that in the Ifalong would be dead and dry and blowing sand. Only the crocodiles would survive, moving on elsewhere—timeless, perfect creatures.
 

The little boats were fewer now, and more crudely constructed. Only the occasional one rounded the bend. Upstream, the great river was smooth, its waters almost empty of human life. Some boats had floated out to sea and their occupants would soon die. Most had been destroyed by the crocodiles, and the green waters were strewn with wreckage. A few had been gathered in by the people of the delta and the babies were being fussed over and wrapped in coarse cloth. Traditional food was being prepared from the pounded root of the
hierba lechera.
 

In the year 143,299 Cyclic, a Wild Human named Dolores had made the mistake of thinking such a baby was one of her own species. She’d taken it from the water, wondering, and carried it to her village. It had been seven years before she realized her mistake, and her tribe had forced her to take the child back to the riverbank and leave it there. The child had been the first member of the delta civilization and, the following year, had retrieved two little boats from the crocodiles...
 

Now the delta people prepared for the year to come.
 

They caught and dried fish and they sowed seed. They rigged primitive shelters for the babies and the people who were going to look after them. They discussed their projects and decided on the most suitable gestalt teams.
 

They decided Hopho’s project held the most promise for new discoveries. Antilla, Buth and Stril were going to join him again. Trevis volunteered to replace Lergs.
 

“No!” said Yato, who worked alone.
 

“Why not?” Hopho respected Yato. They all did. He was a brilliant abstract historian. In the course of his lifetime, and without building on the work of any predecessor, he had traced the flow of human existence up to the present day. Working by intellect alone, he had seen the Beginning, visualized the emergence of life on Earth, evolution, diverging happentracks, wars, ice ages, everything...
 

For instance, Yato had informed the tribe that the Dome, a great mound in the distance, was probably full of sleeping humans living vicarious lives in the circuits of a giant computer.
 

“Technology would always outpace the ability of the mass of people to adapt to it,” he explained. “And at the same time, increased leisure would encourage the development of sedentary pursuits. Finally, people wouldn’t be able to face the real world—the crowding, the pressures, the foul atmosphere, the hopelessness and pointlessness of death—so they would build a safe place where they could dream forever. And to help them dream, they would build a vast storehouse of knowledge with almost infinite reasoning capacity, a composite of all the smaller computers they’d built over the ages.”
 

Now Trevis picked up the thread of that explanation—and Trevis was a futurian. He began to project Yato’s theories and to evaluate all the happen-tracks of the nearby Ifalong.
 

“If I join your group, Hopho, the tribe is doomed. We will have the capacity to gain total knowledge of the Galaxy from the beginning to the end of Time. So we will be destroyed, because someone more powerful than us will want it that way.”
 

“What could be more powerful than us, if we have total knowledge?”
 

“Brute force will always defeat knowledge, Hopho.”
 

“With what motive?”
 

And now Trevis smiled. “It’s a very old motive and it has no meaning to us. But for what it’s worth, I’ll vocalize the way the Wild Humans say it:
jealousy
.”
 

“We cannot stem the flood tide,” Hopho quoted an old tribal saying to hide his unease, “but at least we can move into another dimension.”
 

“Not this time. We’re going to be hit in our most vulnerable spot. Shall we cuerp?”
 

So they lay down together: Hopho, Trevis, Antilla, Buth and Stril, and they allowed their minds to wash over one another. Together they climbed out of their earthly environment, using Moloquit’s simple astral escalator. Moloquit had died a long time previously, but they had retained his most powerful images. Soon they arrived at a stage that Hopho could only describe as the
right place
, although it was not a place in any normal meaning of the word. They picked up the threads of their last great works, and their thoughts were like an infinite spider’s web glittering with the dew of ideas. Knowledge flowed like electricity; theories were formed, accepted, proved, built upon. It was an ecstasy of learning and there was no limit to it. There was nothing they could not know. Yato’s seeds bloomed and all the past was catalogued. Finally, Trevis’s new images began to flow into the gestalt. It was as though he were saying:
 

“We know the rules and we know how it was Now let’s discover how it will be.”
 

And another year went by.
 

Through swamp and steaming jungle to the delta in the north,
 

Three people reached the Astral Builders, where they found a fourth.
 

—Song of Earth
 

Zozula said, “I thought the Mole might help us put the Rainbow right, but it didn’t work out. Now, the other day I saw something strange in the Rainbow: a city inhabited by True Humans, in the delta. At first I thought I was scanning an ancient memory bank, but the Rainbow said it was the present day. There were land vehicles and starships and pink towers—all kinds of wonderful things. It was a very advanced technology. We must visit those people and enlist their help in putting the Rainbow right, before the whole Dome is destroyed.” “There’s no city in the delta,” said Manuel. “Have you ever been to the delta?” “Well, no. But Hasqual has. He’s traveled all over the world. If there were a city in the delta, he’d have told us. All there is, is swamp and jungle and crocodiles, and a few tribes of hunting people. Life is hard in the jungle.” He regarded Zozula critically. “I can’t imagine True Humans wanting to live there.”
 

The Girl said, “You never know. I’ve known jungles to cover whole worlds. It’s easy to miss something.”
 

“Quite right, Girl. It’s worth investigating, anyway. Your Belinda had the appearance of a True Human, Manuel. She had to come from somewhere. We must explore every possibility,” said Zozula cunningly.
 

It was morning and they sat in the ground-level of the Dome. These were the Transitional Quarters that millennia ago were used to house visitors from Outside whom the Dome inhabitants did not quite trust because of their unpredictable nature or their unusual diseases. In these cases, communication between the inhabitants and the newcomers was by visiphone and all elevator shafts were sealed off. Whole communities had grown up in the Transitional Quarters from time to time, had endured for a century or so and then died out or moved on. And the robots, cleaning cavies and washdogs had been sent in to remove the traces of their existence.