The Celestial Steam Locomotive (The Song of Earth) (31 page)

“Then walk.”
 

Humiliation said, “I’ll get scared. I know I will. And I’ll run back and fall down in the mud and let you all down, and you’ll think I’m a coward.”
 

“Keep holding our hands.”
 

Pain said, “There are snags under the water—oh, my poor feet! I’m sure I’ll step on a snag and it’ll go right through my foot.”
 

“Don’t think about it.”
 

Loss said, “Maybe the lake wasn’t such a bad place. We had some good times there. Maybe we should stay.”
 

“It’s a disgusting, stinking place.”
 

Death said,
“There’s a crocodile.”
 

And a ripple moved toward them.
 

The Girl said, “That is not a crocodile.” She let go of the hands of the flaiads and plunged forward, snatching at the water. She held up a struggling frog for them to see, then threw it away. They moved forward again.
 

They were nearly out from under the trees. The sky above was dark and menacing. The Girl reassured the flaiads, “Soon you’ll be able to fly away. Look—there’s the sky! How long is it since you’ve seen the sky?”
 

The flaiads looked up, wondering. They fluttered their wings. The sky roared like a monster, and a flash of brilliant light stabbed toward them.
 

The Swamp lit up and the hard shadows of the trees wheeled around. For a moment the Girl was scared again—and suddenly there were crocodiles everywhere, their eyes blinking red on the surface as they cruised
 

toward the flaiads. A branch crashed down before them, blazing and sizzling. The flaiads broke the chain and, turning, ploughed frantically back toward the shore.
 

The Girl stood there, waist-deep in filth while her moment of fear changed to quick rage. Her hair was matted with mud, her eyes were momentarily dazzled, something nameless wriggled under her foot. A sudden wind whipped sparks from the fire around her, stinging her skin. The crocodiles closed in.
 

The Girl turned her face to the sky.
 

“You up there!” she shouted at the heavens.
“Damn you all to hell!”
 

And the wind dropped and the crocodiles were gone. The last branch of the blazing bough began to slide beneath the surface, the flames flickering out.
 

“Oh, no,” said the Girl. “You don’t get off so easily.”
 

She snatched up the brand before the glow died and carried it back to the shore where the flaiads cowered. By the time she reached them the branch was burning again. She took it to a huge rotted bole and thrust it into the dry interior—and now, as though approving of what she did, the wind rose again, fanning the flames.
 

“Die, Forest,” said the Girl...
 

She led the flaiads back to the lake and they waited all day, while behind them the flames spread. When they huddled in the hut that evening, they could see the fire as a glow on the bellies of the clouds; and by midnight it was very close, and the crashing of trees was loud. The Girl led the flaiads into the lake and they crouched in the water close under the bank while the blaze roared overhead and all around.
 

By morning the fire had passed on, so they emerged from the lake and stood on the blackened shore. Smoke trailed from a few broken trunks here and there, but most of the flames were out and the trees were dead, blackened and limbless.
 

“Look,” said the Girl.
 

Morning came all around them, in soft light the forest had never known before. Overhead the sky was blue and clear. As the flaiads stood in wonderment, the tips of the trees changed from black to gold and within minutes the floor of the Forest of Fear was illuminated with a golden strangeness it had never known. The sun rose, the shadows shortened and soon everything was light.
 

“Now,” said the Girl. “Fly, flaiads!”
 

“But the branches... Everything up there is strange and bright... We’re scared...”
 

“The branches are burned off and you can fly straight up and out of here. Go on, now! If you don’t fly, the forest will begin to grow again and the branches will close over you. Is that what you really want? To live here in misery forever? This is your chance, flaiads. Take it!”
 

It was Humiliation who moved first. Blushing, she fluttered her wings, stifling her imagination, which told her how foolish she would look falling flat on her back. She jumped, fluttered and came down again.
 

Nobody laughed.
 

She jumped again and this time her wings bore her up between the blackened trunks, up past the sharp tips and into the golden sky.
 

Laughing now, the other flaiads followed.
 

The Girl watched them as they rose, their gossamer wings ablaze with light, their laughter becoming faint, until it sounded like the song of distant birds and their bodies were daystars against the sky. Then she turned away and walked toward the swamp, knowing the crocodiles would be gone.
 

So the Girl shook off the May Bees’ poison and freed the flaiads, who had fulfilled their use and were heard of no more. They occur in earlier legends from different parts of Old Earth but at the time of the Triad they were the tools of Starquin as he shaped the Girl to his Purpose.
 

Starquin’s Purpose... This did not emerge until the Hate Bombs were planted, so the one very important event that happened before the Hate Bombs—the ingestion of bor by the beautiful tiger-Captain Spring—was accidental and had nothing to do with Starquin’s will. In fact the coming of the Macrobes was ultimately against the will of Starquin because it resulted in the Inner Think and human longevity, and the Regression... It is ironic to think that those tiny, kindly parasites were responsible at first for
shortening
human life.
 

The Macrobes. There are many stories of the Macrobes and the beginnings of their partnership with Man, which resulted in the creation of a new form of
homo sapiens
. Probably the simplest is contained in an ancient recording of an event on a rock in the Asteroid Belt, sometime in the 95th millennium, at which time the new humans were known simply as the Hosts...
 

Agonistes took a thousand-year egg from the basket and popped it. A faint miasma drifted from the crack in the shell.
 

A voice said, “To the descendants of me, Anatole Ecks, hello. I hope you are in good health. I have concealed a casket beneath a rock in Cavaha which I think you...” The voice faded out. Agonistes crumbled the shell and allowed it to fall to the sand in fragments.
 

“A dud.”
 

“How much did you pay for them, you old fool?” Enchantress, equally old, asked.
 

“It’s not the treasure that matters. I’ve never followed up anything I’ve heard from an egg. I just like to hear those voices from the past. I like to imagine what the people were like.” Agonistes’ voice was wistful. He was old, almost a century old, and he clung to the past like life itself.
 

“Did it ever occur to you that the eggs could be fakes?” This from Sudden, a pouting, proud youth.
 

“They have the ring of truth. The merchant told me they were part of a cache at least twenty-two centuries old, and I believe him.” He cracked another, reverently.
 

A stink of hydrogen sulfide. The egg uttered a string of obscenities, ending with a cackle of derision.
 

“That tells me something about the people, too,” said Agonistes.
 

“Yes. They were just like us.”
 

Now Maya spoke for the first time. “They were frightened of dying—as we are—so they had to leave a bit of themselves behind. A word, a legacy, sometimes a last stab of vindictiveness. They couldn’t know it would become a racket, that eggs would change hands at high prices because so many of them contained directions to hidden treasure. They couldn’t know that the descendants of wealthy folk would sell them unopened to the highest bidder.”
 

“Some folk aren’t so frightened of dying, I hear,” said Enchantress, with that deep portentousness of the aged.
 

“The Hosts? You’ve heard of them recently?” Sudden looked interested.
 

“There are rumors again.”
 

“I’ve heard the same rumors every few years, all my life,” said Agonistes skeptically. “Every few years there’s a witch hunt: The Hosts are among us! It’s nonsense. The Hosts died out two thousand years ago—or else they were killed.”
 

Enchantress said cunningly, “Maya doesn’t seem to age. Maybe we should report her to the authorities.”
 

Maya merely smiled.
 

“What exactly were the Hosts, anyway, Maya?” asked Sudden. Maya was acknowledged to be the history student among them, young though she was.
 

She seemed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of ancient events—which
 

lent a barb to Enchantress’s comment.
 

“The Hosts were humans like us. Or maybe a little more than human.”
 

“Like the Specialists? Animals? No wonder they were wiped out. Maybe we should do the same favor for the Specialists.”
 

“Enchantress,” said Agonistes equably, “you don’t improve with age.”
 

“At least I still have possession of my faculties.” Her tone was spiteful. Maya watched her sadly, Sudden with delighted interest. Another quarrel would brighten this dull day. “At least I wasn’t thrown out of the Guild...”
 

“You were never in the Guild.”
 

“Tell us what happened, old man. Tell us why they threw you out.” Sudden joined in, goading. “Cowardice, wasn’t it? You lost your ship to the Bale Wolves?”
 

“I heard...” said Maya quietly, “Rowena’s alive...”
 

The old man watched her for a moment, then nodded. “I heard that too, girl. Alive, after all these years. They say the Bale Wolves held her prisoner—for seventy years... Imagine that. I wonder...”
 

Enchantress cackled. “You wonder if she’ll come? You’re dreading that, I’ll bet. To be faced with the woman you lost to the enemy. To be faced with the past, with your incompetence. Think of that, old man. Any moment she might step from the Pillar...”
 

The Pillar was a tall edifice nearby, a kind of monument whose origins were lost in antiquity, but that seemed to act as a magnet upon which the lines of force of the Greataway converged. It was a couple of meters tall and pockmarked with meteorite scars.
 

As though on cue, a figure suddenly appeared before it.
 

Agonistes drew in a sharp breath.
 

But it was a young girl, even younger than Maya. She looked at them uncertainly, sizing them up. She wore a tiny white skirt and her body glowed and glittered with gold and jewelry. She was small and unreal, and all that wealth sat uneasily on her, like a crown on a baby. She took three halting steps toward them. She wanted to travel on, and no questions asked, which was why she had come via this remote asteroid instead of using the Guild and the authorized routes of the Greataway. Ropes of diamonds in gold settings hung coldly against her warm, bare breasts.
 

Sudden said, “I’m Sudden and I have the mynde. I can take you anywhere you want to go.”
 

Enchantress said, “Anywhere is right. With this young fool you don’t know where you’ll end up, my dear. Let me take you.”
 

The girl said, “I don’t mind where I go. Anywhere. Where is this?”
 

“Valta, an asteroid stage. Abandoned now, except for us.”
 

Agonistes was silent, having reasons of his own for not wanting a fare at this time. Sudden took the girl’s hand and talked to her quietly; then the two of them disappeared as they stood.
 

“Well... At least he got the first part right.” Enchantress turned to Agonistes, ready to renew the offensive.
 

He said quickly, “You were telling us about the Hosts, Maya.”
 

And Maya’s face seemed to go a little out of focus, the way it always did when she reached back into the long-gone past. The shacks of the shantytown beyond the Pillar looked sharp-edged by comparison.
It is as though Maya is not quite
here
on these occasions,
thought Agonistes.
 

“It began on a planet called Talk-to-Yourself almost two thousand years ago,” said Maya, “but the Macrobes weren’t isolated until later, when they’d spread among a thousand or more people. A Specialist brought the Macrobes back, unknowingly. She was a ship’s captain...”
 

Agonistes shivered. Enchantress frowned.
 

Maya shimmered... In her mind something happened; in her mind and body, in space and time. An echo of a refrain came to her, a couplet from a song that wasn’t written yet...
 

The Captain was a Specialist of feline-human link.
 

She brought to Earth the captivating seeds of Inner Think
 

Inner what? And why did the captain, some faceless half-woman, suddenly assume in her mind the image of a heroine? What did Inner Think mean, and why did it seem to be
good?
And yet, was it good? Changes of style, changes of thought and attitude ran through her mind, dizzying her. The Macrobes were
bad
. Humans had said they were bad.
 

“The Macrobes possessed their host and altered his behavior,” she said determinedly. “They lived in a colorless, waterlike fluid called bor, which was at first looked on as a mild euphoric, and not addictive. Bor heightened the senses and the emotions, and even seemed to increase intelligence. After a while it was found that the effect was permanent and the user didn’t need bor any more—but he remained just a little more aware than he was before. Then it was discovered that if a drop of bor was added to ordinary water, the water became bor. So something within bor was multiplying—and soon the Macrobes were isolated.”