Complete Short Fiction, page 172
Silence lay over that high world. There was a grand dignity about it all, a sense of the spirit ascendant over the strife far below.
Here in this sky loft was peace enough to soothe any soul. The sun shone in a blue, blue sky, a glorious orb of fire in an azure transparency. And there was no feeling of chill, though that could have been because of the gray clothes that fitted so snugly around each body.
There were at least two hundred bodies. They kept gliding in and out, one among the others, so that an accurate count was absolutely impossible. Kenlon judged that half of them were women.
Watching the women, the way their long hair streamed behind them, he thought again of angels; and this time he could see that the description was almost accurate.
They were smaller than the men. Their faces were delicate, finely molded, their hands lovely, somehow untouched by the crude ardor of the wind and the perpetual dampness of the mists below.
It was the women who started the singing. Their voices intruded gently upon the silence, as if first one, and then others, following some secret cue, joined the swelling chorus.
Clear as running water, their voices ran the gamut of a song that was at once almost unbearably sweet yet tuneless, without coherent rhythm or pattern. A universe of sadness and joy quavered in their tones and semitones.
The men took up the words; and now, Kenlon saw, the whole group was flying and singing in unison.
Their song seemed the very essence of the music of an old and gentle race to whom tragedy had come. After a little, Kenlon was able to make out the meaning of the words, though he caught only snatches of the words themselves. Like the music, the words had no rhyme, no meter; and they did not even seem to be broken into verses:
We are the winged.
We sing of ancient glories and of
a world to be
When the water is gone, and
there is land again
To hold our eager feet.
For a 999 of nine-ones we have
kept our faith with destiny.
We have borne children to carry
on the race of men.
Their children have borne children.
We have lived as the council advised.
Now we are threatened.
The men of the sea envy us our
wings.
They desire to bring us low;
And we have no weapons.
We have no material to build
weapons
We have only the council, which
tells us to be brave,
And to carry on in faith and
hope for the future.
We have faith and hope in the
future,
But we are disturbed; we feel
there is need for strong action.
For a 999 of nine-ones we must
live our life;
A 999 of nine-ones of waiting,
of marking time, of simply
living until Earth once more is
a green paradise.
Then we will put aside our wings
And go to work.
It will be hard,
For we are the winged.
It was a hymn to the First Cause of the infinite, half longing appeal, half gratitude for existing joys.
The song died as it had begun, gradually, until finally only a single crystal-clear woman’s voice sustained a note, that faded towards silence.
The groups were flying swiftly now, in ranks of nines. They wove intricately in and out in a sort of winged dance. Faster, faster—spinning, diving, looping, always, fantastically always in perfect timing.
The maneuver was a hundred times more complicated than any earthly dance, its movements three dimensional, its purpose somehow symbolical of the song that had gone before. Sad with longing, sweet with past joys, tinged with the uncertainty of the present, it ended finally as each group of nine joined into a series of circles around a central group of nine. They hovered there.
A man began a discourse in a grave, gentle yet resonant voice:
“On this day we shall discuss the history of the spiritual development of the mighty groundmen, as revealed by the known sayings of their sages in the last nine years before the catastrophe. Let no one doubt but that mankind attained its spiritual zenith in those dark, brave days; and that in the face of final disaster their true greatness was revealed as never before in the history of this aged Earth of ours. We—”
The voice faded strangely away from Kenlon. The scene dimmed, and withdrew, and then winked out.
The next instant he was swimming.
The water was warm; that was all he knew at first. It was hard to see, mainly, Kenlon realized after a long blank moment, because the body he was in wasn’t paying particular attention to surroundings.
Awareness came that there was a strong current running. And that he was idling along in its grasp, with only an occasional plunge of his great arm or leg to aid his swift passage.
He caught a glimpse of the bottom fifty feet below; and there was light filtering in from about an equal distance above. A dozen man-shapes were swimming near him in the dim reaches of water.
He was one of a group of fishmen swimming in a shallow sea perhaps near a shore.
Kenlon’s mind reached out to grasp the wider, greater implications. And they were clear and stunning. He was being shown. The fairness of it was absolutely staggering. First, the life and life purposes of the winged men; now the fishmen.
The water was gorgeously warm; and it billowed gently in and out of his gills, in and out, in and out. The action was as natural as all the breathing he had ever done. Kenlon was aware of it only because he concentrated his mind on it in a sudden fascination with the very idea of a human being swimming under water like a fish.
After a minute the reality was too normal to think about. It was a part of life, like the steady beating of a strong heart, like the quiet action of a stomach during the process of digestion.
He forgot about it.
His interest turned to what was happening. Wonder came as to where these water people were heading. He had an impression of alert attention to something going on in the sea darkness some distance in front of them.
The realization was like a cue. From out of the night of water came a thrillingly strange cry. It was a human voice, but unlike anything Kenlon had ever heard, a sound molded by the water environment, wonderfully alive, lusty in its piercing quality.
Incredibly, though it was in an extremely modified version of the language of the winged men, he understood every syllable.
It was a warning.
“It’s coming!” the voice cried. “Prepare!”
He felt himself patting the long knife in the sheath at his side. There was a darkly gleaming flash in the darkness ahead.
A fish, Kenlon saw; a big fish. Twenty feet long at least. A shark! This was a hunting party.
Strong, big, arrogant fish. It swam into plain view, seemed to pause as it saw the semicircle of shapes waiting for it, then disdainfully darted up and approximately between Kenlon’s body and that of the Ashman next to him.
Faster than the shark, the Ashman plunged upward. And they had it. Kenlon’s arm closed with a viselike strength around the thick, sturdy body, directly in front of the sinister triangulated An on the hard back. His long knife slid with beautiful precision into the soft white belly.
Other knives were darting their death thrusts.
The mad threshings ceased finally. The wild beast of the sea turned lazily over, and lay motionless in death.
No, not motionless. It yielded to the pressure of the current, and began to drift swiftly back the way it had come. Kenlon climbed on top of it, jackknifed his legs around its body, and sat casually while it floated into the darkness.
In a few seconds, his companions were nowhere to be seen. He was alone with the dead Ash, drifting towards an unknown destination.
The darkness did not last long.
He grew aware of a glimmer in the distance. For a moment, a curious moment, Kenlon thought he had gotten his up and sideways directions mixed; and that it was the sun ahead there.
The illusion ended as the shimmering glow widened, and spread into a vast expanse of light.
The city under the sea drew majestically into view’.
It was impossible to obtain a good look. To the individual, whose body he shared, all this was completely unmarvelous; the man simply didn’t look.
He began to paddle vigorously, as they approached the city. That restricted Kenlon’s examination even more. Because his body was intent on the task of breaking free of the current that gripped him and the dead shark.
He made it, apparently with absolutely accurate results, because a minute later he had shoved the shark into a water lock inside the transparent wall of the city, and climbed in after it.
The lock door slid shut; a pump began to work silently. The instant the water was gone, an inner door opened; and Kenlon stepped briskly through it.
He was in the city under the sea.
Kenlon had a conviction that he should feel some tremendous emotion. To be inside the city of the fishmen, he thought, actually inside. To be here to see and examine and judge.
After a second, there was still no great surge of feeling along his nerves. Memory came of how calmly he had taken the fantastic experience of being in the body of a winged man—after the first shock.
It was clear that emotions in these detached states were on a stabler plane. It all seemed to work on the basis of a tiny percentage of what it would have been in his own body.
He was an Olympian spectator aware of and influenced, but not maddened, by his observations.
Being inside the city meant no more to Kenlon’s companion mind than being out. But that very fact now worked in Kenlon’s favor. The fishman stood without interest, his mind apparently concentrated on some inner problem, his gaze absently studying the city.
Kenlon had time to observe the main pattern.
The sea city, he decided, was roughly shaped like an enormous igloo. Inside it were a series of ten other igloos, each one progressively smaller by about the radius of a city block than the one before it.
It was an immensely strong and clever arrangement. If the outer wall were breached by the corroding sea, then the second layer would take the stupendous load with the same fervor of resistance.
What was more, only a very small section of each layer could ever be flooded at one time. The layers were divided into sections and floors. He was standing high up, looking down into geometrical processions of lights and floors that extended into distance.
Everywhere were people working. Giants bending over machines, sitting on other machines that pulled loads—doing a thousand tasks, the nature of which was hidden from Kenlon, mostly by distance, partly by the disinterest of his body.
Abruptly, the latter reason became dominant. His body ceased its inactive contemplation, and walked rapidly towards a pile of almost flat metal sheets that, as he came up to them, showed themselves to be not metal.
Kenlon stepped onto the topmost sheet; and, bending down, touched a button Kenlon hadn’t noticed till the action was taken. The sheet rose up from the floor, and wafted over to the air lock. Kenlon’s large fingers pressed the button again; and the shark was drawn up from where it lay in the lock and deposited onto the carrier.
Shark and Kenlon and carrier flowed off at speed down inclined floors towards the lower depths of the city. Kenlon had fleeting glimpses of fishmen working metal at machines, fishmen in laboratories that glittered with what looked like electron tubes, and with strange pillars of light that looked like nothing on earth.
Fishmen working—that was the general picture. Not singing, not dancing, but working. Here was a busy civilization in the making. Human beings with gills, living a savage, semiprimitive existence in a city built by men with whom they had no more in common than the winged men who had been spawned in the same terrible hour for the same basic purpose.
Beyond all doubt, the fishmen were trying to make something of their environment. They were fitting into it, using it rather than yielding to it.
In them, the unconquerable spirit of man was manifesting in all its immense and variegated forms, whereas the winged men—
Kenlon shook himself mentally. He felt uneasy. The comparison was unfair. The winged men had no alternative, no opportunity. They could not but live for the future.
And what was more, the lust of and fishmen to destroy the flying men was absolutely inexcusable. It was aggression with a capital A, murder-intent of the worst kind because the victims had no weapons, no defense.
The moment their sky structure was completely under water, the winged people, with nowhere to land, would drown to the last man, woman and child.
Such a fate shared simultaneously by 239,999 human beings, an entire race was so frightful that—He refused to contemplate it.
But if the alternative was the destruction of the stronger race, what then?
Kenlon drew a mental breath. He was beginning to see the immensity of the human problem of this remote age.
The journey ended abruptly in a room that contained nothing but a great metal machine. It was metal this time, even at close range. The machine had no attendant; there was no sound of movement from it, nor sign; no activity that affected any of the senses.
The powerful hand of Kenlon’s body touched a lever. A hole gaped in the machine. Into this, the shark was drawn by the same invisible power that had originally deposited it on the thin, sheetlike carrier.
The covering glided down on the hole. Kenlon’s body stepped off the carrier, and walked rapidly to a nearby door. Its mind seemed uninterested in the fate of the shark; and, after a little, Kenlon pushed it to a far part of his brain.
He was being shown a part of a day’s—or whatever they called the time period—activities of one fishman. No portion of those activities mattered particularly. The shark was an incident; so was the present brisk walk. What was interesting was: what next?
He had a feeling that this incarnation was almost due to end. But after at least ten minutes he was still there, still watching the unfolding life of a fishman.
The man carried on conversations but these made sense only in their total effect; the particular sentences and words added mood and fragment, but meant little in themselves.
There was a brief bit, carried on with a chance-met fellow fishman, that went:
“Hail!” said Kenlon’s body. “How go the statistics?”
“Deplorably, Getta.”
“How many recalcitrants this period?”
“Total 1,111,999. That doesn’t include the unknowns born at sea during the last ten generations, and never registered.”
“I mean, how many new ones?”
“83,999.”
“Our birth rate is greater than that. But I can see your point. The call of the sea is becoming stronger. How many strangers registered?”
“999.”
“So few! Hm-m-m!”
They walked on.
Another conversation—with a woman this time, a handsome giantess, who began:
“I’m just up from the mines, Getta. They need help down there.”
“I shall pass on the information,” Getta responded sardonically. “My own inclinations do not run to grubbing in the earth.”
“You men!” the woman reproached. “Always out in the water.”
“Mouth breathing is unpleasantly dry and unwholesome.”
“That’s only your imagination. You were made to breathe in air and water equally well. It’s the mystery, the wildness of the sea, not the breathing.”
“It’s something,” Getta acknowledged. “Why not go with me. I’ll guarantee you a dozen men.”
The woman laughed. “The law that a woman who becomes a recalcitrant cannot return to the city is enough for most of us women. I love the city as much as the sea.
I wouldn’t care to be barred from either.”
“If you change your mind,” said Getta, “let me know.”
They walked their separate ways. Another conversation was with a man.
“Whither bound, Getta?”
“To the eastern gate. You know my skill with the water swallowers?”
“I have heard of it.”
“It is very important that a revival be accomplished; so says the council.”
“Are we still consulting the council on matters of policy? I thought it was used only as a source of science information.”
“We consulted it this time. Of course it happened that our general opinion tended the same way.”
“Well, good luck.”
“Thanks.”
It was not long afterwards that Getta-Kenlon arrived at what Kenlon surmised was the eastern gate. There was a lock there similar to the one through which the shark had been originally brought.
After five minutes, something moved in the sea outside. Three bodies; swimming close together.
They surged into the lock; and the water turned whitish as it drained out. The inner door slid open—and Getta faced it for the first time.
Two giants emerged, carrying the limp body of Jones-Gordon. One of them said:
“Well, here he is, Getta. Shouldn’t be too hard to revive. Only been in the water for five—”
For Kenlon, the words blurred. Darkness, like an impenetrable mask, engulfed his senses.
He could think. There was no sound, no feeling, no taste, no smell, no sight. But his brain worked.
It was a trembling world of thought in which he found himself, because the thought itself seemed too big for his brain; the thought that—
The skipper was alive.
Or rather would be alive as soon as he had been resuscitated by Getta, the expert at reviving water swallowers.
Getta’s was probably more than just a human capability. The medical science he wielded must be advanced to an almost infinite v point.
Alive . . . Jones-Gordon—
In the darkness, Kenlon’s mind writhed in a torment of reaction—and accepted the mighty fact.
