"No more tonight," said Brian aloud. "Some night, though.... Not
competent right now, my friend. Fear's a many-aspect thing. But The
Project...."
He replaced the cover on the Steinway and blew out the candle. He had
brought no torch, long use having taught his feet every inch of the
short journey. It was quite dark. The never-opened western windows of
the auditorium were dirty, most of the dirt on the outside, crusted
wind-blow salt.
In this partial darkness, something was wrong.
At first Brian could find no source for the faint light, the dim orange
with a hint of motion that had no right to be here. He peered into the
gloom of the auditorium, fixed his eyes on the oblong of blacker shadow
that was the door he meant to use, but it told him nothing.
The windows, of course. He had almost forgotten there were any. The
light, hardly deserving the name, was coming through them. But sunset
was surely well past; he had been here a long time, delaying and
brooding before he played. Sunset should not flicker.
So there was some kind of fire on the mainland. There had been no
thunderstorm. How could fire start, over there where no one ever came?
* * * * *
He stumbled a few times, swearing petulantly, locating the doorway
again and groping through it into the Hall of Music. The windows out
here were just as dirty; no use trying to see through them. There must
have been a time when he had enjoyed looking through them.
He stood shivering in the marble silence, trying to remember.
He could not. Time was a gradual eternal dying. Time was a long growth
of dirt and ocean salt, sealing in, covering over forever.
He stumbled for his cave, hurrying now, and lit two candles. He left
one by the cold stove and used the other to light his way down the
stairs to his raft. Once down there, he blew it out, afraid. The room
a candle makes in the darkness is a vulnerable room. With no walls, it
closes in a blindness. He pulled the raft by the guide-rope, gently,
for fear of noise.
He found his canoe tied as he had left it. He poked his white head
slowly beyond the sill, staring west.
Merely a bonfire gleaming, reddening the blackness of the cliff.
Brian knew the spot, a ledge almost at water level. At one end of it
was the troublesome path he used in climbing up to the forest. Usable
driftwood was often there, the supply renewed by the high tides.
"No," Brian said. "Oh, no...."
Unable to accept, or believe, or not believe, he drew his head in,
resting his forehead on the coldness of the sill, waiting for dizziness
to pass, reason to return. Then rather calm, he once more leaned out
over the sill. The fire still shone and was therefore not a disordered
dream of old age, but it was dying to a dull rose of embers.
* * * * *
He wondered a little about time. The Museum clocks and watches had
stopped long ago; Brian had ceased to want them. A sliver of moon was
hanging over the water to the east. He ought to be able to remember
the phases, deduce the approximate time from that. But his mind was
too tired or distraught to give him the necessary data. Maybe it was
somewhere around midnight.
He climbed on the sill and, with grunting effort, lifted the canoe
over it to the motionless water inside. Wasted energy, he decided, as
soon as that struggle was over. That fire had been lit before daylight
passed; whoever lit it would have seen the canoe, might even have
been watching Brian himself come home from his hunting. The canoe's
disappearance in the night would only rouse further curiosity. But
Brian was too exhausted to lift it back.
* * * * *
Why assume that the maker of the bonfire was necessarily hostile? Might
be good company.
Might be....
Brian pulled his raft through the darkness, secured it at the stairway,
and groped back to his cave.
He then locked the door. The venison was waiting, the sight and smell
of it making him suddenly ravenous. He lit a small fire in the stove,
one that he hoped would not be still sending smoke from the ventilator
shaft when morning came. He cooked the meat crudely and wolfed it down,
all enjoyment gone at the first mouthful.
He was shocked then to discover the dirtiness of his white beard. He
hadn't given himself a real bath in--weeks? He searched for scissors
and spent an absent-minded while trimming the beard back to shortness.
He ought to take some soap--valuable stuff--down to Moses' room and
wash.
Clothes, too. People probably still wore them. He had worn none for
years, except for sandals and a clout and a carrying satchel for
his trips to the mainland. He had enjoyed the freedom at first, and
especially the discovery in his rugged fifties that he did not need
clothes even for the soft winters, except perhaps a light covering
when he slept. Then almost total nakedness had become so natural, it
required no thought at all. But the owner of that bonfire--
He checked his rifles. The .22 automatic, an Army model from the 2040s,
was the best. The tiny bullets carried a paralytic poison: graze a
man's finger and he was painlessly dead in three minutes. Effective
range, with telescopic sights, three kilometers; weight, a scant five
pounds.
He sat a long time cuddling that triumph of military science, listening
for sounds that did not come, wondering often about the unknowable
passage of night toward day. Would it be two o'clock?
He wished he could have seen the Satellite, renamed in his mind the
Midnight Star, but when he was down there at his port, he had not
once looked up at the night sky. Delicate and beautiful, bearing its
everlasting freight of men who must have been dead now for twenty-five
years and who would be dead a very long time--well, it was better than
a clock, Brian often thought, if you happened to look at the midnight
sky at the right time of the month when the Man-made star could catch
the moonlight. But he had not seen it tonight.
Three o'clock?
* * * * *
At some time during the long dark, he put the rifle away on the floor.
With studied, self-conscious contempt for his own weakness, he strode
out noisily into the Hall of Music with a fresh-lit candle. This same
bravado, he knew, might dissolve at the first alien noise. While it
lasted, though, it was invigorating.
The windows were still black with night. As if the candle-flame had
found its own way, Brian was standing by the ancient marimba in
the main hall, the light slanting carelessly away from his thin,
high-veined hand. Nearby, on a small table, sat the Stone Age clay
image he had brought long ago from the Directors' meeting room on the
fifteenth floor. It startled him.
He remembered quite clearly how he himself had placed it there, obeying
a half-humorous whim: the image and the singing stones were both
magnificently older than history, so why shouldn't they live together?
Whenever he dusted the marimba, he dusted the image respectfully and
its pedestal. It would not have taken much urging from the impulses of
a lonely mind, he supposed, to make him place offerings before it and
bow down--winking first, of course, to indicate that rituals suitable
to two aging gentlemen did not have to be sensible in order to be good.
But now the clay face, recapitulating eternity, startled him. Possibly
some flicker of the candle had given it a new mimicry of life.
Though worn with antiquity, it was not deformed. The chipped places
were simple honorable scars. The two faces stared mildly from the
single head; there were plain stylized lines to represent folded hands,
equally artless marks of sex on either side. That was all. The maker
might have intended it to be a child's toy or a god.
A wooden hammer of modern make rested on the marimba. Softly, Brian
tapped a few of the stones. He struck the shrillest one harder, waking
many slow-dying overtones, and laid the hammer down, listening until
the last murmur perished and a drop of hot wax hurt his thumb.
He returned to his cave and blew out the candle, thinking of the door,
not caring that he had, in irrational bravado, left it unlocked. Face
down, he rolled his head and clenched his fingers into his pallet,
seeking in pain and finding at last the relief of stormy helpless
weeping in the total dark.
Then he slept.
* * * * *
They looked timid. The evidence of it was in their tense squatting
pose, not in what the feeble light allowed Brian to see of their faces,
which were as blank as rock. Hunched down just inside the open doorway
of the cloakroom-cave, a dim morning grayness from the Hall of Music
behind them, they were ready for flight. Brian's intelligence warned
his body to stay motionless, for readiness for flight could also be
readiness for attack. He studied them, lowering his eyelids to a slit.
On his pallet well inside the cave, he must be in deep shadow.
They were aware of him, though, keenly aware.
They were very young, perhaps sixteen or seventeen years old,
firm-muscled, the man slim but heavy in the shoulders, the girl a fully
developed woman. They were dressed alike: loin-cloths of some coarse
dull fabric and moccasins that might be deerhide. Their hair grew
nearly to the shoulders and was cut off carelessly there, but they were
evidently in the habit of combing it. They appeared to be clean. Their
complexion, so far as Brian could guess it in the meager light, was the
brown of a heavy tan.
With no immediate awareness of emotion, he decided they were beautiful,
and then, within his own poised, perilous silence, Brian reminded
himself that the young are always beautiful.