Morning relaxed the mighty granite cliff muscles. It was the time of
the Avalanche.
The tunnels echoed to running bare feet. Adults, children pushed with
eager, hungry eyes toward the outside dawn. From far out, Sim heard
a rumble of rock, a scream, a silence. Avalanches fell into valley.
Stones that had been biding their time, not quite ready to fall, for
a million years let go their bulks, and where they had begun their
journey as single boulders they smashed upon the valley floor in a
thousand shrapnels and friction-heated nuggets.
Every morning at least one person was caught in the downpour.
The cliff people dared the avalanches. It added one more excitement to
their lives, already too short, too headlong, too dangerous.
Sim felt himself seized up by his father. He was carried brusquely down
the tunnel for a thousand yards, to where the daylight appeared. There
was a shining insane light in his father's eyes. Sim could not move. He
sensed what was going to happen. Behind his father, his mother hurried,
bringing with her the little sister, Dark. "Wait! Be careful!" she
cried to her husband.
Sim felt his father crouch, listening.
High in the cliff was a tremor, a shivering.
"Now!" bellowed his father, and leaped out.
An avalanche fell down at them!
Sim had accelerated impressions of plunging walls, dust, confusion. His
mother screamed! There was a jolting, a plunging.
With one last step, Sim's father hurried him forward into the day. The
avalanche thundered behind him. The mouth of the cave, where mother and
Dark stood back out of the way, was choked with rubble and two boulders
that weighed a hundred pounds each.
The storm thunder of the avalanche passed away to a trickle of sand.
Sim's father burst out into laughter. "Made it! By the Gods! Made it
alive!" And he looked scornfully at the cliff and spat. "Pagh!"
Mother and sister Dark struggled through the rubble. She cursed her
husband. "Fool! You might have killed Sim!"
"I may yet," retorted the father.
Sim was not listening. He was fascinated with the remains of an
avalanche afront of the next tunnel. A blood stain trickled out from
under a rise of boulders, soaking into the ground. There was nothing
else to be seen. Someone else had lost the game.
Dark ran ahead on lithe, supple feet, naked and certain.
The valley air was like a wine filtered between mountains. The heaven
was a restive blue; not the pale scorched atmosphere of full day, nor
the bloated, bruised black-purple of night, a-riot with sickly shining
stars.
This was a tide pool. A place where waves of varying and violent
temperatures struck, receded. Now the tide pool was quiet, cool, and
its life moved abroad.
Laughter! Far away, Sim heard it. Why laughter? How could any of his
people find time for laughing? Perhaps later he would discover why.
The valley suddenly blushed with impulsive color. Plant-life, thawing
in the precipitant dawn, shoved out from most unexpected sources. It
flowered as you watched. Pale green tendrils appeared on scoured rocks.
Seconds later, ripe globes of fruit twitched upon the blade-tips.
Father gave Sim over to mother and harvested the momentary, volatile
crop, thrust scarlet, blue, yellow fruits into a fur sack which hung at
his waist. Mother tugged at the moist new grasses, laid them on Sim's
tongue.
His senses were being honed to a fine edge. He stored knowledge
thirstily. He understood love, marriage, customs, anger, pity, rage,
selfishness, shadings and subtleties, realities and reflections. One
thing suggested another. The sight of green plant life whirled his mind
like a gyroscope, seeking balance in a world where lack of time for
explanations made a mind seek and interpret on its own. The soft burden
of food gave him knowledge of his system, of energy, of movement. Like
a bird newly cracking its way from a shell, he was almost a unit,
complete, all-knowing. Heredity had done all this for him. He grew
excited with his ability.
* * * * *
They walked, mother, father and the two children, smelling the smells,
watching the birds bounce from wall to wall of the valley like
scurrying pebbles and suddenly the father said a strange thing:
"Remember?"
Remember what? Sim lay cradled. Was it any effort for them to remember
when they'd lived only seven days!
The husband and wife looked at each other.
"Was it only three days ago?" said the woman, her body shaking, her
eyes closing to think. "I can't believe it. It is so unfair." She
sobbed, then drew her hand across her face and bit her parched lips.
The wind played at her gray hair. "Now is my turn to cry. An hour ago
it was you!"
"An hour is half a life."
"Come," she took her husband's arm. "Let us look at everything, because
it will be our last looking."
"The sun'll be up in a few minutes," said the old man. "We must turn
back now."
"Just one more moment," pleaded the woman.
"The sun will catch us."
"Let it catch me then!"
"You don't mean that."
"I mean nothing, nothing at all," cried the woman.
The sun was coming fast. The green in the valley burnt away. Searing
wind blasted from over the cliffs. Far away where sun bolts hammered
battlements of cliff, the huge stone faces shook their contents; those
avalanches not already powdered down, were now released and fell like
mantles.
"Dark!" shouted the father. The girl sprang over the warm floor of the
valley, answering, her hair a black flag behind her. Hands full of
green fruits, she joined them.
The sun rimmed the horizon with flame, the air convulsed dangerously
with it, and whistled.
The cave people bolted, shouting, picking up their fallen children,
bearing vast loads of fruit and grass with them back to their deep
hideouts. In moments the valley was bare. Except for one small child
someone had forgotten. He was running far out on the flatness, but he
was not strong enough, and the engulfing heat was drifting down from
the cliffs even as he was half across the valley.
Flowers were burnt into effigies, grasses sucked back into rocks like
singed snakes, flower seeds whirled and fell in the sudden furnace
blast of wind, sown far into gullies and crannies, ready to blossom at
sunset tonight, and then go to seed and die again.
Sim's father watched that child running, alone, out on the floor of
the valley. He and his wife and Dark and Sim were safe in the mouth of
their tunnel.
"He'll never make it," said father. "Do not watch him, woman. It's not
a good thing to watch."
They turned away. All except Sim, whose eyes had caught a glint of
metal far away. His heart hammered in him, and his eyes blurred.
Far away, atop a low mountain, one of those metal seeds from space
reflected a dazzling ripple of light! It was like one of his
intra-embryo dreams fulfilled! A metal space seed, intact, undamaged,
lying on a mountain! There was his future! There was his hope
for survival! There was where he would go in a few days, when he
was--strange thought--a grown man!
The sun plunged into the valley like molten lava.
The little running child screamed, the sun burned, and the screaming
stopped.
Sim's mother walked painfully, with sudden age, down the tunnel,
paused, reached up, broke off two last icicles that had formed during
the night. She handed one to her husband, kept the other. "We will
drink one last toast. To you, to the children."
"To _you_," he nodded to her. "To the children." They lifted the
icicles. The warmth melted the ice down into their thirsty mouths.
* * * * *
All day the sun seemed to blaze and erupt into the valley. Sim could
not see it, but the vivid pictorials in his parents' minds were
sufficient evidence of the nature of the day fire. The light ran like
mercury, sizzling and roasting the caves, poking inward, but never
penetrating deeply enough. It lighted the caves. It made the hollows of
the cliff comfortably warm.
Sim fought to keep his parents young. But no matter how hard he fought
with mind and image, they became like mummies before him. His father
seemed to dissolve from one stage of oldness to another. This is what
will happen to me soon, though Sim in terror.
Sim grew upon himself. He felt the digestive-eliminatory movements
of his body. He was fed every minute, he was continually swallowing,
feeding. He began to fit words to images and processes. Such a word was
love. It was not an abstraction, but a process, a stir of breath, a
smell of morning air, a flutter of heart, the curve of arm holding him,
the look in the suspended face of his mother. He saw the processes,
then searched behind her suspended face and there was the word, in her
brain, ready to use. His throat prepared to speak. Life was pushing
him, rushing him along toward oblivion.
He sensed the expansion of his fingernails, the adjustments of his
cells, the profusion of his hair, the multiplication of his bones and
sinew, the grooving of the soft pale wax of his brain. His brain at
birth as clear as a circle of ice, innocent, unmarked, was, an instant
later, as if hit with a thrown rock, cracked and marked and patterned
in a million crevices of thought and discovery.
His sister, Dark, ran in and out with other little hothouse children,
forever eating. His mother trembled over him, not eating, she had no
appetite, her eyes were webbed shut.
"Sunset," said his father, at last.
The day was over. The light faded, a wind sounded.
His mother arose. "I want to see the outside world once more ... just
once more...." She stared blindly, shivering.
His father's eyes were shut, he lay against the wall.
"I cannot rise," he whispered faintly. "I cannot."
"Dark!" The mother croaked, the girl came running. "Here," and Sim was
handed to the girl. "Hold to Sim, Dark, feed him, care for him." She
gave Sim one last fondling touch.
Dark said not a word, holding Sim, her great green eyes shining wetly.
"Go now," said the mother. "Take him out into the sunset time. Enjoy
yourselves. Pick foods, eat. Play."
Dark walked away without looking back. Sim twisted in her grasp,
looking over her shoulder with unbelieving, tragic eyes. He cried out
and somehow summoned from his lips the first word of his existence.
"Why...?"