The night came and passed and then started the second day.
The bodies of all those who had died during the night were carried in a
funeral procession to the top of a small hill. The procession was long,
the bodies numerous.
Dark walked in the procession, holding the newly walking Sim by one
hand. Only an hour before dawn Sim had learned to walk.
At the top of the hill, Sim saw once again the far off metal seed.
Nobody ever looked at it, or spoke of it. Why? Was there some reason?
Was it a mirage? Why did they not run toward it? Worship it? Try to get
to it and fly away into space?
The funeral words were spoken. The bodies were placed upon the ground
where the sun, in a few minutes, would cremate them.
The procession then turned and ran down the hill, eager to have their
few minutes of free time running and playing and laughing in the sweet
air.
Dark and Sim, chattering like birds, feeding among the rocks, exchanged
what they knew of life. He was in his second day, she in her third.
They were driven, as always, by the mercurial speed of their lives.
Another piece of his life opened wide.
Fifty young men ran down from the cliffs, holding sharp stones and rock
daggers in their thick hands. Shouting, they ran off toward distant
black, low lines of small rock cliffs.
"War!"
The thought stood in Sim's brain. It shocked and beat at him. These men
were running to fight, to kill, over there in those small black cliffs
where other people lived.
But why? Wasn't life short enough without fighting, killing?
From a great distance he heard the sound of conflict, and it made his
stomach cold. "Why, Dark, why?"
Dark didn't know. Perhaps they would understand tomorrow. Now, there
was the business of eating to sustain and support their lives. Watching
Dark was like seeing a lizard forever flickering its pink tongue,
forever hungry.
Pale children ran on all sides of them. One beetle-like boy scuttled up
the rocks, knocking Sim aside, to take from him a particularly luscious
red berry he had found growing under an outcrop.
The child ate hastily of the fruit before Sim could gain his feet. Then
Sim hurled himself unsteadily, the two of them fell in a ridiculous
jumble, rolling, until Dark pried them, squalling, apart.
Sim bled. A part of him stood off, like a god, and said, "This should
not be. Children should not be this way. It is wrong!"
Dark slapped the little intruding boy away. "Get on!" she cried.
"What's your name, bad one?"
"Chion!" laughed the boy. "Chion, Chion, Chion!"
Sim glared at him with all the ferocity in his small, unskilled
features. He choked. This was his enemy. It was as if he'd waited
for an enemy of person as well as scene. He had already understood
the avalanches, the heat, the cold, the shortness of life, but these
were things of places, of scene--mute, extravagant manifestations of
unthinking nature, not motivated save by gravity and radiation. Here,
now, in this stridulent Chion he recognized a thinking enemy!
Chion darted off, turned at a distance, tauntingly crying:
"Tomorrow I will be big enough to kill you!"
And he vanished around a rock.
More children ran, giggling, by Sim. Which of them would be friends,
enemies? How could friends and enemies come about in this impossible,
quick life time? There was no time to make either, was there?
Dark, as if knowing his thoughts, drew him away. As they searched for
desired foods, she whispered fiercely in his ear. "Enemies are made
over things like stolen foods; gifts of long grasses make friends.
Enemies come, too, from opinions and thoughts. In five seconds you've
made an enemy for life. Life's so short enemies must be made quickly."
And she laughed with an irony strange for one so young, who was growing
older before her rightful time. "You must fight to protect yourself.
Others, superstitious ones, will try killing you. There is a belief, a
ridiculous belief, that if one kills another, the murderer partakes of
the life energy of the slain, and therefore will live an extra day. You
see? As long as that is believed, you're in danger."
But Sim was not listening. Bursting from a flock of delicate girls who
tomorrow would be tall, quieter, and who day after that would gain
breasts and the next day take husbands, Sim caught sight of one small
girl whose hair was a violet blue flame.
She ran past, brushed Sim, their bodies touched. Her eyes, white as
silver coins, shone at him. He knew then that he'd found a friend, a
love, a wife, one who'd a week from now lie with him atop the funeral
pyre as sunlight undressed their flesh from bone.
Only the glance, but it held them in mid-motion, one instant.
"Your name?" he shouted after her.
"Lyte!" she called laughingly back.
"I'm Sim," he answered, confused and bewildered.
"Sim!" she repeated it, flashing on. "I'll remember!"
Dark nudged his ribs. "Here, _eat_," she said to the distracted boy.
"Eat or you'll never get big enough to catch her."
From nowhere, Chion appeared, running by. "Lyte!" he mocked, dancing
malevolently along and away. "Lyte! I'll remember Lyte, too!"
Dark stood tall and reed slender, shaking her dark ebony clouds of
hair, sadly. "I see your life before you, little Sim. You'll need
weapons soon to fight for this Lyte one. Now, hurry--the sun's coming!"
They ran back to the caves.
* * * * *
One-fourth of his life was over! Babyhood was gone. He was now a young
boy! Wild rains lashed the valley at nightfall. He watched new river
channels cut in the valley, out past the mountain of the metal seed.
He stored the knowledge for later use. Each night there was a new
river, a bed newly cut.
"What's beyond the valley?" wondered Sim.
"No one's ever been beyond it," explained Dark. "All who tried to reach
the plain were frozen to death or burnt. The only land we know's within
half an hour's run. Half an hour out and half an hour back."
"No one has ever reached the metal seed, then?"
Dark scoffed. "The Scientists, they try. Silly fools. They don't know
enough to stop. It's no use. It's too far."
The Scientists. The word stirred him. He had almost forgotten the
vision he had short hours after birth. His voice was eager. "Where are
the Scientists?" he demanded.
Dark looked away from him, "I wouldn't tell you if I knew. They'd kill
you, experimenting! I don't want you joining them! Live your life,
don't cut it in half trying to reach that silly metal thing on the
mountain."
"I'll find out where they are from someone else, then!"
"No one'll tell you! They hate the Scientists. You'll have to find them
on your own. And then what? Will you save us? Yes, save us, little
boy!" Her face was sullen; already half her life was gone, her breasts
were beginning to shape. Tomorrow she must divine how best to live
her youth, her love, and she knew no way to fully plumb the depths of
passion in so short a space.
"We can't sit and talk and eat," he protested. "And _nothing_ else."
"There's always love," she retorted acidly. "It helps one forget. Gods,
yes," she spat it out. "Love!"
* * * * *
Sim ran through the tunnels, seeking. Sometimes he half imagined where
the Scientists were. But then a flood of angry thought from those
around him, when he asked the direction to the Scientists' cave, washed
over him in confusion and resentment. After all, it was the Scientists'
fault that they had been placed upon this terrible world! Sim flinched
under the bombardment of oaths and curses.
Quietly he took his seat in a central chamber with the children to
listen to the grown men talk. This was the time of education, the
Time of Talking. No matter how he chafed at delay, or how great his
impatience, even though life slipped fast from him and death approached
like a black meteor, he knew his mind needed knowledge. Tonight, then,
was the night of school. But he sat uneasily. Only _five_ more days of
life.
Chion sat across from Sim, his thin-mouthed face arrogant.
Lyte appeared between the two. The last few hours had made her firmer
footed, gentler, taller. Her hair shone brighter. She smiled as she sat
beside Sim, ignoring Chion. And Chion became rigid at this and ceased
eating.
The dialogue crackled, filled the room. Swift as heart beats, one
thousand, two thousand words a minute. Sim learned, his head filled.
He did not shut his eyes, but lapsed into a kind of dreaming that was
almost intra-embryonic in lassitude and drowsy vividness. In the faint
background the words were spoken, and they wove a tapestry of knowledge
in his head.
* * * * *
He dreamed of green meadows free of stones, all grass, round and
rolling and rushing easily toward a dawn with no taint of freezing,
merciless cold or smell of boiled rock or scorched monument. He walked
across the green meadow. Overhead the metal seeds flew by in a heaven
that was a steady, even temperature. Things were slow, slow, slow.
Birds lingered upon gigantic trees that took a hundred, two hundred,
five thousand days to grow. Everything remained in its place, the birds
did not flicker nervously at a hint of sun, nor did the trees suck back
frightenedly when a ray of sunlight poured over them.
In this dream people strolled, they rarely ran, the heart rhythm of
them was evenly languid, not jerking and insane. Their kisses were
long and lingering, not the parched mouthings and twitchings of lovers
who had eight days to live. The grass remained, and did not burn away
in torches. The dream people talked always of tomorrow and living and
not tomorrow and dying. It all seemed so familiar that when Sim felt
someone take his hand he thought it simply another part of the dream.
Lyte's hand lay inside his own. "Dreaming?" she asked.
"Yes."
"Things are balanced. Our minds, to even things, to balance the
unfairness of our living, go back in on ourselves, to find what there
is that is good to see."
He beat his hand against the stone floor again and again. "It does
not make things fair! I hate it! It reminds me that there is something
better, something I have missed! Why can't we be ignorant! Why can't we
live and die without knowing that this is an abnormal living?" And his
breath rushed harshly from his half-open, constricted mouth.
"There is purpose in everything," said Lyte. "This gives us purpose,
makes us work, plan, try to find a way."
His eyes were hot emeralds in his face. "I walked up a hill of grass,
very slowly," he said.
"The same hill of grass I walked an hour ago?" asked Lyte.
"Perhaps. Close enough to it. The dream is better than the reality." He
flexed his eyes, narrowed them. "I watched people and they did not eat."
"Or talk?"
"Or talk, either. And we always are eating, always talking. Sometimes
those people in the dream sprawled with their eyes shut, not moving a
muscle."
As Lyte stared down into his face a terrible thing happened. He
imagined her face blackening, wrinkling, twisting into knots of
agedness. The hair blew out like snow about her ears, the eyes were
like discolored coins caught in a web of lashes. Her teeth sank away
from her lips, the delicate fingers hung like charred twigs from
her atrophied wrists. Her beauty was consumed and wasted even as he
watched, and when he seized her, in terror, he cried out, for he
imagined his own hand corroded, and he choked back a cry.
"Sim, what's wrong?"
The saliva in his mouth dried at the taste of the words.
"Five more days...."
"The Scientists."
Sim started. Who'd spoken? In the dim light a tall man talked. "The
Scientists crashed us on this world, and now have wasted thousands of
lives and time. It's no use. It's no use. Tolerate them but give them
none of your time. You only live once, remember."
Where were these hated Scientists? Now, after the Learning, the Time of
Talking, he was ready to find them. Now, at least, he knew enough to
begin his fight for freedom, for the ship!
"Sim, where're you going?"
But Sim was gone. The echo of his running feet died away down a shaft
of polished stone.
* * * * *
It seemed that half the night was wasted. He blundered into a dozen
dead ends. Many times he was attacked by the insane young men who
wanted his life energy. Their superstitious ravings echoed after him.
The gashes of their hungry fingernails covered his body.
He found what he looked for.
A half dozen men gathered in a small basalt cave deep down in the cliff
lode. On a table before them lay objects which, though unfamiliar,
struck harmonious chords in Sim.
The Scientists worked in sets, old men doing important work, young
men learning, asking questions; and at their feet were three small
children. They were a process. Every eight days there was an entirely
new set of scientists working on any one problem. The amount of work
done was terribly inadequate. They grew old, fell dead just when they
were beginning their creative period. The creative time of any one
individual was perhaps a matter of twelve hours out of his entire span.
Three-quarters of one's life was spent learning, a brief interval of
creative power, then senility, insanity, death.
The men turned as Sim entered.
"Don't tell me we have a recruit?" said the eldest of them.
"I don't believe it," said another, younger one. "Chase him away. He's
probably one of those war-mongers."
"No, no," objected the elder one, moving with little shuffles of his
bare feet toward Sim. "Come in, come in, boy." He had friendly eyes,
slow eyes, unlike those of the swift inhabitants of the upper caves.
Grey and quiet. "What do you want?"
Sim hesitated, lowered his head, unable to meet the quiet, gentle gaze.
"I want to live," he whispered.
The old man laughed quietly. He touched Sim's shoulder. "Are you a new
breed? Are you sick?" he queried of Sim, half-seriously. "Why aren't
you playing? Why aren't you readying yourself for the time of love and
marriage and children? Don't you know that tomorrow night you'll be an
adolescent? Don't you realize that if you are not careful you'll miss
all of life?" He stopped.
Sim moved his eyes back and forth with each query. He blinked at the
instruments on the table top. "Shouldn't I be here?" he asked, naively.
"Certainly," roared the old man, sternly. "But it's a miracle you are.
We've had no volunteers from the rank and file for a thousand days!
We've had to breed our own scientists, a closed unit! Count us! Six!
Six men! And three children! Are we not overwhelming?" The old man spat
upon the stone floor. "We ask for volunteers and the people shout back
at us, 'Get someone else!' or 'We have no time!' And you know why they
say that?"
"No." Sim flinched.
"Because they're selfish. They'd like to live longer, yes, but they
know that anything they do cannot possibly insure their _own_ lives any
extra time. It might guarantee longer life to some future offspring of
theirs. But they won't give up their love, their brief youth, give up
one interval of sunset or sunrise!"