Читать книгу Humanity Prime - Bruce Mcallister - Страница 8

CHAPTER FIVE

I fishsinger begin to bring the sea through the hollow stem again, and in a moment gesture for the euyom to stop near a stiff yellow plant whose leaves seem to have talons and whose soul speaks of roots deep in the dry sandy ground, in search of wetness.

I wet my eyes again, use some of the water to wet the euyom’s dry head, and begin to stare at the bigshinegray. The grayness is merely a few hundred tail lengths away, but I stare to touch its form completely.

It rises with the smoothest, evenest gray I have ever known—grayer than any soul’s feeling—and it rises above all stiff plants and dry rocks as if reaching to pierce the bright blue distance above.

(It fills out, brings to life my forefathers’ memory of the first bigshinegray—and suddenly it is so familiar that it could be that same bigshinegray, and I my earliest forefather....)

I stare, wet my face’s eyes again, and stare.

And then they appear.

Face’s eyes see them in the same moment that soul’s eye feels them.

(See it: Those five bodies are very strange.)

Yes, it seems they have changed too, just as my kind has changed in a million days.

(You feel nothing familiar about them....)

When I come to know them deeply, I will discover our sharings.

But I am confused, jumble of colors—regardless of my attempts at explanation, lines of understanding.

Their bodies are upright—just like those of my earliest forefathers.

They have two legs each with no tails—just as my earliest forefathers lacked tails.

Their color of flesh is different from mine—just as my soul’s earliest memory said it should be.

But their souls....

My forefathers’ memory: We lived in dryness and spoke with rhythms from our throats, not images from our souls.

But these five bodies in the distance seem to be speaking half with rhythms from their throats and half with their strange souls.

Perhaps this is merely another change brought by a million days’ passing.

Their souls are clearer now, as their bodies are nearer, but they have not sensed my presence yet. To my inner eye the deepest pattern of their souls is more than unfamiliar—not unlike the redder weavings of an ioe’s soul, but different than any souls I have ever known because their colors are not in rivers, because their colors are in rigid waves which lap nervously against themselves.

All images in the five souls are unclear. Only feelings are ever completely coherent, and images must be seen as recognizable forms before they can be understood.

So I wait patiently.

Their faces’ eyes—as I expected—are different from mine, so they see the forms of things differently—though never completely differently.

I move my soul to watch one of the five souls carefully.

The soul looks around it through its face’s eyes, and without will it gives me its vision, which blends pink memory with a darker now:

Here place: the ground: sands of beach: the sea: the rim of the sea in the distance—all of this: seen at tremendous distance: as a round blue, white and green object: very wet compared to: a larger round red-yellow object lacking blue—

But what is this “other world” in the strange soul, a world whose accompanying feeling for the soul is closeness, affection, contentment? Is it the goal of the soul’s travels, or its territory of origin—perhaps territory of birth?

Seeking answers, I turn my soul to another of the five souls, to find another flow of images:

Eyes see: familiar gray: distinct smooth form: fond moving-but-now-resting container of self and four fond others: comfort—

Eyes see: small black unthreatening form moving through dryness in circles: similar to other forms on large round red-yellow object and elsewhere: all such forms similar to self in many ways: in other ways similar to rigid forms protruding from nearby ground and elsewhere—even similar to: unpleasant pale smooth forms with two arms two legs but no tail: but there was dark difference in those pale smooth forms—

This last image I fail to understand. The “pale smooth forms” resemble those in my longest forefathers’ memory—and it is impossible that these could bring unpleasant feelings to the soul in front of me.

I turn to a third soul, and its face’s eyes looked into the blue distance before it:

Beyond this: darkness where self cannot breathe without gray container: far in such darkness is fond round red-yellow object-seen-from-tremendous-distance: in past times darkness most familiar to self: full of killing death for forms like self and forms of pale smoothness—

I look carefully into the third soul, and again fail to understand the image: upright men dying—not at the talons of oie or from stomach’s sickness, but by...by...strange lights bringing pain.

Suddenly, before my face’s eyes, the five strange bodies begin to move their arms. I wet my eyes again, look, and scream.

The five bodies are removing their heads, their skins.

My soul stiffens in darkest gray—and I continue staring.

When I see what flesh and colors lay under the discarded skins, I scream again, and the five souls hear my scream and begin to quiver, darkening, alerting.

The five bodies are scaly and green-yellow, quivering in the same nervousness that commands their souls.

(No forefather ever looked like these. See it: Deep within your soul, memory of dark scaliness which is older than your forefathers.)

Dark gives birth to more darkness, and I tremble.

The five souls have turned toward me, and from more than one of them images rush all too clearly:

Killing and killing and killing: hairless scaleless upright bodies killing, being killed by smaller green-yellow scaly bodies—

And I recognize—from forefathering times—who the hairless scaleless bodies were.

And I see clearly now with face’s eyes that the five bodies staring back at me have long finless tails.

One of the five souls gives out without will a final darkening image:

All hairless scaleless upright bodies: long-since dead!

The bodies before me are not my kind—and I scream. In the infinite dryness there are no bodies of my land still living. And I scream.

I wet my eyes frantically, but my soul sees something first:

Self and four others: here seeking: any hairless scaleless bodies remaining: if hidden descendants of the long-since dead—

The five bodies begin moving toward me, and my face’s eyes are dry, and brown fear rises bubbling, and lavender adds brownness even greater, and my soul acts in the only way I know.

I pull the lie from its burrow in my soul, mold it with red of remembered rage, and throw it out as a wounded female ioe would throw it out.

The five bodies slow their advance, stopping nervously in soul.

I add brown of motion, and two of the bodies begin to move back—toward the bigshinegray of the greater lie.

Having forgotten to breathe, I suck quickly on the stem—but hold the lie tensely and strongly.

For a moment I imagine I have won the struggle. The five souls are red, brown and solid gray in their fear of my lying image—whatever their understanding of it is.

But suddenly a flashing line of light leaps from one of the five bodies, and my shoulder is struck with the pain of hot talons.

Using my twisted left hand, I cup a breath of water and wet my eyes—only to see that in the webless hands of four of the five bodies lay small gray objects.

Another line of light leaves them, and the dryness around me trembles, but no pain comes.

Then the next light brings with it a pain on the side of my face—not such depth of pain as in my right shoulder, but enough to nearly blind my face’s eyes.

And now I understand how all my forefathers’ forefathers died, how an animal may die without the touch of talons or the slow crawl of sickness. I touch dim distant visions of small hard objects: one used by forefathers’ fathers for killing food; one used by one man to kill another; and finally, leaping from dimness, many hard objects of a million sizes—used by my distant fathers to kill the fathers of these...these scalesouls, in a million struggles in a million places.

And I see the truest truth, and the deepest brown yet:

The consoling light of the future is gone forever: the wrong bigshinegray has come; and there will never be a right bigshinegray. I and my kind are the last of my forefathers’ fathers’ blood, and our deaths will be the end of praying times.

(Then die. You want to die, to join waterjoyup and screamdeep and their fathers and all lines of blood in the darkness of body’s loss. Die.)

But something else bothers my soul. Under my body is lavender, the euyom, and if I die her death will come too. The lavender soul has offered me many good things, moments of brighter comfort, veins of touch against aloneness.

(You wish to bring death on her, when no euyom has ever wanted death as your kind always has?)

My own soul’s sarcasm makes my answer a shout, and sadness becomes the crags of guilt as I realize the euyom has been listening to me, willing to offer her life if I wish to choose death.

My body begins to quiver, and in a moment my rage gathers hate as its current. I hate these killers of finest dreams, killers of forefathers’ fathers and mothers. (Just as you hate the boy named fishsinger, killer of one mother.)

My single soul raises its pounding talons of brown, and I give the five souls my screaming hate.

And something different happens. The souls of the five darken and become...become fewer.

I wet my face’s eyes quickly, to find in seeing that only three scalesouls remain upright. And those that are upright are swaying and stumbling.

The two bodies lying on the dry ground are as still as rocks.

At first I understand none of this. But understanding comes: When first I cried out in dryness, thinking myself blinded, the violence of my soul’s darkness killed millions of the tiny invisible souls around me. Now I have thrown an even greater violence, swollen with hatred, at the five scalesouls....

With pink of confidence I scream again—but pink is not red, and my hatred is weaker this second throw.

So I need more feelings, colors and darkness. I bend my soul to images of death again—mine, my kind’s, and most intensely the death of lavender’s hues. And then I vomit my fear’s hatred a third time, crashing on the three souls remaining.

Two bodies leave their uprightness and fall to motionless silence.

Then I scream, as another light hits my left tail.

The body of the last scalesoul turns and moves quickly in a bouncing manner toward the smooth gray form behind it, just as an ioe would turn tail and flee.

My soul awakes with pinkest joy, and lavender wobbles under me in sharing.

The pinkest joy confuses my sense of proper action, and instead of killing the last scalesoul, I choose a proud image, weave it with further bright pride, and send it babbling to the fleeing soul:

I, yes I, am one of them: pale smooth hairless scaleless upright fellow of the line of my forefathers’ blood!

The soul disappears to eyes and soul by entering the bigshinegray, and in the next moment harsh thoughts rise in my mind: “The wrong bigshinegray shall carry its lone surviving soul back to the big red-yellow object; but then it shall return here with a thousand bigshinegrays, all of them fatally wrong, with light to kill your kind!”

No action can change my error. The scalesoul is out of my reach, and besides, sleep is beginning to enfold my soul as the pains in my tail, shoulder and head suggest the deepest sleep.

Lavender has already turned herself and is moving toward the sea again. She offers no answers, nor consoling colors to keep the dark browns of sadness from me.

I stop her at sea’s edge, turn my head, wet my eyes and look up at the endless blue around.

The bigshinegray rises on frantic tails of light, growing small and smaller to face’s eyes as it finds some tiny hole and disappears.

The swarming begins inside me. Thoughts mumble, then shout, then roar. They raise my head even higher, enter my throat with their peak of roar—

And my throat begins to rumble, becomes a rattle that shakes my head and pounds against my own soul’s bellowing hatred.

For the first time in a million days one of my kind is speaking in the oldest way—using flesh of throat to show the oldest hatred, the oldest violence, the desire to kill flesh with flesh, souls with bodies....

And I know now that I will begin to wait. Perhaps I will die before the day arrives, but I will wait and wait for the scalesouls’ return, for the day I will kill or be killed.

I enter the water, and enter sleep.