Hugo awards the short st.., p.158
Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 1), page 158
Later, finishing his duties before the ancient altar, he heard a stirring outside.
The youth, awake, was pulling at the splint. The keeper squatted down beside him and pushed his hand away.
"I'm healed, aren't I? Or I wouldn't have woken up."
The keeper, in his fantasies, had forgotten or discounted the youth's hostility; he was taken aback by it now. "I hope that thou art healed," he said evenly. He removed the splint and gently stretched the wing. The web was soft, and cool. It was almost as hard to take his hands away, even though the youth was awake. The line of the bone was clean, sharp under skin, light. The bone was unscarred, still hollow. "Thou must move it several days before requiring it to bear thy weight."
The youth touched the break with his other hand, stood, and opened his wings to their wide full span, reaching. He smiled, but the keeper could detect a slight sag in his wing, a weakening of unused muscles, a contraction of tendons. "I think thou wilt fly again," he said, and it was the truth.
The youth suddenly dropped his wings, staggering, smile gone, weakened by his mild exertion so soon after awakening. All his bones protruded; his body had half-starved itself, and would need time to recover. The keeper reached up, steadied him, but the youth winced when the flap of wing that did not fold brushed against him. The keeper glanced up; after meeting his gaze, the youth looked away.
"We should, perhaps, be tolerant of each other's weaknesses," the keeper said, cruelly, hurt.
"Why? Nothing forced you to help me. I don't owe you anything."
The keeper levered himself to his feet, walked a few steps, stopped. "No," he said. "I could have let thee heal with thy bones twisted." He heard the sweep of wings opening slowly, wing tips brushing the ground.
"I would have died," the youth said, as if he had committed some crime by living.
"So they thought of me," the keeper said, facing him, "when they left me on the hunting plain for the scavengers."
The youth said nothing for a time. The keeper wondered how he had survived infancy: someone must have cared a great deal, or no one had cared at all. He must have been fiercely protected or virtually ignored until his sentience awoke and he was too old to expose. Letting him die would have been kinder than leaving him to live as an outcast.
"And they left you here. Why do you help, instead of hating?"
"Perhaps I'm weak, and cannot stand the sight of pain." The youth glanced up, purposely looking straight at the keeper's eyes, holding his own gaze steady. His expression was quizzical. They both knew the keeper would never have lived if he had been weak. It was the youth who looked away first, perhaps from a habit of hiding his eyes so people would tolerate him.
The youth opened his wing, one long finger at a time. The webbing was so smooth, so glossy, that the auroras reflected off it, scarlet and yellow, like flames. "It hurts," he said.
"Still, thou must move it. It may help if I aid thee in stretching it." He opened his own broken wing a little, showing the bones pulled out of shape by shortened tendons. "I knew what should have been done while I slept."
The youth looked at the wing for a long moment, fascinated, horrified. "Please fold it."
The keeper pulled his fingers against the back of his arm, bending his elbow so they would fit. The torn flap hung loose.
"I'm sorry."
"Never mind."
* * *
Their conversations were crystalline. The keeper would have preferred to cease touching the youth completely, but he needed to help with the wing, and he refused to allow himself to takeout his disappointment on a person. He had hoped his own deformities might cease to matter; that they did not was hardly the youth's fault. The revulsion in him was perhaps less than in others, and perhaps growing weaker, but still present, undeniable, unavoidable.
The keeper began to believe that he himself might as well have died. He had been strong enough to break his fall, strong enough to crawl under a thorn bush away from scavengers, strong enough to sleep eleven days and live. He remembered waking up, peering out through barbed twisting branches at the people hunched watching him and listening to his prophetic mutterings. One held laths and another funeral veils, waiting to brace his wings open and launch him if he died. Even then, with his skin stretched taut over his starved bones, he had been strong enough to crawl toward them, to make a purposeful move to tell them that he would live, that they could rightly help him and take him as their seer. But he was not strong enough for this loneliness and desertion.
* * *
A shrill squeal roused him from a doze, leaving him half-awake, confused, exhausted. He heard another sound, a cry abruptly cut off. He folded his wings and moved into the courtyard.
He found the youth sitting against the wall of the temple, sucking the neck vein of a rabbit-deer so freshly dead that one hind foot still trembled in a muscle spasm. "Where didst thou get that? Animals never come past the auroras."
The youth began, delicately, to pull the small animal apart at the major joints. "Maybe it thought you'd tell it its future." He extended his silver claws and began to shred the meat from a narrow bone.
"I do not mock thee."
The youth worried the carcass with his hands for a time. He looked up, and the auroras caught his eyes and brightened them horribly. "Didn't you hate them when you realized they were going to leave you behind? Didn't you want to slash them and tear them and demand what right they had to pretend you didn't matter?"
After a moment, the keeper said, "I grieved."
He had walked into the temple and stood near the back wall, before the stone figure that was crumbling with age and neglect. The keeper was the first in centuries to offer it anything even resembling belief. Slowly, painfully, he had relaxed his wing-fingers, until the scarred membranes lay half-folded around him. "Why did they help me?" he had cried. "If they did not need an oracle, why did they help me, and if they needed one, why did they leave me behind?" But the old god had made no answer, for if the keeper's belief were real, it had not been enough to call the god back.
"I grieved," the keeper said again.
He expected disdain, but the youth looked down and stroked the stained pelt of the rabbit-deer. "Our world is grieving, too," he said softly. "They stole the spirit out of it, and sucked all the life away. All our people ever did was try to escape it, yet it mourns."
The keeper touched his shoulder, gently. "It must seem lonely to thee. But in time-- "
The youth made a sound of disgust. "There isn't any time. I hope... I hope they have to turn back. I hope they have to come running back to this world they loathed, because they'll find it dead and wasted and unfit to sustain them, and they'll die."
"There will be no turning back in this generation. I dreamed the deaths of some of those who left, and there will be no disaster. The ships will continue, at least through our lifetimes."
The youth stood up, walked a few steps, taut-muscled, angry, spread his wings, allowed the tips to dust the stones. His claws were still bloody. "You'd have everyone substitute your fantasies for their own."
"They are all I have to offer, anymore."
"But they weren't enough for our people, and all you do is grieve." The youth turned and folded his wings against his arms with that graceful smooth snap. "Something will happen, someday, and they'll have to return. They'll spread the sails and catch the rays of some distant sun, and they'll feel grateful that they have some place to come home to. But they never bothered to look at it, they only cared about ways to leave it. So now it's dying, and when they crawl back there won't be anything left."
The keeper realized what the youth was saying. "Thou must have had delusions in thy sorrow and pain," he said. "A world cannot die."
The youth glared at him, and his gaze did not shift, as if in anger he could forget his shame. "This world is dying. If you would sleep and attune yourself to it, the way you did for people, you'd see it. Or come outside your prison and look around."
"I never leave the temple grounds."
The youth closed his eyes, resigned. "Then sit and wait, until the auroras die too." He left the keeper alone, and walked away with the tips of his beautiful wings trailing in the dust.
The keeper wanted to dismiss the youth as unbalanced, but nothing was that easy. It was true that their people had cared more for the sky and the nearby stars than for the world they rested on. It was only natural that this be so for a people who could soar so high that the ground curved away below them, admitting without defense its smallness and insignificance. Only natural for a people whose children make toy gliders with lifting wings by instinct. The stars were so close, they hung in the sky calling, hypnotic. The keeper and his mate, in their ion boat, sailing past the bay between the world and its moon, had navigated by sight and feel alone. And he had seen the ion ships, when the idea was still a fancy, in visions. Before the first was even finished, he had seen the thousand of them, carrying all the people, spread their huge sails and catch the sun's rays and begin to move, very, very slowly, toward a star the passengers already knew had planets they could touch their feet to and leave again.
His people had known much of stars. But he could not say that the world was not dying.
After a little while, he stood up slowly and went to find the youth. "What dost thou mean to do?"
He reached down and picked up a small stone. "What is there to do? I almost wish you had let me die." He hefted the pebble, as if he would throw it into the auroras. The keeper flinched, and saw him hesitate. He thought he would still throw it, but the youth lowered his hand and tossed the pebble back to the ground. "If I knew what to do, I'd do nothing."
"There are still people-- "
"You and I may be the last, for all I know. Maybe all the others have killed themselves. I'd have it lonely to deny the rest a sanctuary."
"Must we both be lonely?"
The youth turned his back, hunched his shoulders. The keeper thought he was offended by the implication. "I meant no impropriety-- "
"Traditions are as dead as the god in your temple." He shrugged his wings. "You would have me stay."
"I would ask nothing."
"You'd hope."
"One cannot control one's dreams."
"I'll stay for a while."
* * *
Later the keeper slept, alone in the close and oppressive darkness of the temple. He expected a vision of the youth, alone in some future that did not include the keeper. He had never seen any part of his own destiny in his prophecies; that made him strangely afraid that no one could ever stay with him. He did not believe he could influence the future. Perhaps the future must influence him.
He saw his world, for the first time since he had come to the temple, and he saw that the youth had been right. Skeletons of rabbit-deer lay scattered on the hunting plain, and the vines that climbed the rock pinnacles of nests shriveled and died. Even the thorn bushes, which could grow where nothing else lived, dried, crumbled, burned. The death of their world would be slow, but the places he saw, deserted, were dying. He could not truly tell, but he thought he would die first. His visions had never frightened him before; now he came out of sleep screaming.
Soft wings rustled beside him. "Did you dream?"
"I did as thou asked," the keeper whispered, lying very still.
"And I was right."
"Yes."
"Is anyone else alive?" In the darkness, the young voice was fervent.
"I saw no one," the keeper said.
"Ah," the youth said, satisfied.
"I am not omniscient."
"You'd see what's important."
"Other people were left."
"They had nothing to keep them alive. Not your strength, nor my hate."
"Thou hast made us too unique."
"I hope not," the youth said. "I think your vision was right, and your hopes are wrong."
The keeper sat up, unwilling to sleep again. "I will never know."
"It would hurt you to know that truth." The tone held compassion that sounded strange after the exultation in death, but the keeper was grateful for it. He watched the shadow of the youth move across the stone floor to the entrance and stand in the wavering light. He rose and followed him, stopping close behind him in his shadow. The youth began to talk, slowly, tentatively. "When the last of them left, I followed them as far as I could, until the sun was so bright I thought I'd go blind... I couldn't see them, but I don't think any of them looked back."
"They did not," the keeper said, and the other did not question his knowledge. "It isn't the character of our people to look back. I think they'll never need to."
"And if they don't-- my determination is foolish?"
The keeper spoke very cautiously, afraid to go too far. "Perhaps. Or futile. Thou wouldst deny thyself rather than them."
"I will... think about that."
Behind him, the keeper nodded to himself. "Wouldst thou eat?"
"All right."
* * *
The youth had not noticed the food while he was sleeping, but awake he had found it less than pleasing. "I'll go out and hunt as soon as I can fly again," he said.
"I'm used to this. The auroras make a long path for thee to walk."
"It's better than staying here."
"I'm used to that, too. But hunt, if that is thy wish."
"Soon?"
"Yes. It is almost ready."
"It's still stiff."
"Thou must stop favoring it." He sipped at his broth. "I will massage it again."
The touching was very much like the motions of love. The keeper could not remember touching any person before this youth since the night his mate had died. They had been flying. She was aged, but still beautiful, and she had decided to die.
It was the way of things. He had chosen her, and made his decision by his bond to her, when she was adult and he, not yet "he," was youth. Half a lifetime before, she, not yet "she," had courted and had bonded with another male, and in time he had aged and died.
Now, she did not wish to grow helpless. She would do what their people had always done, and forever would do, when it was time to die. And he would accept her decision, and carry her veils, as the mates of aging ones always had, and always would. Their children, one youth, one newly adult, bade her farewell. There would have been three, but their second was born with a twisted wing, so they had exposed it.
They flew together for a long time. No clouds obstructed their view of the hunting plain. Had they been hungry they could have feasted on warm meat and fresh blood, but this last night together they did not hunt. They drank thick salty wine and soared higher, giddy. She brushed her wingtip against his cheek, dropped back and down and caressed his chest and belly. She laughed, and made lewd and joyous remarks about whoever would become the next member of their long marriage line. She wished him happiness, and pulled a silver veil from his ankle band. He garlanded her with others. Defying her infirmities, she flew higher. He followed her, feeling the air grow thinner, dangerous, and suddenly cried out in ecstasy.
He had never flown so high. He had heard about this from others, but no one could ever have seen, before, the colors behind his eyes. In reflex, his pupils contracted to pinpoints. He strained upward. His mate cried out to him, "Do you see?" and he called, "I see!" and she said, very softly, it seemed, "Be careful, my love, for I am blind." He looked toward her voice. Very dimly he could see her, tiny, higher than she had ever gone before, higher than he had ever seen anyone fly, wide-eyed against the radiation, the veils seeming only to drift beside her. He saw her wings begin to stiffen, and he knew that she was dead.
As another shower of subatomic particles exploded themselves in his eyes, brighter than any spark through the shielding of their ion boat, he realized he had flown past his wings' ability to carry him, and he felt himself begin to fall.
When his struggle against the vertical wind ripped his wing, perhaps he should have allowed himself to die. Fighting, he slowed his fall, but in the end the earth had grasped and shattered him.
"Keeper-- "
The word, and a touch on his hand, brought him back. He glanced up, startled. The youth's face showed apprehension, irresolution. He drew in his wing-fingers, folding the smooth membrane. "It's not stiff anymore."
"I was remembering," the keeper said. "Thy words gave me hope, and I... I am sorry-- "
"It doesn't matter." He let his touching fingers and half-exposed talons linger on the keeper's hand. "Nothing should be forced to die twice," he said. "If we continued our people, the world would kill our children, or the children would kill the world again."
"Thou art not fair," the keeper said. "Some expression of my memory has frightened thee, but I asked for nothing."
"It's true that I'm frightened." He touched the keeper's throat, slid his hand to his shoulder, down his arm, back along the wing-fingers, and this time he didn't wince. "Of your kindness and your strength."
"I do not understand thee."
"I'd change for you, I think."
The keeper sat back, reluctantly, away from the youth's hands. "Then thou wilt leave?"
"I must."
The auroras led the youth on a long, twisting, directionless path to the hills. Outside, the thorn bushes should have been flowering. The youth stood at the edge of the temple's guardians and looked out over the land, at the brown and black thickets of twisted, dying branches. The wind blew hot against his body, and nothing moved as far as he could see. He felt death, and with it an ugly triumph that had ceased to give him pleasure. He glanced back, and almost turned, but reached high instead and snapped open his wings. The wind caught the webbing. He could feel the place where his bones had broken, and hesitated.
Disgusted by his fear, he launched himself from the top of the hill, slipped sideways in a current, angled up, and flew.
* * *
After the youth left, time passed strangely; it might have been a long or a short time later that the old breaks in the keeper's bones began to ache constantly. He had begun to age, and once aging started in his people, it progressed rapidly. His sharp sight began to dim. Only cowards and weaklings lived long enough to go blind naturally. He knew he should allow himself to live no longer, but still he did nothing. He did not wish to die on the earth, and he dreamed of dying properly, radiation-blind, flying.
