A large anthology of sci.., p.740
A Large Anthology of Science Fiction, page 740
“This is Zee. He is old enough to know the secrets of pigment making. I hope he will not offend you.” Throg laughed.
Singer ignored the laugh. “He will not.” He crouched to the child. “Do you know sign?” He moved his hands slowly and carefully.
Zee looked up at Throg quickly, then nodded.
Singer straightened. “He will help me. How did he come to be here?” He added the dropped hand, indicating a disgusting area nearby. Throg missed it but Zee laughed.
“One of my hunters took as a second wife one of your people nine seasons ago. She died last winter. He survived, though he is ugly.” Throg shrugged.
Singer made a gesture of agreement suitable towards either an infant or a moron. The child laughed again. “I go then to work,” he signed to Throg. To the child he signed: “Mix me the red pigment the color like that of a marmot’s fur and meet me in the cave.” Zee did not understand immediately. Singer mimed a marmot; and Zee smiled, then left at a run.
He found in Zee a remarkable companion, unlike the previous times he had painted for the new men. A helper was necessary, for the new men were far better able to sense the proportions and measurements necessary to the art of pigment-making. Also, Zee was fully conversant in handtalk. Singer did not have to use with him a kind of crippled pidgin as he had to do with Throg. Zee could not sing, but he could sit and listen to singing, something Singer had only seen among his own people. True, Zee was clumsy, both in daily life and in his attempts to help Singer paint. Even in this, however, he was more graceful than Throg’s clan. He lived in a middle world, able to design and make the new men’s pigments and tools, but still retaining some of the qualities Singer prized in his own people.
Fall had gone and winter proper come to the land before Singer was satisfied with his studies for the painting. Now, he knew what image was to be on the wall. It only remained to find the spirit, the essence of the image. For weeks, he sat by lamplight watching the stone wall, waiting for the activity of preparation to die down in him so that he could hear the music of inspiration. Zee waited with him, talking and asking questions. It was obvious to Singer that the miracle of process was lost to him.
Throg came and watched and grunted a question whether there would be men in the painting this time, then left. It was obvious he was lost to any miracle at all.
He could hear Zee crying out long before he reached Singer.
“Singer! Another, shorter man!”
He caught Zee and held him still. “Another shorter man? What do you mean? Like unto myself?”
Zee nodded. “He has just come in with a kill and asked Throg for a place to sleep the night.”
Singer saw him by fading sunlight, old and thin but still broader in the chest than two of the new men together. He laughed out loud when he saw Singer.
“A painter! Will you not sponsor me to this barbarian? He protests no room, though I can tell by his stance he lies.”
Throg did not see the exchange and still was trying to explain that this was a small cave, big enough only for himself, his few hunters, and some women. Singer laughed also. It was plain to him that Throg was interested only in keeping his women to himself. One halfbreed, his body stance and set of mouth said, was enough.
“Sign to him you are a eunuch and he will agree readily enough.”
The stranger did so and Throg reluctantly agreed to let him spend the night. The stranger brought a haunch of bison nearly as big as he from the darkness and lay it in the snow near the entrance. Singer saw Throg wear a look of cool disdain masked over jealousy as the rest of the clan made noises of astonishment over the size of the kill.
“Weaklings!” signed the stranger to Singer, “to be so impressed by one slab of meat.”
“They have their uses. What is your name?”
“I am called Walks-through-the-snow-barefoot-to-remain-quiet.” Walker looked about the refuse in the cave. “Do they have no sense of cleanliness, either?”
Singer smiled and led Walker back from the cave entrance to where he was working.
“What is your commission?” asked Walker.
“The chieftain here saw some of my minimal work in the cave of the Hawk Clan, east of here. He wishes a similar buffalo.”
Walker looked at him with new respect. “You are the buffalo painter? I had thought you older and bowed with experience. I have not seen them myself, but another who has told me they were as sand paintings and ice carvings upon the walls.”
Singer made a sign of embarrassed aversion. “He was surely talking of another.”
Walker shook his head and smiled. Singer showed him the clay studies and Walker commented on them and made a few suggestions.
Zee came in hesitantly and sat next to Singer. Walker stopped signing and, seeing Zee’s appearance, made a motion of sorrow and sympathy. Zee bowed to him.
“There are more such each year,” signed Walker, “and less true men.”.
“We shall live through this. We survived worse when the ice came.”
Walker shook his head. “I do not think so. We are losing more than life. We are losing our soul.”
Singer reached an arm around Zee and held him close. “This may be, but there is some hope in these offspring from us and them.”
“This is truth?”
Singer told him of Zee’s abilities.
Walker nodded. “It may be as you say. I have heard also of a land to the east surrounded by water, where our kind dwell in great numbers. It had been in my mind to go there.”
Singer made a sign of disbelief. Walker looked amused. “I do not believe it either, yet it pleases me to think about going.”
They signed into the night and fell asleep next to Singer’s clay figures. In the morning, Singer rose and found Walker dead.
Throg was horrified. “An evil ghost to haunt my painting! To haunt my cave!”
As he ranted thus, Singer carried Walker gently out of the cave into the daylight. It was too cold to bury him properly, laid out with all of his tools as symbols of his life. He brought Walker farther to a cliff nearby that stood overhanging a lake. There he threw down a large rock and broke through the ice. He tied another rock to Walker’s body, lifted him sadly and slowly, and cast him down, calling after him. They had not sung together that night as Singer had hoped they would. Singer sang now, fully and openly, a grief-born song of the lake and the woods and the wind. It seemed as if Walker sang with him.
Another of us has gone and not been replaced.
Throg surprised him by insisting that Singer continue with the painting. Singer was glad. The inspiration was in him now, born of Walker’s death. Zee helped him block out the space of the painting.
He carefully drew with a smoldering twig the outline and threads of the muscles. These would be removed before the painting was done and served as a guide only.
The winter storms howled and raged outside as he meticulously applied Zee’s pigments to the stone. The lamplight gave them a rose color, and he countered this by using more charcoal dust on the brushes. Around the central bull were smaller bulls, barely there, ephemeral ghosts of the idea of bulls. The old one himself was painted with his head on an outcropping of rock, so that he looked as if he had just been arrested in the act of turning to gaze into the cave. His eyes were heavy with wisdom.
The winter was hard on Singer. The ready women were closer to him and he found himself distracted. Throg had already made crude signs to him that he considered his women as part of Singer’s payment. It was a payment Singer did not really want. Still, his body betrayed him at times and woke him with lusty dreams.
The time was near daybreak. The season was very early spring.
He stared at the wall, unconscious of any noise or movement beyond it. There, staring back at him, stood an old buffalo. Old dreams of youth surrounded it, ancient visions of glory. It watched him with Walker’s eyes.
He walked quietly to the front of the cave and sat before the fire. Around him he felt, but did not take part in, the movement and bustle of living: the thin scraping sound of hide preparation, the smell of Throg’s women, the tracery of the fire’s shadows.
Throg looked across the fire to him. Singer nodded.
The chieftain whooped and stood. “It is done. The painting is finished.”
Around him erupted a geyser of laughter and motion. Throg dragged him back to the painting and a hush fell upon the clan.
Throg watched it for a long time. Singer leaned against the cave wall, tired, spent, uninterested in their opinion.
Throg cleared his throat. “Why is there no man in it?”
Singer closed his eyes and sent up an entreaty to the gods, if gods there were, that such stupidity be allowed to live. “It needs none,” he signed.
Throg nodded. “It is good. You have done well.”
Singer agreed.
The party lasted until dawn and afterwards. Throg insisted the acting out of hunts and brave deeds be done. Singer watched their clumsy attempts to act out a wolf or a ram and remembered the brilliant illusions he had seen in his own tribes, without costume or props, only their own bodies. Throws clan beat on drums and chanted with reed pipe accompaniment. He remembered the singing, alone or only with each other, of his people. He drank their mixture of blood and sap and grew drunk, became violently sick, and passed out.
It was quiet when he awoke.
He sat up suddenly and was sick at once. Around him there was massive evidence he had been sick in his sleep. He stumbled out into the snow and rolled in it, washing off the vomit and filth of the cave and bringing himself stingingly awake.
He returned and walked back to the painting.
There was a glow of lamplight there.
Throg stood before it, working near the head with one of Singer’s brushes.
Singer stood frozen still, a shock penetrating through his heart and viscera. A thought: have they no understanding at all?
He roared and in the same instant struck at Throg. Throg tried to move away but was too slow and the blow struck him at the shoulder. He was thrown against the wall of the cave, his side hitting an outcropping of rock.
The rest of the clan surrounded Singer and prevented him from reaching Throg. He looked at the painting. Near the head of the buffalo, Throg had drawn the stick figure of a man obviously dead or injured, with an erection.
Throg limped over to him, holding his side. “It is my painting now. I say it must have a man.”
“Fool!” signed Singer, “Offal! Dung! I spit on your clan. I spit on your whole foul race. You are weak so you invent tools. You are slow so you make weapons. You cannot mime so you use costumes. You cannot stand cold so you bundle up in skins. Things you cannot do you must undo. Half-men! You cannot even sing! You are not worth the least of my tribe.”
They beat him with clubs and he broke two or three of them before he was brought down. They shoved him roughly across the floor and threw him from the cave mouth into a drift of snow.
He carefully mouthed their ugly-sounding words back at them. “You are dead inside. Dead!”
He crawled from the snowdrift and brushed the flakes from him. It was cold and his wounds hurt, but he ignored both. He staggered across a hill, wanting to be at least out of sight from them. There, he sat on an exposed boulder and shook his head, waiting for it to clear.
“Singer?”
He whirled to the voice. It was Zee, holding a bundle of his things.
“I brought these to you. Throg was going to throw them out.” The boy looked up at him. “Are you all right?”
Singer nodded. “What will he do to you? You are associated with me.
The child shrugged. Singer corrected himself. This last winter Zee had put on muscle and bone. He had grown. He was nearly a man.
“Where will you go?” Zee asked.
Singer did not know himself.
“I think I shall go east, after the land Walker spoke of.” He dressed himself with a light skin shawl and bound his feet against the ice.
“This is too quick,” said Zee.
“It is always thus. The world moves too fast for those on it.”
“Take me with you!” Zee cried. “I want to . . . see sunrises and birds flying and be alive as you are.”
He held the boy a long time, close and warm. When Zee ceased to weep he released him. “You must go back. You are my hope.”
“Hope?”
“Go back. Breed with them. Make them learn. Bring them to life. Paint for them. Make clay figures. Teach them to move gracefully. If you cannot teach them, teach your children. Go.” He waved him back. “Go,” he signed to Zee. Zee disappeared over the hill.
Singer shouldered the skin bag of his possessions. He was sick, hurt, and brutally tired. He would not think of that now. He walked to the east, though he did not believe in Walker’s mythical land. There was no place free of these new men. They were supplanting his tribe, stealing his earth. He felt inside a quiet despair.
The song of his mourning moved toward the sunrise.
TRICERATOPS
Kono Tensei
A large reptile of the late Cretaceous Period. A herbivorous quadruped; a horned dinosaur.
The father and son were returning from cycling. They had set out together on a Sunday of deepening autumn, heading for the cycling course along the river. On the way back they had been forced to burrow through the exhaust and dust of the national highway before finally reaching the residential area a mile from home. Their house lay beyond this slightly aging neighborhood, on the other side of the small hill, in the new subdivision. It was only a little past seven, but the autumn sun was sinking quickly and darkness had begun to gather about them. The father and son stopped their bikes beneath the yellow light of the streetlamps and breathed the cool air in deeply. “Are you okay, Dad?”
“My knees are ready to fall apart.
Let me rest a minute.”
“I don’t feel a thing.”
“I guess you wouldn’t,” said the father. He smiled wryly as he lit a cigarette. “Somebody’s making curry!” his son cried suddenly. “I’m starving to death. Can’t we go now? It’s just a little bit farther.”
“I guess so.”
The father crushed out the cigarette with the tip of his shoe and put his hands back on the black handlebars. II was at the instant the father and son had put one foot to the pedals, at the instant they were looking down the road ahead of them, were beginning to gather momentum, a huge shadow darted across the intersection no more than five or six meters away, shaking the very earth as it passed.
It had the feeling of mass, of power, of a bulldozer, of a ten-ton truck.
Though its passage took but an instant, it indelibly burned on their eyes an image of thick, clearly animal skin, an almost slimy sheen, the quiver of flesh and muscle.
Hands still tightly gripping the handlebars, the father and son lowered their feet from the pedals and stared.
Thick dust swirled beneath the street-lamps. The tremors gradually subsided.
It seemed a subterranean rumbling still growled about them.
Then, quite abruptly, even that rumbling stopped.
It stopped with a slightly unnatural air, almost as though a tape recording had been suddenly switched off, but in any case it had ceased, and their surroundings filled again with crying babies, the smell of dinner cooking, raucous TV commercials.
Shall we . . .?
The father asked with his eyes, and his son nodded.
They stopped their bikes at the intersection and looked ahead.
A scattering of streetlamps threw down hazy light. Traces of gas and watermain work were everywhere around them. The road stretched on with its splitting asphalt, returned to silence.
“Where’d it go?” the son asked.
“Aaah.”
The father shook his head.
The two of them were silent for a while.
“Dad, what do you think it was?”
“I don’t know.”
“I almost thought it was a rhinoceros. It was too big to be a cow. It looked seven or eight meters long. And if my eyes weren’t fooling me, it was twice as high as this fence. That would make it three meters, uh-uh, even taller.”
“Aaah,” said the father again. “I guess a rhino might get loose from the zoo sometimes. It’s not impossible. But didn’t you see two horns on that thing’s head?”
“Homs? Yeah, it did look like two horns.”
“So it couldn’t be a rhinoceros.”
“So it was a cow after all? A bull?”
“It must be. You don’t see many of them anymore, but it’s my guess a bull got loose from some farm or pasture near here.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, if it keeps on like that, there’s going to be one whale of an accident when it meets a truck.”
“Yeah.”
The father and son looked back down the road. They listened. But aside from the cheerful night noises with their tales of domestic peace and tranquillity, there were no hints of anything amiss in the town.
Almost as though it never happened.
The father shook his head.
If I’d been alone, I’d have thought I was hallucinating.
After a long while the father and son pedaled silently and hurried along the road home. The street began its gradual ascent, and they stopped several times to rest.
The town spread out behind them. They turned and looked back, but there were no signs of anything unusual, no accusing shadows, and nowhere a trembling of the earth, a rising plume of dust.
“Dad, did you see the tail?” the son asked suddenly.
“Mmmm, what about it?”
“Didn’t you see it? A superfat tail?”
The father and son reached the crest of the hill and passed through the last sparse copse of trees.
Suddenly their own subdivision lay before them.
The lights were on in all the new houses of the new town, but somehow—perhaps because of the sharp glare of the scattered mercury-vapor lamps—the homes seemed to hunch stockily against the earth.
