Catch a falling star, p.3
Catch a Falling Star, page 3
IV
Why am I running?
The question rattled around Creohan’s skull like a pea jumping in a hollow drum: rational, but not enough to halt the pounding of his feet on the wet beach-sand. There could be no hurry now in any task he might undertake. Even the quest for a fellow-mourner could, if he chose, occupy the rest of his life. It was not, after all, as though there were something he could do to avert the fate of Earth.
And yet he could not escape from an overwhelming sense of urgency, as if every day he spent on this doomed planet would now be wasted unless it held some meaningful action directed towards…
Towards what? Turning aside a gigantic ball of flaming gas called a star? It was ridiculous!
So it was not the call of reason that put an end to his mad flight along the beach, but only the upheaval of his belly, that ultimately revolted at the memory of the black-clad woman’s death and doubled him over as surely as a blow to the pit of his stomach, convulsing him like a live frog spitted on a hot iron.
One hand supporting him against a nearby rock, he gasped and retched and spat and almost wept until the necessary foulness of his deed was purged from him. Then, weakened, he remained for a while with head bowed, assuring himself again of the harsh truth that had he not done as he did the woman who sought to ape the Glorious Gerynts would herself have consigned him and possibly many others to oblivion for no better reason than that the co-life in her brain disapproved of their clothing or the way they dressed their hair.
Eventually a curious fact intruded on his awareness: the rock on which his hand was resting did not feel like rock, but like rough cloth. Confused, he was trying to comprehend that when a voice spoke sweetly out of nowhere: the voice of a girl.
“You’re sick, friend! Is there something I can do to help?”
He raised his eyes. Here, the rocks that studded the shore broached the limit of the water. A few paces seaward of him, up to her knees, long dark hair sparkling as it shed droplets which caught the random flash of the circling lights above, the speaker stood gazing at him. How long she had been there he could not tell.
Effortlessly he formed words with his much-abused mouth. “I thank you—no. It was only something which… But never mind. It’s gone to the past and cannot be amended.”
Relieved, the girl came forward and, with a murmur of excuse, eased from beneath his numb hand the rough cloth that his skin had paradoxically reported—a towel to dry herself. She was quite unclad and not at all abashed about it. Why should she be? Her body, Creohan noted as he regained command of his normal self, was slender and exquisitely formed; at the moment the towel wrapped around and hid her, a dying light wheeled by and cast a momentary glow before it fell into the sea, enough to show him that her face too was beautiful, broad and underlain by strong bones.
Yet her appearance, seemingly from the ocean itself, was a mystery to him. Fumbling, he shaped awkward words.
“Did you—did you come out of the sea?”
“Of course! Why not?” the girl said, and gave a trilling laugh as she gathered handfuls of her dark tresses and wrung water from them, drip-drip-drip. “I’ve been out there seeing what there is to see. I do it nightly, and often in the day as well.”
“Under the water? Surely it’s not possible to breathe down there!”
“I doubt if my friends down there would be so cruel as to let me drown,” the girl shrugged. The motion exposed her breast above the towel, and she glanced down as though approving its form before wiping off the last trace of water.
This was all new and strange to Creohan. He said slowly, “There are people in the sea, then?”
“People? You might call them people, I suppose,” the girl replied. She deftly twisted her towel into a sort of snood around her wet hair and reached for a garment likewise draped upon the rock, which she drew on against the nighttime cool. “And not only people—things! Oh, they’re so beautiful!”
She checked almost before the last words were uttered. “Do you truly not know what can be found beneath the waves?” she demanded. “A shame, a shame! If I’d not tired myself out with overmuch swimming tonight, I’d take you now and show you what there is, for it’s so—so beautiful!”
“There too?” said Creohan, half to himself. “Why, that’s all the greater pity that the world should end.”
The girl, engaged in rubbing at her hair, caught the faint words and stared at him. “End?” she repeated uncertainly. “Why should it end? It has gone on for thousands of years, so I believe—not so?”
Creohan did not answer her directly. He said instead, “Would you join with me in regretting its passing?”
“Of course I would! But I don’t understand what you mean.” The girl fixed him with her large dark eyes, seeming deep as the ocean whose praises she had sung.
He extended his arm, pointing. “Do you see that star?”
She turned to follow the direction he indicated, and said, “Ah—the greenish one?”
“No, the bluish, very bright and almost at the horizon.”
She hesitated. After a moment, she stepped close to him and put her cheek against his upper arm so that she might the better follow his pointing finger. “Yes, I see it,” she said. “What of it?”
“That is a sun about as large as ours. In a short while-longer than our lifetimes, but shorter than the times Historickers go back to—it will come so close that it will burn the Earth to ashes.”
“A—sun? Like the one which shines on us by day?”
“They are all suns. Perhaps they have worlds like ours circling them—who knows?”
The girl shivered; Creohan felt the movement through the light contact of her head against his arm. She said, “To think I have lived all my life without wondering about the nature of the sky… It must be a great place up there, greater by far than my little world beneath the sea. Tell me about it!”
She reached back, unlooking, with both hands to find a level section of the edge of the rock, and sprang backwards up to it. With bare legs swinging she sat there and attended to Creohan as he spoke softly of the knowledge he had had from his telescope, and from the ancient work of many, many vanished scientists: about the great empty deeps between those spangled lights, the stars; about the heat and fury which, close to, the innocent jewels of the sky poured forth; about the fabled voyages that could be traced only in half-missing legends, supposedly preceding the furthest explorations of Historickers, beyond the comforting armour of Earth’s atmosphere…
In her turn, too, she spoke, and told of the friends she had made beneath the sea, not people exactly, but creatures of whom some were quite intelligent and all were curious, so that when a visitor swam down among the hollow coral grottoes they inhabited they would emerge, chanting a sort of booming song of welcome that made the ears complain and the very skin tingle, and bringing with them certain kinds of gas-filled waterweed, which nipped between the teeth furnished the means of breathing—after some practice—so that one might go for hours through their jeweled underwater caverns, alight with singing mobile creatures that glowed red and white and yellow and green.
And they spoke of many other things besides, including matters that Creohan had never before discussed with anybody. They talked of the threatening star below the horizon, and others along with it, until the gaudy colours of dawn began to tint the sky.
Only then did Creohan remember to stretch his cramped body and yawn, which last turned into a short bitter laugh. “Thank you for hearing me out,” he said. “All day and the earlier part of tonight I have been hunting for someone who would merely listen to me. But no one seems to care!”
“No one?” said the girl quietly. “I care.”
“You do indeed, and that’s a miracle. But… Well, for me it was as though the truth I’d learned had transformed the world. On the instant it was no longer the same place as yesterday. And—it is, and also it isn’t.” His fingers curled over to his palms, as though trying to shape forms of air which would convey his precise meaning. “Those people I met in the tavern, whom I told you of: they don’t care because they don’t know how to care! Some bored, so that one of them could say that the end of the world would save her and her friends from having to think of new ways to pass their time—some obsessed by repeating erotic acts that cannot possibly be novel because our bodily form has not changed in more time than Historickers can estimate—and as for the woman whom I had to kill…”
He bowed his head, words failing him. Equally silent, the girl laid a comforting arm around his shoulders and waited until he could speak again. Lightly he brushed her fingers with his own, to signal thanks, and resumed.
“And yet even people like her, in some sense, have an important gift: the power to commit themselves wholly to a cause in which they believe. Is not the ending of our world a cause to demand the attention of everyone? I’d scarcely have imagined that it could not be. Yet I’ve found proof by actual trial. Most of our race would rather live and laugh and love, and there’s an end of it. They know that they’ll be dead before this disaster happens, so they pay it no heed. It seems to me as though my friend Molichant is right: the spirit that motivated the lusty ages Historickers retire to has been drained from our modern breed!”
“I could believe that,” the girl nodded. “Since I ceased to be a child I’ve spent much time alone, because so few of the people I’ve met are like myself. What word should I use? I’d say curious’, I suppose-as, being curious, I went to see what was in the ocean for the very first time. And yet—”
A sudden vehemence filled her voice. “And yet this spirit cannot have been drained completely away! When you summoned up the energy to go looking, in less than one short day for all your disappointments you found one other person-me-who cares like you! What’s one day against the span of history? The world is wide, and we have many days. Let’s show that our race still has the audacity to take on an impossible task, and a love for Earth great enough to achieve it! So there is no one but us here who loves adventure, welcomes challenges, dares to try and dictate the shape of tomorrow-why should such a person stay here, among a gang of self-indulgent lazybones? With all the world before us, why should we?”
Creohan stared at her, hardly able to accept what his ears reported to him. He said blankly, “Do you mean you’d abandon everything on the spur of the moment, commit yourself to a quest that will be likely vain?”
“Why not?” she retorted. “Are you intending to do less? And is it not more worthy of a human being to make a voluntary relinquishment than to have everything snatched away by a grab of blind accident?”
“Oh, yes!” Creohan said in a low voice. “Yes, yes, yes!”
He caught her hand and drew her to her feet. Standing together they lifted their eyes towards the sky where it was paling from black into blue with the coming of sunrise.
“Yet to turn aside a star!” Creohan whispered, the last writhing of doubt speaking against his will. “I think—I think we must be insane!”
Confidently enough, the girl answered, “Isn’t it a glorious madness?”
Nonetheless, he felt that the hand she had linked with his was very cold, and she was trembling.
V
They finally wearied of their staring and made to depart, and in the same instant a point struck Creohan to which he gave immediate voice.
“Why!” he exclaimed. “We have talked all these hours and I still do not know your name or place of residence. I am called Creohan, and I live on the Street of the Musicians.”
“My name is Chalyth,” the girl responded. “And as for my home—why, here or anywhere, all about and around.”
“You have taken no house of your own?”
“What need has one of a house? I have few belongings. The nights are always warm, and when rain falls there are trees and shrubs to shelter under. But I love the touch of water on my skin, so I seldom hide from the wetness of mere rain.”
“But-but food!” Creohan fumbled. “And clothing!”
“Are those not always to be had? For all their faults the people of our city are generous—as why should they not be when what they give away costs them nothing? This shift grows thin.” She plucked up the hem of it. “Tomorrow or the next day or whenever it wore out, I’d need to do no more than look out for another girl my size and put my request to her; likewise for food, or else the people of the sea would give me something strange and good to bring back to the air with me and savour on the beach, still tingling with the sharp salt of the ocean. We have a rich and bountiful world, and there’s enough for all.”
This was so far from Creohan’s own rootedness, his attachment to his home with its beloved telescope and the zareba of thorns before the entrance, that he shook his head in wonder, and she laughed openly at his bewilderment.
“Tell me truly!” she cried. “Could someone anchored by possessions suggest so lightly that we depart on our quest?”
He hesitated, then admitted, “No. Indeed I myself feel half put to shame by your words. But for the lucky chance of meeting you I could envisage myself in fifty years from now, a gnarled and bitter old man, still clutching at the sleeves of passers-by, still in this same city which I’d then have sifted over and over without finding anyone to heed my warning until at last the people would shun me, thinking me deranged. Should we start out now before my courage dies? If so, which way?” He looked about the land now lit by the beginning of day, and saw that the dull purple lights which had hovered above the road were climbing high and fading out of sight.
Once more Chalyth laughed. “Oh, hardly, Creohan. To go about the world at random as you about the city would be to mock at good fortune. Where one searcher must guess, two may discuss and make a proper plan. Besides, there are preparations, and chief among these”-she fought, and failed to master, a yawn—”would be some rest.”
“Come with me, then,” Creohan said.
“Yes, I will. Whatever I think of tying oneself to a house, I can foresee that on our journey it may be long and long before we lie in one again.”
So they went companionably into the city again, and in Creohan’s house lay down together on his broad soft couch, green and springy as good turf and always kept to human temperature. There they embraced without passion but with a kind of matter-of-fact friendliness that filled his mind with confidence to quiet his former terror, and drifted with limbs entwined into sleep as untroubled as a happy child’s.
Noon past, they rose, and from the resources of the house clad themselves already in garments fit for a long difficult journey, flame-red shirts, and loose grey breeches, and soft tough boots resistant to a stony road. They broke their fast in the chamber of the telescope, almost without talking, until suddenly Creohan raised his voice and commanded the house to rid the room of its dominant feature.
At once their ears were filled with a complaining sound, but he was obeyed. The great mirror dulled; the strong supports withered and cracked like old dry branches before a forest fire; the house re-absorbed his treasure into its substance, and the chamber seemed as empty as the deeps of space.
“Why did you that?” Chalyth cried. “Was it not what you chiefly prized?”
“Once it was,” Creohan said grimly. “But I remembered what you said last night—that no one encumbered with possessions would lightly propose setting forth on the road we must take. What use would my telescope be to me now? All it could do would be to tempt me to stare at that disastrous star, and eat out my heart with sorrow. If I need confirmation of our purpose, I need only gaze upwards; it’s bright enough now to signal danger to my mind without artificial aids.”
Across the table at which they sat Chalyth looked at him, and her eyes brimmed with tears.
“It’s done,” he said gruffly. “And done for a purpose, what is more. I take it as a good omen. So! Which way shall we go?”
Chalyth swallowed hard, and blinked away her tears, and countered with a question of her own in an equally level voice. “In the city there’s a street they call the Street of Travellers. Is there anyone dwelling there who has indeed explored the land around?”
Creohan grimaced. “Hah! Whenever it was that they gave our streets their names, it must have been long ago; there are, likely, as many travellers on the street called after them as there are musicians here on mine, which is none at all. So-Wait, though!” His face brightened. “Now that I think of it, there is indeed one man who justifies that name, and lives there, too. I heard of him from Molichant, who said that he’s now old, but that in his youth he voyaged out across the ocean and found strange marvellous things.”
“How is he called?”
“Glyre, if I remember right.”
“Then there’s where we begin our search,” said Chalyth.
But when they came to Glyre’s home there was no answer to their calls, and as they shouted a neighbour of his spoke up, to convey distressing news.
“It’s no use you shouting after him,” he said—a lean man growing old, resting on a swing of red-leaved creepers. “If he’s at home he likely will not answer, being much distracted. That’s the trouble with these Historickers.”
“He’s turned Historicker?” Creohan said, dismayed.
“Why, certainly! Do you not know this tale he’s so fond of repeating to everyone, how in his youth he voyaged out to sea and found an ancient city, its towers crumpled by the fist of time? These many years past he’s been determined to view it in its prime, and I suppose has managed to.”
“I think I know that city,” said Chalyth. “One of my friends beneath the sea brought me a golden helmet as a gift, which was too large for me and I declined it. He said in the way such creatures have that he had swum many times faster than a boat can travel for a day and a night to reach the shore on which such things are littered by the thousand. It was not known to him how long ago the city fell.”
