The beast v1 0, p.22
The Beast (v1.0), page 22
The rain must have been far back in the mountains, for the sky remains clear, the sun brilliant on the opposite cliff. Below, the men and horses have disappeared downstream, gone somewhere in the heavier stand of trees. I watch as the flood loses force and spreads out evenly over the sands. And then she arrives.
The bird appears over the edge of the far cliff, sailing directly at the cave mouth like a graceful diver. I watch her, knowing it is she, feel her words in my mind as she approaches across the abyss of air. She lands with a thunderous flapping of great wings and shifts into her own lovely self, the blue-gray fur glinting like an evening sky full of stars. She greets me, we touch muzzles and she goes to work on the wounded man. I have never seen a healer operate, never known there were such things until now. I follow her thoughts, the intense kinetic probing that goes inside the man’s flesh from her mind, the careful arranging of tissues, the heat of regeneration. It is miraculous, but nothing more than any healer could do. The blood stops as the arteries are joined again. The bone ends are in place and lightly fused, as much as the man’s body can stand at this moment. The flesh is cleansed and joined. She makes a bandage of the man’s shirt and ties it around the wound.
She moves to the older man, whose body has not stirred.
He is shocked, she tells me. His Self has closed up.
Can you help?
Ican wake him, but his own will must complete. He must want to live.
She probes at the man. He opens his eyes, sits up in the dust, looks at us with blank eyes. There is no surprise. He is not in his mind.
The humans are cared for as well as we can do it. We are together for long moments, saying, listening, feeling in our own minds each the self of the other. We prepare in this way for the joining that will be possible now, the Conjunction.
Voices drift down to us from overhead. Then a rope appears at the cave mouth. We consider whether to shift, or whether she should leave for a time. I cannot think of being alone. She will stay, but we must shift until our humans are cared for.
We shift.
Barry looked at the Indian woman with whom only . yesterday he had been as physically intimate as it is possible for humans to be. She looked back at him, smiled. They felt at once like friends and strangers.
“Now you see,*’ she said.
“You must be very close to your Beast,9* Barry said, feeling great fatigue from the climb now.
“She has been kind to me.*’
Barry thought about that. Yes, it was possible to say that his Beast had also been kind, but then he had not asked to be taken out of his life and put into this double form. He noticed the rope switching back and forth outside the cave mouth. Bo’s voice came down from above.
“Hey, Barry!”
“Yeah, I got it,” Barry said, reaching out over that terrible drop to get the rope and drag it back into the cave. When he glanced down, the fear he felt shoot along his spine made him jerk back and sit heavily on the dusty cave floor. God in heaven. He had climbed that! He must have been out of his mind. Cold sweat sprang out on his forehead, and he felt like being sick. But the rope was pulling strongly in his hands now. Someone was climbing down. The Indian had skinned his hands getting around the slope of the stone as he came into the cave, but he let his bloody hands dangle as he looked with amazement at Sarah. He said a few words in Navajo and she answered, her look noncommittal. Then she said something else, indicating Johnny. The Indian nodded and began tying the rope securely around Johnny’s waist and shoulders.
Johnny and his uncle had been hoisted out of the cave, the Indian rescuer leaning perilously out over the long drop to get their unconscious bodies safely around the overhang. He looked at Sarah and Barry sitting near the opening, said something to her in their language and then began climbing up the rope, bracing his bare feet on the stone. He was out of sight in seconds.
“Now?” Barry asked, wondering at the change inside him, the* new sensation of fullness and joy he felt from the Beast. What would happen to him now? He recognized some hold the Beast was exerting over his mind. It was hard for him to think about his survival with that pressure on his mind, as if he were under some strong tranquilizing drug.
“I’m coming down,” was shouted from outside the cave. It was Bo.
The two humans stood uncertainly as the rope jerked back and forth. Barry grabbed the end of it to make the climb down easier. Beaumont’s feet came into view, bare as had been the Indian’s, then his long, gaunt body, the black beard. He swung down to the cave floor, looking at Sarah with no surprise.
“Why’d you do that?” Barry asked.
Bo took the figurine from his pocket, the carved piece of abalone shell that had been in Barry’s jacket pocket He grinned at Sarah.
“In case you’re wondering”—he looked at Barry also— “I know about the two of you.”
He stood, his legs apart, as if ready for a battle. In his band the figurine glistened: the carved bear, muzzle in the air as if crying out in pain. Lifting it in his fingers, he held it toward the man and then the woman.
“I know this has some power over you creatures in your natural form,” he said, grinning. “If you want to take on your other forms, go ahead.” He stood, waiting. The two people looked at each other. Sarah spoke first.
“Bo, what do you want? We are almost finished here.”
“I want—” The tall man paused, swallowed. “You damn well know what I want.”
Barry looked at the woman as he felt his existence fading, felt the two Beasts in their completeness taking form. It was like knowing when you are falling asleep, he thought, as his self faded away into something larger, something so powerful he could not comprehend its limits. Yes, like falling asleep and being aware as the landscape of dream takes form, and you yourself become something else….
We shift.
The two great cats sat on their haunches, the one tawny, the other blue-gray. They were similar but not identical. They did not need to look at each other now, for they were already one in their minds.
“You’re beautiful, all right,” Bo said, holding the figurine at arm’s length in front of him. He was frightened in spite of himself, muscles quivering behind his knees.
You want a Person, we say.
“I want Lilly,” Bo said.
Do you know your son was a Person of ours once?
Bo stepped back, hit his head on the low, overhanging ceiling and half fell, half crouched among the scattered bones of those a century dead. He looked at the two Beasts, the hand holding the figurine faltering. “My son?”
Charles Cahill, whose full name did not come through at the time of his being called—Charles Cahill Beaumont, a fine young man, my second Person, I say, remembering in my self for a moment that heroic young man and his ignominious end caused by my own childish reactions.
“What?” the black-bearded man said, his face sagging. The amulet had fallen into the dust and lay glittering among the bones. “My son? He’s dead,” he whispered.
All of our Persons are chosen from the newly dead, we say. It is our method of assuming humanity for our purposes. Our kind must mature in a different life form, and
so we are able to draw on those Persons who hold interim positions in the adjoining space.
“You can call back the dead?” Bo’s eyes are dull and full of pain now. “Then Lilly was dead, too?”
You know she was. You have been there.
“She said one time,” he whispered, “that she remembered it.”
We can use the amulet you have. It is an opening, or you might think of it as a time-stop. It opens into adjoining spaces and allows energy to be transferred through its timeless structure. It may be used to add energy to any time-bound form.
“What are you saying?” Bo said, seeming to come back to life.
That together we can draw energy from Outside, but our ability to do so is limited.
“Can you bring them back?”
We can each create a separate structure with our own life energy. Together we can bring in only two Persons without injuring ourselves.
“Well, bring them back, then,” Bo said. He stood up again, carefully, stooping under the low ceiling. “Lilly, and my son, too,” he added with a note of triumph. He bent to pick up the amulet again.
It is not possible to bring them both. Barry will be brought in as a separate Person. That is one. You must choose the other.
“Between Charles and Lilly?” Bo screamed. “You can’t be saying that. I can’t make that choice, condemn one of them to death. That’s horrible!” He took a step forward, the amulet held before him. Both of the Beasts rose to their feet and backed away a step or two.
Please. Do not threaten us. We might leave you at any moment.
“Okay, okay, but if you can bring back one..
It is not possible to bring back both.
“Why does he … I mean Barry … why does he—” Bo stopped, his head dropped. He turned away and put one hand against the stone wall. “I don’t mean that,” he said softly. He stood for a long time, or perhaps it was only a few seconds. Time in the cave did not move in a normal way. The dusty bones might have stood up again, fleshed as they were in the last century, alive and speaking with each other as they waited in the cold for the Spanish with their guns.
When the man turned, his face looked old. There seemed more gray in his hair and beard. “I understand,“ he said. He closed his eyes, and from under the lids two tears came and ran down his cheeks. He said, “Charles.”
Barry sat on the fender of the Model A gazing along one edge of the canyon where the piñons and yuccas ended and the sandstone began. Down in the depths it was evening, although the sun would not set for at least another hour. From the comer of his eye he could see Bo and his son standing beneath one of the taller cedar trees. They had been talking, hugging each other, walking about for maybe an hour, Barry thought. He grinned, and in spite of his happiness he felt tears in his eyes. Hell, they could take all night if they wanted to. He felt firmly himself now, fitted to this world, not doubled and tom in opposing directions or given to strange hungers and powers. This was his world.
Before, in that terrible time when he had never been alone, when the Power had been always with him, he had not known of his past, his human life. Now it was clear; even the death, the blaze of brightness from which he had been pulled back by the power of those creatures united with what seemed accidental events. The amulet that coyote had meant as a malicious trick on the Beast, the fact of Mina’s extrasensory powers and George Beaumont’s abilities, too: all of these had somehow been brought together into a web of power. In those few seconds, Barry had shared with the creatures and had learned something he would not ever tell his two friends standing over there in the evening light.
—Barry comes through Mina’s power and his own life force.
—Charles can be brought back because his father’s love held the boy in an interim space.
—The others continue on their way as imperishable Persons.
Barry remembered the brightness clearing to reveal the Indian woman, Sarah, a little boy, a slightly built young woman with short, dark hair and other people he did not recognize. They rose then, as on an updraft of light energy, disappearing into the brightness.
—The young woman could not be brought back.
—She had been released on her way.
—He does not know he had no choice.
No, Barry thought, he will never know that.
A sudden shout from the two standing under the cedar tree jerked Barry from his reverie. They were pointing out over the canyon. He jumped to the ground and ran to where they stood watching the birds lift out of the dusky canyon like meteors rising from the earth.
“God!” Bo said, his hand shading his eyes. “Look at that!”
“They’re almost too bright to look at,” Charles said, his hand also at his forehead.
The two flying creatures, for they were not really birds, rose from the canyon into sunlight, circling about each other, scintillating with color: aquamarine, crimson, turquoise, a deep coral red, color flowing back from them. They trailed a fluttering rainbow as they rose into the evening sky. The brilliant winged beings circled, approached in graceful curves, seemed to fuse with flashings of white light, circled again, always rising higher into the deep blue sky.
Barry watched, his mind opening to the beauty of their color and movement. Parts of the peyote ritual came back to him, the vision of a home world where these were in their natural surroundings, a world of shifting forms. I have been so fortunate, he thought, as the two flying creatures came together again and the light blazed out from them.
And then the spot of light exploded, showering fragments of rainbow down into the canyon. And a second later the detonation hit them, a loud crack, as of close lightning. The sky was clear, deep blue again and empty.
“Damn,” Bo said, turning his dazed face to look at Barry. “They blew up.”
Barry looked at Charles, who was smiling. “No,” he said. ‘That was the Leap.”
Later, as the little Ford bounced along toward Chinle, Barry still felt some of that joyful glow, the farewell of those creatures whose life imperative was a progressive change of form, as simple as the tadpole and the moth. From the back seat came the happy voices of Bo and Charles.
“Well, can we, Dad?”
“Sure. I just got to stop off in Salt Lake City to see a guy I know and make some arrangements.” Bo’s voice picked up, grew more confident. “I bet your mom would like that town.”
“We can talk her into it, can’t we, Dad?”
“Sure,” Bo said. “You know we can.”
Barry switched on the headlights as the sunset glowed deep red like embers in the west. He was going home, too, really home this time. A movement caught his eyes as they bumped out of an arroyo, and he noticed a large, lean coyote trotting off at an angle between the junipers. The wild dog cast a quick look toward the car and turned sharply away into the growing darkness. Poor coyote, Barry thought. Even his meanness was put to good use. A person could say that’s how coyote got such a bad name among the Navajo, or could say that’s how the Indians came up with the Thunderbird symbol But the truth is, he thought, settling his arm on the window and sniffing the evening breeze, the truth is, we’d be better off attending to the important things. He grinned. Like getting home.
Unknown Author, The Beast (v1.0)
