The winged man, p.11
The Winged Man, page 11
Kenlon had been wondering how he was going to be transported. The answer began to be clear when he saw more than two score winged men wheeling down from the sky. They brought the lamps. They also brought a sling — supported by scores of thin wires, each one of which was attached to the belt around the waists of the flyers.
After everything else had been done, Kenlon climbed into the sling; and in a minute his feet left the deck, and he was on his way.
He was looking down at the conning tower and the long, bulging shape of the submarine floating like a toy in bright, transparent water. The glow points of the Gihlander lamps, which hung now in the water, curiously accentuated the impression of a toy submarine in an indoor pool with ceiling lights reflecting from the water.
Kenlon swung slowly around and around in his harness and swayed gently from side to side. To his left he could see the gleaming metallic shapes of the various vessels — Gand's big ship, the Sessa Clen's yacht.
The ships receded slowly. The sea took on a flat appearance. The wall of the eyrie loomed black and near to one side, and below and above, blocking out three quarters of his view in the direction the submarine's instruments had always indicated as being west.
After a few minutes more, the Segomay 8 disappeared behind an outjutting angle of the mountain, and one by one, as he watched, the other craft were blotted from his view until, finally, only the speck that was the Sea Serpent, and the high-riding, red-glinting ship of the Sessa Clen, remained in his field of vision.
Kenlon estimated that he was at least a mile above the sea. Which left about half a mile to go, before he reached the building. He glanced upward to verify the distance, and it was so.
Laren must have noticed the intent expression that Kenlon always got in his face when he calculated. He winged down to a point just below Kenlon. He called melodiously:
"Anything wrong?"
Kenlon started to shake his head; and then with a jerk that was as much physical as mental, stopped the action. Anything wrong! Everything was wrong, his whole universe topsy-turvy. Of all the things in the world that he needed, more information was the most important. Information that would straighten out the bends in his mind. Information that would fill enormous gaps. Information! First, about the council.
He stated his confusion, finished: "What I want to know is, why is the council opposed?"
Laren said gravely: "It would take too long to explain the council to you. Theoretically, it is omniscient. We are disturbed by its reactions to this affair. You will realize the difficulty of our problem in a few minutes when you see the council."
Kenlon considered that, frowning. An omniscient council whose findings had to be overruled — it was puzzling. He twisted toward Laren. "Why didn't you," he began, "send someone to the age of the last groundmen with your problem? Better than any twentieth-century submarine, they'd be able—"
He was talking to empty air. Laren, evidently taking his brief silence for the end of the conversation, was swinging strongly upward a hundred feet away.
Kenlon thought of beckoning him back but, after a moment's consideration, changed his mind. Knowing what he knew — through what he had learned of Arpo's character — of the great groundmen, it seemed obvious that the council had understood the situation very well. Being totally altruistic, they had given their help at the time. They would not take sides.
And so — Kenlon reasoned — he had better start thinking about what he was going to ask the omniscient council.
He was still frowningly preparing his questions a few minutes later when he grew aware that the flight was leveling off. And that he had come to the end of his aerial journey.
Chapter 15
They were not, Kenlon saw, at the top of the building, but about halfway up. An open door, a very large door, at least a hundred feet wide and high, yawned directly before him. Marble steps led down from it and terminated in space.
It was one of many such entrances in a building the grand dimensions of which were only now apparent. It towered and spread. It was wider than it was high. But it was high. It floated in clouds; part of it was hidden in thick mists. He could see the remote upper reaches through shimmering fog. And those heights were at least an eighth of a mile farther up.
The building in itself was a city.
Everywhere he looked were winged men and women, in groups and singly, though none was near the door toward which he was being edged. Kenlon gazed in fascination at the women, though they were mostly too far away for him to make them out clearly.
Of the two nearest him, one had jet black hair, the other golden. The hair was very long and whipped behind them as they flew. Kenlon thought of angels, but he was vaguely glad that they came no closer. He had, he thought as his feet settled on the comfortingly hard marble terrace, no fancy for disillusionments.
"Just walk in, but go carefully," said Laren.
Evidently, he was to remain in his harness, attached to the fliers. The precaution evoked a mind picture of what the inside must be like. Kenlon walked gingerly through the doorway.
He found himself in a well-lighted and vast room. There were great unguarded boles in the floor, in the ceiling, in the walls; gleaming tunnels that fell away into depths, or gave tantalizing glimpses of tastefully furnished antechambers to what must be apartments because there were closed doors visible in some of the horizontal vistas along which Kenlon gazed.
Height untrammeled by too many walls — that was the general effect. Kenlon, his neck arched, his whole manner one of a gaping tourist, walked forward until he felt Laren's withholding pressure on his arm. Startled, he looked down — at an abyss of a tunnel unguarded by rails of any description. The floor actually curved down, so that there was no sharp edge. Beyond the curving floor was a gulf forty feet wide and three-quarters of a mile deep. Kenlon reeled back, and then flushed as, beside him, Laren laughed softly.
The winged man said, "Have no fear. The carriers could support you even in a sudden fall. You realize, of course, that in a world where men have wings living quarters will be different."
Kenlon realized silently.
Laren went on: "You are to be taken down about—" He gave the winged men's equivalent of a hundred meters. He finished with an enigmatic smile: "Do not be too surprised at the nature of the council."
Before Kenlon could reply, Laren launched himself down the shaft The sling tightened around Kenlon. He was swung out and down. Below him, he saw Laren land, and stand, looking up. An intervening ceiling hid the council room; then he could see more of the floor beyond Laren. And then
He was flying.
He was flying. There was no mistaking the movement, the free, the immensely strong, movement. He was flying through a thick mist of cloud that hid even the tips of his wings.
His vision included eye awareness of his legs drawn up against his body; and it included blurred visualization of his wings — blurred because the two great pinions were hammering away at the air like the pistons of a swiftly running engine. His body glowed with power; his whole being exulted with the glory of winged flight. The exhilaration was a tingling joy inside him.
For a long minute that was all there was. Then slowly his mind began to emerge from the state of rigidity into which it seemed to have frozen. The period of pure impression ended. And a personal thought was born, the first of many. A thought so powerful, so devastating, that his wings ceased their pumping, his body twisted with amazement; he felt bewildered, stunned. And still that thought would not be eased, but rather grew like a storm, becoming more intense with each passing moment:
What — what — WHAT had happened? The winged men had been lowering him toward the council room; the floor of the room was actually coming into his view when — this!
Flying. With wings. Actually inside — his brain, his consciousness, his being inside the body of a winged man.
They must have done it on purpose. They must have transferred his — essence — into the body of this winged man in order to show him the mental and physical universe of the race.
Kenlon clung to that logicalization even as awareness came that he was flying again. Without having consciously willed it, he was climbing strongly upward toward whatever high goal the winged man, into whose body he had been transferred in mid-flight, had been originally heading.
He felt a sudden, intense curiosity as to that goal. He fought on up through the incredible cloud formation, up, up. His wings were soaking wet, but their strength defied the clinging water. The great heart, the mighty lungs, the untiring muscles of the body he bore, accepted every ounce of that terrific strain, and still they climbed.
Kenlon's mind grew immensely weary of that struggle against gravity and the resisting elements; and it was then that he became aware that it was not he who was doing the flying.
He tried to stop the wings in their flapping. And couldn't. He tried to end that upward flight, and twist downward — and couldn't!
Dismayed, he ceased the effort. He thought blankly: I'm just a rider. The brain of the real winged man is still here, still in charge. I'm being shown. I'm not participating. But then, what about the way he had stopped the wings from movement earlier?
The answer came to him instantly: The violence of his reaction at the moment of discovering his predicament had succeeded in dominating the nerves and muscles of the winged man. But only for that one shocked moment. There must be liaison; he must be capable of potential half-control. But it would require a desperate impulse to enforce it
He had better remain quiet and await events.
The decision was barely made when the all-enveloping mist began to clear. First he could see the tips of his wings, then the beginning of a second pair of wings, then all around him other wings beating at the thinning air, mounting up now through ever fleecier clouds.
Abruptly, they burst into sunlight, climbed several hundred yards, and leveled off.
Whatever the purpose of it, the tremendous climb was over.
Their purpose could, of course, be to see the sun. It was reason enough. A month of gray skies had filled Kenlon with a longing to bask in pure, unadulterated sunlight.
If he felt thus, what then must these winged ones feel, whose horizon was always hidden by fog and mist and cloud?
He watched them experiencing the reality of the sun.
For a while they simply floated, wings almost moveless. They seemed to be resting on the great ocean of atmosphere beneath them, with only an occasional shunting of a wing to take advantage of the air that breathed now this way, now that. Silence lay over that high world. There was a grand dignity about it all, a sense of the spirit ascendant over the strife far below.
Here in this sky loft was peace enough to soothe any soul. The sun shone in a deep blue sky, a glorious orb of fire in an azure transparency. And there was no feeling of chill, though that could have been because the gray clothes fitted so snugly around each body.
There were at least two hundred bodies. They kept gliding in and out, one among the others, so that an accurate count was impossible. Kenlon judged that half of them were women.
Watching the women, the way their long hair streamed behind them, he thought again of angels; and this time he could see that the description was almost accurate. They were smaller than the men. Their faces were delicate, finely molded, their hands lovely, somehow untouched by the crude ardor of the wind and the perpetual dampness of the mists below.
It was the women who started the singing. Their voices intruded gently upon the silence, as if first one, and then others, following some secret cue, joined the swelling chorus.
Clear as running water, their voices ran the gamut of a song that was at once almost unbearably sweet yet tuneless, without coherent rhythm or pattern. A universe of sadness and joy quavered in their tones and semitones.
The men took up the words, and now, Kenlon saw, the whole group was flying and singing in unison.
Their song seemed the very essence of the music of an old and gentle race to whom tragedy had come. After a little, Kenlon was able to make out the meaning of the words, though he caught only snatches of the words themselves. Like the music, the words had no rhyme, no meter; and they did not even seem to be broken into verses:
We are the winged.
We sing of ancient glories and of a world to be.
When the water is gone, and there is land again
To hold our eager feet.
For a 999 of three-ones we have kept our faith with destiny.
We have borne children to carry on the race of men.
Their children have borne children.
We have lived as the council advised.
Now we are threatened.
The men of the sea envy us our wings.
They desire to bring us low;
And we have no weapons.
We have no material from which to build weapons.
We have only the council, which tells us to be brave,
And to carry on in faith and hope for the future.
We have faith and hope in the future,
But we are disturbed; we feel there is need for strong action.
For a 999 of three-ones we must live our life;
A 999 of three-ones of waiting, of marking time, of simply living until Earth once more is a green paradise.
Then we will put aside our wings
And go to work.
It will be hard,
For we are the winged.
It was a hymn to the First Cause of the infinite, half longing appeal, half gratitude for existing joys. The song died as it had begun, gradually, until finally only a single crystal-clear woman's voice sustained a note, that faded into silence.
The group were flying swiftly now, in ranks of nines. They wove intricately in and out in a sort of winged dance. Faster, faster — spinning, diving, looping, always, fantastically always, in perfect timing. The maneuver was a hundred times more complicated than any earthly dance, its movements three dimensional, its purpose somehow symbolical of the song that had gone before. Sad with longing, sweet with past joys, tinged with the uncertainty of the present, it ended finally as each group of nine joined into a series of circles around a central group of nine. They hovered there.
A man began a discourse in a grave, gentle yet resonant voice:
"On this day we shall discuss the history of the spiritual development of the mighty groundmen, as revealed by the known sages in the last nine years before the catastrophe. Let no one doubt but that mankind attained its spiritual zenith in those dark, brave days, and that in the face of final disaster their true greatness was revealed as never before in the history of this aged Earth of ours. We—"
The voice faded strangely away from Kenlon. The scene dimmed, and withdrew, and then winked out.
The next instant he was swimming.
Chapter 16
The water was warm; that was all he knew at first. It was hard to see, mainly, Kenlon realized after a long, blank moment, because the body he was in wasn't paying particular attention to surroundings.
Awareness came that there was a strong current running. And that he was idling along in its grasp, with only an occasional plunge of his great arm or leg to aid his swift passage. He caught a glimpse of the bottom fifty feet below; and there was light filtering in from about an equal distance above. A dozen man-shapes were swimming near him in the dim reaches of water. He was one of a group of fishmen swimming in a shallow sea perhaps near a shore.
Kenlon's mind reached out to grasp the wider, greater implications. And they came clear and stunning. He was being shown. The fairness of it was absolutely staggering. First, the life and life-purposes of the winged men, now the fishmen.
The water was delightfully warm; and it billowed gently in and out of his gills, in and out, in and out. The action was as natural as all the breathing he had ever done. Kenlon was aware of it only because he concentrated his mind on it in a sudden fascination with the very idea of a human being swimming under water like a fish. After a minute the reality was too normal to think about. It was a part of life, like the steady beating of a strong heart, like the quiet action of a stomach during the process of digestion.
He forgot about it.
His interest turned to what was happening. Wonder came as to where these water people were heading. He had an impression of alert attention to something going on in the sea darkness some distance in front of them.
The realization was like a cue. From out of the night of water came a thrillingly strange cry. It was a human voice, but unlike anything Kenlon had ever heard, a sound molded by the water environment, wonderfully alive, lusty in its piercing quality. Incredibly, though it was in an extremely modified version of the language of the winged men, he understood every syllable.
It was a warning.
"It's coming!" the voice cried. "Prepare!"
He felt himself patting the long knife in the sheath at his side. There was a darkly gleaming flash in the darkness ahead. A fish, Kenlon saw; a big fish. Twenty feet long at least. A shark! This was a hunting party.
A strong, big, arrogant fish. It swam into plain view, seemed to pause as it saw the semicircle of shapes waiting for it, then disdainfully darted up approximately between Kenlon's body and that of the fishman next to him.
Faster than the shark, the fishmen plunged upward. And they had it. Kenlon's arm closed with a viselike strength around the thick, sturdy body, directly in front of the sinister triangulated fin on the hard back. His long knife slid with beautiful precision into the soft white belly.
Other knives were darting their death thrusts. The mad threshings ceased finally. The wild beast of the sea turned lazily over, and lay motionless in death.
No, not motionless. It yielded to the pressure of the current, and began to drift swiftly back the way it had come. Kenlon climbed on top of it, jackknifed his legs around its body, and sat casually while it floated into the darkness. In a few seconds, his companions were nowhere to be seen. He was alone with the dead fish, drifting toward an unknown destination.
