stars — again he’d simply listened.
What new dimension had been added to himself, he wondered, that would
have permitted him to try to communicate with the creature? Had the
possibility that he was about to die moved him?
The creature in the stone might not be subject to death — it might be
immortal.
He crawled out of the far recess of the cave and crept out to where he
had room to hunker down.
The storm had worsened. The ice now was mixed with snow and the
temperature had fallen. The ledge in front of the cave was filmed with
slippery ice. If a man tried to walk it he’d go plunging down the cliff face
to his death.
The wind was blowing harder. The branches of the trees were waving and a
storm of leaves was banking down the hillside, flying with the ice and snow.
From where he squatted he could see the topmost branches of the clump of
birches which grew atop the mound just beyond where the cave tree had stood.
And these branches, it seemed to him, were waving about far more violently
than could be accounted for by wind. They were lashing wildly from one side
to the other and even as he watched they seemed to rise higher in the air,
as if the trees, in some great agony, were raising their branches far above
their heads in a plea for mercy.
Daniels crept forward on his hands and knees and thrust his head out to
see down to the base of the cliff.
Not only the topmost branches of the clump of birches were swaying but
the entire clump seemed to be in motion, thrashing about as if some unseen
hand were attempting to wrench it from the soil. But even as he thought
this, he saw that the ground itself was in agitation, heaving up and out. It
looked exactly as if someone had taken a time-lapse movie of the development
of a frost boil with the film being run at a normal speed. The ground was
heaving up and the clump was heaving with it. A shower of gravel and other
debris was flowing down the slope, loosened by the heaving of the ground. A
boulder broke away and crashed down the hill, crushing brush and shrubs and
leaving hideous scars.
Daniels watched in horrified fascination.
Was he witnessing, he wondered, some wonderfully speeded-up geological
process? He tried to pinpoint exactly what kind of process it might be. He
knew of one that seemed to fit. The mound kept on heaving upward,
splintering outward from its center. A great flood of loose debris was now
pouring down the slope, leaving a path of brown in the whiteness of the
fallen snow. The clump of birch tipped over and went skidding down the slope
and out of the place where it had stood a shape emerged.
Not a solid shape, but a hazy one that looked as if someone had scraped
some stardust from the sky and molded it into a ragged, shifting form that
did not set into any definite pattern, that kept shifting and changing,
although it did not entirely lose all resemblance to the shape in which it
might originally have been molded. It looked as a loose conglomeration of
atoms might look if atoms could be seen. It sparkled softly in the grayness
of the day and despite its seeming insubstantiality it apparently had some
strength — for it continued to push itself from the shattered mound until
finally it stood free of it.
Having freed itself, it drifted up toward the ledge.
Strangely, Daniels felt no fear, only a vast curiosity. He tried to make
out what the drifting shape was but he could not be sure.
As it reached the ledge and moved slightly above it he drew back to
crouch within the cave. The shape drifted in a couple of feet or so and
perched on the ledge — either perched upon it or floated just above it.
_You spoke_, the sparkling shape said to Daniels.
It was not a question, nor a statement either, really, and it was not
really speaking. It sounded exactly like the talk Daniels had heard when
he’d listened to the stars.
_You spoke to it_, said the shape, _as if you were a friend_ (although
the word was not friend but something else entirely, something warm and
friendly). _You offered help to it. Is there help that you can give?_
That question at least was clear enough.
‘I don’t know,’ said Daniels. ‘Not right now, there isn’t. But in a
hundred years from now, perhaps — are you hearing me? Do you know what I am
saying?’
_You say there can be help_, the creature said, _but only after time.
Please, what is that time?_
‘A hundred years,’ said Daniels. ‘When the planet goes around the star
one hundred times.’
_One hundred?_ asked the creature.
Daniels held up the fingers of both hands. ‘Can you see my fingers? The
appendages on the tips of my arms?’
_See?_ the creature asked.
‘Sense them. Count them.’
_Yes, I can count them._
‘They number ten,’ said Daniels. ‘Ten times that many of them would be a
hundred.’
_It is no great span of time_, the creature said. _What kind of help by
then?_
‘You know genetics? How a creature comes into being, how it knows what
kind of thing it is to become, how it grows, how it knows how to grow and
what to become. The amino acids that make up the ribonucleic acids and
provide the key to the kind of cells it grows and what their functions are.’
_I do not know your terms_, the creature said, _but I understand. So you
know of this? You are not, then, a brute wild creature, like the other life
that simply stands and the others that burrow in the ground and climb the
standing life forms and run along the ground._
It did not come out like this, of course. The words were there — or
meanings that had the feel of words — but there were pictures as well of
trees, of burrowing mice, of squirrels, of rabbits, of the lurching
woodchuck and the running fox.
‘Not I,’ said Daniels, ‘but others of my kind. I know but little of it.
There are others who spend all their time in the study of it.’
The other perched on the ledge and said nothing more. Beyond it the
trees whipped in the wind and the snow came whirling down, Daniels huddled
back from the ledge, shivered in the cold and wondered if this thing upon
the ledge could be hallucination.
But as he thought it, the thing began to talk again, although this time
it did not seem to be talking to him. It talked, rather, as the creature in
the stone had talked, remembering. It communicated, perhaps, something he
was not meant to know, but Daniels had no way of keeping from knowing.
Sentience flowed from the creature and impacted on his mind, filling all his
mind, barring all else, so that it seemed as if it were he and not this
other who was remembering.
5
First there was space — endless, limitless space, so far from
everything, so brutal, so frigid, so uncaring that it numbed the mind, not
so much from fear or loneliness as from the realization that in this
eternity of space the thing that was himself was dwarfed to an
insignificance no yardstick could measure. So far from home, so lost, so
directionless — and yet not entirely directionless, for there was a trace,
a scent, a spoor, a knowing that could not be expressed or understood or
even guessed at in the framework of humanity; a trace, a scent, a spoor that
showed the way, no matter how dimly or how hopelessly, that something else
had taken at some other time. And a mindless determination, an unflagging
devotion, a primal urgency that drove him on that faint, dim trail, to
follow where it might lead, even to the end of time or space, or the both of
them together, never to fail or quit or falter until the trail had finally
reached an end or had been wiped out by whatever winds might blow through
empty space.
There was something here. Daniels told himself, that, for all its
alienness, still was familiar, a factor that should lend itself to
translation into human terms and thus establish some sort of link between
this remembering alien mind and his human mind.
The emptiness and the silence, the cold uncaring went on and on and on
and there seemed no end to it. But he came to understand there had to be an
end to it and that the end was here, in these tangled hills above the
ancient river. And after the almost endless time of darkness and uncaring,
another almost endless time of waiting, of having reached the end, of having