Orbit 13 - [Anthology] Read online

  The barman went and did this, and the bear drank his drink in silence.

  “We don’t get many bears in here,” the barman finally said when the silence had gotten on his nerves.

  “At ninety lira a throw I can understand why not,” the bear said.

  * * * *

  There were hundreds of these talking-animal jokes in those days. But they had a quality different from most jokes: they were all true exactly as told.

  * * * *

  Then there were the invisible African elephants (how can an African elephant possibly be invisible in clear daylight and open landscape?) coining up across the Sinai wastelands and going on for a great distance across the Syrian Desert. They were seven very large African elephants and they spoke courteously to all who stood and gaped as they passed. They were the only African elephants in the world with the gift of speech: the others had lost it long ago. No one would admit seeing these out-of-place elephants, of course. That would be the same as admitting that one was crazy.

  There were the great crocodiles traveling in labor and pain over the long dry places. There were the zebras and giraffes snuffling along out of Greater Africa, and the black-maned and the tawny-maned lions. There were the ostriches and the Cape buffalo and the huge boa snakes (the Day of the Snake had been a very long time ago). There were not large groups of any of these, five or seven, or sometimes nine. All were rather superior individuals of their species: all had the gift of speech and reason. All had a certain rakishness and wry humor in their mien, and yet all went under that curious compulsion that is the younger brother of fear.

  No person would admit seeing any of these “invisible animals,” but many persons told, with a peculiar nervousness, of other persons claiming to have seen them. There was somebody telling of somebody seeing a band of Irish elk: no matter that the species was supposedly extinct for several hundred years; reportorial jokers would never be extinct. And it is true that these very few elk said that they were the very last of their species.

  Many persons were said to have seen two floating islands going past Cyprus in the Eastern Mediterranean. One of these floating islands was loaded with various animals from South America; the other was filled and painfully crowded with sundry animals from the North American continent. At least half of these animals had been believed to be extinct. Some of them must have kept themselves well hidden for centuries to be able to appear now even as “invisible animals.”

  But even odder things were coming across the plains of India and Iran. They were hopping and leaping animals. Actually their motion, when they were at full speed, was like that of the hindquarters of a galloping horse, a horse that has no forequarters. These were the big kangaroos and the smaller wallabies and such. But what were they doing here? With them were many other creatures from Australia and New Zealand and Tasmania and the Impossible Islands.

  Ah well, then what about the polar bears riding on a small iceberg that floated past Crete and on toward Little Asia? There were seals riding on this also, and sea lions were sporting in the lee of it. Oddest of odd, there was a light but continuous snowstorm over this berg and the circle of graying frothing water around it, and over no other place.

  But whales in the Kurdish Highlands? What? What? Yes, the rivers had been very high that year. They had cut new channels here and there and left parts of their old channels in the form of a series of lakes. But whales in the Highlands! It’s true that nobody told about it without winking. And yet it was told about.

  And how’s about the angel out of heaven who walked and stood in those high plains and who seemed to be in some sort of pleasant trouble? It’s true that he said he was not an angel. He said he was a man only and was named Man. It is true that he looked like a man and not an angel (nobody knowing what an angel looked like). He looked like a man, a man of a very superior sort. But even this is a presumptive statement, since no one had admitted seeing him at all personally.

  Even so, whales in the Highlands, and a new special man named Man! And a thousand other prodigies. Could it all be the report of jokers?

  * * * *

  3

  To us, the bright, the magic set,

  The world is but a crumb.

  Ifwe be not the People yet,

  Whenwill the People come?

  But there were seven other very special humans met together in that same part of the world—met together, perhaps, by a sort of contrived accident. Nobody could deny that they were human; and yet one of the things they were discussing was the report that their humanity might be denied that very day or the following day.

  They had met in a private clubroom of the International Hotel in Mosul. They were making ready for a journey beyond Mosul. Which way beyond Mosul? Well, that was the thing they were discussing with some puzzlement on their own part. It would not be North or South or East or West or Up or Down from Mosul. It would just be beyond, a little bit beyond Mosul town.

  The seven special humans were Antole Keshish, a Turkish-Greek-Armenian intellectual of easy urbanity; Helen Rubric, the great lady and puzzle forever; Toy Tonk, a Eurasian girl who constructed philosophies that were like flower arrangements; Hatari Nahub, that charismatic Negro man who transcended continents and cultures; Lisa Baron of the light-haired and light-eyed peoples, and she was light-minded and light-tongued beyond the others; Charley Mikakeh, who was six kinds of American Indian, with a few touches of French, Irish, dark Dutch, and Jew in him; Jorge Segundo, who was all the Latins in the world in one man, but in whom the old Roman predominated (there was once a wise man who said that we tended to forget that the old Romans were Italians, to believe that they were Englishmen, but they weren’t).

  These seven had brilliance dripping off them like liquid jewels, an image which we cannot express rightly in words, not even their own fragmentary words.

  How these seven had been selected for a mission that they understood hardly at all is a puzzle. But they had gathered here from all over the world without a word of instruction or suggestion from anyone. It was only a sort of psycho-biological urge that had told them to come exactly here, exactly now.

  “We are met here and we hardly know why,” said Jorge Segundo. “We know each other not at all personally and only slightly by reputation. We are called here, but who is the caller? We come like lemmings.”

  “The lemmings came today,” said Toy Tonk, “but only seven of them, and they not at all in a panic. Nor are we, though perhaps we should be. This is perhaps the ‘Childhood’s End’ as foretold by the Clarke in the century past. Will this now be ‘The Second Age of Man’? And will ourselves seem children in comparison to the man (so far he is reported as singular in all ways) who comes?”

  “This is perhaps the new morning, the epiphany of one more of the ‘Nine Billion Names of God’ as phrased by the same Clarke, and we will either be ourselves magnified, or we will be reduced to something less than children,” Lisa Baron said lightly. “But we do not know that anything is happening.”

  “I stood and talked to a camel this afternoon,” said Charley Mikakeh, “and you say that nothing is happening? ‘What do you make of all the new and strange animals passing through?’ the camel asked me. ‘It’s a puzzler, is it not? And what do you make of myself talking? I and the very few others of my species have not done that for a very long time, not since the mushrooms still had prepuces as a normal thing, and yourself began to walk upright. It’s an odd thing, ape, is it not?’ ‘I am man and not ape,’ I told the camel, somewhat stiffly, I’m afraid. But the very fact that there was this conversation with a camel indicates that something is happening.”

  “Perhaps only inside your own head, Charley,” Antole jibed. “I have had conversation with a variety of animal species myself today. All say that it is unusual with them; not at all common for their species to be able to talk. Yet I find it less strange than that we seven, previously unknown to each other, should be gathered here and talking together.”

  “Oh, we are the seven magic p
eople,” Hatari said rationally, though he now had a not quite rational look in his eyes. “Every age of the world (and I believe that our own has been the penultimate age) has its seven magic people who came together by psychic magnet at a hinge time. We are the spokesmen for the rest. But if we are the spokesmen, what will we say, and to whom?”

  “If we be people indeed (and we never doubted it till this day) then we will speak it to our own variant (this mysterious shining man), and it will be given to us in that moment what we should say,” Helen Rubric was murmuring with her eyes half-closed. “But I am very edgy about all this, and I believe that we are really coming to the edge. There is something wrong with the setting and the set.”

  “What do you say, Helen?” Jorge asked. “What is wrong with the set?”

  “The set is off; it is gone wrong. Both the picture and the sound seem doubled, Jorge.”

  “Cannot it be fixed? But what am I talking about? I do feel for a moment that we are no more than animated cartoons on a screen. But this isn’t a TV set; it is something larger.”

  “This set is the whole-world set, Jorge,” Helen Rubric muttered. “And it has gone too far wrong to be fixed by ourselves. It may be fixed by this new fixer who comes. But I feel that we ourselves are diminished and demoted, that we are put into a shadowy box now and confined to a narrow corner.

  “I gazed upon my own double today and talked with her. She said that her name was Mary Rainwood. She seemed to take a saddened and sisterly view of me. She is an animal of the species orangutan; and if we are sisters under the skin, then hers is much the thicker and hairier skin; I might say that hers is the harder skin to get under. I know her species, but of what species am I an animal?

  “It was odd that she was able to speak. She says that it only happens in the last seven days of an age. It seems equally odd that I am able to speak, and I really wonder whether I have been doing it for more than seven days. I believe that our own era has been a very short one and a deponent one.”

  It was something like a ski lodge there in that private club room of the International Hotel of Mosul. Very cozy there by the open fire at night after a strenuous day on the snow slopes. What open fire? What snow slopes? That was all illusion.

  It was more like a cave they were in. Open fire or not, there was a flickering and a shadowing on the cave walls. And’ the talk among them became more and more shadowy on that last night of the age.

  It was morning then. It hadn’t been such a long evening and night, only a few hours. It hadn’t been such a long age, no more than thirty or forty thousand years. They went out in that morning to a place a little bit beyond Mosul. Seven magic persons on either the last or the first morning of their magic.

  * * * *

  4

  Yours: nervous sort of apish lives,

  Derivative the while:

  And, somehow, ferroconcrete hives

  Have not a lot of style.

  The shining man hadn’t arrived from anywhere. All ways of coming had been watched by some or other of the creatures. And yet he was there now on the crown of the animated hill. He was very much as all the creatures had supposed he would be, before they had seen him at all: not really shining, not of imposing stature, with an inexperienced and almost foolish look on his face, not complex, not at all magic; competent, though, and filled with an uneasy sort of grace.

  He was not nervous. Nervousness, of course, was not possible for such an excellent one as he was. But he was in some pain, for he was already in light travail.

  The animated hill was merely a wide low hill (higher, though, than the high hills around it) covered with creatures. They were in tiers and files and arrays; they were in congregations and assemblies and constellations. Creatures almost beyond counting, enough seemingly to cover the earth, and they did very nearly cover the wide hill.

  The man appointed and named them, speaking to them with an easy dominance, and then sending them away again, species after species, speechless again for another era, yet having their assigned places and tasks for a new age of the world.

  Earthworms, beetles, damselflies, honeybees, locusts, cicadas, came and went. They had slightly new assignments now in a world which would be at least slightly different. Shrikes and eagles and doves and storks came through the crowded air. The spoke; sometimes they argued; they were convinced, or they accepted their assignments without being convinced. But they winged away again, speechless now once more, but far from soundless.

  Time became diffused and multiplex, for the man imposed and directed thousands of species while the sun hardly moved. Space also was extradimensional, for the wide low hill could not have served as staging space for so many species in the normal order of things.

  “We will be the last ones,” Lisa Baron said to her magical companions. “As we are the highest species, the lords of the world, so we will have the final instruction and appreciation. Ourselves, the first age of mankind, will receive confirmation and approval from this aberrant creature who (however unlikely he seems) ushers in the second age of mankind. I beg you all, confer with him straightfaced and in all seriousness. Consider that his office is more important than himself. We are the giants and he is the dwarf, but he is higher than ourselves, for he is appointed to stand on our shoulders.”

  “We will not be the last ones,” said Jorge Segundo. “Can you not see that all these confrontations and instructions are simultaneous? And yet we wait. It is as if he notices’ all the others and not ourselves; he is probably jealous of our basic stature. But do you not see that even the trees and grasses come and go, speaking with him in their moment, and then going away speechless again to their own places. It is the un-naturing of the ecology that happens now, the preter-naturalizing of the ecological balance. The natural world was always out of balance. There could not be a balanced ecology before or without man. Well, but why did we not bring the balance in our own time? Are we not men?”

  The whales went away, greatly pleased and greatly relieved about something. And yet, all that the man had done was bless them and say, “Your name is whale.”

  There were long conversations with some of the species, and the man was forced to become eloquent with these. But the long confrontations did not use up great quantities of time. All these things were telescoped and simultaneous.

  “Your name is lion, . . . Your name is buffalo, . . . Your name is donkey,” the man was saying. The man was tired now and in more than light travail. But he continued to name and assign the creatures. There was much discussion and instruction in each case but they did not consume much time. “Your name is swine,” for instance, was a total statement that contained all that discussion and instruction. The palaver was like a scaffold that is disassembled and taken down when the building is completed. “Your name is carp-fish” was such a completed structure, with very much of stress and synthesis having gone into it.

  “Your name is ape,” the man said, smiling in his pain.

  “No, no, no, we are men,” shouted Joe Sunrise, that big and brindled ape from Little Asia. “We are not ape. It is the miserable half-creature there who called us ape. Can he be right about anything?”

  “Not of himself, and surely not about himself,” the man said. “But he hadn’t this knowledge of himself. He is only an air and a noise. Remember that you yourself had the day when you named the names: you named lion and buffalo and mammoth and others. This half-thing also had his shorter day. It may have sounded as though he said, and perhaps he did say, ‘Your name is ape.’ I do say it. ‘Your name is ape.’ Now go and fill your niche.”

  There was much more to it, as there was to every confrontation, yet it consumed little time. There was lamentation from Mary Rainwood and Kingman Savanna and Linger Quick-One and others of their group. There were hairy visages and huge brown eyes shining with tears. But the apes were convinced and almost at peace when they finally accepted it and went away, speechless again but not noiseless, shedding their robes and wrappings and going hairy. Th
ey were confirmed as apes now, and they would be more fulfilled apes than they had been before.

  It seemed that there was only one group left. Really, it had seemed to every group that it was the last one left; and yet every group had heard the naming of every other group, for it was all simultaneous.

  “Well, come, come, my good man,” Antole Keshish said to the man, and he clapped his hands for attention. “Now that you have disposed of the animals (and you did do it neatly, even though you were a little too wordy about it sometimes), it is time that we had our talk. We will clue you in on the world situation. Then we will be willing to listen to your special mission and message. I believe that we have been waiting for the message a long while, though frankly we expected it to be brought by a more imposing messenger.”

  “You haven’t any name,” the man said almost with bluntness. “Your particular species vanishes now as a separate thing. It has never been a real species. It hasn’t either body or spirit: only air and noise. Several of the creatures were correct in calling you the interlopers, the half-creatures. Be submerged now! Be nothing!”