The Legend of Miaree Read online

  The Legend of Miaree

  Zach Hughes Неизвестный Автор

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  The Legend of Miaree by Zach Hughes

  Chapter One

  You must understand, my children, that a fable is merely a fable. Understand, too, that although I am old, and reputed, by former students of certain perceptiveness, to know everything, there are things that even I do not understand. The best mind can be befuddled, for example, by the mere existence of the Q.S.S.'s beyond Cygnus, unbelievably far, unusually bright, deliciously mysterious.

  We men are arrogant creatures. We measure and guess, within plus or minus a few light years, their distance, those objects which we cannot explain. We speculate endlessly. Ah, how we do speculate.

  The fable. You have read your first assignment, of course. I think not even the most daring of you would face me had you not.

  In reading the table you must remember that the world, this world, that world, any world, was once young. Yes, even Trojan V, my young Alaxender. Once we crawled, we men, on the surface of the old earth, and even then we could look up and see the colliding galaxies in Cygnus.

  Have you considered, Elizabeth, why man had to go to Cygnus?

  Ah, primitivism, you say. The urge to hear and see the big bang. Yes, that is the nature of man. When star meets star—picture it, a giant and ancient blue star sending out a corona at fifty hundred degrees thousand degrees centigrade toward a cooler red star with a surface of only fifteen hundred degrees—man must be there to measure. We are the

  inchworms of the universe, glorying in our ability to be there, feeling superior as we observe the paroxysm of two island galaxies wheeling ponderously into the ultimate death dance.

  Because of the myth of understanding, you say, Julius. Yes, you too, Leslie, know that myth. Know the parts to understand the whole. See stricken stars surge into death and know the secret of creation.

  Has that theory worked in practice, my lovely Stella?

  Are we more than we were, John of Selbelle III?

  We live. I am proof of that. We spread the dubious vitality of mankind to the far ends of this galaxy. We have heard, not with our inferior ears, but with instruments, the scream of a planet seared in the rush of an expanding nova, and we have probed into the old star fields at the center to find—what? What, Elana?

  The dead planets? Death?

  Ah, how alone we are.

  But the question was this—about Cygnus: Do we understand the whole more for having been to far Cygnus?

  At first we tried to go back in time, to measure the prime big bang of creation. Unable to do so, unable to find help in our quest from races other than our own, we poured a portion of the wealth of an empire of worlds into a Cygnus expedition, and we found a burning world and this. This treasury of words. Oh you may, at any time, by appointment (since it is a popular pastime and in great demand), see in the viewing rooms the ponderous dance of the dying galaxies, speeded into a motion which our frail life-span could not cover. This theory and that theory come forth and we know one more tiny part of our universe, but we are still unable to define it, no more than primitive man with his theory of the universe folding back upon itself.

  Why do you shiver, Martha from Terra II? Why? Is it the fear of an emptiness beyond the range of our strongest instruments?

  We are mobile to an unbelievable degree. Parsecs are but moments to us in our known blink patterns. Yet the unknown exists, representing—what? Death? Fear? We whistle into the dark maw of creation and further our knowledge. For what? For pure knowledge? Ah, we have planets devoted to the worship of data. We usurp a world to store our facts. We have a planet with machines to work endlessly, simply to relate out vast store of words.

  Our parent sun, my young Healer from the old world, is said to be billions of years old, and it is a Population I sun, a young star. There at the center, where the Dead Worlds mock us, the stars are ancient, but where there was once life there are only death and silence and a hell of radiation from the densely packed fields of stars, and in all the universe we are, father and son, my young Healer, still alone.

  Forgive me, I ramble. The question of ultimate creation is not scheduled to be solved this early in the semester. Yes, you may laugh, Cecile. I congratulate you on being able to understand that I make a pleasantry.

  We are here to discuss a fable, for so your learned men have labeled it, this story of Miaree, this slim volume, this handful of words. Consider it and what went into the making of it. It is the product of two civilizations. Made by one, salvaged from a charred world by another.

  What does it mean? I will not have the arrogance to tell you that. It is for you to decide.

  First, we must remember that the words are only our words, and thus, a feeble substitute for reality. The words are not necessarily those of Miaree, for we found the fable to be totally incapable of literal trainslation. There is, as a result, a certain lack of preciseness, and absence of definition. There are questions left unanswered. Was Rei a man, much like us, Alfred? Ah, you can't say? Don't be ashamed. Neither can I. Yet I can see him and I know him. He lives in my mind, and thus, although he is separated by an eon of time and by endless light years from our pleasant rooms, he exists, does he not?

  "When our race was young it looked up and saw the colliding galaxies. They will be colliding long after you and I, young friends, have joined Miaree in past time. And then, as now there will be many questions and few answers; hopefully, men will still be trying to find answers, perhaps, as we do, through literature. For I consider literature to be a minute island of sanity in a sea of excesses of cold measurement

  and frantic amassing of data. We live, through literature, many lives. This is a blessing, I feel, comparable to those bestowed by our medical miracles, which give us the longevity to travel to Cygnus for the sole purpose of watching stars mash each other, and which allow us a surplus of years so that we may squander the youth of our children in studying a fable which gives no answers.

  I was asked once, by a scientist, the purpose of my seat here. I confessed that I had no answer. I said that my work would not chart the voids beyond our deepest blink. I said that my teachings would not explain any reasons. The universe, I said, will continue to expand as I talk and after I cease to talk, and someday, if you are right, my scientist friend, it will slowly, over endless eons, slow, fail, and fall, to start the cycle again. Will you be there to measure that primeval rebirth? You say, I told him, that all matter began with hydrogen. If so, explain what happens when all the matter in the universe coagulates into one infinite mass and goes Boom!

  In the face of such monumental questions, we are more concerned—are we not?—with today's lunch menu in the dining hall. Life is measured in microseconds in the day of the universe, and our sun is but a second in its life, my children. We must be content to live our lives on the rolling seas of the endless eons and to be thankful, as Miaree was thankful.

  Thomax, would you please shake your friend LaConius and remind him that sleeping is best done in barracks? Ah, thank you. Now, LaConius, since you exhibit such interest, perhaps you would condescend to open your volume to page 1 and begin to read, that we might savor the literary style of the translator computer so well developed by your fellows on Tigian.

  Chapter Two

  In the beginning, God set the heavens aglow with a golden light to guide the feet of nocturnal travelers and to light the dense juplee forests so that hungry ifflings might continue their feasting on broad, fat leaves.

  It was a blessing, the light, the broad splash o
f fire which appeared low in the evening sky and grew with the movement of The World to burn night away and to cover the dome of the sky with its glory.

  From the lowly ifflings, God created Artonuee to love the beauty which fought the darkness. The light was good. And the Artonuee flourished and partook of God’s wisdom and flew on the wings of the sun and, coming too near, angered Her.

  For to gain a world, and another, Artonuee forsook God and, in punishment, were doomed.

  She spake: From the ifflings you came. To the ifflings return, and in the end, to eternal fire.

  And the fires in the darkness grew as the Artonuee grew, and their thunder could be heard, and the end was ordained not quickly, but with inevitable slowness—eternal death marching down the blackness, sending messengers of light and radiation to remind the Artonuee of their transgressions.

  Struggling against God’s anger, the Artonuee bellowed out into the cold void in drivers and sought refuge, but did not find it, being limited by God’s divine will.

  Chapter Three

  "Forgive me, Mother. I sin."

  She bowed before the shrine of Her dwelling, released her prayer. Around her, the soft silk of the walls glowed warmth and comfort, and through the spun covering of the viewer the fires of the night glowed the earth.

  She had risen at a predawn hour in order to catch the shuttle driver.

  Dressed for flight, her fragility cocooned in the protection of spacecloth, she pushed against the diaphragm of the entrance, felt it give, open,

  caress, close behind her. There in the night the sky was a sea of fires in blues and reds and yellows. She tuned her multi-faceted eyes to drink the beauty and the awesome power of it, the variance of color and frequency, and the grim reminder, in halos of burning carbons and metals and gases, of the slow march of eternity. In her ears was the voice of God, on a non-utilitarian frequency, the scream of it, the roar of it; the tortured stars were knifing into her universe edge on, slightly inclined, wheeling star on star, worlds burning in terrible beauty.

  She was young. As did all Artonuee, she reckoned her twenty years by The World out there up wind, where the ifflings crawled and fed on leaves. Maturing, she was considered beautiful. Life was sweet.

  All senses open, she studied God’s grandeur. The night sky reflects the power of God, and Her anger.

  She looked on it as a child, wide-round eyes registering all, ears operative on all frequencies, and she was as a child, lying on a mossy hill behind her Chosen Mother’s dwelling, hands under her head, looking up.

  Individual, near stars were dimmed. The dome burned. And yet it was all so distant, the nearest flare magnified out of its importance by relative nearness. Small, insignificant stars streaming toward each other, blending, blossoming into space-eating hugeness. Flying downwind from such small stars would be, she knew, an exercise for a novice.

  But to fly before the combined fury of their meeting?

  She shivered. To be alive when the masses struck, to fly before the storm of winds then. On that wind she would fly forever into the impenetrable depths where life was too short. But to fly, once, on such force! To feel the beat of the wind on the wings of her flyer.

  Such thoughts angered God. She pressed herself, indicating her defenseless heart to God. She felt deliciously sacreligious.

  The words of the priests came back to her. "Space is God’s dwelling," they said. Why, she asked, are males so much more devout than females? "You flaunt your sin before Her, flying. It is an arrogant repetition of the original sin, and it is useless. Have we not determined that we cannot flee Her? Forsake the ways of the wicked. Fight the whim in you, female, which calls you to defy Her."

  "I die," she answered. "All Artonuee die. We see our doom in the night sky. Our world dies day by day. Our death comes toward us slowly, as stellar distances are measured, but inevitably. Our instruments can measure it. We ourselves can sense it. I, of course, will not be alive, in this body, at the end. That is Her will. But were I alive, I would watch the nearing of the colliding star through the thick viewer of my flyer. I would sail before it, the end, using its winds. I would watch the tendrils of the solar flames reach out, touch our worlds. And as I flew there, deep in space, all wings spread, catching the fury of the death of all, using it to reach a depth never before achieved by flyer, by Artonuee, I would ask Her: Why, Mother? No. I refuse to see that my flying makes the original sin—if, indeed, it were sin—any more reprehensible. Can we be punished more than once? We die. Meanwhile, I fly."

  "God, in Her mercy, could decide to forgive." they said.

  Males. Weak. Foolish. But then, they were changed without wings, never knowing the soar of it, the view of The World from aloft on the gentle winds of the air. "I read the Book," she told them. "It foretells all things and I find no promise of forgiveness. Can God, Herself, find a reversal for the inexorable movements of the universe?"

  "Sacrilege," cried the male teachers, hiding their eyes from the possibility of God’s immediate fury.

  It was the nature of the female to think, to seek. During long hours under the night sky she watched the march of the galaxies and, in theory classes, talked of ways to beat God’s laws. That she could not overcome the limitation of the speed of light saddened her, as it had saddened generations of Artonuee females. Yet, saddened, she still faced the impossible distance between the Artonuee galaxy and the nearest giant wheel which swam in clean space immune to the angry retribution of the Artonuee God.

  Once, with her soul mate, she calculated the size of a driver large enough to carry juplee leaves for two ifflings and a host on a voyage through time to the far galaxy. Ifflings, given an unlimited supply of food, lived through the centuries. The host could be in dormant state.

  The cubic area required for food alone dwarfed her imagination. Only the growing juplee forests could supply a greedy iffling with his food, and it was beyond Artonuee technology to transship a growing forest. Not even

  an imaginative Artonuee female could counter the immutable laws of a vengeful God.

  You think thus, if you’re an Artonuee female standing under the fires of the night. You shiver in your spacecloth and press your heart and force the sacrilege far down inside you and think, perhaps, of the long life which the race has already enjoyed and of how far it has flown from The World, green, cool, damp, how far from the ifflings the race has risen. Yet, one is not allowed to be prideful for more than a moment, for it is there, moving at thirty-five thousand miles per second, great sheets of stellar flame as stars embrace in paroxysmal finality. It is impossible to deny it. Not even if you are Miaree, aged twenty and feeling the first thrust of the formation of pre-eggs in your body. So you tuck your tiny, now useless wings close under the snug spacecloth, pick your way down the dew-dampened vault of the garden past the night-blooming flowers. You lean now and then, if you’re Miaree and twenty, for there is no one out to see and laugh as you revert to childhood and, with your long, graceful, and marvelously flexible lips, drink nectar and laugh at yourself.

  Up there the sun is beginning to light the tops of the low hills. The World wakens slowly. The first red rays reach and pierce and do battle with the cold light of the evil stars, and you tune out evil, using only part of your senses, and you run lightly to the roller where the meter shows more than enough charge to last the few moments of predawn required to drive the empty thoroughfare, wind moving the fine tendrils of your hair, dawning streets, an early riser keening a greeting, and in the burst of dawn the driver pointed upward, phallic, male, waiting and reaching.

  Chapter Four

  Stinkpot driver pounding upward on primitive fire blackening the atmosphere. But even pollution can, at times, be beautiful, and the pull of the enforced gravity of the drive does not detract from the sheer joy of looking back to see the long trail as the driver gains cold air and speeds, screaming, into the dark side. Behind, as night moves in a knife-edge line, the distant stream of the contrail and the silk-puff clouds which are once indivi
dual and soft, looking as if one could walk, and then, from the heights, solid blankets, and then, higher still, overall whorls and patterns

  of the planet’s weather. A huge circular movement on the southern seas, the shine of the ice cap of the north as the driver reaches height and apparent motion ceases, only the swimming of New World below giving an illusion of life in the stillness of near space.

  The shuttle is not crowded. The days of leisure are ahead, but below the Artonuee labor industriously and only a few, on holiday, may seek the frivolity of work-period flying. To her left, a matronly woman, grown thick in age, soon to feel the debilitating call back home. In the seat to her rear a young girl, wearing the red-and-yellow badge of the learner, slightly nervous. First solitary flight, guesses Miaree, and feels a surge of empathy, a need to reach out and touch. Her mind seeks, is greeted. "Love, don’t be afraid."

  A burst of corrective fire, sending a tremble through the driver, and the lingering, in the nostrils, of the smell of New World, gradually replaced, cycled out, as the air is reconditioned. And in the huge forward viewer, Flyer Haven. In the time it takes to reach it, drifting at mechanical speeds, she could have soared past Outworld. But there is patience mixed with her anticipation, for she has a long holiday. The Rim Star is provisioned and ready, according to her advance orders.

  Flyer Haven gleams with inner light. The dome, slightly frosted by condensation from the interior, is a silver jewel in the black fur of the outer night. The main spread of the distant fires is hidden behind the planetary bulk, but shines out at the rims, haloing the globe, refracting blue on the fringes of the atmosphere. The good blue world, a paradise of hills and water and multicolored plant life, home, now. And out there, a half-inch circle of reflected light. The World.