Robert Silverberg - Gilgamesh in the Outback

Jagged green lightning danced on the horizon and the wind came ripping like a blade out of the east, skinning the flat land bare and sending up clouds of gray-brown dust. Gilgamesh grinned broadly. By Enlil, now that was a wind! A lion-killing wind it was, a wind that turned the air dry and crackling. The beasts of the field gave you the greatest joy in their hunting when the wind was like that, hard and sharp and cruel.

He narrowed his eyes and stared into the distance, searching for this day’s prey. His bow of several fine woods, the bow that no man but he was strong enough to draw—no man but he and Enkidu his beloved thrice-lost friend—hung loosely from his hand. His body was poised and ready. Come now, you beasts! Come and be slain! It is Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, who would make his sport with you this day!

Other men in this land, when they went about their hunting, made use of guns, those foul machines that the New Dead had brought, which hurled death from a great distance along with much noise and fire and smoke; or they employed the even deadlier laser devices from whose ugly snouts came spurts of blue-white flame. Cowardly things, all those killing machines! Gilgamesh loathed them, as he did most instruments of the New Dead, those slick and bustling Johnny-come-latelies of Hell. He would not touch them if he could help it. In all the thousands of years he had dwelled in this nether world he had never used any weapons but those he had known during his first lifetime: the javelin, the spear, the double-headed axe, the hunting bow, the good bronze sword. It took some skill, hunting with such weapons as those. And there was physical effort; there was more than a little risk. Hunting was a contest, was it not? Then it must make demands. Why, if the idea was merely to slaughter one’s prey in the fastest and easiest and safest way, then the sensible thing to do would be to ride high above the hunting grounds in a weapons platform and drop a little nuke, eh, and lay waste five kingdoms’ worth of beasts at a single stroke!

He knew that there were those who thought him a fool for such ideas. Caesar, for one. Cocksure cold-blooded Julius with the gleaming pistols thrust into his belt and the submachine gun slung across his shoulders. “Why don’t you admit it?” Caesar had asked him once, riding up in his jeep as Gilgamesh was making ready to set forth toward Hell’s open wilderness. “It’s a pure affectation, Gilgamesh, all this insistence on arrows and javelins and spears. This isn’t old Sumer you’re living in now.”

Gilgamesh spat. “Hunt with 9-millimeter automatics? Hunt with grenades and cluster bombs and lasers? You call that sport, Caesar?”

“I call it acceptance of reality. Is it technology you hate? What’s the difference between using a bow and arrow and using a gun? They’re both technology, Gilgamesh. It isn’t as though you kill the animals with your bare hands.”

“I have done that, too,” said Gilgamesh.

“Bah! I’m on to your game. Big hulking Gilgamesh, the simple innocent oversized Bronze Age hero! That’s just an affectation, too, my friend! You pretend to be a stupid, stubborn thick-skulled barbarian because it suits you to be left alone to your hunting and your wandering, and that’s all you claim that you really want. But secretly you regard yourself as superior to anybody who lived in an era softer than your own. You mean to restore the bad old filthy ways of the ancient ancients, isn’t that so? If I read you the right way you’re just biding your time, skulking around with your bow and arrow in the dreary Outback until you think it’s the right moment to launch the putsch that carries you to supreme power here. Isn’t that it, Gilgamesh? You’ve got some crazy fantasy of overthrowing Satan himself and lording it over all of us. And then we’ll live in mud cities again and make little chicken scratches on clay tablets, the way we were meant to do. What do you say?”

“I say this is great nonsense, Caesar.”

“Is it? This place is full of kings and emperors and sultans and pharaohs and shahs and presidents and dictators, and every single one of them wants to be Number One again. My guess is that you’re no exception.”

“In this you are very wrong.”

“I doubt that. I suspect you believe you’re the best of us all; you, the sturdy warrior, the great hunter, the maker of bricks, the builder of vast temples and lofty walls, the shining beacon of ancient heroism. You think we’re all decadent rascally degenerates and that you’re the one true virtuous man. But you’re as proud and ambitious as any of us. Isn’t that how it is? You’re a fraud, Gilgamesh, a huge musclebound fraud!”

“At least I am no slippery tricky serpent like you, Caesar, who dons a wig and spies on women at their mysteries if it pleases him.”

Caesar looked untroubled by the thrust. “And so you pass three-quarters of your time killing stupid monstrous creatures in the Outback and you make sure everyone knows that you’re too pious to have anything to do with modern weapons while you do it. You don’t fool me. It isn’t virtue that keeps you from doing your killing with a decent double-barreled .470 Springfield. It’s intellectual pride, or maybe simple laziness. The bow just happens to be the weapon you grew up with, who knows how many thousands of years ago. You like it because it’s familiar. But what language are you speaking now, eh? Is it your thick-tongued Euphrates gibberish? No, it seems to be English, doesn’t it? Did you grow up speaking English too, Gilgamesh? Did you grow up riding around in jeeps and choppers? Apparently some of the new ways are acceptable to you.”

Gilgamesh shrugged. “I speak English with you because that is what is spoken now in this place. In my heart I speak the old tongue, Caesar. In my heart I am still Gilgamesh of Uruk, and I will hunt as I hunt.”

“Uruk’s long gone to dust. This is the life after life, my friend. We’ve been here a long time. We’ll be here for all time to come, unless I miss my guess. New people constantly bring new ideas to this place, and it’s impossible to ignore them. Even you can’t do it. Isn’t that a wristwatch I see on your arm, Gilgamesh? A digital watch, no less?”

“I will hunt as I hunt,” said Gilgamesh. “There is no sport in it, when you do it with guns. There is no grace in it.”

Caesar shook his head. “I never could understand hunting for sport, anyway. Killing a few stags, yes, or a boar or two, when you’ve bivouacked in some dismal Gaulish forest and your men want meat. But hunting? Slaughtering hideous animals that aren’t even edible? By Apollo, it’s all nonsense to me!”

“My point exactly.”

“But if you must hunt, to scorn the use of a decent hunting rifle—”