Jack Chalker - Priam's Lens

“Daddy, how can so many of us have died so quickly and so terribly? ”

“Because we were so removed from the land ourselves that we had forgotten how to do things, son. We played at being farmers and ranchers when actually it was done by machines and computers and automated systems. We forgot just how many skills, how many pieces of knowledge it takes to make a simple pair of pants or build a grass hut or to cultivate the land with or without draft animals. We’d forgotten how to be blacksmiths, how to be potters when you had to create everything, literally everything, from scratch, how to fashion and make a yoke or properly plow and plant. We equated primitive with simple; in fact, it was our lives that had been made simple by our machines. The primitive was impossibly complex. We simply never realized how little we really knew.”

His parents had even come to suspect that the survivors, few as they were compared to those who had lived here, were almost being shaped into this existence, turned back into nearly hairless animals deliberately, perhaps for the same reason naturalists preserved some representatives of various animal and plant species in reserves. Just to have them around, so long as they made little trouble. Perhaps as a reserve for experimentation, or breeding, although for what purpose it was impossible to know.

They were still close enough to have the language, and the stories, but even now the bulk of the big words meant little to the younger ones, who had no frame of reference for them. The Family was evolving into a social group that could survive as a group and perpetuate itself but, like animals and insects, for no larger purpose. For no other purpose at all.

Father Alex often looked up at the stars when he was at his most melancholy, knowing what they were, and wondered if the Titans had done this to all the worlds of humans by now. Was there anybody left out there save a few living pretty much as they were living and facing the same bleak future? Were there still places like those his parents had spoken of, lands with strange names where machines did the work and humanity went between those stars in their own shining ships?

He would not, could not, believe that God would allow this to happen without some higher purpose. All those tens of thousands of years, all that work and dream and effort, could not have been, in the end, a cruel cosmic joke. He had to believe that God, somehow, was working His will, that even if humanity was sent back into the wilderness for some divine punishment or to relearn some long-forgotten lesson, there was a Promised Land at the end. Perhaps not for him, or for anybody here, but sometime.

Because, if there wasn’t, then even survival didn’t matter at all.

“As the God hears me and is my witness, Father, the dead spoke to us on that hill!”

Littlefeet was still scared and looked like he’d come through hell as well as the storm. Big Ears was, if anything, in even worse shape, but he was so exhausted that he’d just about passed out coming into the camp.

“And Big Ears heard this as well?” The priest wasn’t exactly convinced that there was anything extraordinary here other than a young boy’s imagination and fear, but, still, Littlefeet was generally very reliable. It was why he’d sent him in the first place.

“Yes, Father. You can ask him as soon as he awakens.”

“I will do that. Now, eat something here and then tell me slowly and carefully of your whole experience, particularly what you really saw up there. The body, conditions, all of that.”

Littlefeet gave a pretty straightforward account, but the description of the body as fair and unmarked was most significant. Where could such a one have come from except perhaps from the Titans themselves? But, then, why send the Hunters after him? An escapee? In all his years he’d never heard of anybody escaping once caught and brought in there, although there were tales of ones emerging as slaves of the Titans and acting as Trojan horses to bring others into captivity. Still, if not from there, then where? The idea that there was any sort of underground civilization going was always one of those stories, but if they were down there then why did this one come up? Certainly in all his life they’d never given any indication that they existed in this part of the world.

“Littlefeet—this is important. Did you feel any wind up there? A cool wind, as if coming from the hill?”

The boy thought. “I do not remember it, but it might have been. We paid little attention, since we were exposed there in daylight. We just wanted to make the observations and get back into the grass. You never said nothin’ ’bout scoutin’ the place, Father.”

“That’s all right. I was just wondering if this fellow was coming out from a cave or something of that sort. It would explain something.” But not much.

“It may be, Father. We did not stay to see. But it was a ghost for sure anyway! It said it was!”

Father Alex sent Littlefeet away to get some rest and tried to think on this. If Big Ears confirmed this story—and, knowing both boys as he did, he was certain that this would be the case—then what did it mean? Could a spirit truly be bound to a place in that way? Nothing in his training suggested it, and he fought such superstitions among the family even though, he knew, they believed in all of them and worse. When you have nothing, magic is all you have.

He decided to consult with Mother Paulista about this. His counterpart among the women was younger than he but looked at least as old if not older, with thin gray hair and a haggard, weatherbeaten face and form. She did, however, possess a better mind than he for the memorization and interpretation of the scriptures, and she was pretty hardheaded when it came to this sort of thing.

“A fair man in a place that can have no fair men, and a disembodied voice that claims to be his ghost, all on that cursed rock,” she muttered, as much to make sure she had things right in her mind as to feed back his facts. Still, he answered her.

“That is what is said, yes. They are boys, and they ran, of course, as well they should have from something this extraordinary.”

“Yes, boys, but they are of the age to be men, and there are several girls here who are now old enough to do their duty for the survival of the family and the propagation of the faith that binds us. I see that you believe them. If we do not interpret anything, but merely lay out the facts, there is only one conclusion possible.”

“Indeed?” He had thought of several, each unlikely, but she was far more pragmatic.

“The Hunter band coming into this family’s land after so long yet doing so little suggests that they were sent here on the orders of the shining demons. We have been left alone too long, I think. They are after fresh blood, and they want to stamp out the largest group of those remaining faithful to God in their immediate domain. They have failed to get us before, or to do more than slightly wound us with a capture or kill here and there, and they are losing patience. What better way to ensnare us and make us betray our whole family than to lay such a trap? Butcher one of their own, knowing we will have to look and see if it is a kinsman, then station a demon to entice the youngest and most gullible up there, all the better to possess and then lead the entire family into Perdition. No, if a demon chooses to live on that rock, let him live there until his foul Master is cast into the Pit and we are raised up. The rock must be reinforced as a place of evil, a place where none of the faithful is to go! This must be agreed and be consistent through the Family.”

“You do not think it could be anything else? A third party? One of the ancient machines?”