Дэймон Найт - Orbit 13

Well, they had a place to go and they were going there, but they had a great uneasiness about it all. These seven, by the way, out of all the members of their several species remaining on Earth, still retained speech and the abstracting thought that goes with it. And on what dark day had these gifts been lost by all the rest of their closest kindred?

And such was the case with almost all of the so-different groups moving toward the meeting place. Such was the case with the elands and the antelopes, with the hogs and the hippos, with the asses and the zebras, with the eagles and the cranes, with the alligators and the gavials, with the dolphins and with the sharks. They were small elites representing large multitudes, and they retained certain attributes of elites that the multitudes had lost.

There had been all through the Near East, and then all through the world, a general hilarity and an air of hoax about the reports of the “Invisible Animals.” There were, of course, the bears that walked and talked like men and were reported as coming out of the Russias. One of these bears, so the joke went, entered a barroom in Istanbul. The bear was nattily dressed, smoked a cigar, laid a hundred-lira note on the bar and ordered a rum and cola.

The barman didn’t know what to do, so he went back to the office and asked the boss.

“Serve the bear,” the boss said, “only don’t give him ninety lira change. Give him ten lira only. We will make the prodigies pay for being prodigies.”

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?

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.