Дэймон Найт - Orbit 13

“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. They 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!”

“No, no, no, we are men,” Jorge Segundo cried out, very much as the brindled ape Joe Sunrise had cried out the same words. “We are the lords of creation. Ours is the world civilization. We are the First Age of Mankind.”

“You were the Second Age of Apedom,” the man said, “and an abridged and defective age it has been. I intuit that there have been other such unsatisfactory half-ages or no-ages. Ah, and I am responsible for getting rid of the clutter you have left.”

The magic had suddenly gone out of the seven persons or erstwhile persons. Pieces of it that had fallen off them seemed to shine like jellyfish on the ground.

“We have fission, we have space travel,” Hatari Nahub protested. “We have great cities and structures of every sort.”

“I intuit all this,” the man said. “You are a hiving species, but your hives and structures do not have the style of those of the bower-birds or the honeybees or the African termites. I have wondered a little though, how you build up these ferroconcrete hives that you call cities. Do you accrete them by deposits of you regurgitations or your excrement after you have eaten limestone and iron ore? It’s a grotesque way, but the blind and instinctive actions of such hive creatures as yourselves always seem grotesque to thinking creatures such as myself. Such mindlessness, such waste in all that you do! The ferroconcrete and wood and stone and chrome hive-colonies that you construct for the billions of inmates, they are more strange, more mindless, of less use than would be so many great anthills. Go now, you mindless hiving folk. You tire me.”

“But we have civilization; we have the electromagnetic complex and the nuclear complex,” Charley Mikakeh challenged.

“And the firefly has a light in his tail,” the man said. “Go. Your short day is done.”

“But we have all the arts,” Toy Tonk claimed, and she was very near the art of tears.

“Can you sing like the mockingbird or posture like the peacock?” the man asked. “What arts do you have? Go now.”

(This was not really a long argument. The crows, had argued much longer, and just for the jabbering fun of it. Besides, this was happening at the same time that all the other decisions were being given.)

“We will not go. You have not named us yet,” Helen Rubric spoke.

“It will be better if I do not speak your name,” the man said. “You will shrivel enough without. Go back to your hive cities and decay in their decay. Your speech now becomes gibberish and you begin your swift decline.”

“Why, I know who you are now,” Lisa Baron exclaimed. “You are the Genesis Myth. In fact you are the Par the no-Genesis Myth. Is it not strange that no language has a masculine form of ‘parthen,’ and yet it appears to be the oldest. Now I know why the myth is in pain. From your side, will it be? I am a doctor, among other things. May I assist?”

“No,” the man said. “You may not. And know you something else, female of the unnamed species: every myth comes true when enough time has run. There was a great myth about the earthworm once. There was even a sort of myth about yourselves. And you, creature, have a little more than the rest of your kindred. It seems a shame that you have already come and gone before the scene itself begins.”

“We have not gone, we will not go,” Antole Keshish insisted. “Everyone is of some use. What can we offer?” Then his tongue lost its cunning forever.

“You can offer only your submission and retrogression,” the man said.

“Ah, but tell us finally, what is our real name?” Hatari Nahub asked. Those were the last true words he ever spoke.

“Your name is ape,” the man said. “Really your name is ‘secondary ape.’“