Judith Merril - The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6

Night was settling in now, steady as snow. Hidden behind banks of mist, the sun prepared to set. But Venus was high, a gallant half-crescent four times as big as the Moon had been before the Moon, spiralling farther and farther from Earth, had shaken off its parent’s clutch to go dance round the sun, a second Mercury. Even by that time Venus had been moved by gravitotraction into Earth’s orbit, so that the two sister worlds circled each other as they circled the sun.

The stamp of that great event still lay everywhere, its tokens not only in the crescent in the sky. For Venus put a strange spell on the hearts of man, and a more penetrating displace­ment in his genes. Even when its atmosphere was transformed into a muffled breathability, it remained an alien world; against logic, its opportunities, its possibilities, were its own. It shaped men, just as Earth had shaped them.

On Venus, men bred themselves anew.

And they bred the so-called Impurse. They bred new plants new fruits, new creatures—original ones, and duplications of creatures not seen on Earth for aeons past. From one line of these familiar strangers Dandi’s baluchitherium was descended. So, for that matter, was Dandi.

The huge creature came now to Involute, or as near as it cared to get. Again it began to crop at thistles, thrusting its nose through dewy spiders’ webs and ground mist.

‘Like you, I’m a vegetarian,’ Dandi said, climbing down to the ground. A grove of low fruit trees grew nearby; she reached up into the branches, gathered and ate, before turning to inspect the Involute. Already her spine tingled at the near­ness of it; awe, loathing and love made a part-pleasant sensa­tion near her heart.

The Involute was not beautiful. True, its colours changed with the changing light, yet the colours were fish-cold, for they belonged to another universe. Though they reacted to dusk and dawn, Earth had no stronger power over them; They pricked the eyes. Perhaps too they were painful because they were the last signs of materialist man. Even Lass moved un­easily before that ill-defined lattice, the upper limits of which were lost in thickening gloom.

‘Don’t fear,’ Dandi said. ‘There’s an explanation for this, old girl.’ She added sadly, ‘There’s an explanation for every­thing, if we can find it.’

She could feel all the personalities in the Involute. It was a frozen screen of personality. All over the old planet the struc­tures stood, to shed their awe on those who were left behind. They were the essence of man. They were man—all that remained of him.

When the first flint, the first shell, was shaped into a weapon, that action shaped man. As he moulded and complicated his tools, so they moulded and complicated him. He became the first scientific animal. And at last, via information theory and great computers, he gained knowledge of all his parts. He formed the Laws of Integration, which reveal all beings as part of a pattern and show them their part in the pattern. There is only the pattern, the pattern is all the universe, creator and created. For the first time, it became possible to duplicate that pattern artificially; the transubstantiaspatializers were built.

All mankind left their strange hobbies on Earth and Venus and projected themselves into the pattern. Their entire per­sonalities were merged with the texture of space itself. Through science, they reached immortality.

It was a one-way passage.

They did not return. Each Involute carried thousands or even millions of people. There they were, not dead, not living. How they exulted or wept in their transubstantiation, nobody left could say. Only this could be said: man had gone, and a great emptiness was fallen over the Earth.

‘Your thoughts are heavy, Dandi Lashadusa. Get you home.’ Her mentor was back in her mind. She caught the feeling of his moving round and round in his coral-formed cell.

‘I must think of man,’ she said.

‘Your thoughts mean nothing, do nothing.’

‘Man created us; I want to consider him in peace.’

‘He only shaped a stream of life that was always entirely out of his control. Forget him. Get on to your mare and ride home.’

‘Mentor-----’

‘Get home, woman. Moping does not become you. I want to hear no more of your swan song, for I’ve given you my final word on that. Use a theme of your own, not of man’s. I’ve said it a million times and I say it again.’

‘I wasn’t going to mention my music. I was only going to tell you that...’

‘What then?’ His thought was querulous. She felt his power­ful tail tremble, disturbing the quiet water of his cell.

‘I don’t know...’

‘Get home then.’

‘I’m lonely.’

He shot her a picture from another of his wards before leaving her. Dandi had seen this ward before in similar dream­like glimpses. It was a huge mole creature, still boring under­ground as it had been for the last twenty years. Occasionally it crawled through vast caves; once it swam in a subterranean lake; most of the while it just bored through rock. It’s motiva­tions were obscure to Dandi, although her mentor referred to it as ‘a geologer’. Doubtless if the mole was vouchsafed occa­sional glimpses of Dandi and her musicolumnology, it would find her as baffling. At least the mentor’s point was made: loneliness was psychological, not statistical.

Why, a million personalities glittered almost before her eyes!

She mounted the great baluchitherium mare and headed for home. Time and old monuments made glum company.

Twilight now, with just one streak of antique gold left in the sky, Venus sweetly bright, and stars peppering the purple. A fine night for being alive on, particularly with one’s last bedtime close at hand.

And yes, for all her mentor said, she was going to turn into that old little piece derived from one of the tunes in the 1540 Souter Liedekens, that splendid source of Netherlands folk music. For a moment, Dandi Lashadusa chuckled almost as eruditely as her mentor. The sixteenth-century Old Time, with the virtual death of plainsong and virtual birth of the violin, was most interesting to her. Ah, the richness of facts, the tex­ture of man’s brief history! Pure joy! Then she remembered herself.

After all, she was only a megatherium, a sloth as big as an elephant, whose kind had been extinct for millions of years until man reconstituted a few of them in the Venusian experi­ments. Her modifications in the way of fingers and enlarged brain gave her no real qualification to think up to man’s level.

Early next morning they arrived at the ramparts of the town Crotheria where Dandi lived. The ubiquitous goats thronged about them, some no bigger than hedgehogs, some almost as big as hippos—what madness in his last days pro­voked man to so many variations on one undistinguished caprine theme?—as Lass and her mistress moved up the last slope and under the archway.

It was good to be back, to push among the trails fringed with bracken, among the palms, oaks, and treeferns. Almost all the town was deeply green and private from the sun, cur­tained by swathes of Spanish moss. Here and there were houses—caves, pits, crude piles of boulders, or even genuine man-type buildings, grand in ruin. Dandi climbed down, walking ahead of her mount, her long hair curling in pleasure. The air was cool with the coo of doves or the occasional bleat of a merino.

As she explored familiar ways, though, disappointment overcame her. Her friends were all away, even the dreamy bison whose wallow lay at the corner of the street in which Dandi lived. Only pure animals were here, rooting happily and mindlessly in the lanes, beggars who owned the Earth. The Impures—-descendants of the Venusian experimental stock— were all absent from Crotheria.