Vonda McIntyre - Wings

* * *

A shrill squeal roused him from a doze, leaving him half-awake, confused, exhausted. He heard another sound, a cry abruptly cut off. He folded his wings and moved into the courtyard.

He found the youth sitting against the wall of the temple, sucking the neck vein of a rabbit-deer so freshly dead that one hind foot still trembled in a muscle spasm. "Where didst thou get that? Animals never come past the auroras."

The youth began, delicately, to pull the small animal apart at the major joints. "Maybe it thought you'd tell it its future." He extended his silver claws and began to shred the meat from a narrow bone.

"I do not mock thee."

The youth worried the carcass with his hands for a time. He looked up, and the auroras caught his eyes and brightened them horribly. "Didn't you hate them when you realized they were going to leave you behind? Didn't you want to slash them and tear them and demand what right they had to pretend you didn't matter?"

After a moment, the keeper said, "I grieved."

He had walked into the temple and stood near the back wall, before the stone figure that was crumbling with age and neglect. The keeper was the first in centuries to offer it anything even resembling belief. Slowly, painfully, he had relaxed his wing-fingers, until the scarred membranes lay half-folded around him. "Why did they help me?" he had cried. "If they did not need an oracle, why did they help me, and if they needed one, why did they leave me behind?" But the old god had made no answer, for if the keeper's belief were real, it had not been enough to call the god back.

"I grieved," the keeper said again.

He expected disdain, but the youth looked down and stroked the stained pelt of the rabbit-deer. "Our world is grieving, too," he said softly. "They stole the spirit out of it, and sucked all the life away. All our people ever did was try to escape it, yet it mourns."

The keeper touched his shoulder, gently. "It must seem lonely to thee. But in time-- "

The youth made a sound of disgust. "There isn't any time. I hope... I hope they have to turn back. I hope they have to come running back to this world they loathed, because they'll find it dead and wasted and unfit to sustain them, and they'll die."

"There will be no turning back in this generation. I dreamed the deaths of some of those who left, and there will be no disaster. The ships will continue, at least through our lifetimes."

The youth stood up, walked a few steps, taut-muscled, angry, spread his wings, allowed the tips to dust the stones. His claws were still bloody. "You'd have everyone substitute your fantasies for their own."

"They are all I have to offer, anymore."

"But they weren't enough for our people, and all you do is grieve." The youth turned and folded his wings against his arms with that graceful smooth snap. "Something will happen, someday, and they'll have to return. They'll spread the sails and catch the rays of some distant sun, and they'll feel grateful that they have some place to come home to. But they never bothered to look at it, they only cared about ways to leave it. So now it's dying, and when they crawl back there won't be anything left."

The keeper realized what the youth was saying. "Thou must have had delusions in thy sorrow and pain," he said. "A world cannot die."

The youth glared at him, and his gaze did not shift, as if in anger he could forget his shame. "This world is dying. If you would sleep and attune yourself to it, the way you did for people, you'd see it. Or come outside your prison and look around."

"I never leave the temple grounds."

The youth closed his eyes, resigned. "Then sit and wait, until the auroras die too." He left the keeper alone, and walked away with the tips of his beautiful wings trailing in the dust.

The keeper wanted to dismiss the youth as unbalanced, but nothing was that easy. It was true that their people had cared more for the sky and the nearby stars than for the world they rested on. It was only natural that this be so for a people who could soar so high that the ground curved away below them,

admitting without defense its smallness and insignificance. Only natural for a people whose children make toy gliders with lifting wings by instinct. The stars were so close, they hung in the sky calling, hypnotic. The keeper and his mate, in their ion boat, sailing past the bay between the world and its moon, had navigated by sight and feel alone. And he had seen the ion ships, when the idea was still a fancy, in visions. Before the first was even finished, he had seen the thousand of them, carrying all the people, spread their huge sails and catch the sun's rays and begin to move, very, very slowly, toward a star the passengers already knew had planets they could touch their feet to and leave again.

His people had known much of stars. But he could not say that the world was not dying.

After a little while, he stood up slowly and went to find the youth. "What dost thou mean to do?"

He reached down and picked up a small stone. "What is there to do? I almost wish you had let me die." He hefted the pebble, as if he would throw it into the auroras. The keeper flinched, and saw him hesitate. He thought he would still throw it, but the youth lowered his hand and tossed the pebble back to the ground. "If I knew what to do, I'd do nothing."

"There are still people-- "

"You and I may be the last, for all I know. Maybe all the others have killed themselves. I'd have it lonely to deny the rest a sanctuary."

"Must we both be lonely?"

The youth turned his back, hunched his shoulders. The keeper thought he was offended by the implication. "I meant no impropriety-- "

"Traditions are as dead as the god in your temple." He shrugged his wings. "You would have me stay."

"I would ask nothing."

"You'd hope."

"One cannot control one's dreams."

"I'll stay for a while."

* * *

Later the keeper slept, alone in the close and oppressive darkness of the temple. He expected a vision of the youth, alone in some future that did not include the keeper. He had never seen any part of his own destiny in his prophecies; that made him strangely afraid that no one could ever stay with him. He did not believe he could influence the future. Perhaps the future must influence him.

He saw his world, for the first time since he had come to the temple, and he saw that the youth had been right. Skeletons of rabbit-deer lay scattered on the hunting plain, and the vines that climbed the rock pinnacles of nests shriveled and died. Even the thorn bushes, which could grow where nothing else lived, dried, crumbled, burned. The death of their world would be slow, but the places he saw, deserted, were dying. He could not truly tell, but he thought he would die first. His visions had never frightened him before; now he came out of sleep screaming.

Soft wings rustled beside him. "Did you dream?"

"I did as thou asked," the keeper whispered, lying very still.

"And I was right."

"Yes."

"Is anyone else alive?" In the darkness, the young voice was fervent.

"I saw no one," the keeper said.

"Ah," the youth said, satisfied.

"I am not omniscient."

"You'd see what's important."

"Other people were left."

"They had nothing to keep them alive. Not your strength, nor my hate."

"Thou hast made us too unique."

"I hope not," the youth said. "I think your vision was right, and your hopes are wrong."

The keeper sat up, unwilling to sleep again. "I will never know."

"It would hurt you to know that truth." The tone held compassion that sounded strange after the exultation in death, but the keeper was grateful for it. He watched the shadow of the youth move across the stone floor to the entrance and stand in the wavering light. He rose and followed him, stopping close behind him in his shadow. The youth began to talk, slowly, tentatively. "When the last of them left, I followed them as far as I could, until the sun was so bright I thought I'd go blind... I couldn't see them, but I don't think any of them looked back."