to laugh.
He stood in front of the sweeping edge of a star spindle and saw himself in the burnished gloss. He looked at the burned eyebrows, the singed patchy hair, the emaciated scarecrow frame under the scraps of clothing.
“The wisdom of the ages,” he said, without animosity. “What a piece of work!” Bitterness was alien to Wish. He viewed the ravaged spectacle of philosophical man with amusement.
Beth crept up beside him, from the crowd of skeletons, like a child to a protecting arm. Their roles were reversed; this was a strangeness only innocence might face with equanimity.
Wish laughed again, and the small crowd shuffled noisily, somehow relieved, and through their muttering a voice spoke to them. Meaning echoed without words in their minds. The people of the ships spoke.
“We heard the cry of death from your world,” the voice told them. “It was a shout of lamentation and grief that crossed the void in the moment your world died. We took it for the cry of one murdered, and find instead that you brought this blight upon yourselves.”
In the silence, in the awful reproach, Wish looked across the land where life had come with expectation four billion years before and had perished in suicide. The fog arched overhead, an iron-gray pall glistening with points of light, a looming covenant of death. The voice spoke only the truth, and it was beyond human power to redeem their crime. He clenched his hands. Beyond the ships, the ground curled and shifted in harsh, sluggish peristalses.
“It is not within our power to remake your Earth. The biosphere is slain by your small stupid machines. We can resurrect only a small part of it. We will exact a payment, but some of your world at least will be now, again, green and fresh.”
The last humans stirred then, mindless life crying for a chance to live again.
“Yes!” cried humanity, cried life. The tattered group passed instantly beyond identity in its paroxysm.
“Yes!”
“We will meet your fee, whatever it is.”
“Only let us live again!”
Silence returned to the plain, save for a whining wind that carried insanely creative dust across the wasteland. A vision came into the minds of the survivors: the sea of darkness, an ocean of blackness blazing with the light of stars. The spindles hung there, another kind of shining dust, life and consciousness, consumed in a battle with those from the shores of the galaxy, or some folded, deeper place.
“They are murderous and beyond our comprehension,” said the voice. “They have come from the places between the islands of stars, come with a blind, unreasoning hatred which cannot be turned aside except by lethal force. We had thought your world a victim of their murder. Instead, we find something worse, a world that has taken its own life. It is too late to offer our aid, but at least we can build you sanctuary, if, in return, some of your number will come with us, to fight.”
“To fight?” A woman screamed in rage; her face ran with weeping wounds. “Is all life so stupid? Do you condemn us as murderers of our planet and then ask us to repeat the madness? No, we will not fight. Go away and let us die in our shame and folly.”
“It is for each of you separately to make this choice,” the voice said. “Understand this: they attack without quarter. And they are winning.”
The price of life is death, Beth told herself, pressed against her husband’s arm. Those who went from among this pitiful number surely would not return.
“Only some among you will suit our purpose,” the voice explained. “The predators, the fighters. They must come with us. The others will remain, and we will restore to them a corner of their world. Come, you must decide. The stars are dying in our galaxy.”
It was beyond most of them, this vision of a war between gods. Not gods, though, Wish Jerome told himself. Merely life, exerted in an unconscionable violence to safeguard its own seed.
Fear blew across the group, chilling as the wind, but their decision, too, rose like a wind, beyond fear.
High above them, an opening dilated in the silver hull. The last of humanity went forward for their testing.
* * * *
That was the way of it, sings memory, here in the dusk. They took our soul and gave us the comfort of emortality amid a new-built Xanadu. The stars came clear in the dark of an unclouded sky. We can look into the black night and know that somewhere out there the spindles are warring against an enemy too terrible for understanding or compassion. And our soul is with them, sweating, slaving in the agony of death and victory. We spin on, we and our quiet garden, in an anesthesia of contentment.
I see a hawk soaring on a high wave of song. His cry hangs in the air, and his lofty feathered body. Now he stoops, falls like a projectile, opens his wings, stills magically, climbs the sky again. It is cozy here, in the warmth of the sun. I seem, though, to remember a word from the past, from the repeated past. Why do I feel a stir of horror as I gaze upon my unaging hands? Did my innocence save me then? Perhaps, but I am innocent no longer. Our life will stretch on, for our bargain is sealed, and the sun is warm on our peace.
Still, the horror remains, as the memory remains, that the meek have inherited the earth.
INNSMOUTH BANE
by John Glasby
I am writing this narrative in the sincere belief that something terrible has come to Innsmouth; something about which it is not wise to speak openly. Many of my neighbors, if they should ever read this account, will undoubtedly assume that any accusations I make against Obed Marsh are based upon jealousy, since there is little doubt that he, alone, is prospering while those of us who lost much during the years of depression are still finding it difficult to profit from this strange upturn in fortune which is his alone.
My name is Jedediah Allen. My family left Boston and settled in Innsmouth in 1676, twenty-one years after the town was founded, my grandfather and father being engaged in trade with the Orient, prospering well following the success of the Revolution. The War of 1812, however, brought misfortune to many Innsmouth families. The loss of men and ships was heavy, the Gilman shipping business suffering particularly badly.
Only Obed Marsh seemed to have come out of the depression successfully. His three vessels, the Sumatra Queen, Hetty, and Columbia still made regular sailings to the islands of the South Seas. Yet there was, from the very beginning, something odd about these voyages. From the first, he returned with large quantities of gold trinkets, more treasure than anyone in Innsmouth had ever seen.
One rumor had it that this hoard of gold had been discovered by him concealed in some secret cave on Devil Reef, left there by buccaneers more than two centuries earlier; that he covertly ferried it ashore on nights when there was no moon. Yet, having seen some of these artifacts for myself, for Obed displayed many of them quite openly, I was more inclined towards the former explanation as to their origin.
Certainly, the objects were beautiful in their intricate workmanship and design, but this was marred by an alienness in their imagery. All of the objects appeared to have an aquatic motif. To my eye, they had disturbing suggestions of fish or frog symbols, totally unlike any of the Spanish trinkets from the West Indies.
There was also something strange about the metal from which they were fashioned which indicated a non-European source.
My
