Son of Man Read online

  He cannot continue the struggle.

  He has passed every test; he has survived every hazard. But he has gained nothing and lost a great deal. Now he surrenders. He will not match himself against Dark.

  He sits. He locks his arms around his knees. He stares forward and sees nothing.

  Why hast thou forsaken me?

  If he could have but one sign, he would try to go on: a single drop of rain, the sound of a distant sob, the passage of a bird close by, a flicker of lightning, a moment of stargleam. But the blackness is complete. He is overwhelmed. He stretches out flat, arms outspread, face to the absent sky, eyes open but seeing nothing. He will do nothing more. He will wait.

  He remembers a world of content and form and color. The blazing constellations; the wrinkled gray boughs of trees; a frog’s golden eye; the insistent verticals of a furious snowstorm; rich red desert sand at sunrise; the deep rose of a nipple against the pinkness of a breast; a goldfish’s lightning-bright frightened flicker in a green pool; high-tension towers dark against a summer sky; a gaudy iguana frozen in a thicket of jacaranda; the aurora’s dazzling folds; the sharp sparkle of a welder’s arc; New Jersey’s dying red sunlight splashed on Manhattan’s towers; white scum on a blue stream; the Zen garden’s smiling pebbles; the ocean; the mountains; the prairies; the foam. To see none of these things again. To stare with keen eyes into a world gone blind. Where are the trees? Where are the frogs? Where are the stars? Where is the light?

  A million years of empty blackness roll over him.

  “Enough,” he murmurs. “Enough!”

  And lightning splits the sky. And Wrong sobs. And a bird whickers past his nose in a flurry of feathers. And rain lashes his belly. And the stars erupt in the night. And all about him spring up the objects of nature, trees and shrubs and flowering plants, rocks and pebbles, chattering insects, veils of moss, yellow lizards, blue lichens, red toadstools. In the lower sky a pinpoint of light appears and widens, becoming a quicksilver glare, a fiery eye, a radiant sun. Celestial choirs sing. The blue sky, cloud flecked, blankets him. Color oozes from everything. “I am Hanmer,” a gentle voice says. “I am love.” Clay sits up. The Skimmers surround him. They are in the female form. Ninameen strokes his arms, saying, “I am love. I am Ninameen.” Ti plays with his toes, Bril with his hair, Angelon twines a dozen of her fingers around four of his, Serifice brushes her lips against his cheek. “I am love,” Serifice whispers. “I am Angelon,” says Angelon. They draw him to his feet. He blinks. The brightness is too strong for him now. “Where have I been?” he asks them. “Fire,” says Bril. “Heavy,” says Hanmer. “Slow,” says Ninameen. “Empty,” says Angelon. “Dark,” says Ti. “Where am I now?” he asks. “With us,” they tell him. “Where have you been?” he asks. And they say, “We have been swimming in the Well of First Things. We have discussed death with the Interceders. We have visited Mars and Neptune. We have laughed at Wrong. We have taught beauty to the goat-men. We have loved the Destroyers and sung to the Eaters.”

  “And now? And now?”

  “Now,” says Hanmer, “we will do the Filling of the Valleys.”

  23

  They run off with him. He is hard-pressed to keep pace, and fears they will lose him again so soon after finding him, but they never quite get out of his sight, and after a while they halt in a glade of tall triangular trees with ropy, dangling limbs. The sun is high and hot. They loll with him on tightly woven bluish grass under the strange trees. He has been alone so long that he scarcely knows how to talk to them. Finally he says, “Why didn’t you come for me earlier?”

  “We thought you were having a good time,” Hanmer replies.

  “Are you serious? Yes, you are. But—” Clay shakes his head. “I was suffering.”

  “You were learning. You were growing.”

  “I was in pain. Both physical and moral.”

  Hanmer strokes Clay’s thighs. She says, “Are you sure it was pain?” and becomes male. “It is time for the Filling of the Valleys now,” he says.

  “One of the Five Rites?” Clay asks.

  “The fourth of them. The cycle is almost complete. Will you take part?”

  Clay shrugs. These Skimmers, their rituals, their obliquenesses, their unpredictabilities, have begun to bother him. He feels a warmth toward them, yet he wonders if it would not be better to go back to Quoi’s pond, to the Awaiter’s mudbank, even to the tunnel-world, before some Skimmer prank turns out more grim than the last. He brushes the thought away. They are his guides and his friends. He loves them. They love him. He nods. “What must I do?” he asks.

  “Lie back,” Hanmer says. “Close your eyes. Make yourself receptive.”

  He senses that he is about to lose them again. “Wait,” he says. “Don’t go. Hanmer, can’t we get to know each other better? Can’t you let me get behind that jumpy facade? What do you really feel? What do you think is the purpose of life? Why are we in this place? Are you ever afraid? Are you ever unsure? Hanmer?” He looks up. Hanmer seems insubstantial, well on the way toward invisibility. Nothing left but the grin. “Hanmer? Don’t go, Hanmer. Don’t start the rite yet. Talk to me. If you love me, Hanmer, talk to me!”

  “Lie back,” Hanmer says. “Close your eyes. Make yourself receptive.”

  Even the grin is gone. Alone again. He does as he is told.

  In a moment he feels hands caressing his body. Soft fleshy fingers trace paths of sensuality across his chest, into the hollow between his neck and his shoulder, up his cheeks, down his earlobes. The tender touch traverses his belly and comes to his flaccid penis, which rapidly rises as the fingers grip the stiffening shaft. Other hands toy with his toes. A sly fingertip delicately prods the root of his scrotum. His breathing grows ragged with excitement. He stirs; he gasps; he arches his back. How cunning the hands are! How light their touch! He feels the delicious caress at his thighs, his loins, his face, his hands, his feet, his calves, his forearms, his throat. Hundreds of hands touching him all at once.

  Hundreds?

  Hanmer, Ninameen, Angelon, Ti, Bril, and Serifice have but a dozen hands among them. He knows that more than a dozen touch him now, many more. Without opening his eyes, he attempts to isolate each zone of contact and count the hands. Impossible. They crawl all over him. Hundreds.

  Frightened, he looks. He sees darkness and a cat’s-cradle of crisscrossing fibers. He sees no Skimmers above him at all. Who touches him? He understands. The hands belong to the triangular trees, which have bent low so that their swaying ropy limbs almost reach the ground. Each limb ends in a hand; each hand now roams his skin. Is it obscene to be handled this way by a tree? He dares not try to creep away. He fears that if he makes a move to withdraw, the hands will seize his throat and tighten. Or tug at his limbs. He would not match his tensile strength against the power of these trees. He submits, fearful. He closes his eyes again. He gives himself to the trees.

  The unseen hands stroke him, sliding more and more often to his waist, flicking his balls, rubbing his cock. Idiot, he tells himself. Pervert. To let yourself be jerked off by trees. Get up! Brush their filthy hands away! Where do you go from here? Banging ducks? Sucking horny salmon? He churns with resistance. He is tense, tight, angry. They have their nerve. You ought to have your head examined. Where’s your sense? Where’s your shame? This is dirt. Show some backbone. Hands off! What kind of queer do you think I am? Away! Away! The apogee of the polymorphous. But he does not move. He shuttles sullen thoughts in the circuits of his skull.

  “Love. Love. We are love.”

  “Who said that?”

  “All things are one. Love is all. Give yourself. Give.”

  “No.”

  His no rockets toward the sun. The world shivers. The clouds blush.

  “Yes,” the trees say. “Yes, yes, yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “Love.”

  “Love.”

  “Yielding.”

  “Yielding.”

  “All.”

  “All
.”

  “Warmth.”

  “Warmth.”

  He is conquered. He will not fight them. He is into the rhythm of the thing now, feet flat against the ground, shoulders grinding the grass, head flung back, back flexed, buttocks in the air, hips moving. He thrusts his inflamed member again and again into the sweet slippery hand that grasps it. He has no shame. He is pleasure’s slave. He hears the choirs singing; he hears the sobbing on high, like the tolling of bells, and the sound descends in luminous golden teardrops. He thinks he is coming: muscles tremble and twitch everywhere in his body, even in his lips. But the ecstatic sensation is diffused over his entire skin, and he cannot concentrate it at his middle, and the impulse sweeps by, leaving him fulfilled but uncome. And the excitement mounts again, for the hand (or is it some other hand?) will not let go of him, and he thrusts and thrusts and thrusts again, and again he finds a cosmic transducer at work, spreading the sheerly erotic currents out into something too general to be sexual, and with a sigh he subsides in a haze of miscellaneous delights. And it happens again, but this time he slides past that point of undifferentiated ecstasy and reaches a place of pure sexual fervor, in which his rod has expanded to fill the heavens and burns with a clear brilliant fire. He feels his lips pulling back as passion mounts: with bared teeth and flared nostrils and rolled-up eyeballs he enters his orgasm and sends fiery jets of jissom trumpeting across the cosmos. He subsides. The tree-hands release him. A great gong sounds. As he sinks back, dizzied, sweat-bathed, he realizes that the Filling of the Valleys has begun.

  The Skimmers are banishing inequality from the terrestrial sphere. They are making the rough places plain. Every mountain and hill is made low. As the planet turns, they hover above it, pushing ascensions into declensions, loading gulleys with former mesas, demolishing outcroppings, plugging crevices. All imperfections are slain. The world will become a flawless globe, a gleaming white marble dancing in its orbit.

  The transformation proceeds rapidly. Already, whole continents have been leveled. Mighty mountain ranges have crumbled and now are distributed elegantly in potholes and basins. Clay is aware of this without leaving his place beneath the trees, and he knows that in some fashion he has helped to provide the energy with which this titanic undertaking is being carried out. But he does nothing himself. He cannot see the Skimmers, but they must be up there, six swirls of force in space, rearranging and editing the Earth. Nothing will withstand their efforts. They who have already tuned the darkness and lifted the sea and opened the Earth will now fill the valleys, and the world will come a phase closer to perfection.

  And now they reach the place where he lies.

  And out of the east comes a wave of substance that sweeps over him in a fluid flow and cancels the topographic flaws of his present location. He is sealed into the ground. He is entombed again, but it is different from the entombing he knew when he was with the Awaiter, for then he merely rested in the soil, sending out roots, but now he is actually one with it, fused, part of the planet as it turns. He is without form. He is without independent existence. He is a grain of sand. He is a nub of quartz. He is loam. He is basalt. He is bubbling magma.

  He is at peace. He thinks it almost might be possible for him to sleep again.

  “Hello?” It is Hanmer, calling from far away. “Clay? Clay? Hello?”

  “I am love,” Ninameen says, from a different direction.

  Serifice says, “Death was a little like this. We will all try it together.”

  “Hello,” Ti says.

  “Hello,” says Bril.

  “Hello? Hello? Hello?” It is Angelon.

  They show him sunlight sliding over the Earth’s pearly perfect surface. They seem to want him to applaud their work. He does not reply. He is trying to sleep.

  “Hello,” says Hanmer.

  “I am love,” says Ninameen.

  “When shall we die?” Serifice asks.

  He remains silent. And Wrong sobs, and cracks appear in the flawless skin of the world. And mountains rise. And valleys sink. And ravines yawn. But it does not matter. “We have carried out the rite,” Hanmer says. “What happens afterward is not our concern.”

  24

  Only one of the Five Rites remains to be performed: the Shaping of the Sky. They will not tell him when they plan to do it or what it will be like. Clay imagines that it will be something brassy and apocalyptic, as the climax of such a cycle of transformations should properly be. Perhaps the world will be truly changed. Perhaps a new species of man will come forth. Perhaps the Trump of Trumps will sound. But they laugh his questions away, and tell him to be patient. “Anticipation is sin,” Hanmer says gravely.

  “Sin? What do you know of sin?”

  “Oh, we have our sins too,” says Hanmer.

  25

  There is a bad geological accident and Chaos breaks through into the world. One of Hanmer’s birds brings the news; the Skimmers at once must see it. “Come,” they say. “It may be very beautiful, who knows?”

  They waste no time walking. The distance is too great. Instead they dissolve and soar, taking Clay up with them. In the form of whizzing gray-green streamers, they flock across the sky at an altitude of several miles, casting inverted electromagnetic shadows that sparkle and fizz in the ionosphere. Looking down, Clay imagines that he sees the route of his recent wanderings, but he is not sure. From this height everything is mixed together, and even after Ninameen shows him how to adjust his vision, he has his doubts. He thinks a certain gray blotch below may be Empty, but Angelon tells him it is a dead meadow, marshy and cluttered. He sees a pinpoint of blackness and asks if it is Dark, and learns that he is just then flying over the Well of First Things. “What is that?” he asks, and Hanmer laughs, saying, “It is the brother of what we will see today.”

  They cross an ocean. “I see Floaters!” Bril cries, and Hanmer decides to let Clay have a look. So they flash down some thousands of feet. Just beneath the surface of the water lie a dozen immense whalish beasts, green flecked with gold: each is at least half a mile long, with a single placid eye the size of a stadium at one end, atop the flat skull, and a pair of shaggy mustache-shaped flukes dangling at the other. Clay is allowed to make contact with their minds. It is like wandering through the coral gardens of a tropical sea: shallow but complex. The thoughts of the Floaters are spiky and gnarled, sprawling in baroque configurations over immense territories of the soul, and covered with a rich many-colored crust of anemones and tubeworms, sponges, barnacles, clams, bristleworms, and chitons. In the interstices of this structure crawl beady-eyed many-clawed crabs of the spirit, limuli with long barbed spines, peaceful seahares and periwinkles, urchins, neritas, starfish. A sparkling bed of pure white sand underlies everything. Yet, as he pushes cautiously through the submerged foliage of the Floaters’ minds, Clay realizes that it all is alien to him: he can comprehend nothing of what he touches.

  “Are these also human?” he asks.

  “No,” Hanmer says. “Merely beasts.”

  “How can they sustain themselves at such a great size? How can they find enough food? How can they keep gravity from pulling them apart?”

  “Oh, they are often pulled apart,” Hanmer replies. “It is not important to them. They rejoin afterward.” They swoop still lower, until they hover almost within touching distance of the enormous browsing islands of meat. Several Floaters swivel the golden platters of their eyes at him. “Don’t land on one,” Hanmer cautions. “You’ll sink in.” Clay explores a Floater’s tangled mind at closer range, following paths that branch and rebranch, until he is lost in a forest of gently waving sea-fans. Are there sharks? Are there barracuda? Out of the jumbledness comes a single coherent thought, powerful, intense: a vision of a Floater lying dead on a beach, rotting, blackened, covering vast crescents of the shore, attracting scavengers from several continents. The image splinters and Clay is out of his element again, trapped in the incomprehensible corridors of the coral garden. “We must go,” Hanmer murmurs. “Are
they not strange? Are they not beautiful? We often visit them. We find them refreshing and original.”

  “We love animals,” Ninameen observes.

  Up they go. They speed across the glassy sea. Shortly the shore appears, an auburn strand fringed by clumsy close-set trees. It is early morning here. This continent has a rough look of buckled terrain and ribbed mountains; the colors Clay sees from above are gray, blue, black, and dark green. They journey inland for some time and make an abrupt descent into a dissected plain. Ahead of them rises a single great mountain, treeless and smooth. A little more than halfway up its eastern face is a tremendous wound, a place where tons of rock have dropped out, creating a passage to the mountain’s dim interior. It is by way of this passage that Chaos has staged its breakout.

  “I don’t understand,” Clay says softly.

  “Just look. Just look.”

  He looks. What appears to be a river is gushing from the hole in the side of the mountain. But the fluid that pours out is misty and intricate, carrying in itself a multitude of indistinct shapes. Steam accompanies the dark flow. Patterns form and degenerate within this white halo: Clay sees monsters, pyramids, ancient beasts, machines, vegetables, crystals, but nothing lasts. The Skimmers lead him nearer to the event. They sigh and exclaim their pleasure at the sight. What color is the flow? It seems to be a rich blue streaked with filaments of red, but as he reaches that conclusion he discovers a distinct green tinge, and islands of brownness, and a sort of maroon, and then a freshet of colors he is entirely unable to name. Nor can he identify the shapes he sees. Nothing endures. All is in flux. The stream emerges horizontally, spewing over the mountain’s flank to cover the rubble marking the place of the wound, and after several hundred yards suddenly tumbles over the side, racing downward in a series of five or eight cataracts until it strikes the ground. At the foot of the mountain a pool has formed where the flow of Chaos lands. Out of that pool, Clay notices, strangenesses are constantly being born: animals that scramble to shore and run wildly away, clumsy tractors and derricks, self-propelled monoliths. No two objects are alike. Unending inventiveness is the rule here. He sees a shining spear of a beast go careening end over end, and a thick snaky worm with luminous antennae, and a walking black barrel, and a dancing fish, and a tunnel with legs. He sees a trio of giant eyes without bodies. He sees two green arms that clutch each other in a desperate and murderous grip. He sees a squadron of marching red eggs. He sees wheels with hands. He sees undulating carpets of singing slime. He sees fertile nails. He sees one-legged spiders. He sees black snowflakes. He sees men without heads. He sees heads without men.