Son of Man Read online

  Ahead of them now lies a natural amphitheater: a wide deep bowl contained at one end by a cluster of great black boulders encrusted with blue lichens. Five members of Hanmer’s race sit near the boulders. Three females, two males. Hanmer says, “We will do the Opening of the Earth, I think. The time is right.” The day has become quite warm; if Clay were wearing clothes, he would want to remove them. The lazy sun hangs close to the horizon and fat beams of energy come rolling bumpily down the amphitheater’s slope. Hanmer does not introduce him to the other five, who seem to know of him already. They rise and welcome him with sleepy smiles and shortwinded bursts of song. He has difficulty telling one from another, and even in distinguishing Hanmer from the other two males. A female glides toward him. “I am Ninameen,” she says. “Will you be joyous here? Have you come for the Opening of the Earth? Was it painful to awaken? Do I attract you?” She has a singsong voice, high and fluty, and she holds herself in what Clay sees as Japanese postures. She seems daintier and more vulnerable than the female Hanmer. The remnants of his enhanced perceptions show him the ticking sensuality within her: tiny translucent petcocks are spilling golden hormones that stream toward her loins. Her accessibility disturbs him. He feels suddenly ashamed of his nakedness, of the long dangling organ at his thighs; he envies the men of Hanmer’s species for their shielded sex. Ninameen turns and sprints toward the boulders, looking back once to see if he is following. He remains where he is. Hanmer, or one whom he takes to be Hanmer, has chosen a female and lies beside her in a pocket of low spongy grass. The third of the females and the other two males have begun a little mincing dance, with much laughter and frequent embracing. Ninameen, capering atop a boulder, pelts him with scraps of lichen. He runs after her.

  She is incredibly agile. He glimpses her slim golden-green body always ahead of him as he scrambles over the black rocks; he pants, he sweats, he coughs in fatigue. Satyr-like, he erects. She peeks from unexpected crannies. A tiny breast showing here, a flat buttock there. Pursued this way, she seems almost wholly human to him, although there are reminders of the gulf between them when he pauses to consider the flat-fronted face, the scarlet eyes, the spidery many-fingered hands. He knows, from the glimpses he had had before his perceptions grew dull again, that her inner anatomy is monstrously strange, a series of neat rectangular compartments linked by narrow, pearly channels, bearing no more resemblance to his own internal workings than do his to those of a lobster. Yet he desires her. Yet he will have her.

  He reaches the summit of the biggest boulder. Where is she? Looking about, he sees no one. The boulder’s top is hollowed to form a shallow crater; rainwater has filled it and black threads drift on the surface, quivering and making buzzing sounds. He peers in, thinking she has submerged to hide from him, but sees only his own image, reflected not from the surface of the water but from its obsidian depths. He seems tense and clumsy, a Neanderthal inflamed with lust. “Ninameen?” he calls. The sound of his voice makes bubbles rise and his reflection is lost.

  She giggles. He finds her hovering ten feet above his head, resting quite comfortably belly-down in the air, arms and legs outspread. He is able to sense the rivers of not-blood flowing in her not-veins, and he feels the breeze of thwarted gravity that her levitation creates.

  “Come down,” he calls.

  “Not yet. Tell me about your time.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything. From the beginning. Do you die? Do you love? Do you put his body inside hers? Do you quarrel? Do you dream? Do you forgive? Do you—”

  “Wait,” he says. “I’ll try to show you. Look: this is how it was in my time.”

  He opens his soul to her. Feeling like a museum exhibit, he gives her views of automobiles, shirts, shoes, restaurants, unmade beds, hotel lobbies, airplanes, potted palms, telephones, highways, ripe bananas, atomic explosions, power stations, zoos, dental drills, office buildings, traffic jams, municipal swimming pools, shooting galleries, and newspapers. He shows her movies, lawnmowers, grilled steaks, and snow. He shows her church spires. He shows her parades. He shows her toothpaste. He shows her rocket launchings.

  She tumbles terribly from the air.

  Desperately lurching, he breaks her fall and lands beneath her, grunting at the impact. Her cool body clings to him, trembling, and her fright is so intense that panicky images leak through from her mind to his. He sees, through a bleak haze of distortion, some gigantic cyclopean gray wreck of a stone building, and five enormous creatures sitting in front of it, dinosaur-like beasts embedded in mud, lifting their great heads slowly, snorting, shaking the ground with their complaints, and there is Ninameen groveling before them, as if praying, pleading for absolution, and the colossal reptilian things grumble and wheeze, shake their heads, drag their immense chins through the muck, and slowly Ninameen sinks, sobbing, into the ground. The image melts. He cradles the frightened girl as gently as he can. “Are you hurt?” he murmurs. “Are you ill?” She shivers and utters a miserable little purring noise. “I misunderstood,” she whispers finally. “I couldn’t understand your poem and it frightened me. How strange you are!” She draws a multitude of fingertips over his skin. Now he is the one to shiver. She slips down to lie at his side, and he kisses her throat and lightly touches one of her breasts, admiring the quicksilver texture of her skin, but as he starts to enter her, he abruptly imagines that she has begun to shift toward the male form of her species, and he loses firmness as though his sensory inputs have been disconnected. She pushes against him, but no use: he does not rise. Helpfully she does switch to the male form, making the change with such swiftness that he cannot follow it, but things are no better this way, and she goes back. In a thin urgent voice she says, “Please. We’ll be late for the Opening.” He feels her burrowing along the track of a thick sluggish nerve in the fleshy part of his back; she bursts through the webs of resistance, tickles his brain, catalyzes him into virility. Then she winds one leg around him and, before the impulse eludes him, he drives himself to her depths. She clasps him as though she would ingest him. Why do these beings have sex at all? Surely they can find more immediate ways of making contact. Surely it can have no biological purpose at this late date in human evolution. Surely this simple animal pleasure must be as obsolete as eating or sleeping. He conceives an agreeable fantasy: they have reinvented copulation for his benefit, and have equipped themselves with these vaginas and penises in a kind of masquerade spirit, the better to understand the nature of their primitive guest. The idea delights him. Hips thrusting, he embellishes it by trying to visualize Hanmer’s people in their normal asexual form, blank as machines between the legs, and while he does this, Ninameen slyly sends a burst of ecstatic sensation into him, using the part of him within her as a direct conduit to his cerebellum; he responds with a quick hot spurt and lies back, dazed and drained.

  “Do you want to help us do the Opening of the Earth, now?” she murmurs when his eyes open.

  “What is it?”

  “One of the Five Rites.”

  “A religious ceremony?”

  His question hangs like frost in the air. She is already scrambling down the boulder. He follows her, ponderously, wobbly-legged, getting caught in crevices; turning, she tenderly lifts him with a smile and a glance and floats him to the ground. He lands on his feet in the warm damp soil. She tugs him forward, toward the center of the amphitheater, where the other five have already gathered. All of them are now in the female form. He is unable to tell which is Hanmer until the others brandish their names at him in a jingling rush: Bril, Serifice, Angelon, and Ti. Their slender naked bodies ripple and gleam in the bright sunlight. They arrange themselves in a circle, holding hands. He thinks he is between Serifice and Ninameen in the ring. Serifice, if Serifice it is, says in a lovely tinkling voice, “Do you think we are the evil ones or the good ones?” Ninameen giggles. From across the circle, the one who he believes is Hanmer calls out, “Don’t confuse him!” But he is confused. Temporarily purged of h
is lusts by Ninameen, he is obsessed with the strangeness of these people again, and wonders how he can feel sexual interest in them when they are so alien. Is it something in the air? Or will any handy hole suit the purpose when the time-flux seizes you?

  They are dancing. He dances with them, though he cannot imitate the free swiveling of their unhinged limbs. The hands clasped in his grow cold. He sprouts an icy knot of uncertainty in his belly, knowing that the rite of the Opening of the Earth is now beginning. A fierce rush of activity flutters in his skull. His vision fogs. The six of them rush toward him and press their chilly bodies against him. He feels their rigid nipples like nodes of fire on his skin. They are forcing him to the ground. Is this a sacrifice, and is he the victim? “I am Angelon,” Angelon croons. “I am love.” Ti sings, “I am Ti. I am love.” “I am love,” sings Hanmer. “I am Hanmer.” “I am Serifice. I am love.” “I am Bill.” “I am Angelon.” “Love.” “Ninameen.” “I am love.” “Serifice.” His body is expanding. He is becoming a net of fine copper wires engulfing the entire planet. He has length and breadth but no height. “I am Ninameen,” sings Ninameen. The planet is splitting open. He penetrates it.

  He sees all.

  He sees the insects in their nests and the nightcrawlers in their tunnels, and he sees the roots of the trees and shrubs and flowers twining and twisting and extending, and he sees the subterranean rocks and the levels of stratification. Precious minerals glisten in the planet’s sundered crust. He finds the beds of streams and the floors of lakes. He touches everything and is touched by everything. He is the sleeping god. He is the returning spring. He is the heart of the world.

  He descends into the deeper strata, where pools of oil seep sadly through layers of silent shale, and he finds golden nuggets budding and bursting, and he wades in a clear sweet rivulet of sapphires. Then he drifts into the part of the planet that had been a home for man in one of the generations that followed his, and he wanders in awe down empty streets in clean, spacious tunnels, while obliging machines clatter forth and volunteer to serve his every need. “We are the friends of man,” they tell him, “and we accept our ancient obligations.” The planet shudders and the time-flux blows, and for one stunning moment he sees this city inhabited again: tall harried-looking mortals crowd its corridors, pale, slab-faced, not very different from the men and women of his own era, except that their bodies tend to be attenuated and flimsy. He is not sorry to drift through their level into the authentic bowels. Here is the blazing magma; here are the inner fires. Not cold yet, old planet? No, not by plenty. Moonless I am and my seas have shifted, yet at the core I glow. His friends are close beside him. “I am Bril,” Serifice whispers. “I am Angelon,” says Ti. They all are male and they have extruded their members from their sheaths. Have they come to fertilize the Earth’s core? Clouds of billowing blue steam erupt and hide his companions from him, and he wanders onward, swimming up through porphyry and alabaster and sardonyx and diabase and malachite and feldspar, spearing through the tissues of the world like a sentient needle, until the surface grows near. He emerges. Night has come and his friends lie exhausted in the amphitheater, and swarms of droning golden wasps bedeck their limp bodies, three male, three female. In his exaltation Clay discovers that he can walk in the air. He rises to a height of perhaps thirty feet and, grinning, takes great clumsy strides. How easy it is! He merely must maintain a distance between himself and the ground. Yes! Yes! Yes! He walks the length of the amphitheater. He lets himself float down until his toes nearly touch the shrubs, and boosts himself on high again. Step and step and step. It is worth being blown who knows how many millions of years off course, to be able to walk the air like this, not in some intangible incorporeal form as before, but in his own tingling body.

  He comes down. He sees the shimmering metal cage of the spheroid, with the lifeless, shriveled spheroid slumped within it. He goes to it and lets his hands rest on the brilliant bars.

  “No one should be dead on the night of the Opening of the Earth,” he says. “Find your strength again! Come! Come!” He puts his hands on the spheroid’s prickly corpse. “Can you hear me? I call you back to life, son, daughter, nephew, niece.” From the depths of the opened Earth he summons new life and pumps it into the spheroid, which gains in fullness, resuming its old plumpness, growing smooth and firm once more, turning purple, turning red, turning pink. It lives again. He detects its wordless emanations of gratitude. “We humans stick together,” he tells the spheroid. “I am Clay. My era is a little earlier than yours, before the race changed its shape. You see, though, that later epochs brought a return to the original arrangement. Those sleepers there—our hosts—”

  Hanmer, Bril, Serifice, Angelon, Ti, and Ninameen waver and grow dim, oscillate from male to female and female to male, stir, subside. They are still enmeshed in the ceremony of the Opening of the Earth. He wonders if he should have remained with them, but decides that if he had, he might not have had the pleasure of his airwalk, nor would he have resurrected the spheroid. It has been a day of wonders. He has never known such joy before.

  Even when the hideous goat-men shuffle into sight, Clay’s delirium of happiness is unchecked. He bows to them. “I am Clay,” he explains. “Of all those caught by the time-flux, I seem to be the most ancient. The spheroid is of an era subsequent to mine. These, of course, are the current dominant variety of man. And the three of you, I take it, come from some intermediate period when—”

  Mumbling ominously, the goat-men advance on him.

  They speak to one another in a dreary language of monotones and move slowly forward crabwise, scuttling on wide angles. They fill the air with the odor of rot. Clay fights off dismay, telling himself to beware of exterior judgments; these too are the sons of man, and in some vanished era must have represented the summit of human striving. I will be naive: I will be charitable: I will be loving. They are quite close to him now, thrusting their faces at him, exhaling foul vapors, spattering him with gluey spittle. He gags and coughs. They keep their short thick arms clutched up against their white hairless chests; the fingers, blunt and stubby, trail driblets of peeling skin, and there are no nails. They rock rhythmically on their enormous thighs. Clay sees their eyes flash with indisputable malevolence. The weeds that sprout at their feet are choking the amphitheater with coarse growth. “Can we discuss this?” he asks. “It is the night of the Opening of the Earth. Let us be loving. Let us be receptive. How can I help you?” The creatures edge closer to him. Waves of genuine menace emanate from them. Troubled, he attempts to rise from the ground, but their arms flicker forward to seize him and hold him down. They begin to shove him back and forth, one heaving him toward another, and a thin rattling sound of soiled laughter comes from them. A game! Hare ringed by hounds! “You misunderstand,” Clay says. “I’m a human being, an early form but still—deserving—of—respect—” The shoving grows violent. They loom above him; his head reaches only to their chests. They stomp their feet fiercely, making the ground shake. Teeth now glitter.

  Hanmer, Ninameen, Ti, Serifice, Bril, and Angelon sit up to watch. They make no move to interfere.

  Only the spheroid shows resentment as the goat-men buffet Clay. It chatters angrily at them. But the goat-men can no more understand the pink spheroid’s language than can Clay. They continue to push Clay about. His skin stings where their touch has slimed it. As they shove, they murmur insistently at him. What are they saying? He imagines that they are telling him, You will become as we are. You will become as we are. You will become as we are. Is that cracked shriek their laughter? What sinister swing of events produced these things from the human gene-pool? They are the skeletons in tomorrow’s closet. They are the joke the future will play on all the utopian dreamers. Clay sinks to the earth under their pummeling. The tangle of quick-rising weeds envelops him and he struggles for breath. They kick and batter him. He vomits. And yet he takes heart from the knowledge that these beasts are only a transient phase in the story. Mankind will pass through t
hem, purged, and go on to become godlike Hanmer. It is comforting, though godlike Hanmer at present offers little comfort. Buoyed, Clay crawls through an opening between the flailing feet and scrambles down the slope of the amphitheater toward Hanmer and his friends. “You! Hanmer!” he calls. “Call them off me! Can’t you control your own ancestors?”

  Hanmer laughs. “They are in the service of Wrong at the moment, my beloved. And so they are beyond my control.”

  The goat-men have observed that Clay has eluded them. They turn on the spheroid instead, but they are hit by defensive shocks the moment they touch the cage, and, grunting, they move away and shuffle toward Clay again.

  How can he escape? The bruising he can tolerate, but not the reek, not the sickening ugliness. Stumbling, slipping, he runs off into the deepening darkness, circling the boulders and plunging into a dim forest beyond. He can hear the snorting of the goats behind him: hhruhf, hhruhf, hhruhf. A hasty stride sends him into some concealed body of water; he feels the wetness at his shins, tries to back out, trips on an unseen obstacle, falls headlong forward. There is a great splash. Something plucks at his body from below. He goes down.

  5

  Breathing water is not as difficult as he anticipates. He fills his lungs with the stuff, really drawing it in until every wrinkled puffy crevice is saturated; then he draws energy from it. The panic swiftly passes. He adapts. He is in a black pond five times as deep as it is wide, and the water is cold. He paddles slowly across its middle with little flipping pushes of his feet, while he expels the final blobs of air from his body. The other occupant of the pool waits patiently, letting him become acclimated. I am Quoi, it tells him after a while, sending the information to him in a stream of blue and green and red bubbles that cross the bottom of the pool as though on phosphor dots. I am an enemy of Wrong. You are safe here.