The Acquired Taste of Desolation
The storm-rain floods like tears from the black eyes in the sky. The brightness of childhood is covered by the undergrowth of the dark forest of age. The branches on the frightened trees are leafless and shattered, their greenery fallen long since to the ashen ground. The burden of life hangs heavy upon their brittle frames. The valleys and the grasslands have passed into their own antiquity, forlorn, without even the company of shadows. The wailing night descends upon their hollow reaches, howling frosty winds and screaming starlight. The deathful face of time, with its features half-molten, half-given into foam, has long ago claimed the streets of existence into the cackling of vultures and the hum of flies.
The wake of man is empty of mourners.
The rivers and the marshes are fathoms deep in ancient, discarded dreams which the reaching willows may no longer pluck from the surfaces of the rippled lakes. What is done is finished and the world is wholly, truly, totally human.
And as dead as cradled bones and grave-lined rust and dust.
The silver cities are let to the cats and rats and bats, and they, too, leave only the footprints of ghosts. The world waits only for the everlasting sunset and the dreaming shadow of eternity to reawaken. . . .
. . . The smoke-veiled ground which slopes away from me, while below me half a hundred men slip and struggle in ankle-deep mud trying to shift some huge piece of machinery against the slope. Its giant wheels spin uselessly, failing to gain any purchase at all in the fluid earth. Other machines — no two are alike — light the semidarkness with streaks of blue flame, and where the streaks become arcs the ground flares and leaves a lingering glow.
The machines are impressive, but I know full well that it is only the men who are important. They work unceasingly in their thousands and tens of thousands to move and operate their masters in the most appalling of conditions. Where the machines cannot go alone, the men are ready and eager to push and carry them. They feed the juggernauts with fuel which the machines spit out in anger at some hidden enemy below them, in the bowl-valley, and above them in the mountains. The oily pall of smoke hides the array of the opposing forces from my stinging eyes.
Half a mile away, a large vehicle with thick treads and a double cupola lurches to the top of a ridge. Two rods of polished metal protruding from the twin hoods oscillate madly, but whatever effect the activity might have is hidden from me. Men suddenly erupt from its sides, sprinting madly downhill and throwing themselves flat as the tank explodes in wreaths of rose-tinted flame. I cannot tell how many men might have been left inside the leviathan, or too close to its destruction. There seem to be thousands struggling to their feet, but that cannot be. Perhaps ten or twelve.
A target is pinpointed, there is a curtain of explosions along a ragged line drawn horizontally across the far slopes, until a blossom of angry red flowers in the gloom, and there is a brief pause, taken up almost immediately by sourceless sheets of lightning, flare, and scarlet splash, and men boil out of the ground with fire and fury, dangling their burnt and broken limbs in the current of the shock waves.
Strategy is quite incalculable. Position. Fire. Run. Keep moving all the time, and finally disappear in a whimpering flood of fire. Nothing gained, everything lost; one side or other winning, but I cannot tell which.
A man races past me, shouting unintelligibly, and a small, mobile machine bounces gaily toward me. I run downhill a short distance, curiously unafraid, and drop into a trench. Seconds later, a huge bulk hurtles into the trench a little way to my right. I hear heavy breathing, a storm of racking coughs, and then it is gone again.
I am involved, but I can hardly imagine myself one of this limitless pygmy horde which labors so fruitlessly to serve its terrifying machines. I am alone and aloof. I climb out of the trench. Hot air surrounds me and clutches at my clothing, but I stand firm.
A silver thread flies from a pinnacle far to the right and unravels in a great arc all the way across the bowl. Puffs of angry red enclose it in smoke, and a stab of white gulps in the head of the streamer, but something lands at the far end of the rainbow, and there is a fragmentary rush of colored flame. The glow of an accompanying retinue of explosions illuminates a great shadowy hulk. Before the afterimage fades, it bubbles into fire, vomiting great gobs of rosy molten hail.
The black pinnacle from which the missile came becomes the focus of a thousand flickering fireworks, and the solid rock is whittled swiftly into dust and cloud.
A rain of silver rockets shoots into the far mountainsides. There is a tremble in the earth as the mountains reverberate to the impact. Several slopes slide downward with a dull roaring which drowns completely the fragile protests of a hundred thousand men whose bodies are mangled in the cascades.
Then the slopes around me erupt in their turn, sheets of flame and a vast tumult of sound which bursts and continues to expand, intolerable heat, and running men mingle all around me into a fluid mass of images whose fabric is torn by time and shattered into bloody chaos.
The survivors — seeming to be thousands, but only ten or twelve — are running uphill, their machines abandoned in their wake, still trumpeting their fury and disgust, still maintaining their own ceaseless blast.
Burning men swarm down to the plain, scattering.
Black ash fills the air, choking me and sending me writhing to my knees, gagging, and fighting desperately for air.
The bombardment ceases with a final squadron of cylindrical missiles riding white cones of flame, sweeping in shallow arcs to the roots of the mountains.
And then the charge and the pursuit: here come the machines, out of the smoke, leaping and racing on thick-tired wheels, dancing on their caterpillar feet, sounding their war cries with klaxons and whistles and grinding gears. Shambling over the scarred, cratered surfaces come horde upon horde of the conquerors, with hard, jointed bodies like giant metal locusts, with cyclopean eyes and tentacles of rubber and steel.
I stand alone against their cavorting advance, and they pass me by.
I’m a hero.
I discover an old man on the beach which borders a pale-colored, glass-faced sea. He is pouring water from a bowl, and the slack, languorous ripples which spread from the stream are the only blemishes upon the surface of the ocean.
They are soon lost.
“Who are you?” I ask him, feeling sure that I can penetrate his facelessness if he will only give me a clue.
“My name is the name of the ocean,” the old man replies.
“How old are you?” I ask.
“As old as the ocean,” replies the ancient, his eyes rolling like gigantic waves to heave their surf-led humors from their contemplation of the sea to the time-thin sight of my shallow face.
“Will that bowl never run dry?” I ask, marveling at the steady fall of crystalline liquid from the earthenware vessel.
“I hope so,” whispers the old man, with a quiet tiredness. “I hope so.”
I think I am getting used to infinity.
It has three main characteristics:
Transience.
Diversity.
Alternativity.
I think I can afford to acquire a taste for desolation — or indulge a taste that I have already acquired. There is no trap to be feared there. It is where I fear traps that the danger lies. Whatever I try to keep bottled up inside me — that is what threatens to explode me.