Slow Music

JAMES TIPTREE, JR.

 

 

 

As most of you probably know by now, multiple Hugo- and Nebula-winning author James Tiptree, Jr.—at one time a figure reclusive and mysterious enough to be regarded as the B. Traven of science fiction—was actually the late Dr. Alice Sheldon, a semiretired experimental psychologist who also wrote occasionally under the name of Raccoona Sheldon. Dr. Sheldon’s tragic death in 1987 put an end to “both” authors’ careers, but, before that, she had won two Nebula and two Hugo Awards as Tiptree, won another Nebula Award as Raccoona Sheldon, and established herself, under whatever name, as one of the best writers in science fiction.

Although “Tiptree” published two reasonably well-received novels—Up the Walls of the World and Brightness Falls from the Air—she was, like Damon Knight and Theodore Sturgeon (two writers she aesthetically resembled and by whom she was strongly influenced), more comfortable with the short story and more effective with it. She wrote some of the very best short stories of the seventies: “The Screwfly Solution,” “The Girl Who Was Plugged In,” “The Women Men Don’t See,” “Beam Us Home,” “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side,” “I’m Too Big but I Love to Play,” and “His Smoke Rose Up Forever.” Already it’s clear that these are stories that will last. They—and a dozen others almost as good—show that Alice Sheldon was simply one of the best short-story writers to work in the genre in our times.

Here, in one of her few ventures into the far future, she shows us a melancholy vision of the end of the human race as we know it, as humanity is seduced into abandoning corporeal existence and merging into a metaphysical alien River that sweeps them away from the Earth forever … except for those few people who choose to remain behind … .

As James Tiptree, Jr., Alice Sheldon also published nine short-story collections: Ten Thousand Light Years from Home, Warm Worlds and Otherwise, Starsongs of an Old Primate, Out of the Everywhere, Tales of the Quintana Roo, Byte Beautiful, The Starry Rift, the posthumously published Crown of Stars, and the retrospective collection Her Smoke Rose Up Forever.

 

Caoilte tossing his burning hair
And Niamh calling “Away, come away;
Empty your heart of its mortal dream.
… We come between man and the deed of his hand,
We come between him and the hope of his heart.”

—W. B. Yeats

 

Lights came on as Jakko walked down the lawn past the house; elegantly concealed spots and floods which made the night into a great intimate room. Overhead the big conifers formed a furry nave drooping toward the black lake below the bluff ahead. This had been a beloved home, he saw; every luxurious device was subdued to preserve the beauty of the forested shore. He walked on a carpet of violets and mosses, in his hand the map that had guided him here from the city.

It was the stillness before dawn. A long-winged night bird swirled in to catch a last moth in the dome of light. Before him shone a bright spearpoint. Jakko saw it was the phosphorescent tip of a mast against the stars. He went down velvety steps to find a small sailboat floating at the dock like a silver leaf reflected on a dark mirror.

In silence he stepped on board, touched the mast.

A gossamer sail spread its fan, the mooring parted soundlessly. The dawn breeze barely filled the sail, but the craft moved smoothly out, leaving a glassy line of wake. Jakko half-poised to jump; he knew nothing of such playtoys, he should go back and find another boat. As he did so, the shore lights went out, leaving him in darkness. He turned and saw Regulus rising ahead where the channel must be. Still, this was not the craft for him. He tugged at the tiller and sail, meaning to turn it back.

But the little boat ran smoothly on, and then he noticed the lights of a small computer glowing by the mast. He relaxed; this was no toy, the boat was fully programmed and he could guess what the course must be. He stood examining the sky, a statue-man gliding across reflected night.

The eastern horizon changed, veiled its stars as he neared it. He could see the channel now, a silvery cut straight ahead between dark banks. The boat ran over glittering shallows where something splashed hugely, and headed into the shining lane. As it did so, all silver changed to lead and the stars were gone. Day was coming. A great pearl-colored blush spread upward before him, developed bands of lavender and rays of coral-gold fire melting to green iridescence overhead. The boat was now gliding on a ribbon of fiery light between black silhouetted banks. Jakko looked back and saw dazzling cloud-cities heaped behind him in the west. The vast imminence of sunrise. He sighed aloud.

He understood that all this demonstration of glory was nothing but the effects of dust and vapor in the thin skin of air around a small planet, whereon he crawled wingless. No vastness brooded; the planet was merely turning with him into the rays of its mediocre primary. His family, everyone, knew that on the River he would encounter the galaxy itself in glory. Suns beyond count, magnificence to which this was nothing. And yet—and yet to him this was not nothing. It was intimately his, man-sized. He made an ambiguous sound in his throat. He resented the trivialization of this beauty, and he resented being moved by it. So he passed along, idly holding the sailrope like a man leashing the living wind, his face troubled and very young.

The little craft ran on unerringly, threading the winding sheen of the canal. As the sun rose, Jakko began to hear a faint drone ahead. The sea surf. He thought of the persons who must have made this voyage before him: the ship’s family, savoring their final days of mortality. A happy voyage, a picnic. The thought reminded him that he was hungry; the last ground-car’s synthesizer had been faulty.

He tied the rope and searched. The boat had replenished its water, but there was only one food-bar. Jakko lay down in the cushioned well and ate and drank comfortably, while the sky turned turquoise and then cobalt. Presently they emerged into an enormous lagoon and began to run south between low islands. Jakko trailed his hand and tasted brackish salt. When the boat turned east again and made for a seaward opening, he became doubly certain. The craft was programmed for the River, like almost everything else on the world he knew.

Sure enough, the tiny bark ran through an inlet and straight out into the chop beyond a long beach, extruded outriggers, and passed like a cork over the reef-foam onto the deep green swells beyond. Here it pitched once and steadied; Jakko guessed it had thrust down a keel. Then it turned south and began to run along outside the reef, steady as a knife-cut with the wind on its quarter. Going Riverward for sure. The nearest Riverplace was here called Vidalita or Beata, or sometimes Falaz, meaning Illusion. It was far south and inland. Jakko guessed they were making for a landing where a moveway met the sea. He had still time to think, to struggle with the trouble under his mind.

But as the sun turned the boat into a trim white-gold bird flying over green transparency, Jakko’s eyes closed and he slept, protected by invisible deflecters from the bow-spray. Once he opened his eyes and saw a painted fish tearing along magically in the standing wave below his head. He smiled and slept again, dreaming of a great wave dying, a wave that was a many-headed beast. His face became sad and his lips moved soundlessly, as if repeating, “No … no …”

When he woke they were sailing quite close by a long bluff on his right. In the cliff ahead was a big white building or tower, only a little ruined. Suddenly he caught sight of a figure moving on the beach before it. A living human? He jumped up to look. He had not seen a strange human person in many years.

Yes—it was a live person, strangely colored gold and black. He waved wildly.

The person on the beach slowly raised an arm.

Alight with excitement, Jakko switched off the computer and grabbed the rudder and sail. The line of reef-surf seemed open here. He turned the boat shoreward, riding on a big swell. But the wave left him. He veered erratically, and the surf behind broached into the boat, overturning it and throwing him out. He knew how to swim; he surfaced and struck out strongly for the shore, spluttering brine. Presently he was wading out onto the white beach, a short, strongly-built, reddened young male person with pale hair and water-blue eyes.

The stranger was walking hesitantly toward him. Jakko saw it was a thin, dark-skinned girl wearing a curious netted hat. Her body was wrapped in orange silk and she carried heavy gloves in one hand. Three nervous moondogs followed her. He began turning water out of his shorts pockets as she came up.

“Your … boat,” she said in the language of that time. Her voice was low and uncertain.

They both turned to look at the confused place by the reef where the sailboat floated half-submerged.

“I turned it off. The computer.” His words came jerkily, too, they were both unused to speech.

“It will come ashore down there.” She pointed, still studying him in a wary, preoccupied way. She was much smaller than he. “Why did you turn? Aren’t you going to the River?”

“No.” He coughed. “Well, yes, in a way. My father wants me to say good-bye. They left while I was traveling.”

“You’re not … ready?”

“No. I don’t—” He broke off. “Are you staying alone here?”

“Yes. I’m not going either.”

They stood awkwardly in the sea-wind. Jakko noticed that the three moondogs were lined up single file, tiptoeing upwind toward him with their eyes closed, sniffing. They were not, of course, from the moon, but they looked it, being white and oddly shaped.

“It’s a treat for them,” the girl said. “Something different.” Her voice was stronger now. After a pause she added, “You can stay here for a while if you want. I’ll show you but I have to finish my work first.”

“Thank you,” he remembered to say.

As they climbed steps cut in the bluff Jakko asked, “What are you working at?”

“Oh, everything. Right now it’s bees.”

“Bees!” he marveled. “They made what—honey? I thought they were all gone.”

“I have a lot of old things.” She kept glancing at him intently as they climbed. “Are you quite healthy?”

“Oh yes. Why not? I’m all alpha so far as I know. Everybody is.”

“Was,” she corrected. “Here are my bee skeps.”

They came around a low wall and stopped by five small wicker huts. A buzzing insect whizzed by Jakko’s face, coming from some feathery shrubs. He saw that the bloom-tipped foliage was alive with the golden humming things. Recalling that they could sting, he stepped back.

“You better go around the other way.” She pointed. “They might hurt a stranger.” She pulled her veil down, hiding her face. Just as he turned away, she added, “I though you might impregnate me.”

He wheeled back, not really able to react because of the distracting bees. “But isn’t that terribly complicated?”

“I don’t think so. I have the pills.” She pulled on her gloves.

“Yes, the pills. I know.” He frowned. “But you’d have to stay, I mean one just can’t—”

“I know that. I have to do my bees now. We can talk later.”

“Of course.” He started away and suddenly turned back.

“Look!” He didn’t know her name. “You, look!”

“What?” She was a strange little figure, black and orange with huge hands and a big veil-muffled head. “What?”

“I felt it. Just then, desire. Can’t you see?”

They both gazed at his wet shorts.

“I guess not,” he said finally. “But I felt it, I swear. Sexual desire.”

She pushed back her veil, frowning. “It will stay, won’t it? Or come back? This isn’t a very good place, I mean, the bees. And it’s no use without the pills.”

“That’s so.”

He went away then, walking carefully because of the tension around his pubic bone. Like a keel, snug and tight. His whole body felt reorganized. It had been years since he’d felt flashes like that, not since he was fifteen at least. Most people never did. It was variously thought to be because of the River, or from their parents’ surviving the Poison Centuries, or because the general alpha strain was so forebrain dominant. It gave him an archaic, secret pride. Maybe he was a throwback.

He passed under cool archways, and found himself in a green, protected place behind the seaward wall. A garden, he saw, looking round surprised at clumps of large tied-up fruiting plants, peculiar trees with green balls at their tops, disorderly rows of rather unesthetic greenery. Tentatively he identified tomatoes, peppers, a feathery leaf which he thought had an edible root. A utilitarian planting. His uncle had once amused the family by doing something of the sort, but not on this scale. Jakko shook his head.

In the center of the garden stood a round stone coping with a primitive apparatus on top. He walked over and looked down. Water, a bucket on a rope. Then he saw that there was also an ordinary tap. He opened it and drank, looking at the odd implements leaning on the coping. Earth-tools. He did not really want to think about what the strange woman had said.

A shadow moved by his foot. The largest moondog had come quite close, inhaling dreamily. “Hello,” he said to it. Some of these dogs could talk a little. This one opened its eyes wide but said nothing.

He stared about, wiping his mouth, feeling his clothes almost dry now in the hot sun. On three sides the garden was surrounded by arcades; above him the ruined side was a square cracked masonry tower with no roof. A large place, whatever it was. He walked into the shade of the nearest arcade, which turned out to be littered with a myriad disassembled or partly assembled objects: tools, containers, who knew what. Her “work”? The place felt strange, vibrant and busy. He realized he had entered only empty houses on his year-long journey. This one was alive, lived-in. Messy. It hummed like the bee skeps. He turned down a cool corridor, looking into rooms piled with more stuff. In one, three white animals he couldn’t identify were asleep in a heap of cloth on a bed. They moved their ears at him like big pale shells but did not awaken.

He heard staccato noises and came out into another courtyard where plump birds walked with jerking heads. “Chickens!” he decided, delighted by the irrational variety of this place. He went from there into a large room with windows on the sea and heard a door close.

It was the woman, or girl, coming to him, holding her hat and gloves. Her hair was a dark curly cap, her head elegantly small; an effect he had always admired. He remembered something to say.

“I’m called Jakko. What’s your name?”

“Jakko.” She tasted the sound. “Hello, Jakko. I’m Peachthief.” She smiled very briefly, entirely changing her face.

“Peachthief.” On impulse he moved toward her, holding out his hands. She tucked her bundle under her arm and took both of his. They stood like that a moment, not quite looking at each other. Jakko felt excited. Not sexually, but more as if the air was electrically charged.

“Well.” She took her hands away and began unwrapping a leafy wad. “I brought a honeycomb even if it isn’t quite ready.” She showed him a sticky looking frame with two dead bees on it. “Come on.”

She walked rapidly out into another corridor and entered a shiny room he thought might be a laboratory.

“My food room,” she told him. Again Jakko was amazed. There stood a synthesizer, to be sure, but beside it were shelves full of pots and bags and jars and containers of all descriptions. Unknown implements lay about and there was a fireplace which had been partly sealed up. Bunches of plant parts hung from racks overhead. He identified some brownish ovoids in a bowl as eggs. From the chickens?

Peachthief was cleaning the honeycomb with a manually operated knife. “I use the wax for my loom, and for candles. Light.”

“What’s wrong with the lights?”

“Nothing.” She turned around, gesturing emphatically with the knife. “Don’t you understand? All these machines, they’ll go. They won’t run forever. They’ll break or wear out or run down. There won’t be any, anymore. Then we’ll have to use natural things.”

“But that won’t be for centuries!” he protested. “Decades, anyhow. They’re all still going, they’ll last for us.”

“For you,” she said scornfully. “Not for me. I intend to stay. With my children.” She turned back on him and added in a friendlier voice, “Besides, the old things are esthetic. I’ll show you, when it gets dark.”

“But you haven’t any children! Have you?” He was purely astonished.

“Not yet.” Her back was still turned.

“I’m hungry,” he said, and went to work the synthesizer. He made it give him a bar with a hard filler; for some reason he wanted to crunch it in his teeth.

She finished with the honey and turned around. “Have you ever had a natural meal?”

“Oh yes,” he said, chewing. “One of my uncles tried that. It was very nice,” he added politely.

She looked at him sharply and smiled again, on—off. They went out of the food room. The afternoon was fading into great gold and orange streamers above the courtyard, colored like Peachthief’s garment.

“You can sleep here.” She opened a slatted door. The room was small and bare, with a window on the sea.

“There isn’t any bed,” he objected.

She opened a chest and took out a big wad of string. “Hang this end on that hook over there.”

When she hung up the other end he saw it was a large mesh hammock.

“That’s what I sleep in. They’re comfortable. Try it.”

He climbed in awkwardly. The thing came up around him like a bag. She gave a short sweet laugh as brief as her smile.

“No, you lie on the diagonal. Like this.” She tugged his legs, sending a peculiar shudder through him. “That straightens it, see?”

It would probably be all right, he decided, struggling out. Peachthief was pointing to a covered pail.

“That’s for your wastes. It goes on the garden in the end.”

He was appalled, but said nothing, letting her lead him out through a room with glass tanks in the walls to a big screened-in porch fronting the ocean. It was badly in need of cleaners. The sky was glorious with opalescent domes and spires, reflections of the sunset behind them, painting amazing colors on the sea.

“This is where I eat.”

“What is this place?”

“It was a sea-station last, I think. Station Juliet. They monitored the fish and the ocean traffic, and rescued people and so on.”

He was distracted by noticing long convergent dove-blue rays like mysterious paths into the horizon; cloud-shadows cast across the world. Beauty of the dust. Why must it move him so?

“—even a medical section,” she was saying. “I really could have babies, I mean in case of trouble.”

“You don’t mean it.” He felt only irritation now. “I don’t feel any more desire,” he told her.

She shrugged. “I don’t, either. We’ll talk about it later on.”

“Have you always lived here?”

“Oh, no.” She began taking pots and dishes out of an insulated case. The three moondogs had joined them silently; she set bowls before them. They lapped, stealing glances at Jakko. They were, he knew, very strong despite their stick-like appearance.

“Let’s sit here.” She plumped down on one end of the lounge and began biting forcefully into a crusty thing like a slab of drybar. He noticed she had magnificent teeth. Her dark skin set them off beautifully, as it enhanced her eyes. He had never met anyone so different in every way from himself and his family. He vacillated between interest and a vague alarm.

“Try some of the honey.” She handed him a container and a spoon. It looked quite clean. He tasted it eagerly; honey was much spoken of in antique writings. At first he sensed nothing but a waxy sliding, but then an overpowering sweetness enveloped his tongue, quite unlike the sweets he was used to. It did not die away but seemed to run up his nose and almost into his ears, in a peculiar way. An animal food. He took some more, gingerly.

“I didn’t offer you my bread. It needs some chemical, I don’t know what. To make it lighter.”

“Don’t you have an access terminal?”

“Something’s wrong with part of it,” she said with her mouth full. “Maybe I don’t work it right. We never had a big one like this, my tribe were travelers. They believed in sensory experiences.” She nodded, licking her fingers. “They went to the River when I was fourteen.”

“That’s very young to be alone. My people waited till this year, my eighteenth birthday.”

“I wasn’t alone. I had two older cousins. But they wanted to take an aircar up north, to the part of the River called Rideout. I stayed here. I mean, we never stopped traveling, we never lived anywhere. I wanted to do like the plants, make roots.”

“I could look at your program,” he offered. “I’ve seen a lot of different models, I spent nearly a year in cities.”

“What I need is a cow. Or a goat.”

“Why?”

“For the milk. I need a pair, I guess.”

Another animal thing; he winced a little. But it was pleasant, sitting here in the deep blue light beside her, hearing the surf plash quietly below.

“I saw quite a number of horses,” he told her. “Don’t they use milk?”

“I don’t think horses are much good for milk.” She sighed in an alert, busy way. He had the impression that her head was tremendously energetic, humming with plans and intentions. Suddenly she looked up and began making a high squeaky noise between her front teeth, “Sssswwt! Sssswwwt!”

Startled, he saw a white flying thing swooping above them, and then two more. They whirled so wildly he ducked.

“That’s right,” she said to them. “Get busy.”

“What are they?”

“My bats. They eat mosquitoes and insects.” She squeaked again and the biggest bat was suddenly clinging to her hand, licking honey. It had a small, fiercely complicated face.

Jakko relaxed again. This place and its strange inhabitant were giving him remarkable memories for the River, anyway. He noticed a faint glow moving where the dark sky joined the darker sea.

“What’s that?”

“Oh, the seatrain. It goes to the River landing.”

“Are there people on it?”

“Not anymore. Look, I’ll show you.” She jumped up and was opening a console in the corner, when a sweet computer voice spoke into the air.

“Seatrain Foxtrot Niner calling Station Juliet! Come in, Station Juliet!”

“It hasn’t done that for years,” Peachthief said. She tripped tumblers. “Seatrain, this is Station Juliet, I hear you. Do you have a problem?”

“Affirmative. Passenger is engaging in nonstandard activities. He-slash-she does not conform to parameters. Request instructions.”

Peachthief thought a minute. Then she grinned. “Is your passenger moving on four legs?”

“Affirmative! Affirmative!” Seatrain Foxtrot sounded relieved.

“Supply it with bowls of meat-food and water on the floor and do not interfere with it. Juliet out.”

She clicked off, and they watched the far web of lights go by on the horizon, carrying an animal.

“Probably a dog following the smell of people,” Peachthief said. “I hope it gets off all right … We’re quite a wide genetic spread,” she went on in a different voice. “I mean, you’re so light, and body-type and all.”

“I noticed that.”

“It would give good heterosis. Vigor.”

She was talking about being impregnated, about the fantasy-child. He felt angry.

“Look, you don’t know what you’re saying. Don’t you realize you’d have to stay and raise it for years? You’d be ethically and morally bound. And the River places are shrinking fast, you must know that. Maybe you’d be too late.”

“Yes,” she said somberly. “Now it’s sucked everybody out it’s going. But I still mean to stay.”

“But you’d hate it, even if there’s still time. My mother hated it, toward the end. She felt she had begun to deteriorate energetically, that her life would be lessened. And me—what about me? I mean, I should stay too.”

“You’d only have to stay a month. For my ovulation. The male parent isn’t ethically bound.”

“Yes, but I think that’s wrong. My father stayed. He never said he minded it, but he must have.”

“You only have to do a month,” she said sullenly. “I thought you weren’t going on the River right now.”

“I’m not. I just don’t want to feel bound, I want to travel. To see more of the world, first. After I say goodbye.”

She made an angry sound. “You have no insight. You’re going, all right. You just don’t want to admit it. You’re going just like Mungo and Ferrocil.”

“Who are they?”

“People who came by. Males, like you. Mungo was last year, I guess. He had an aircar. He said he was going to stay, he talked and talked. But two days later he went right on again. To the River. Ferrocil was earlier, he was walking through. Until he stole my bicycle.”

A sudden note of fury in her voice startled him; she seemed to have some peculiar primitive relation to her bicycle, to her things.

“Did you want them to impregnate you, too?” Jakko noticed an odd intensity in his own voice as well.

“Oh, I was thinking about it, with Mungo.” Suddenly she turned on him, her eyes wide open in the dimness like white-ringed jewels. “Look!

Once and for all, I’m not going! I’m alive, I’m a human woman. I am going to stay on this earth and do human things. I’m going to make young ones to carry on the race, even if I have to die here. You can go on out, you—you pitiful shadows!”

Her voice rang in the dark room, jarring him down to his sleeping marrow. He sat silent as though some deep buried bell had tolled.

She was breathing hard. Then she moved, and to his surprise a small live flame sprang up between her cupped hands, making the room a cave.

“That’s a candle. That’s me. Now go ahead, make fun like Mungo did.”

“I’m not making fun,” he said, shocked. “It’s just that I don’t know what to think. Maybe you’re right. I really … I really don’t want to go, in one way,” he said haltingly. “I love this earth too. But it’s all so fast. Let me …”

His voice trailed off.

“Tell me about your family,” she said, quietly now.

“Oh, they studied. They tried every access you can imagine. Ancient languages, history, lore. My aunt made poems in English … The layers of the earth, the names of body cells and tissues, jewels, everything. Especially stars. They made us memorize star maps. So we’ll know where we are, you know, for a while. At least the earth-names. My father kept saying, when you go on the River you can’t come back and look anything up. All you have is what you remember. Of course you could ask others, but there’ll be so much more, so much new …”

He fell silent, wondering for the millionth time; is it possible that I shall go out forever between the stars, in the great streaming company of strange sentiences?

“How many children were in your tribe?” Peachthief was asking.

“Six. I was the youngest.”

“The others all went on the River?”

“I don’t know. When I came back from the cities the whole family had gone on, but maybe they’ll wait a while too. My father left a letter asking me to come and say good-bye, and to bring him anything new I learned. They say you go slowly, you know. If I hurry there’ll still be enough of his mind left there to tell him what I saw.”

“What did you see? We were at a city once,” Peachthief said dreamily. “But I was too young, I don’t remember anything but people.”

“The people are all gone now. Empty, every one. But everything works, the lights change, the moveways run. I didn’t believe everybody was gone until I checked the central control offices. Oh, there were so many wonderful devices.” He sighed. “The beauty, the complexity. Fantastic what people made.” He sighed again, thinking of the wonderful technology, the creations abandoned, running down. “One strange thing. In the biggest city I saw, old Chio, almost every entertainment-screen had the same tape running.”

“What was it?”

“A girl, a young girl with long hair. Almost to her feet, I’ve never seen such hair. She was laying it out on a sort of table, with her head down. But no sound, I think the audio was broken. Then she poured a liquid all over very slowly. And then she lit it, she set fire to herself. It flamed and exploded and burned her all up. I think it was real.” He shuddered. “I could see inside her mouth, her tongue going all black and twisted. It was horrible. Running over and over, everywhere. Stuck.”

She made a revolted sound. “So you want to tell that to your father, to his ghost, or whatever?”

“Yes. It’s all new data, it could be important.”

“Oh yes,” she said scornfully. Then she grinned at him. “What about me? Am I new data too? A woman who isn’t going to the River? A woman who is going to stay here and make babies? Maybe I’m the last.”

“That’s very important,” he said slowly, feeling a deep confusion in his gut. “But I can’t believe it, I mean, you—”

“I mean it.” She spoke with infinite conviction. “I’m going to live here and have babies by you or some other man if you won’t stay, and teach them to live on the earth naturally.”

Suddenly he believed her. A totally new emotion was rising up in him, carrying with it sunrises and nameless bonds with earth that hurt in a painless way, as thought a rusted door was opening within him. Maybe this was what he had been groping for.

“I think—I think maybe I’ll help you. Maybe I’ll stay with you, for a while at least. Our—our children.”

“You’ll stay a month?” she asked wonderingly. “Really?”

“No, I mean I could stay longer. To make more and see them and help raise them, like my father did. After I come back from saying goodbye I’ll really stay.”

Her face changed. She bent to him and took his face between her slim dark hands.

“Jakko, listen. If you go to the River you’ll never come back. No one ever does. I’ll never see you again. We have to do it now, before you go.”

“But a month is too long!” he protested. “My father’s mind won’t be there, I’m already terribly late.”

She glared into his eyes a minute and then released him, stepping back with her brief sweet laugh. “Yes, and it’s already late for bed. Come on.”

She led him back to the room, carrying the candle, and he marveled anew at the clutter of strange activities she had assembled. “What’s that?”

“My weaving-room.” Yawning, she reached in and held up a small, rough-looking cloth. “I made this.”

It was ugly, he thought; ugly and pathetic. Why make such useless things? But he was too tired to argue.

She left him to cleanse himself perfunctorily by the well in the moonlit courtyard, after showing him another waste-place right in the garden. Other peoples’ wastes smell bad, he noticed sleepily. Maybe that was the cause of all the ancient wars.

In his room he tumbled into his hammock and fell asleep instantly. His dreams that night were chaotic; crowds, storms, jostling and echoing through strange dimensions. His last image was of a great whirlwind that bore in its forehead a jewel that was a sleeping woman, curled like an embryo.

He waked in the pink light of dawn to find her brown face bending over him, smiling impishly. He had the impression she had been watching him, and jumped quickly out of the hammock.

“Lazy,” she said. “I’ve found the sailboat. Hurry up and eat.”

She handed him a wooden plate of bright natural fruits and led him out into the sunrise garden.

When they got down to the beach she led him south, and there was the little craft sliding to and fro, overturned in the shallows amid its tangle of sail. The keel was still protruding. They furled the sail in clumsily and towed it out to deeper water to right it.

“I want this for the children,” Peachthief kept repeating excitedly. “They can get fish, too. Oh, how they’ll love it!”

“Stand your weight in the keel and grab the siderail,” Jakko told her, doing the same. He noticed that her silks had come loose from her breasts, which were high and wide-pointed, quite unlike those of his tribe. The sight distracted him, his thighs felt unwieldy, and he missed his handhold as the craft righted itself and ducked him. When he came up he saw Peachthief scrambling aboard like a cat, clinging tight to the mast.

“The sail! Pull the sail up!” he shouted, and got another faceful of water. But she had heard him, the sail was trembling open like a great wing, silhouetting her shining slim dark body. For the first time Jakko noticed the boat’s name, on the stern: Gojack. He smiled. An omen.

Gojack was starting to move smoothly away, toward the reef.

“The rudder!” he bellowed. “Turn the rudder and come back.”

Peachthief moved to the tiller and pulled at it; he could see her strain. But Gojack continued to move away from him into the wind, faster and faster toward the surf. He remembered she had been handling the mast where the computer was.

“Stop the computer! Turn it off, turn it off!”

She couldn’t possibly hear him. Jakko saw her in frantic activity, wrenching at the tiller, grabbing ropes, trying physically to push down the sail. Then she seemed to notice the computer, but evidently could not decipher it. Meanwhile Gojack fled steadily on and out, resuming its interrupted journey to the River. Jakko realized with horror that she would soon be in dangerous water; the surf was thundering on coralheads.

“Jump! Come back, jump off!” He was swimming after her as fast as he could, his progress agonizingly slow. He glimpsed her still wrestling with the boat, screaming something he couldn’t hear.

“JUMP!”

And finally she did, but only to try jerking Gojack around by its mooring lines. The boat faltered and jibbed, but then went strongly on, towing the threshing girl.

“Let go! Let go!” A wave broke over his head.

When he could see again he found she had at last let go and was swimming aimlessly, watching Gojack crest the surf and wing away. At last she turned back toward shore, and Jakko swam to intercept her. He was gripped by an unknown emotion so strong it discoordinated him. As his feet touched bottom he realized it was rage.

She waded to him, her face contorted by weeping. “The children’s boat,” she wailed. “I lost the children’s boat—”

“You’re crazy,” he shouted. “There aren’t any children.”

“I lost it—” She flung herself on his chest, crying. He thumped her back, her sides, repeating furiously, “Crazy! You’re insane!”

She wailed louder, squirming against him, small and naked and frail. Suddenly he found himself flinging her down onto the wet sand, falling on top of her with his swollen sex crushed between their bellies. For a moment all was confusion, and then the shock of it sobered him. He raised to look under himself and Peachthief stared too, round-eyed.

“Do you w-want to, now?”

In that instant he wanted nothing more than to thrust himself into her, but a sandy wavelet splashed over them and he was suddenly aware of chafing wet cloth and Peachthief gagging brine. The magic waned. He got awkwardly to his knees.

“I thought you were going to be drowned,” he told her, angry again.

“I wanted it so, for—for them …” She was still crying softly, looking up desolately at him. He understood she wasn’t really meaning just the sailboat. A feeling of inexorable involvement spread through him. This mad little being had created some kind of energy-vortex around her, into which he was being sucked along with animals, vegetables, chickens, crowds of unknown things: only Gojack had escaped her.

“I’ll find it,” she was muttering, wringing out her silks, staring beyond the reef at the tiny dwindling gleam. He looked down at her, so fanatic and so vulnerable, and his inner landscape tilted frighteningly, revealing some ancient-new dimension.

“I’ll stay with you,” he said hoarsely. He cleared his throat, hearing his voice shake. “I mean I’ll really stay, I won’t go the the River at all. We’ll make the, our babies now.”

She stared up at him open-mouthed. “But your father! You promised!”

“My father stayed,” he said painfully. “It’s—it’s right, I think.”

She came close and grabbed his arms in her small hands.

“Oh, Jakko! But no, listen—I’ll go with you. We can start a baby as we go, I’m sure of that. Then you can talk to your father and keep your promise and I’ll be there to make sure you come back!”

“But you’d be, you’d be pregnant!” he cried in alarm. “You’d be in danger of taking an embryo on the River!”

She laughed proudly. “Can’t you get it through your head that I will not go on the River? I’ll just watch you and pull you out. I’ll see you get back here. For a while, anyway,” she added soberly. Then she brightened. “Hey, we’ll see all kinds of things. Maybe I can find a cow or some goats on the way! Yes, yes! It’s a perfect idea.”

She faced him, glowing. Tentatively she brought her lips up to his, and they kissed inexpertly, tasting salt. He felt no desire, but only some deep resonance, like a confirmation in the earth. The three moondogs were watching mournfully.

“Now let’s eat!” she began towing him toward the cliff-steps. “We can start the pills right now.”Oh, I have so much to do! But I’ll fix everything, we’ll leave tomorrow.”

She was like a whirlwind. In the foodroom she pounced on a small gold-colored pillbox and opened it to show a mound of glowing green and red capsules.

“The red ones with the male symbol are for you.”

She took a green one, and they swallowed solemnly, sharing a watermug. He noticed that the seal on the box had been broken, and thought of that stranger, Mungo, she had mentioned. How far had her plans gone with him? An unpleasant emotion he had never felt before rose in Jakko’s stomach. He sensed that he was heading into more dubious realms of experience than he had quite contemplated, and took his foodbar and walked away through the arcades to cool down.

When he came upon her again she seemed to be incredibly busy, folding and filling and wrapping things, closing windows and tying doors open. Her intense relations with things again … He felt obscurely irritated and was pleased to have had a superior idea.

“We need a map,” he told her. “Mine was in the boat.”

“Oh, great idea. Look in the old control room, it’s down those stairs. It’s kind of scary.” She began putting oil in her loom.

He went down a white ramp that became a tunnel stairway, and came finally through a heavily armored portal to a circular room deep inside the rock, dimly illumined by portholes sunk in long shafts. From here he could hear the hum of the station energy source. As his eyes adjusted he made out a bank of sensor screens and one big console standing alone. It seemed to have been smashed open; some kind of sealant had been poured over the works.

He had seen a place like this before; he understood at once that from here had been controlled terrible ancient weapons that flew. Probably they still stood waiting in their hidden holes behind the station. But the master control was long dead. As he approached the console he saw that someone had scratched in the cooling sealant. He could make out only the words, “—WAR NO MORE.” Undoubtedly this was a shrine of the very old days.

He found a light switch that filled the place with cool glare and began exploring side alleys. Antique gear, suits, cupboards full of masks and crumbling packets he couldn’t identify. Among them was something useful—two cloth containers to carry stuff on one’s back, only a little mildewed. But where were the maps?

Finally he found one on the control-room wall, right where he had come in. Someone had updated it with scrawled notations. With a tremor he realized how very old this must be; it dated from before the Rivers had touched earth. He could hardly grasp it.

Studying it he saw that there was indeed a big landing-dock not far south, and from there a moveway ran inland about a hundred kilometers to an airpark. If Peachthief could walk twenty-five kilometers they could make the landing by evening, and if the cars were still running the rest would be quick. All the moveways he’d seen had live cars on them. From the airpark a dotted line ran southwest across mountains to a big red circle with a cross in it, marked “VIDA!” That would be the River. They would just have to hope something on the airpark would fly, otherwise it would be a long climb.

His compass was still on his belt. He memorized the directions and went back upstairs. The courtyard was already saffron under great sunset flags.

Peachthief was squatting by the well, apparently having a conference with her animals. Jakko noticed some more white creatures he hadn’t seen before, who seemed to live in an open hutch. They had long pinkish ears and mobile noses. Rabbits, or hares perhaps?

Two of the strange white animals he had seen sleeping were now under a bench, chirruping irritably at Peachthief.

“My raccoons,” she told Jakko. “They’re mad because I woke them up too soon.” She said something in a high voice Jakko didn’t understand, and the biggest raccoon shook his head up and down in a supercilious way.

“The chickens will be all right,” Peachthief said. “Lotor knows how to feed them, to get the eggs. And they can all work the water-lever.” The other raccoon nodded crossly, too.

“The rabbits are a terrible problem.” Peachthief frowned. “You just haven’t much sense, Eusebia,” she said fondly, stroking the doe. “I’ll have to fix something.”

The big raccoon was warbling at her, Jakko thought he caught the word “dog-g-g.”

“He wants to know who will settle their disputes with the dogs,” Peachthief reported. At this one of the moondogs came forward and said thickly, “We go-o.” It was the first word Jakko had heard him speak.

“Oh, good!” Peachthief cried. “Well, that’s that!” She bounced up and began pouring something from a bucket on a line of plants. The white raccoons ran off silently with a humping gait.

“I’m so glad you’re coming, Tycho,” she told the dog. “Especially if I have to come back alone with a baby inside. But they say you’re very vigorous, at first anyway.”

“You aren’t coming back alone,” Jakko told her. She smiled a brilliant, noncommittal flash. He noticed she was dressed differently; her body didn’t show so much, and she kept her gaze away from him in an almost timid way. But she became very excited when he showed her the backpacks.

“Oh, good. Now we won’t have to roll the blankets around our waists. It gets cool at night, you know.”

“Does it ever rain?”

“Not this time of year. What we mainly need is lighters and food and water. And a good knife each. Did you find the map?”

He showed it. “Can you walk, I mean really hike if we have to? Do you have shoes?”

“Oh yes. I walk a lot. Especially since Ferrocil stole my bike.”

The venom in her tone amused him. The ferocity with which she provisioned her small habitat!

“Men build monuments, women build nests,” he quoted from somewhere.

“I don’t know what kind of monument Ferrocil built with my bicycle,” she said tartly.

“You’re a savage,” he said, feeling a peculiar ache that came out as a chuckle.

“The race can use some savages. We better eat now and go to sleep so we can start early.”

At supper in the sunset-filled porch they scarcely talked. Dreamily Jakko watched the white bats embroidering flight in the air. When he looked down at Peachthief he caught her gazing at him before she quickly lowered her eyes. It came to him that they might eat hundreds, thousands of meals here; maybe all his life. And there could be a child, children, running about. He had never seen small humans younger than himself. It was all too much to take in, unreal. He went back to watching the bats.

That night she accompanied him to his hammock and stood by, shy but stubborn, while he got settled. Then he suddenly felt her hands sliding on his body, toward his groin. At first he thought it was something clinical, but then he realized she meant sex. His blood began to pound.

“May I come in beside you? The hammock is quite strong.”

“Yes,” he said thickly, reaching for her arm.

But as her weight came in by him she said in a practical voice, “I have to start knotting a small hammock, first thing. Child-size.”

It broke his mood.

“Look. I’m sorry, but I’ve changed my mind. You go on back to yours, we should get sleep now.”

“All right.” The weight lifted away.

With a peculiar mix of sadness and satisfaction he heard her light footsteps leaving him alone. That night he dreamed strange sensory crescendoes, a tumescent earth and air; a woman who lay with her smiling lips in pale green water, awaiting him, while thin black birds of sunrise stalked to the edge of the sea.

Next morning they ate by candles, and set out as the eastern sky was just turning rose-gray. The ancient white coral roadway was good walking. Peachthief swung right along beside him, her backpack riding smooth.

The moondogs pattered soberly behind. Jakko found himself absorbed in gazing at the brightening landscape. Jungle-covered hills rose away on their right, the sea lay below on their left, sheened and glittering with the coming sunrise. When a diamond chip of sun broke out of the horizon he almost shouted aloud for the brilliance of it; the palm trees beyond the road lit up like golden torches, the edges of every frond and stone were startling clear and jewellike. For a moment he wondered if he could have taken some hallucinogen.

They paced on steadily in a dream of growing light and heat. The day-wind came up, and torn white clouds began to blow over them, bringing momentary coolness. Their walking fell into the rhythm Jakko loved, broken only occasionally by crumbled places in the road. At such spots they would often be surprised to find the moondogs sitting waiting for them, having quietly left the road and circled ahead through the scrub on business of their own. Peachthief kept up sturdily, only once stopping to look back at the far white spark of Station Juliet, almost melted in the shimmering horizon.

“This is as far as I’ve gone south,” she told him.

He drank some water and made her drink too, and they went on. The road began to wind, rising and falling gently. When he next glanced back the station was gone. The extraordinary luminous clarity of the world was still delighting him.

When noon came he judged they were well over halfway to the landing. They sat down on some rubble under the palms to eat and drink, and Peachthief fed the moondogs. Then she took out the fertility pillbox. They each took theirs in silence, oddly solemn. Then she grinned.

“I’ll give you something for dessert.”

She unhitched a crooked knife from her belt and went searching around in the rocks, to come back with a big yellow-brown palm nut. Jakko watched her attack it with rather alarming vigor; she husked it and then used a rock to drive the point home.

“Here.” She handed it to him. “Drink out of that hole.” He felt a sloshing inside; when he lifted it and drank it tasted hairy and gritty and nothing in particular. But sharp, too, like the day. Peachthief was methodically striking the thing around and around its middle. Suddenly it fell apart, revealing vividly white meat. She pried out a piece.

“Eat this. It’s full of protein.”

The nutmeat was sweet and sharply organic.

“This is a coconut!” he suddenly remembered.

“Yes. I won’t starve, coming back.”

He refused to argue, but only got up to go on. Peachthief bolstered her knife and followed, munching on a coconut piece. They went on so in silence a long time, letting the rhythm carry them. Once when a lizard waddled across the road Peachthief said to the moondog at her heels, “Tycho, you’ll have to learn to catch and eat those one day soon.” The moondogs all looked dubiously at the lizard but said nothing. Jakko felt shocked and pushed the thought away.

They were now walking with the sun westering slowly to their right. A flight of big orange birds with blue beaks flapped squawking out of a roadside tree, where they were apparently building some structure. Cloud-shadows fled across the world, making blue and bronze reflections in the sea. Jakko still felt his sensory impressions almost painfully keen; a sunray made the surf-line into a chain of diamonds, and the translucent green of the near shallows below them seemed to enchant his eyes. Every vista ached with light, as if to utter some silent meaning.

He was walking in a trance, only aware that the road had been sound and level for some time, when Peachthief uttered a sharp cry.

“My bicycle! There’s my bicycle!” She began to run; Jakko saw shiny metal sticking out of a narrow gulch in the roadway. When he came up to her she was pulling a machine out from beside the roadwall.

“The front wheel—Oh, he bent it! He must have been going too fast and wrecked it here. That Ferrocil! But I’ll fix it, I’m sure I can fix it at the Station. I’ll push it back with me on the way home.”

While she was mourning her machine Jakko looked around and over the low coping of the roadwall. Sheer cliff down there, with the sun just touching a rocky beach below. Something was stuck among the rocks—a tangle of whitish sticks, cloth, a round thing. Feeling his stomach knot, Jakko stared down at it, unwillingly discovering that the round thing had eye-holes, a U-shaped open mouth, blowing strands of hair. He had never seen a dead body before, nobody had, but he had seen pictures of human bones. Shakenly he realized who this had to be: Ferrocil. He must have been thrown over the coping when he hit that crack. Now he was dead, long dead. He would never go on the River. All that had been in that head was perished, gone forever.

Scarcely knowing what he was doing, Jakko grabbed Peachthief by the shoulders, saying roughly, “Come on! Come on!” When she resisted, confusedly he took her by the arm and began forcibly pulling her away from where she might look down. Her flesh felt burning hot and vibrant, the whole world was blasting colors and sounds and smells at him. Images of dead Ferrocil mingled with the piercing scent of some flowers on the roadway. Suddenly an idea struck him; he stopped.

“Listen. Are you sure those pills aren’t hallucinaids? I’ve only had two and everything feels crazy.”

“Three,” Peachthief said abstractedly. She took his hand and pressed it on her back. “Do that again, run your hand down my back.”

Bewildered, he obeyed. As his hand passed her silk shirt onto her thin shorts he felt her body move under it in a way that made him jerk away.

“Feel? Did you feel it? The lordotic reflex,” she said proudly. “Female sexuality. It’s starting.”

“What do you mean, three?”

“You had three pills. I gave you one that first night, in the honey.”

“What? But—but—” He struggled to voice the enormity of her violation, pure fury welling up in him. Choking, he lifted his hand and struck her buttocks the hardest blow he could, sending her staggering. It was the first time he had ever struck a person. A moondog growled, but he didn’t care.

“Don’t you ever—never—play a trick like—” He yanked at her shoulders, meaning to slap her face. His hand clutched a breast instead, he saw her hair blowing like dead Ferrocil’s. A frightening sense of mortality combined with pride surged through him, lighting a fire in his loins. The deadness of Ferrocil suddenly seemed violently exciting. He, Jakko, was alive! Ignoring all sanity he flung himself on Peachthief, bearing her down on the road among the flowers. As he struggled to tear open their shorts he was dimly aware that she was helping him. His engorged penis was all reality; he fought past obstructions and then was suddenly, crookedly in her, fierce pleasure building. It exploded through him and then had burst out into her vitals, leaving him spent.

Blinking, fighting for clarity, he raised himself up and off her body. She lay wide-legged and disheveled, sobbing or gasping in a strange way, but smiling too. Revulsion sent a sick taste in his throat.

“There’s your baby,” he said roughly. He found his canteen and drank. The three moondogs had retreated and were sitting in a row, staring solemnly.

“May I have some, please?” Her voice was very low; she sat up, began fixing her clothes. He passed her the water and they got up.

“It’s sundown,” she said. “Should we camp here?”

“No!” Savagely he started on, not caring that she had to run to catch up. Was this the way the ancients lived? Whirled by violent passions, indecent, uncaring? His doing sex so close to the poor dead person seemed unbelievable. And the world was still assaulting all his senses; when she stumbled against him he could feel again the thrilling pull of her flesh, and shuddered. They walked in silence awhile; he sensed that she was more tired than he, but he wanted only to get as far as possible away.

“I’m not taking any more of those pills,” he broke silence at last.

“But you have to! It takes a month to be sure.”

“I don’t care.”

“But, ohhh—”

He said nothing more. They were walking across a twilit headland now. Suddenly the road turned, and they came out above a great bay.

The waters below were crowded with boats of all kinds, bobbing emptily where they had been abandoned. Some still had lights that made faint jewels in the opalescent air. Somewhere among them must be Gojack. The last light from the west gleamed on the rails of the moveway running down to the landing.

“Look, there’s the seatrain.” Peachthief pointed. “I hope the dog or whatever got ashore … I can find a sailboat down there, there’s lots.”

Jakko shrugged. Then he noticed movement among the shadows of the landing-station and forgot his anger long enough to say, “See there! Is that a live man?”

They peered hard. Presently the figure crossed a light place, and they could see it was a person going slowly among the stalled waycars. He would stop with one awhile and then waver on.

“There’s something wrong with him,” Peachthief said.

Presently the stranger’s shadow merged with a car, and they saw it begin to move. It went slowly at first, and then accelerated out to the center lanes, slid up the gleaming rails and passed beyond them to disappear into the western hills.

“The way’s working!” Jakko exclaimed. “We’ll camp up here and go over to the way-station in the morning, it’s closer.”

He was feeling so pleased with the moveway that he talked easily with Peachthief over the foodbar dinner, telling her about the cities and asking her what places her tribe had seen. But when she wanted to put their blankets down together he said No, and took his away to a ledge farther up. The three moondogs lay down by her with their noses on their paws, facing him.

His mood turned to self-disgust again; remorse mingled with queasy surges of half-enjoyable animality. He put his arm over his head to shut out the brilliant moonlight and longed to forget everything, wishing the sky held only cold quiet stars. When he finally slept he didn’t dream at all, but woke with ominous tollings in his inner ear. The Horse is hungry, deep voices chanted. The Woman is bad!

He roused Peachthief before sunrise. They ate and set off overland to the hill station; it was rough going until they stumbled onto an old limerock path. The moondogs ranged wide around them, appearing pleased. When they came out at the station shunt they found it crowded with cars.

The power-pack of the first one was dead. So was the next, and the next. Jakko understood what the stranger at the landing had been doing; looking for a live car. The dead cars here stretched away out of sight up the siding; a miserable sight.

“We should go back to the landing,” Peachthief said. “He found a good one there.”

Jakko privately agreed, but irrationality smouldered in him. He squinted into the hazy distance.

“I’m going up to the switch end.”

“But it’s so far, we’ll have to come all the way back—”

He only strode off; she followed. It was a long way, round a curve and over a rise, dead cars beside them all the way. They were almost at the main tracks when Jakko saw what he had been hoping for; a slight jolting motion in the line. New cars were still coming in ahead, butting the dead ones.

“Oh fine!”

They went on down to the newest-arrived car and all climbed in, the moondogs taking up position on the opposite seat. When Jakko began to work the controls that would take them out to the main line, the car bleated an automatic alarm. A voder voice threatened to report him to Central. Despite its protests, Jakko swerved the car across the switches, where it fell silent and began to accelerate smoothly onto the outbound express lane.

“You really do know how to work these things,” Peachthief said admiringly.

“You should learn.”

“Why? They’ll all be dead soon. I know how to bicycle.”

He clamped his lips, thinking of Ferrocil’s white bones. They fled on silently into the hills, passing a few more station jams. Jakko’s perceptions still seemed too sharp, the sensory world too meaning-filled.

Presently they felt hungry, and found that the car’s automatics were all working well. They had a protein drink and a pleasantly fruity bar, and Peachthief found bars for the dogs. The track was rising into mountains now; the car whistled smoothly through tunnels and came out in passes, offering wonderful views. Now and then they had glimpses of a great plain far ahead. The familiar knot of sadness gathered inside Jakko, stronger than usual. To think that all this wonderful system would run down and die in a jumble of rust … He had a fantasy of himself somehow maintaining it; but the memory of Peachthief’s pathetic woven cloth mocked at him. Everything was a mistake, a terrible mistake. He wanted only to leave, to escape to rationality and peace. If she had drugged him he wasn’t responsible for what he’d promised. He wasn’t bound. Yet the sadness redoubled, wouldn’t let him go.

When she got out the pill-box and offered it he shook his head violently. “No!”

“But you promised—”

“No. I hate what it does.”

She stared at him in silence, swallowing hers defiantly. “Maybe there’ll be some other men by the River,” she said after awhile. “We saw one.”

He shrugged and pretended to fall asleep.

Just as he was really drowsing the car’s warning alarm trilled and they braked smoothly to a halt.

“Oh, look ahead—the way’s gone! What is it?”

“A rockslide. An avalanche from the mountains, I think.”

They got out among other empty cars that were waiting their prescribed pause before returning. Beyond the last one the way ended in an endless tumble of rocks and shale. Jakko made out a faint footpath leading on.

“Well, we walk. Let’s get the packs, and some food and water.”

While they were back in the car working the synthesizer, Peachthief looked out the window and frowned. After Jakko finished she punched a different code and some brownish lumps rolled into her hand.

“What’s that?”

“You’ll see.” She winked at him.

As they started on the trail a small herd of horses appeared, coming toward them. The two humans politely scrambled up out of their way. The lead horse was a large yellow male. When he came to Peachthief he stopped and thrust his big head up at her.

“Zhu-gar, zhu-gar,” he said sloppily. At this all the other horses crowded up and began saying “zhu-ga, zu-cah,” in varying degrees of clarity.

“This I know,” said Peachthief to Jakko. She turned to the yellow stallion. “Take us on your backs around these rocks. Then we’ll give you sugar.”

“Zhu-gar,” insisted the horse, looking mean.

“Yes, sugar. After you take us around the rocks to the rails.”

The horse rolled his eyes unpleasantly, but he turned back down. There was some commotion, and two mares were pushed forward.

“Riding horseback is done by means of a saddle and bridle,” protested Jakko.

“Also this way. Come on.” Peachthief vaulted nimbly onto the back of the smaller mare.

Jakko reluctantly struggled onto the fat round back of the other mare. To his horror, as he got himself astride she put up her head and screamed shrilly.

“You’ll get sugar too,” Peachthief told her. The animal subsided, and they started off along the rocky trail, single file. Jakko had to admit it was much faster than afoot, but he kept sliding backward.

“Hang onto her mane, that hairy place there,” Peachthief called back to him, laughing. “I know how to run a few things too, see?”

When the path widened the yellow stallion trotted up alongside Peachthief.

“I thinking,” he said importantly.

“Yes, what?”

“I push you down and eat zhugar now.”

“All horses think that,” Peachthief told him. “No good. It doesn’t work.”

The yellow horse dropped back, and Jakko heard him making horse-talk with an old gray-roan animal at the rear. Then he shouldered by to Peachthief again and said, “Why no good I push you down?”

“Two reasons,” said Peachthief. “First, if you knock me down you’ll never get any more sugar. All the humans will know you’re bad and they won’t ride on you any more. So no more sugar, never again.”

“No more hoomans,” the big yellow horse said scornfully. “Hoomans finish.”

“You’re wrong there too. There’ll be a lot more humans. I am making them, see?” She patted her stomach.

The trail narrowed again and the yellow horse dropped back. When he could come alongside he sidled by Jakko’s mare.

“I think I push you down now.”

Peachthief turned around.

“You didn’t hear my other reason,” she called to him.

The horse grunted evilly.

“The other reason is that my three friends there will bite your stomach open if you try.” She pointed up to where the three moondogs had appeared on a rock as if by magic, grinning toothily.

Jakko’s mare screamed again even louder, and the gray roan in back made a haw-haw sound. The yellow horse lifted his tail and trotted forward to the head of the line, extruding manure as he passed Peachthief.

They went on around the great rockslide without further talk. Jakko was becoming increasingly uncomfortable; he would gladly have got off and gone slower on his own two legs. Now and then they broke into a jog trot, which was so painful he longed to yell at Peachthief to make them stop. But he kept silent. As they rounded some huge boulders he was rewarded by a distant view of the unmistakable towers of an airpark to their left on the plain below.

At long last the rockslide ended quite near a station. They stopped among a line of stalled cars. Jakko slid off gratefully, remembering to say “Thank you” to the mare. Walking proved to be uncomfortable too.

“See if there’s a good car before I get off!” Peachthief yelled.

The second one he came to was live. He shouted at her.

Next moment he saw trouble among the horses. The big yellow beast charged in, neighing and kicking. Peachthief came darting out of the melee with the moondogs, and fell into the car beside him, laughing.

“I gave our mares all the sugar,” she chuckled. Then she sobered. “I think mares are good for milk. I told them to come to the station with me when I come back. If that big bully will let them.”

“How will they get in a car?” he asked stupidly.

“Why, I’ll be walking, I can’t run these things.”

“But I’ll be with you.” He didn’t feel convinced.

“What for, if you don’t want to make babies? You won’t be here.”

“Well then, why are you coming with me?”

“I’m looking for a cow,” she said scornfully. “Or a goat. Or a man.”

They said no more until the car turned into the airpark station. Jakko counted over twenty apparently live ships floating at their towers. Many more hung sagging, and some towers had toppled. The field moveways were obviously dead.

“I think we have to find hats,” he told Peachthief.

“Why?”

“So the service alarms won’t go off when we walk around. Most places are like that.”

“Oh.”

In the office by the gates they found a pile of crew hats laid out, a thoughtful action by the last of the airpark people. A big hand-lettered sign said, ALL SHIPS ON STAND-BY, MANUAL OVERRIDE. READ DIRECTIONS. Under it was a stack of dusty leaflets. They took one, put on their hats, and began to walk toward a pylon base with several ships floating at its tower. They had to duck under and around the web of dead moveways, and when they reached the station base there seemed to be no way in from the ground.

“We’ll have to climb onto that moveway.”

They found a narrow ladder and went up, helping the moondogs. The moveway portal was open, and they were soon in the normal passenger lounge. It was still lighted.

“Now if the lift only works.”

Just as they were making for the lift shaft they were startled by a voice ringing out.

“Ho! Ho, Roland!”

“That’s no voder,” Peachthief whispered. “There’s a live human here.”

They turned back and saw that a strange person was lying half on and half off one of the lounges. As they came close their eyes opened wide: he looked frightful. His thin dirty white hair hung around a horribly creased, caved-in face, and what they could see of his neck and arms was all mottled and decayed-looking. His jerkin and pants were frayed and stained and sagged in where flesh should be. Jakko thought of the cloth shreds around dead Ferrocil and shuddered.

The stranger was staring haggardly at them. In a faint voice he said, “When the chevalier Roland died he predicted that his body would be found a spear’s throw ahead of all others and facing the enemy … If you happen to be real, could you perhaps give me some water?”

“Of course.” Jakko unhooked his canteen and tried to hand it over, but the man’s hands shook and fumbled so that Jakko had to hold it to his mouth, noticing a foul odor. The stranger sucked thirstily, spilling some. Behind him the moondogs inched closer, sniffing gingerly.

“What’s wrong with him?” Peachthief whispered as Jakko stood back.

Jakko had been remembering his lessons. “He’s just very, very old, I think.”

“That’s right.” The stranger’s voice was stronger. He stared at them with curious avidity. “I waited too long. Fibrillation.” He put one feeble hand to his chest. “Fibrillating … rather a beautiful word, don’t you think? My medicine ran out or I lost it … A small hot animal desynchronizing in my ribs.”

“We’ll help you get to the River right away!” Peachthief told him.

“Too late, my lords, too late. Besides, I can’t walk and you can’t possibly carry me.”

“You can sit up, can’t you?” Jakko asked. “There have to be some rollchairs around here, they had them for injured people.” He went off to search the lounge office and found one almost at once.

When he brought it back the stranger was staring up at Peachthief, mumbling to himself in an archaic tongue of which Jakko only understood: “ … The breast of a grave girl makes a hill against sunrise.” He tried to heave himself up to the chair but fell back gasping. They had to lift and drag him in, Peachthief wrinkling her nose.

“Now if the lift only works.”

It did. They were soon on the high departure deck, and the fourth portal-berth held a waiting ship. It was a small local ferry. They went through into the windowed main cabin, wheeling the old man, who had collapsed upon himself and was breathing very badly. The moondogs trooped from window to window, looking down. Jakko seated himself in the pilot chair.

“Read me out the instructions,” he told Peachthief.

“One, place ship on internal guidance,” she read. “Whatever that means. Oh, look, here’s a diagram.”

“Good.”

It proved simple. They went together down the list, sealing the port, disengaging umbilicals, checking vane function, reading off the standby pressures in the gasbags above them, setting the reactor to warm up the drive-motor and provide hot air for operational buoyancy.

While they were waiting, Peachthief asked the old man if he would like to be moved onto a window couch. He nodded urgently. When they got him to it he whispered, “See out!” They propped him up with chair pillows.

The ready-light was flashing. Jakko moved the controls, and the ship glided smoothly out and up. The computer was showing him wind speed, attitude, climb, and someone had marked all the verniers with the words Course-set—RIVER. Jakko lined everything up.

“Now it says, put it on automatic,” Peachthief read. He did so.

The takeoff had excited the old man. He was straining to look down, muttering incomprehensibly. Jakko caught, “The cool green hills of Earth … Crap!” Suddenly he sang out loudly, “There’s a hell of a good universe next door—let’s go!” and fell back exhausted.

Peachthief stood over him worriedly. “I wish I could at least clean him up, but he’s so weak.”

The old man’s eyes opened.

“Nothing shall be whole and sound that has not been rent; for love hath built his mansion in the place of excrement.” He began to sing crackedly, “Take me to the River, the bee-yew-tiful River, and wash all my sins a-away! … You think I’m crazy, girl, don’t you?” he went on conversationally. “Never heard of William Yeats. Very high bit-rate, Yeats.”

“I think I understand a little,” Jakko told him. “One of my aunts did English literature.”

“Did literature, eh?” The stranger wheezed, snorted. “And you two—going on the River to spend eternity together as energy matrices or something equally impressive and sexless … Forever wilt thou love and she be fair.” He grunted. “Always mistrusted Keats. No balls. He’d be right at home.”

“We’re not going on the River,” Peachthief said. “At least, I’m not. I’m going to stay and make children.”

The old man’s ruined mouth fell open, he gazed up at her wildly.

“No!” he breathed. “Is it true? Have I stumbled on the lover and mother of man, the last?”

Peachthief nodded solemnly.

“What is your name, Oh, Queen?”

“Peachthief.”

“My god. Somebody still knows of Blake.” He smiled tremulously, and his eyelids suddenly slid downward; he was asleep.

“He’s breathing better. Let’s explore.”

The small ship held little but cargo space at the rear. When they came to the food-synthesizer cubby Jakko saw Peachthief pocket something.

“What’s that?”

“A little spoon. It’ll be just right for a child.” She didn’t look at him.

Back in the main cabin the sunset was flooding the earth below with level roseate light. They were crossing huge, oddly pockmarked meadows, the airship whispering along in silence, except when a jet whistled briefly now and then for a course correction.

“Look—cows! Those must be cows,” Peachthief exclaimed. “See the shadows.”

Jakko made out small tan specks that were animals, with grotesque horned shadows stretching away.

“I’ll have to find them when I come back. What is this place?”

“A big deathyard, I think. Where they put dead bodies. I never saw one this size. In some cities they had buildings just for dead people. Won’t all that poison the cows?”

“Oh no, it makes good grass, I believe. The dogs will help me find them. Won’t you, Tycho?” she asked the biggest moondog, who was looking down beside them.

On the eastern side of the cabin the full moon was rising into view. The old man’s eyes opened, looking at it.

“More water, if you please,” he croaked.

Peachthief gave him some, and then got him to swallow broth from the synthesizer. He seemed stronger, smiling at her with his mouthful of rotted teeth.

“Tell me, girl. If you’re going to stay and make children, why are you going to the River?”

“He’s going because he promised to talk to his father and I’m going along to see he comes back. And make the baby. Only now he won’t take any more pills, I have to try to find another man.”

“Ah yes, the pills. We used to call them Wake-ups … . They were necessary, after the population-chemicals got around. Maybe they still are, for women. But I think it’s mostly in the head. Why won’t you take any more, boy? What’s wrong with the old Adam?”

Peachthief started to answer but Jakko cut her off. “I can speak for myself. They upset me. They made me do bad, uncontrolled things, and feel, agh—” He broke off with a grimace.

“You seem curiously feisty, for one who values his calm above the continuance of the race.”

“It’s the pills, I tell you. They’re—they’re dehumanizing.”

“Dee-humanizing,” the old man mocked. “And what do you know of humanity, young one? … That’s what I went to find, that’s why I stayed so long among the old, old things from before the River came. I wanted to bring the knowledge of what humanity really was … I wanted to bring it all. It’s simple, boy. They died.” He drew a rasping breath. “Every one of them died. They lived knowing that nothing but loss and suffering and extinction lay ahead. And they cared, terribly … . Oh, they made myths, but not many really believed them. Death was behind everything, waiting everywhere. Aging and death. No escape … Some of them went crazy, they fought and killed and enslaved each other by the millions, as if they could gain more life. Some of them gave up their precious lives for each other. They loved—and had to watch the ones they loved age and die. And in their pain and despair they built, they struggled, some of them sang. But above all, boy, they copulated! Fornicated, fucked, made love!”

He fell back, coughing, glaring at Jakko. Then, seeing that they scarcely understood his antique words, he went on more clearly. “Did sex, do you understand? Made children. It was their only weapon, you see. To send something of themselves into the future beyond their own deaths. Death was the engine of their lives, death fueled their sexuality. Death drove them at each other’s throats and into each other’s arms. Dying, they triumphed … That was human life. And now that mighty engine is long stilled, and you call this polite parade of immortal lemmings humanity? … Even the faintest warmth of that immemorial holocaust makes you flinch away?”

He collapsed, gasping horribly; spittle ran down his chin. One slit of eye still raked them.

Jakko stood silent, shaken by resonances from the old man’s words, remembering dead Ferrocil, feeling some deep conduit of reality reaching for him out of the long-gone past. Peachthief’s hand fell on his shoulder, sending a shudder through him. Slowly his own hand seemed to lift by itself and cover hers, holding her to him. They watched the old man so for a long moment. His face slowly composed, he spoke in a soft dry tone.

“I don’t trust that River, you know … You think you’re going to remain yourselves, don’t you? Communicate with each other and with the essences of beings from other stars … The latest news from Betelgeuse.” He chuckled raspingly.

“That’s the last thing people say when they’re going,” Jakko replied. “Everyone learns that. You float out, able to talk with real other beings. Free to move.”

“Yes. What could better match our dreams?” He chuckled again. “I wonder … could that be the lure, just the input end of some cosmic sausage machine? …”

“What’s that?” asked Peachthief.

“An old machine that ground different meats together until they came out as one substance … Maybe you’ll find yourselves gradually mixed and minced and blended into some, some energetic plasma … and then maybe squirted out again to impose the terrible gift of consciousness on some innocent race of crocodiles, or poached eggs … and so it begins all over again. Another random engine of the universe, giving and taking obliviously …” He coughed, no longer looking at them, and began to murmur in the archaic tongue, “Ah, when the ghost begins to quicken, conf usion of the death-bed over, is it sent … Out naked on the roads as the books say, and stricken with the injustice of the stars for punishment? The injustice of the stars …” He fell silent, and then whispered faintly, “Yet I too long to go.”

“You will,” Peachthief told him strongly.

“How … much longer?”

“We’ll be there by dawn,” Jakko said. “We’ll carry you. I swear.”

“A great gift,” he said weakly. “But I fear … I shall give you a better.” He mumbled on, a word Jakko didn’t know; it sounded like “afrodisiack.”

He seemed to lapse into sleep then. Peachthief went and got a damp, fragrant cloth from the clean-up and wiped his face gently. He opened one eye and grinned up at her.

“Madame Tasselass,” he rasped. “Madame Tasselass, are you really going to save us?”

She smiled down, nodding her head determinedly, Yes. He closed his eyes, looking more peaceful.

The ship was now fleeing through full moonlight, the cabin was so lit with azure and silver that they didn’t think to turn on lights. Now and again the luminous mists of a low cloud veiled the windows and vanished again. Just as Jakko was about to propose eating, the old man took several gulping breaths and opened his eyes. His intestines made a bubbling sound.

Peachthief looked at him sharply and picked up one of his wrists. Then she frowned and bent over him, opening his filthy jerkin. She laid her ear to his chest, staring up at Jakko.

“He’s not breathing, there’s no heartbeat!” She groped inside his jerkin as if she could locate life, two tears rolling down her cheeks.

“He’s dead—ohhh!” She groped deeper, then suddenly straightened up and gingerly clutched the cloth at the old man’s crotch.

“What?”

“He’s a woman!” She gave a sob and wheeled around to clutch Jakko, putting her forehead in his neck. “We never even knew her name …”

Jakko held her, looking at the dead man-woman, thinking, she never knew mine either. At that moment the airship jolted, and gave a noise like a cable grinding or slipping before it flew smoothly on again.

Jakko had never in his life distrusted machinery, but now a sudden terror contracted his guts. This thing could fall! They could be made dead like Ferrocil, like this stranger, like the myriads in the deathyards below. Echoes of the old voice ranting about death boomed in his head, he had a sudden vision of Peachthief grown old and dying like that. After the Rivers went, dying alone. His eyes filled, and a deep turmoil erupted under his mind. He hugged Peachthief tighter. Suddenly he knew in a dreamlike way exactly what was about to happen. Only this time there was no frenzy; his body felt like warm living rock.

He stroked Peachthief to quiet her sobs, and led her over to the moonlit couch on the far side of the cabin. She was still sniffling, hugging him hard. He ran his hands firmly down her back, caressing her buttocks, feeling her body respond.

“Give me that pill,” he said to her. “Now.”

Looking at him huge-eyed in the blue moonlight, she pulled out the little box. He took out his and swallowed it deliberately, willing her to understand.

“Take off your clothes.” He began stripping off his jerkin, proud of the hot, steady power in his sex. When she stripped and he saw again the glistening black bush at the base of her slim belly, and the silver-edge curve of her body, urgency took him, but still in a magical calm.

“Lie down.”

“Wait a minute—” She was out of his hands like a fish, running across the cabin to where the dead body lay in darkness. Jakko saw she was trying to close the dead eyes that still gleamed from the shadows. He could wait; he had never imagined his body could feel like this. She laid the cloth over the stranger’s face and came back to him, half-shyly holding out her arms, sinking down spread-legged on the shining couch before him. The moonlight was so brilliant he could see the pink color of her sexual parts. He came onto her gently, controlledly, breathing in an exciting animal odor from her flesh. This time his penis entered easily, an intense feeling of all-rightness.

But a moment later the fires of terror, pity, and defiance deep within him burst up into a flame of passionate brilliance in his coupled groin. The small body under his seemed no longer vulnerable but appetitive. He clutched, mouthed, drove deep into her, exulting. Death didn’t die alone, he thought obscurely, as the ancient patterns lurking in his vitals awoke. Death flew with them and flowed by beneath, but he asserted life upon the body of the woman, caught up in a great crescendo of unknown sensations, until a culminant spasm of almost painful pleasure rolled through him into her, relieving him from head to feet.

When he could talk, he thought to ask her, “Did you—” he didn’t know the word. “Did it sort of explode you, like me?”

“Well, no.” Her lips were by his ear. “Female sexuality is a little different. Maybe I’ll show you, later … But I think it was good, for the baby.”

He felt only a tiny irritation at her words, and let himself drift into sleep with his face in her warm-smelling hair. Dimly the understanding came to him that the great beast of his dreams, the race itself maybe, had roused and used them. So be it.

A cold thing pushing into his ear awakened him, and a hoarse voice said “Foo-ood!” It was the moondogs.

“Oh my, I forgot to feed them!” Peachthief struggled nimbly out from under him.

Jakko found he was ravenous too. The cabin was dark now, as the moon rose overhead. Peachthief located the switches, and made a soft light on their side of the cabin. They ate and drank heartily, looking down at the moonlit world. The deathyards were gone from below them now, they were flying over dark wooded foothills. When they lay down to sleep again they could feel the cabin slightly angle upward as the ship rose higher.

He was roused in the night by her body moving against him. She seemed to be rubbing her crotch.

“Give me your hand,” she whispered in a panting voice. She began to make his hands do things to her, sometimes touching him too, her body arching and writhing, sleek with sweat. He found himself abruptly tumescent again, excited and pleased in a confused way. “Now, now!” she commanded, and he entered her, finding her interior violently alive. She seemed to be half fighting him, half devouring him. Pleasure built all through him, this time without the terror. He pressed in against her shuddering convulsions. “Yes—Oh, yes!” she gasped, and a series of paroxysms swept through her, carrying him with her to explosive peace.

He held himself on and in her until her body and breathing calmed to relaxation, and they slipped naturally apart. It came to him that this sex activity seemed to have more possibilities, as a thing to do, than he had realized. His family had imparted to him nothing of all this. Perhaps they didn’t know it. Or perhaps it was too alien to their calm philosophy.

“How do you know about all this?” he asked Peachthief sleepily.

“One of my aunts did literature, too.” She chuckled in the darkness. “Different literature, I guess.”

They slept almost as movelessly as the body flying with them on the other couch a world away.

A series of noisy bumpings wakened them. The windows were filled with pink mist flying by. The airship seemed to be sliding into a berth. Jakko looked down and saw shrubs and grass close below; it was a ground-berth on a hillside.

The computer panel lit up: RESET PROGRAM FOR BASE.

“No,” said Jakko. “We’ll need it going back.” Peachthief looked at him in a new, companionable way; he sensed that she believed him now. He turned all the drive controls to standby while she worked the food synthesizer. Presently he heard the hiss of the deflating lift-bags, and went to where she was standing by the dead stranger.

“We’ll take her, her body, out before we go back,” Peachthief said. “Maybe the River will touch her somehow.”

Jakko doubted it, but ate and drank his breakfast protein in silence.

When they went to use the wash-and-waste cubby he found he didn’t want to clean all the residues of their contact off himself. Peachthief seemed to feel the same way; she washed only her face and hands. He looked at her slender, silk-clad belly. Was a child, his child, starting there? Desire flicked him again, but he remembered he had work to do. His promise to his father; get on with it. Sooner done, sooner back here.

“I love you,” he said experimentally, and found the strange words had a startling trueness.

She smiled brilliantly at him, not just off-on. “I love you, too, I think.”

The floor-portal light was on. They pulled it up and uncovered a stepway leading to the ground. The moondogs poured down. They followed, coming out into a blowing world of rosy mists. Clouds were streaming around them; the air was all in motion up the hillside toward the crest some distance ahead of the ship berth. The ground here was uneven and covered with short soft grass, as though animals had cropped it.

“All winds blow to the River,” Jakko quoted.

They set off up the hill, followed by the moondogs, who stalked uneasily with pricked ears. Probably they didn’t like not being able to smell what was ahead, Jakko thought. Peachthief was holding his hand very firmly as they went, as if determined to keep him out of any danger.

As they walked up onto the flat crest of the hilltop the mists suddenly cleared, and they found themselves looking down into a great, shallow, glittering sunlit valley. They both halted involuntarily to stare at the fantastic sight.

Before them lay a huge midden heap, kilometers of things upon things upon things, almost filling the valley floor. Objects of every description lay heaped there; Jakko could make out clothing, books, toys, jewelry, a myriad artifacts and implements abandoned. These must be, he realized, the last things people had taken with them when they went on the River. In an outer ring not too far below them were tents, ground- and air-cars, even wagons. Everything shone clean and gleaming as if the influence of the River had kept off decay.

He noticed that the nearest ring of encampments intersected other, apparently older and larger rings. There seemed to be no center to the pile.

“The River has moved, or shrunk,” he said.

“Both, I think,” Peachthief pointed to the right. “Look, there’s an old war-place.”

A big grass-covered mound dominated the hill crest beside them. Jakko saw it had metal-rimmed slits in its sides. He remembered history: how there were still rulers of people when the River’s tendrils first touched earth. Some of the rulers had tried to keep their subjects from the going-out places, posting guards around them and even putting killing devices in the ground. But the guards had gone themselves out on the River, or the River had swelled and taken them. And the people had driven beasts across the mined ground and surged after them into the stream of immortal life. In the end the rulers had gone too, or died out. Looking more carefully, Jakko could see that the green hill slopes were torn and pocked, as though ancient explosions had made craters everywhere.

Suddenly he remembered that he had to find his father in all this vast confusion.

“Where’s the River now? My father’s mind should reach there still, if I’m not too late.”

“See that glittery slick look in the air down there? I’m sure that’s a danger place.”

Down to their right, fairly close to the rim, was a strangely bright place. As he stared it became clearer: a great column of slightly golden or shining air. He scanned about, but saw nothing else like it all across the valley.

“If that’s the only focus left, it’s going away fast.”

She nodded and then swallowed, her small face suddenly grim. She meant to live on here and die without the River, Jakko could see that. But he would be with her; he resolved it with all his heart. He squeezed her hand hard.

“If you have to talk to your father, we better walk around up here on the rim where it’s safe,” Peachthief said.

“No-oo,” spoke up a moondog from behind them. The two humans turned and saw the three sitting in a row on the crest, staring slit-eyed at the valley.

“All right,” Peachthief said. “You wait here. We’ll be back soon.”

She gripped Jakko’s hand even tighter, and they started walking past the old war mound, past the remains of ancient vehicles, past an antique pylon that leaned crazily. There were faint little trails in the short grass. Another war mound loomed ahead; when they passed around it they found themselves suddenly among a small herd of white animals with long necks and no horns. The animals went on grazing quietly as the humans walked by. Jakko thought they might be mutated deer.

“Oh, look!” Peachthief let go his hand. “That’s milk—see, her baby is sucking!”

Jakko saw that one of the animals had a knobby bag between its hind legs. A small one half-knelt down beside it, with its head up nuzzling the bag. A mother and her young.

Peachthief was walking cautiously toward them, making gentle greeting sounds. The mother animal looked at her calmly, evidently tame. The baby went on sucking, rolling its eyes. Peachthief reached them, petted the mother, and then bent down under to feel the bag. The animal sidestepped a pace, but stayed still. When Peachthief straightened up she was licking her hand.

“That’s good milk! And they’re just the right size, we can take them on the airship! On the way-cars, even.” She was beaming, glowing. Jakko felt an odd warm constriction in his chest. The intensity with which she furnished her little world, her future nest! Their nest …

“Come with us, come on,” Peachthief was urging. She had her belt around the creature’s neck to lead it. It came equably, the young one following in awkward galloping lunges.

“That baby is a male. Oh, this is perfect,” Peachthief exclaimed. “Here, hold her a minute while I look at that one.”

She handed Jakko the end of the belt and ran off. The beast eyed him levelly. Suddenly it drew its upper lip back and shot spittle at his face. He ducked, yelling for Peachthief to come back.

“I have to find my father first!”

“All right,” she said, returning. “Oh, look at that!”

Downslope from them was an apparition—one of the white animals, but partly transparent, ghostly thin. It drifted vaguely, putting its head down now and then, but did not eat.

“It must have got partly caught in the River, it’s half gone. Oh, Jakko, you can see how dangerous it is! I’m afraid, I’m afraid it’ll catch you.”

“It won’t. I’ll be very careful.”

“I’m so afraid.” But she let him lead her on, towing the animal alongside. As they passed the ghost-creature Peachthief called to it, “You can’t live like that. You better go on out. Shoo, shoo!”

It turned and moved slowly out across the piles of litter toward the shining place in the air.

They were coming closer to it now, stepping over more and more abandoned things. Peachthief looked sharply at everything; once she stooped to pick up a beautiful fleecy white square and stuff it in her pack. The hill crest was merging with a long grassy slope, comparatively free of debris, that ran out toward the airy glittering column. They turned down it.

The River-focus became more and more awesome as they approached. They could trace it towering up and now, twisting gently as it passed beyond the sky. A tendril of the immaterial stream of sidereal sentience that had embraced earth, a pathway to immortal life. The air inside looked no longer golden, but pale silver-gilt, like a great shaft of moonlight coming down through the morning sun. Objects at its base appeared very clear but shimmering, as if seen through cool crystal water.

Off to one side were tents. Jakko suddenly recognized one, and quickened his steps. Peachthief pulled back on his arm.

“Jakko, be careful!”

They slowed to a stop a hundred yards from the tenuous fringes of the River’s effect. It was very still. Jakko peered intently. In the verges of the shimmer a staff was standing upright. From it hung a scarf of green and yellow silk.

“Look—that’s my father’s sign!”

“Oh Jakko, you can’t go in there.”

At the familiar colored sign all the memories of his life with his family had come flooding back on Jakko. The gentle rationality, the solemn sense of preparation for going out from earth forever. Two different realities strove briefly within him. They had loved him, he realized that now. Especially his father … But not as he loved Peachthief, his awakened spirit shouted silently. I am of earth! Let the stars take care of their own. His resolve took deeper hold and won.

Gently he released himself from her grip.

“You wait here. Don’t worry, it takes a long while for the change, you know that. Hours, days. I’ll only be a minute, I’ll come right back.”

“Ohhh, it’s crazy.”

But she let him go and stood holding to the milk-animal while he went down the ridge and picked his way out across the midden-heap toward the staff. As he neared it he could feel the air change around him, becoming alive and yet more still.

“Father! Paul! It’s Jakko, your son. Can you still hear me?”

Nothing answered him. He took a step or two past the staff, repeating his call.

A resonant susurrus came in his head, as if unearthly reaches had opened to him. From infinity he heard without hearing his father’s quiet voice.

You came.

A sense of calm welcome.

“The cities are all empty, Father. All the people have gone, everywhere.”

Come.

“No!” He swallowed, fending off memory, fending off the lure of strangeness. “I think it’s sad. It’s wrong. I’ve found a woman. We’re going to stay and make children.”

The River is leaving, Jakko my son.

It was as if a star had called his name, but he said stubbornly, “I don’t care. I’m staying with her. Good-bye, father. Good-bye.”

Grave regret touched him, and from beyond a host of silent voices murmured down the sky: Come! Come away.

“No!” he shouted, or tried to shout, but he could not still the rapt voices. And suddenly, gazing up, he felt the serenity of the River, the overwhelming opening of the door to life everlasting among the stars. All his mortal fears, all his most secret dread of the waiting maw of death, slid out of him and fell away, leaving him almost unbearably light and calmly joyful. He knew that he was being touched, that he could float out upon that immortal stream forever. But even as the longing took him, his human mind remembered that this was the start of the first stage, for which the River was called Beata. He thought of the ghost-animal that had lingered too long. He must leave now, and quickly. With enormous effort he took one step backward, but could not turn.

“Jakko! Jakko! Come back!”

Someone was calling, screaming his name. He did turn then and saw her on the little ridge. Nearby, yet so far. The ordinary sun of earth was brilliant on her and the two white beasts.

“Jakko! Jakko!” Her arms were outstretched, she was running toward him.

It was as if the whole beautiful earth was crying to him, calling to him to come back and take up the burden of life and death. He did not want it. But she must not come here, he knew that without remembering why. He began uncertainly to stumble toward her, seeing her now as his beloved woman, again as an unknown creature uttering strange cries.

“Lady Death,” he muttered, not realizing he had ceased to move. She ran faster, tripped, almost fell in the heaps of stuff. The wrongness of her coming here roused him again; he took a few more steps, feeling his head clear a little.

“Jakko!” She reached him, clutched him, dragging him bodily forward from the verge.

At her touch the reality of his human life came back to him, his heart pounded human blood, all stars fled away. He started to run clumsily, half-carrying her with him up to the safety of the ridge. Finally they sank down gasping beside the animals, holding and kissing each other, their eyes wet.

“I thought you were lost, I thought I’d lost you,” Peachthief sobbed.

“You saved me.”

“H-here,” she said. “We b-better have some food.” She rummaged in her pack, nodding firmly as if the simple human act could defend against unearthly powers. Jakko discovered that he was quite hungry.

They ate and drank peacefully in the soft, flower-studded grass, while the white animals grazed around them. Peachthief studied the huge strewn valley floor, frowning as she munched.

“So many good useful things here. I’ll come back some day, when the River’s gone, and look around.”

“I thought you only wanted natural things,” he teased her.

“Some of these things will last. Look.” She picked up a small implement. “It’s an awl, for punching and sewing leather. You could make children’s sandals.”

Many of the people who came here must have lived quite simply, Jakko thought. It was true that there could be useful tools. And metal. Books, too. Directions for making things. He lay back dreamily, seeing a vision of himself in the far future, an accomplished artisan, teaching his children skills. It seemed deeply good.

“Oh, my milk-beast!” Peachthief broke in on his reverie. “Oh, no, you musn’t!” She jumped up.

Jakko sat up and saw that the white mother-animal had strayed quite far down the grassy ridge. Peachthief trotted down after her, calling, “Come here! Stop!”

Perversely, the animal moved away, snatching mouthfuls of grass. Peachthief ran faster. The animal threw up its head and paced down off the ridge, among the litter piles.

“No! Oh, my milk! Come back here, come.”

She went down after it, trying to move quietly and call more calmly.

Jakko had got up, alarmed.

“Come back! Don’t go down there!”

“The babies’ milk,” she wailed at him, and made a dash at the beast. But she missed, and it drifted away just out of reach before her.

To his horror Jakko saw that the glittering column of the River had changed shape slightly, eddying out a veil of shimmering light close ahead of the beast.

“Turn back! Let it go!” he shouted, and began to run with all his might. “Peachthief—Come back!”

But she would not turn, and his pounding legs could not catch up. The white beast was in the shimmer now; he saw it bound up onto a great sun-and-moonlit heap of stuff. Peachthief’s dark form went flying after it, uncaring, and the creature leaped away again. He saw her follow, and bitter fear grabbed at his heart. The very strength of her human life is betraying her to death, he thought; I have to get her physically, I will pull her out. He forced his legs faster, faster yet, not noticing that the air had changed around him too.

She disappeared momentarily in a veil of glittering air, and then reappeared, still following the beast. Thankfully he saw her pause and stoop to pick something up. She was only walking now, he could catch her. But his own body was moving sluggishly, it took all his will to keep his legs thrusting him ahead.

“Peachthief! Love, come back!”

His voice seemed muffled in the silvery air. Dismayed, he realized that he too had slowed to a walk, and she was veiled again from his sight.

When he struggled through the radiance he saw her, moving very slowly after the wandering white beast. Her face was turned up, unearthly light was on her beauty. He knew she was feeling the rapture, the call of immortal life was on her. On him, too; he found he was barely stumbling forward, a terrible serenity flooding his heart. They must be passing into the very focus of the River, where it ran strongest.

“Love—” Mortal grief fought the invading transcendence. Ahead of him the girl faded slowly into the glimmering veils, still following her last earthly desire. He saw that humanity, all that he had loved of the glorious earth, was disappearing forever from reality. Why had it awakened, only to be lost? Spectral voices were near him, but he did not want specters. An agonizing lament for human life welled up in him, a last pang that he would carry with him through eternity. But its urgency fell away. Life incorporeal, immortal, was on him now; it had him as it had her. His flesh, his body was beginning to attenuate, to dematerialize out into the great current of sentience that flowed on its mysterious purposes among the stars.

Still the sense of his earthly self moved slowly after hers into the closing mists of infinity, carrying upon the River a configuration that had been a man striving forever after a loved dark girl, who followed a ghostly white milch deer.