Expedition to Earth, Page 2

  “I don’t know what you mean,” said Eris flatly.

  “It’s hard to explain, and I won’t try—except to say this. Do you realize just how pitiably feeble is our control over the external world, and how useless these limbs of ours really are? No—you can’t, for you won’t have seen what I have. But perhaps this will make you understand.”

  The pattern of Aretenon’s thoughts modulated suddenly into a minor key.

  “I remember once coming upon a bank of beautiful and curiously complicated flowers. I wanted to see what they were like inside, so I tried to open one, steadying it between my hoofs and picking it apart with my teeth. I tried again and again—and failed. In the end, half mad with rage, I trampled all those flowers into the dirt.”

  Jeryl could detect the perplexity in Eris’s mind, but she could see that he was interested and curious to know more.

  “I have had that sort of feeling, too,” he admitted. “But what can one do about it? And after all, is it really important? There are a good many things in this universe which are not exactly as we should like them.”

  Aretenon smiled.

  “That’s true enough. But Therodimus has found out how to do something about it. Will you come and see him?”

  “It must be a long journey.”

  “About twenty days from here, and we have to go across a river.”

  Jeryl felt Eris give a little shudder. The Atheleni hated water, for the excellent and sufficient reason that they were too heavy-boned to swim, and promptly drowned if they fell into it.

  “It’s in enemy territory: they won’t like me.”

  “They respect you, and it might be a good idea for you to go—a friendly gesture, as it were.”

  “But I’m wanted here.”

  “You can take my word that nothing you do here is as important as the message Therodimus has for you—and for the whole world.”

  Eris veiled his thoughts for a moment, then uncovered them briefly.

  “I’ll think about it,” he said.

  It was surprising how little Aretenon managed to say on the many days of the journey. From time to time Eris would challenge the defenses of his mind with half-playful thrusts, but always they were parried with an effortless skill. About the ultimate weapon that had ended the War he would say nothing, but Eris knew that those who had wielded it had not yet disbanded and were still at their secret hiding place. Yet though he would not talk about the past, Aretenon often spoke of the future, and with the urgent anxiety of one who had helped to shape it and was not sure if he had acted aright. Like many others of his race, he was haunted by what he had done, and the sense of guilt sometimes overwhelmed him. Often he made remarks which puzzled Eris at the time, but which he was to remember more and more vividly in the years ahead.

  “We’ve come to a turning-point in our history, Eris. The powers we’ve uncovered will soon be shared by the Mithraneans, and another war will mean destruction for us both. All my life I’ve worked to increase our knowledge of the mind, but now I wonder if I’ve brought something into the world that is too powerful, and too dangerous, for us to handle. Yet it’s too late, now, to retrace our footsteps: sooner or later our culture was bound to come to this point, and to discover what we have found.

  “It’s a terrible dilemma: and there’s only one solution. We cannot go back, and if we go forward we may meet disaster. So we must change the very nature of our civilization, and break completely with the million generations behind us. You can’t imagine how that could be done: nor could I, until I met Therodimus and he told me of his dream.

  “The mind is a wonderful thing, Eris—but by itself it is helpless in the universe of matter. We know now how to multiply the power of our brains by an enormous factor: we can solve, perhaps, the great problems of mathematics that have baffled us for ages. But neither our unaided minds, nor the group-mind we’ve now created, can alter in the slightest the one fact that all through history has brought us and the Mithraneans into conflict—the fact that the food supply is fixed, and our populations are not.”

  Jeryl would watch them, taking little part in their thoughts, as they argued these matters. Most of their discussions took place while they were browsing, for like all active ruminants they had to spend a considerable part of each day searching for food. Fortunately the land through which they were passing was extremely fertile—indeed, its fertility had been one of the causes of the War. Eris, Jeryl was glad to see, was becoming something of his old self again. The feeling of frustrated bitterness that had filled his mind for so many months had not lifted, but it was no longer as all-pervading as it had been.

  They left the open plain on the twenty-second day of their journey. For a long time they had been traveling through Mithranean territory, but those few of their ex-enemies they had seen had been inquisitive rather than hostile. Now the grasslands were coming to an end, and the forest with all its primeval terrors lay ahead.

  “Only one carnivore lives in this region,” Aretenon reassured them, “and it’s no match for the three of us. We’ll be past the trees in a day and a night.”

  “A night—in the forest!” gasped Jeryl, half petrified with terror at the very thought.

  Aretenon was obviously a little ashamed of himself.

  “I didn’t like to mention it before,” he apologized, “but there’s really no danger. I’ve done it by myself, several times. After all, none of the great flesh-eaters of ancient times still exists—and it won’t be really dark, even in the woods. The red sun will still be up.”

  Jeryl was still trembling slightly. She came of a race which, for thousands of generations, had lived on the high hills and the open plains, relying on speed to escape from danger. The thought of going among trees—and in the dim red twilight while the primary sun was down—filled her with panic. And of the three of them, only Aretenon possessed a horn with which to fight. (It was nothing like so long or sharp, thought Jeryl, as Eris’s had been.)

  She was still not at all happy even when they had spent a completely uneventful day moving through the woods. The only animals they saw were tiny, long-tailed creatures that ran up and down the tree-trunks with amazing speed, gibbering with anger as the intruders passed. It was entertaining to watch them, but Jeryl did not think that the forest would be quite so amusing in the night.

  Her fears were well founded. When the fierce white sun passed below the trees, and the crimson shadows of the red giant lay everywhere, a change seemed to come over the world. A sudden silence swept across the forest—a silence abruptly broken by a very distant wail toward which the three of them turned instinctively, ancestral warnings shrieking in their minds.

  “What was that?” gasped Jeryl.

  Aretenon was breathing swiftly, but his reply was calm enough.

  “Never mind,” he said. “It was a long way off. I don’t know what it was.”

  And Jeryl knew that he was lying.

  They took turns keeping guard, and the long night wore slowly away. From time to time Jeryl would awaken from troubled dreams into the nightmare reality of the strange, distorted trees gathered threateningly around her. Once, when she was on guard, she heard the sound of a heavy body moving through the woods very far away—but it came no nearer and she did not disturb the others. So at last the longed-for brilliance of the which sun began to flood the sky, and the day had come again.

  Aretenon, Jeryl thought, was probably more relieved than he pretended to be. He was almost boyish as he frisked around in the morning sunlight, snatching an occasional mouthful of foliage from an overhanging branch.

  “We’ve only half a day to go now,” he said cheerfully. “We’ll be out of the forest by noon.”

  There was a mischievous undertone to his thoughts that puzzled Jeryl. It seemed as if Aretenon was keeping still another secret from them, and Jeryl wondered what further obstacles they would have to overcome. By midday she knew, for their way was barred by a great river flowing slowly past them as if in no haste to meet th
e sea.

  Eris looked at it with some annoyance, measuring it with a practiced eye.

  “It’s much too deep to ford here. We’ll have to go a long way upstream before we can cross.”

  Aretenon smiled.

  “On the contrary,” he said cheerfully, “we’re going downstream.”

  Eris and Jeryl looked at him in amazement.

  “Are you mad?” Eris cried.

  “You’ll soon see. We’ve not far to go now—you’ve come all this way, so you might as well trust me for the rest of the journey.”

  The river slowly widened and deepened. If it had been impassable before, it was doubly so now. Sometimes, Eris knew, one came upon a stream across which a tree had fallen, so that one could walk over on the trunk—though it was a risky thing to do. But this river was the width of many trees, and was growing no narrower.

  “We’re nearly there,” said Aretenon at last. “I recognize the place. Someone should be coming out of those woods at any moment.” He gestured with his horn to the trees on the far side of the river, and almost as he did so three figures came bounding out on to the bank. Two of them, Jeryl saw, were Atheleni: the third was a Mithranean.

  They were now nearing a great tree, standing by the water’s edge, but Jeryl had paid it little attention: she was too interested in the figures on the distant bank, wondering what they were going to do next. So when Eris’s amazement exploded like a thunderclap in the depths of her own mind, she was too confused for a moment to realize its cause. Then she turned toward the tree, and saw what Eris had seen.

  To some minds and some races, few things could have been more natural or more commonplace than a thick rope tied round a tree trunk, and floating out across the waters of a river to another tree on the far bank. Yet it filled both Jeryl and Eris with the terror of the unknown, and for one awful moment Jeryl thought that a gigantic snake was emerging from the water. Then she saw that it was not alive, but her fear remained. For it was the first artificial object that she had ever seen.

  “Don’t worry about what it is, or how it was put there,” counseled Aretenon. “It’s going to carry you across, and that’s all that matters for the moment. Look—there’s someone coming over now!”

  One of the figures on the far bank had lowered itself into the water, and was working its way with its fore-limbs along the rope. As it came nearer—it was the Mithranean, and a female—Jeryl saw that it was carrying a second and much smaller rope looped round the upper part of its body.

  With the skill of long practice, the stranger made her way across the floating cable, and emerged dripping from the river. She seemed to know Aretenon, but Jeryl could not intercept their thoughts.

  “I can go across without any help,” said Aretenon, “but I’ll show you the easy way.”

  He slipped the loop over his shoulder and, dropping into the water, hooked his fore-limbs over the fixed cable. A moment later he was being dragged across at a great speed by the two others on the far bank where, after much trepidation, Eris and Jeryl presently joined him.

  It was not the sort of bridge one would expect from a race which could quite easily have dealt with the mathematics of a reinforced concrete arch—if the possibility of such an object had ever occurred to it. But it served its purpose, and once it had been made, they could use it readily enough.

  Once it had been made. But—who had made it?

  When their dripping guides had rejoined them, Aretenon gave his friends a warning.

  “I’m afraid you’re going to have a good many shocks while you’re here. You’ll see some very strange sights, but when you understand them, they’ll cease to puzzle you in the slightest. In fact, you will soon come to take them for granted.”

  One of the strangers, whose thoughts neither Eris nor Jeryl could intercept, was giving him a message.

  “Therodimus is waiting for us,” said Aretenon. “He’s very anxious to see you.”

  “I’ve been trying to contact him,” complained Eris. “But I’ve not succeeded.”

  Aretenon seemed a little troubled.

  “You’ll find he’s changed,” he said. “After all, you’ve not seen each other for many years. It may be some time before you can make full contact again.”

  Their road was a winding one through the forest, and from time to time curiously narrow paths branched off in various directions. Therodimus, thought Eris, must have changed indeed for him to have taken up permanent residence among trees. Presently the track opened out into a large, semicircular clearing with a low white cliff lying along its diameter. At the foot of the cliff were several dark holes of varying sizes—obviously the openings of caves.

  It was the first time that either Eris or Jeryl had ever entered a cave, and they did not greatly look forward to the experience. They were relieved when Aretenon told them to wait just outside the opening, and went on alone toward the puzzling yellow light that glowed in the depths. A moment later, dim memories began to pulse in Eris’s mind, and he knew that his old teacher was coming, even though he could no longer fully share his thoughts.

  Something stirred in the gloom, and then Therodimus came out into the sunlight. At the sight of him, Jeryl screamed once and buried her head in Eris’s mane, but Eris stood firm, though he was trembling as he had never done before battle. For Therodimus blazed with a magnificence that none of his race had ever known since history began. Around his neck hung a band of glittering objects that caught and refracted the sunlight in myriad colors, while covering his body was a sheet of some thick, many-hued material that rustled softly as he walked. And his horn was no longer the yellow of ivory: some magic had changed it to the most wonderful purple that Jeryl had ever seen.

  Therodimus stood motionless for a moment, savoring their amazement to the full. Then his rich laugh echoed in their minds, and he reared up upon his hind limb. The colored garment fell whispering to the ground, and at a toss of his head the glittering necklace arched like a rainbow into a corner of the cave. But the purple horn remained unchanged.

  It seemed to Eris that he stood at the brink of a great chasm, with Therodimus beckoning to him on the far side. Their thoughts struggled to form a bridge, but could make no contact. Between them was the gulf of half a lifetime and many battles, of myriad unshared experiences—Therodimus’ years in this strange land, his own mating with Jeryl and the memory of their lost children. Though they stood face to face, a few feet only between them, their thoughts could never meet again.

  Then Aretenon, with all the power and authority of his unsurpassed skill, did something to his mind that Eris was never quite able to recall. He only knew that the years seemed to have rolled back, that he was once more the eager, anxious pupil—and that he could speak to Therodimus again.

  It was strange to sleep underground, but less unpleasant than spending the night amid the unknown terrors of the forest. As she watched the crimson shadows deepening beyond the entrance to the little cave, Jeryl tried to collect her scattered thoughts. She had understood only a small part of what had passed between Eris and Therodimus, but she knew that something incredible was taking place. The evidence of her eyes was enough to prove that: today she had seen things for which there were no words in her language.

  She had heard things, too. As they had passed one of the cave-mouths, there had come from it a rhythmic, “whirring” sound, unlike that made by any animal she knew. It had continued steadily without pause or break as long as she could hear it, and even now its unhurried rhythm had not left her mind. Aretenon, she believed, had also noticed it, though without any surprise: Eris had been too engrossed with Therodimus.

  The old philosopher had told them very little, preferring, as he said, to show them his empire when they had had a good night’s rest. Nearly all their talk had been concerned with the events of their own land during the last few years, and Jeryl found it somewhat boring. Only one thing had interested her, and she had eyes for little else. That was the wonderful chain of colored crystals that Therodi
mus had worn around his neck. What it was, or how it had been created, she could not imagine: but she coveted it. As she fell asleep, she found herself thinking idly, but more than half seriously, of the sensation it would cause if she returned to her people with such a marvel gleaming against her own pelt. It would look so much better there than upon old Therodimus.

  Aretenon and Therodimus met them at the cave soon after dawn. The philosopher had discarded his regalia—which he had obviously worn only to impress his guests—and his horn had returned to its normal yellow. That was one thing Jeryl thought she could understand, for she had come across fruits whose juices could cause such color changes.

  Therodimus settled himself at the mouth of the cave. He began his narration without preliminaries, and Eris guessed that he must have told it many times before to earlier visitors.

  “I came to this place, Eris, about five years after leaving our country. As you know, I was always interested in strange lands, and from the Mithraneans I’d heard rumors that intrigued me very much. How I traced them to their source is a long story that doesn’t matter now. I crossed the river far upstream one summer, when the water was very low. There’s only one place where it can be done, and then only in the driest years. Higher still the river loses itself in the mountains, and I don’t think there’s any way through them. So this is virtually an island—almost completely cut off from Mithranean territory.

  “It’s an island, but it’s not uninhabited. The people who live here are called the Phileni, and they have a very remarkable culture—one entirely different from our own. Some of the products of that culture you’ve already seen.

  “As you know, there are many different races on our world, and quite a few of them have some sort of intelligence. But there is a great gulf between us and all other creatures. As far as we know, we are the only beings capable of abstract thought and complex logical processes.