Jack Williamson - Afterlife.pdf

(96 KB) Pobierz
303521798 UNPDF
JACK WILLIAMSON
AFTERLIFE
"WE LIVE ON FAITH," MY father used to say. "The afterlife is all we have."
I wasn't sure of any afterlife. My questions troubled my father, who was pastor of our little
church. He made me kneel with him to pray and listen to long chapters from the Bible on
the altar. That sacred book, he said, had come from the holy Mother Earth. It looked old
enough, the brittle yellow pages breaking loose from the cracked leather binding, but if its
miracles had ever really happened, that had been a hundred light-years away and long
millennia ago.
"If there is a God," I told him, "and if he heard our prayers, we'd all be dead before we ever
got his answer."
With an air of tragic sorrow, he warned me that such reckless words could put my immortal
soul in danger.
"We ourselves are miracles," he told me, "happening every day. Our whole planet was the
Lord's miraculous answer to the prayers of the first Earthmen to land here. They found it
rich in everything, and spoiled it with their own greed and folly."
I heard the history of that from our one-legged schoolmaster. Our first dozen centuries had
been a golden age. We settled both great continents, harvested the great forests, loaded
fleets of space freighters with precious hardwoods and rare metals. All that wealth was
gone two thousand years ago.
Sadly, he showed us a few precious relics he kept in the dusty cupboard he called a
museum. There was a little glass tube that he said had shone with the light of a hundred
candles when there was power to make it burn, and a dusty telephone that once had
talked around the world.
We were born poor, in a poor little village. On the Sabbaths, my father preached in the
adobe-walled church. On weekdays, he got into his dusty work clothes and ground corn
on a little grist mill turned by a high waterwheel. His pay was a share of the meal.
Wheat grew on the flat land down in the valley below us, but the soil in our hill country had
eroded too badly for wheat. Through most of the week we ate cornmeal mush for
breakfast and corn pones for bread. Sometimes my mother made white bread or even
honey cakes, when church members from the valley gave us wheat flour.
On the Sabbaths she played a wheezy old organ to accompany the hymns. I used to love
the music and the promise of a paradise where the just and good would live happily
forever, but now I saw no reason to believe it. With no life here at home, I longed to get
away into the wider universe, but I saw no chance of that.
It's seven light-years to the nearest settled star system. The trade ships quit coming long
 
ago, because we had nothing left to trade. There's only the mail ship, once every Earth
year. It arrives nearly empty and leaves with every sling filled with those lucky people who
find money for the fare.
It lands at the old capitol, far across the continent. I'd never been there, nor seen any kind
of starship till the year I turned twelve. That quiet Sabbath morning, the rest of the family
was gone in the wagon with my father to a revival meeting in another village down the
river. Expecting no miracle there or anywhere, I'd been happy to stay home and do the
chores.
Awakened by a rooster crowing, I was walking out to the barn to milk our three cows. I
heard something thundering across the sky. In a moment I found it, a flash of silver when it
caught the sun. I dropped the milk bucket, staring while it wheeled low over the crumbled
ruins of something that had stood on the hill west of us.
It turned and dived straight at me.
With no time to run, I stood frozen while it sank over the west pasture and the apple
orchard. It struck the cornfield and plowed on though a cloud of dust and flying rocks till it
stopped at the edge of my mother's kitchen. Its thunder ceased. It lay still, a smoking mass
of broken metal.
I stood there watching, waiting for something more to happen. Nothing did. I caught my
breath at last, and walked uneasily toward it. Nothing about it made any kind of sense until
I looked into the long furrow it had dug and found a torn and bleeding human arm. A leg
farther on, most of the skin torn off. Another naked leg, still attached to the mangled body.
Finally a hairless skull grinning from the bottom of the ditch.
Dazed by the sudden strangeness of it, I thought I ought to call my father or the constable
or the schoolmaster, but they were all away at the revival. I was still there, wondering what
to do, when I saw a carrion bird hovering over the body. I shouted and threw stones to
keep it away till some of the neighbors came from up the river. We gathered up what we
could, the smallest red scraps in my milk bucket, and carried them into the church.
The sheriff came on horseback, the doctor with him. They frowned over the body parts,
laid out on a long table made of planks laid across the benches. The doctor fitted them
closer together to see if anything was missing. The sheriff picked up pieces of broken
metal, scowled at them uneasily, threw them back in the ditch.
They all left at last, for their dinners or whatever they had to do. I think they were afraid of
too much they didn't understand. So was I, but I didn't like the flies buzzing around the
body. I went home for a sheet to cover it. After a cold corn pone and a bowl of clabbered
milk for lunch, I came back to look at the wreck again, and watch the empty sky. Nothing
else came down.
Evening came. I milked the cows again, fed the pig, found a dozen eggs in the nests. I
heard dogs barking and went back to the church to be certain the door was closed. Night
fell as I was walking home. Our planet has no moon. In the sudden darkness, the stars
 
were a blaze of diamonds.
I stopped to look up at them, wondering about the stranger. Where was his home? Why
had he come here? What could have gone so terribly wrong when he tried to land? The
answers were beyond me, but I stood there a long time, wishing I'd been born somewhere
else, with a chance to see worlds more exciting than our own.
In the empty house, I lit a candle, ate another corn pone and a piece of fried chicken my
mother had left for me, went to bed. Trying to forget the vulture circling over that skinned
skull in the ditch, I lay listening to the tick of the old clock in the hall till I heard the rattle of
my father's wagon.
My mother and my sister came in the house while he drove on to stable the team. News of
the dead stranger stopped their chatter about the meeting. My father lit a candle lantern
when he heard about it, and we all walked across the road to the church. My mother lifted
the sheet to look at the body.
She screamed and my father dropped the lantern.
"Alive! It's alive!"
The candle had gone out. I shivered when I heard some small creature scurry away in the
dark. My father's hands must have been shaking; it took him a long time to find a match to
light the candle again. The long naked body was a man's, black with dried blood and
horribly scarred, but somehow whole again.
The bald skull had hair again, a short pale fuzz. The eyes were open, staring blindly up into
the dark. The body seemed stiff and hard, but I saw the blood-caked chest rise and slowly
fall. My mother reached to touch it, and said she felt a heartbeat.
My father made me saddle my pony and go for the doctor. I had to hammer at the door a
long time before he came out in his underwear to call me crazy for waking him in the
middle of the night with such a cock-and-bull story. If we had a live man there at the
church, it had to be some drunk who had crept inside to sober up.
Still angry, he finally dressed and saddled a horse to come back with me. My mother had lit
candles at the altar. My father was on his knees before it, praying. The doctor threw the
sheet off the man, felt his wrist, and said he'd be damned.
"The hand of God!" my father whispered, backing away and dropping back to his knees.
"A holy miracle! We prayed at the meeting for a sign to help us persuade the unbelievers.
And the good Lord has answered!"
"Maybe." The doctor squinted at me. "Or is it some trick of Satan?"
My mother brought a basin of warm water and helped him wash off the clots of blood and
mud. His eyes closed, the man seemed to be sleeping. He woke when day came, and sat
up to stare blankly at the empty benches around him. His blond hair and beard had grown
longer. The scars had disappeared.
 
My mother asked how he felt.
He blinked at her and shivered, wrapping the sheet around himself.
"Are you the Son of God?" My father knelt before him. "Have you come to save the
world?"
He shook his head in a puzzled way.
My mother asked if he was hungry. He nodded, and rose unsteadily when she asked if he
could. She took his hand and led him out of the church and down the street to our house.
He limped slowly beside her, peering around him as if everything was strange.
"Sir?" The doctor came up beside him. "Can you tell us who you are?"
He made a strange animal grunt and shook his head again.
At our house, my mother brought him a glass and a pitcher of apple juice. He gulped it
thirstily and sat watching her fix breakfast. My father brought clothing for him, and a pair of
shoes. He sat frowning at them and finally stood up to dress himself, slow and clumsy
about it, and let me tie the shoes.
"Sir?" The doctor stood watching. "Where are you from?"
"Earth." He spoke at last, his voice deep and slow. "I am here from Mother Earth."
My mother set a plate for him. He studied the knife and fork as if they were new to him, but
plied them ravenously when she brought a platter of ham and scrambled eggs. She had
set plates for the doctor and my father, but they forgot to eat.
"You were dead." My father was hoarse with awe. "How can you live again?"
"I was never dead." He reached to stab another slice of ham. "I am eternal."
"Eternal?" The doctor blinked and squinted at him. "Do you mean immortal?"
"I --" He paused as if he had to search for words. "I do not die."
"I saw you dead." The doctor swallowed hard and watched him slice the ham. "What
brought you back?"
"The power." Smiling as though glad to find what to say, he wiped his lips with a slice of
white bread. "The immortal power that moves the mortal body."
"I see," the doctor muttered, as if he really did. "Why are you here?"
"If immortality interests you, that is what I bring."
The doctor blinked, startled into silence. My father muttered something under his breath
and moved to a chair across the room. My mother had made a pot of tea. The man drained
a tall glass of it, sweetened with honey. Seeming to grow stronger and brighter, he began
 
asking questions. He wanted to know about our history, cities, industries, governments,
ways of travel. Did ships from Earth ever land here? I thought he looked pleased that the
mail skipper was not due soon. Our neighbors had crowded the kitchen by then, and we all
moved into the front room. Somebody asked his name.
"Who cares?" He shrugged, standing tall in the middle of the room. "Your world is new to
me. I come to you as a new man, an agent of eternity. I bring you the gift of eternal life."
"Eternal?" The doctor had recovered his voice. "Just what do you mean?"
"My secrets are my own." He was suddenly smiling, his voice resonant and strong. "But if
you wish to live forever, follow me."
Too many people had pushed into our house by then, and the blacksmith wanted to take
him to speak at the church. Stubbornly, my father shook his head.
"I don't know what he is, but he claims no power from God. He could be a son of Satan,
scheming to trap our souls for hell. I don't want him in my church. Get him out of my
house!"
"He's slick as a barrel of eels," the doctor agreed. "I wouldn't believe him if he swore the
sun came up this morning. But I don't--" He shrugged uneasily toward the wreckage in the
cornfield. "I want to know more about him."
The sheriff escorted him to a vacant lot. My father stayed away, but I followed with my
sister. The sheriff helped him to the top of an old stone slab that must have supported
some public monument when our world was great. We all crowded around. He stood silent
while the blacksmith spoke to tell how he had risen from the dead. The murmur of voices
died into breathless expectation as we waited for him to speak. I heard a dog barking
somewhere, and a rooster crowing. I thought he looked handsome, even in the misfit
garments.
"He can't be the demon Dad says he is." I saw a glow of awed admiration on my sister's
face. "I believe he's an angel sent from Heaven to save us."
He spread his arms to beckon us closer.
"I see that your world has suffered misfortune."
His voice rang loud and clear, but he paused to gesture at the muddy ruts we called a
street and our straggle of mud-walled, straw-roofed homes. He turned to nod at the rubble
mounds of what had been a city on the hill behind him.
"I knew poverty like yours back on the mother world. It is ruled by the rich. They live in
great mansions, with swarms of servants and every luxury. Skipping time on space flights
to their estates on other planets, they stretch their lives almost forever. The very richest can
pay for microbots."
"Microbots?" the doctor shouted. "What are they?"
 

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika:

Zgłoś jeśli naruszono regulamin