Frederick Pohl Star of Stars

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the
"
hatch. He suddenly realized that he was very hungry, and had better do
something about the breakfast he had missed. There were not many men
on earth who had earned a better right to eat their morning meal. He had
saved for humanity more tons of meat, oil and milk than could easily be
estimated.
Don Burley was the happy warrior, coming home from one battle that man would
always have to fight. He was holding at bay the specter of famine
which had confronted all earlier ages, but which would never threaten the
world again while the great plankton farms harvested their millions of tons of
protein, and the whale herds obeyed their new masters. Man had come back to
the sea after aeons of exile; until the oceans froze, he would never be hungry
again....
Don glanced at the scanner as he set his course. He smiled as he saw
the two echoes keeping pace with the central splash of light that marked
his vessel. Hang
"
around, he said. "We mammals must stick together. Then, as the
autopilot took
"
"
over, he lay back in his chair.
And presently Benj and Susan heard a most peculiar noise, rising
and falling against the drone of the turbines. It had filtered faintly
through the thick walls of Sub
5, and only the sensitive ears of the porpoises could have detected it. But
intelligent beasts though they were, they could hardly be expected to
understand why Don
Burley was announcing, in a highly unmusical voice, that he was Heading for
the Last
Round-up....
HENRY KUTTNER
The present editor was (and still is) a fan; and almost the first fan letter
he ever wrote was to the Weird Tales of the Thirties, attempting to
communi-cate his high excitement at having read a story by a brand-new
name in that magazine. The story was a ghastly, shuddery bit of horror;
and the author was Henry Kuttner, just beginning, a long way from the
heights of competence and creativity he was to attain, but already
showing a most individual capac-ity for stirring the guts of his readers.
Henry Kuttner wrote an incredible quantity for more than two decades
after that (all good, and much superb) until his tragic death in 1958. Almost
the last and one of the best of his countless fine science fiction stories is
A Cross of Centuries
They called him Christ. But he was not the Man who had toiled up the long road
to
Golgotha five thousand years before. They called him Buddha and Mohammed; they
called him the Lamb, and the Blessed of God. The called him the Prince of
Peace and the Immortal One.
His name was Tyrell.
He had come up another road now, the steep path that led to the monastery on
the mountain, and he stood for a moment blinking against the bright sunlight.
His white robe was stained with the ritual black.
The girl beside him touched his arm and urged him gently forward. He stepped
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into the shadow of the gateway.
Then he hesitated and looked back. The road had led up to a level
mountain meadow where the monastery stood, and the meadow was dazzling green
with early spring. Faintly, far away, he felt a wrenching sorrow at the
thought of leaving all this brightness, but he sensed that things would be
better very soon. And the brightness was far away. It was not quite real any
more. The girl touched his arm again and he nodded obediently and moved
forward, feeling the troubling touch of approach-ing loss that his tired mind
could not understand now.
I am very old, he thought.
In the courtyard the priests bowed before him. Mons, the leader, was standing
at the other end of a broad pool that sent back the bottomless blue of the
sky. Now and again the water was ruffled by a cool, soft breeze.
Old habits sent their messages along his nerves. Tyrell raised his hand and
blessed them all.
His voice spoke the remembered phrases quietly.
Let there be peace. On all the troubled earth, on all the worlds
and in God s blessed sky between, let there be peace. The powers of of
his hand wavered;
then he remembered the powers of darkness have no strength against God s love
and understanding. I bring you God s word. It is love; it is
understanding; it is peace.
They waited till he had finished. It was the wrong time and the wrong ritual.
But that did not matter, since he was the Messiah.
Mons, at the other end of the pool, signaled. The girl beside Tyrell put her
hands gently on the shoulders of his robe.
Mons cried, Immortal, will you cast off your stained garment and with it the
sins of time?
Tyrell looked vaguely across the pool.
Will you bless the worlds with another century of your holy presence?
Tyrell remembered some words.
I leave in peace; I return in peace, he said.
The girl gently pulled off the white robe, knelt, and removed
TyrelI s sandals.
Naked, he stood at the pool s edge.
He looked like a boy of twenty. He was two thousand years old.
Some deep trouble touched him. Mons had lifted his arm, summoning, but Tyrell
looked around confusedly and met the girl s gray eyes.
Nerina? he murmured..
Go in the pool, she whispered. Swim across it.
He put out his hand and touched hers. She felt that wonderful current of
gentleness that was his indomitable strength. She pressed his hand tightly,
trying to reach through the clouds in his mind, trying to make him know that
it would be all right again, that she would be waiting as she had waited for
his resurrection three times already now, in the last three hundred years.
She was much younger than Tyrell, but she was un-mortal too.
For an instant the mists cleared from his blue eyes.
Wait for me, Nerina, he said. Then, with a return of his old skill, he went
into the pool with a clean dive.
She watched him swim across, surely and steadily. There was nothing wrong with
his body; there never was, no matter how old he grew. It was only
his mind that stiffened, grooved deeper into the iron ruts of time, lost its
friction with the present, so that his memory would fragment away little by
little. But the oldest memories went last, and the automatic memories last of
all.
She was conscious of her own body, young and strong and beautiful, as it would
always be. Her mind...there was an answer to that too. She was watching the
answer.
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I am greatly blessed, she thought.
Of all women on all the worlds, I am the Bride of Tyrell, and the only other
immortal ever born.
Lovingly and with reverence she watched him swim. At her feet his discarded
robe lay, stained with the mem-ories of a hundred years.
It did not seem so long ago. She could remember it very clearly, the last time
she had watched Tyrell swim across the pool. And there had been one
time before that and that had been the first. For her; not for Tyrell.
He came dripping out of the water and hesitated. She felt a strong
pang at the change in him from strong sureness to bewildered questioning.
But Mons was ready.
He reached out and took Tyrell s hand. He led the Messiah toward a door in the
high monastery wall and through it. She thought that Tyrell looked back at
her, with the tenderness that was always there in his deep, wonderful calm.
A priest picked up the stained robe from her feet and carried it away. It
would be washed clean now and placed on the altar, the spherical tabernacle
shaped like the mother world. Dazzling white again, its folds would hang
softly about the earth.
It would be washed clean, as Tyrell s mind would be washed clean too, rinsed
of the clogging deposit of mem-ories that a century had brought.
The priests were filing away. She glanced back, beyond the open gateway, to
the sharply beautiful green of the mountain meadow, spring grass sensuously
reaching to the sun after the winter s snow.
Immortal, she thought, lifting her arms high, feeling the eternal blood, ichor [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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