Read Ebook: The Music Master of Babylon by Pangborn Edgar Krigstein Illustrator

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Ebook has 181 lines and 11910 words, and 4 pages

He found his canoe tied as he had left it. He poked his white head slowly beyond the sill, staring west.

Merely a bonfire gleaming, reddening the blackness of the cliff.

Brian knew the spot, a ledge almost at water level. At one end of it was the troublesome path he used in climbing up to the forest. Usable driftwood was often there, the supply renewed by the high tides.

"No," Brian said. "Oh, no...."

Unable to accept, or believe, or not believe, he drew his head in, resting his forehead on the coldness of the sill, waiting for dizziness to pass, reason to return. Then rather calm, he once more leaned out over the sill. The fire still shone and was therefore not a disordered dream of old age, but it was dying to a dull rose of embers.

He wondered a little about time. The Museum clocks and watches had stopped long ago; Brian had ceased to want them. A sliver of moon was hanging over the water to the east. He ought to be able to remember the phases, deduce the approximate time from that. But his mind was too tired or distraught to give him the necessary data. Maybe it was somewhere around midnight.

He climbed on the sill and, with grunting effort, lifted the canoe over it to the motionless water inside. Wasted energy, he decided, as soon as that struggle was over. That fire had been lit before daylight passed; whoever lit it would have seen the canoe, might even have been watching Brian himself come home from his hunting. The canoe's disappearance in the night would only rouse further curiosity. But Brian was too exhausted to lift it back.

Why assume that the maker of the bonfire was necessarily hostile? Might be good company.

Might be....

Brian pulled his raft through the darkness, secured it at the stairway, and groped back to his cave.

He then locked the door. The venison was waiting, the sight and smell of it making him suddenly ravenous. He lit a small fire in the stove, one that he hoped would not be still sending smoke from the ventilator shaft when morning came. He cooked the meat crudely and wolfed it down, all enjoyment gone at the first mouthful.

He was shocked then to discover the dirtiness of his white beard. He hadn't given himself a real bath in--weeks? He searched for scissors and spent an absent-minded while trimming the beard back to shortness. He ought to take some soap--valuable stuff--down to Moses' room and wash.

Clothes, too. People probably still wore them. He had worn none for years, except for sandals and a clout and a carrying satchel for his trips to the mainland. He had enjoyed the freedom at first, and especially the discovery in his rugged fifties that he did not need clothes even for the soft winters, except perhaps a light covering when he slept. Then almost total nakedness had become so natural, it required no thought at all. But the owner of that bonfire--

He checked his rifles. The .22 automatic, an Army model from the 2040s, was the best. The tiny bullets carried a paralytic poison: graze a man's finger and he was painlessly dead in three minutes. Effective range, with telescopic sights, three kilometers; weight, a scant five pounds.

He sat a long time cuddling that triumph of military science, listening for sounds that did not come, wondering often about the unknowable passage of night toward day. Would it be two o'clock?

He wished he could have seen the Satellite, renamed in his mind the Midnight Star, but when he was down there at his port, he had not once looked up at the night sky. Delicate and beautiful, bearing its everlasting freight of men who must have been dead now for twenty-five years and who would be dead a very long time--well, it was better than a clock, Brian often thought, if you happened to look at the midnight sky at the right time of the month when the Man-made star could catch the moonlight. But he had not seen it tonight.

Three o'clock?

At some time during the long dark, he put the rifle away on the floor. With studied, self-conscious contempt for his own weakness, he strode out noisily into the Hall of Music with a fresh-lit candle. This same bravado, he knew, might dissolve at the first alien noise. While it lasted, though, it was invigorating.

The windows were still black with night. As if the candle-flame had found its own way, Brian was standing by the ancient marimba in the main hall, the light slanting carelessly away from his thin, high-veined hand. Nearby, on a small table, sat the Stone Age clay image he had brought long ago from the Directors' meeting room on the fifteenth floor. It startled him.

He remembered quite clearly how he himself had placed it there, obeying a half-humorous whim: the image and the singing stones were both magnificently older than history, so why shouldn't they live together? Whenever he dusted the marimba, he dusted the image respectfully and its pedestal. It would not have taken much urging from the impulses of a lonely mind, he supposed, to make him place offerings before it and bow down--winking first, of course, to indicate that rituals suitable to two aging gentlemen did not have to be sensible in order to be good.

But now the clay face, recapitulating eternity, startled him. Possibly some flicker of the candle had given it a new mimicry of life.

Though worn with antiquity, it was not deformed. The chipped places were simple honorable scars. The two faces stared mildly from the single head; there were plain stylized lines to represent folded hands, equally artless marks of sex on either side. That was all. The maker might have intended it to be a child's toy or a god.

A wooden hammer of modern make rested on the marimba. Softly, Brian tapped a few of the stones. He struck the shrillest one harder, waking many slow-dying overtones, and laid the hammer down, listening until the last murmur perished and a drop of hot wax hurt his thumb.

He returned to his cave and blew out the candle, thinking of the door, not caring that he had, in irrational bravado, left it unlocked. Face down, he rolled his head and clenched his fingers into his pallet, seeking in pain and finding at last the relief of stormy helpless weeping in the total dark.

Then he slept.

They looked timid. The evidence of it was in their tense squatting pose, not in what the feeble light allowed Brian to see of their faces, which were as blank as rock. Hunched down just inside the open doorway of the cloakroom-cave, a dim morning grayness from the Hall of Music behind them, they were ready for flight. Brian's intelligence warned his body to stay motionless, for readiness for flight could also be readiness for attack. He studied them, lowering his eyelids to a slit. On his pallet well inside the cave, he must be in deep shadow.

They were aware of him, though, keenly aware.

They were very young, perhaps sixteen or seventeen years old, firm-muscled, the man slim but heavy in the shoulders, the girl a fully developed woman. They were dressed alike: loin-cloths of some coarse dull fabric and moccasins that might be deerhide. Their hair grew nearly to the shoulders and was cut off carelessly there, but they were evidently in the habit of combing it. They appeared to be clean. Their complexion, so far as Brian could guess it in the meager light, was the brown of a heavy tan.

With no immediate awareness of emotion, he decided they were beautiful, and then, within his own poised, perilous silence, Brian reminded himself that the young are always beautiful.

Softly--Brian saw no motion of her lips--the woman muttered: "He wake."

A twitch of the man's hand was probably meant to warn her to be quiet. His other hand clutched the shaft of a javelin with a metal blade. Brian saw that the blade had once belonged to a bread-knife; it was polished and shining, lashed to a peeled stick. The javelin trailed, ready for use at a flick of the young man's arm. Brian opened his eyes plainly.

Deliberately, he sighed. "Good morning."

The youth said: "Good morning, sa."

"Where do you come from?"

"Millstone." The young man spoke automatically, but then his facial rigidity dissolved into amazement and some kind of distress. He glanced at his companion, who giggled uneasily.

"The old man pretends to not know," she said, and smiled, and seemed to be waiting for the young man's permission to go on speaking. He did not give it, but she continued: "Sa, the old ones of Millstone are dead." She thrust her hand out and down, flat, a picture of finality, adding with nervous haste: "As the Old Man knows. He who told us to call him Jonas, she who told us to call her Abigail, they are dead. They are still-without-moving for six days. Then we do the burial as they told us. As the Old Man knows."

"But I don't know!" said Brian, and sat up on his pallet, too quickly, startling them. But their motion was backward, readiness for flight, not for aggression. "Millstone? Where is Millstone?"

Both looked wholly bewildered, then dismayed. They stood up with splendid animal grace, stepping backward out of the cave, the girl whispering in the man's ear. Brian caught only two words: "Is angry...."

He jumped up. "Don't go! Please don't go!" He followed them out of the cave, slowly now, aware that he might well be an object of terror in the half-dark, aware of his gaunt, graceless age and dirty hacked-off beard. Almost involuntarily, he adopted something of the flat stilted quality of their speech: "I will not hurt you. Do not go."

They halted. The girl smiled dubiously.

The man said: "We need old ones. They die. He who told us to call him Jonas said, many days in the boat, not with the sun-path, he said, across the sun-path, he said, keeping land on the left hand. We need old ones to speak the--to speak.... The Old Man is angry?"

"No, I am not angry. I am never angry." Brian's mind groped, certain of nothing. No one had come for twenty-five years. Only twenty-five? Millstone?

There was red-gold on the dirty eastern windows of the Hall of Music, a light becoming softness as it slanted down, touching the long rows of cases, the warm brown of an antique spinet, the arrogant clean gold of a 20th century harp, the dull gray of singing stones five thousand years old and a clay face much older than that.

"Millstone?" Brian pointed southwest in inquiry.

The girl nodded, pleased and not at all surprised that he should know, watching him now with a squirrel's stiff curiosity. Hadn't there once been a Millstone River in or near Princeton? He thought he remembered that it emptied into the Raritan Canal. There was some moderately high ground around there. Islands now, no doubt, or--well, perhaps they would tell him.

"There were old people in Millstone," he said, trying for gentle dignity, "and they died. So now you need old ones to take their place."

The girl nodded vigorously. A glance at the young man was full of shyness, possessiveness, maybe some amusement. "He who told us to call him Jonas said no marriage can be without the words of Abraham."

"Abr--" Brian checked himself. If this was religion, it would not do to speak the name Abraham with a rising inflection, at least not until he knew what it stood for. "I have been for a long time--" He checked himself again. A man old, ugly and strange enough to be sacred should never stoop to explain anything.

They were standing by the seven-stone marimba. His hand dropped, his thumbnail clicking by accident against the deepest stone and waking a murmur. The children drew back alarmed.

Brian smiled. "Don't be afraid." He tapped the other stones lightly. "It is only music. It will not hurt you." He was silent a while, and they were patient and respectful, waiting for more light. He asked carefully: "He who told you to call him Jonas, he taught you all the things you know?"

"All things," the boy said, and the girl nodded quickly, so that the soft brownness of her hair tumbled about her face, and she pushed it back in a small human motion as old as the clay image.

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