It would probably be painful if any bat ever got to bite into him or any snake were to swallow him whole, but while he remained safe, successfully protected by the leaves that surrounded him — whose photosynthesis was presumable producing the blood that nourished his flesh and thoughts alike — and the eagles who fed upon the bats, he was feeling no physical pain and no particular mental anguish. If his fate was to suffer eternal inertia, with no idle hands for with the Devil might make work, he thought that he might be able to cope — and since it was now proven that he could be reincarnated, perhaps he had an infinite and infinitely various future to look forward to, in which he would have abundant opportunity to fly and to swim, to squirm and to walk, always knowing that even if pain and death were to arrive, however hideous they might be on a temporary basis, there would be other lives to come: times to rest and times to ponder, times to eat as well as to be eaten.
Or was it, he wondered, merely his reduced capacity to feel such emotions as horror and terror that made the future seem so promising? Might he, in fact, be better off as a gibbering wreck, consumed from within by mindworms, his very consciousness reduced to immaterial dust?
The invisible sun was climbing behind the cloud-sheet. Eventually, it began to rain. The drops seemed tropically large, but when they splashed on his chin and his cheeks the liquid explosions were more pleasurable than painful, and the moisture was welcome. The shower didn’t last long. When it stopped the cloud was much lighter and thinner. Rapid shadows occasionally fluttered across Tremeloe’s face, but no bats or birds came close to him. The eagles patrolling the sky were drifting lazily in slow circles.
“I know that you never expected to be here,” Tremeloe said to his companion, “and that you’d rather be snug and warm in Pnakotus, dreaming of one day becoming a beetle, but this really isn’t as bad as all that, is it?”
“I don’t know,” the other replied, “and not knowing is something that my kind aren’t used to. I shouldn’t be here. I’ve borrowed humanity in the past, for research purposes, but I’m not human. I wasn’t designed for this. It’s not my fate. You’re a prisoner of time, so you can’t begin to understand how Yithians think, any more than I can begin to imagine how Cthulhu and the star-spawn might think, but believe me when I say that this is wrong.”
Tremeloe did believe him, after a fashion, but he couldn’t sympathize. If all the silly rumors about Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee were actually true, and the professor’s body really had been taken over by an alien time-traveler for several years way back in the 1900s, then the alien time-travelers in question evidently didn’t observe the principle of informed consent, and could hardly complain if the tables were turned on them. They had poked their noses into human affairs, and had no right to bleat that they were only reporters, not creators, as if that somehow let them off the moral hook. except, of course, that the human world had moved beyond good and evil now, into an era when morality no longer had hooks, or claws, or censorious staring eyes.
Tremeloe remembered the bat’s eyes then and the eagle’s. No, they hadn’t been censorious, or even judgmental — but he felt sure that they had been more than merely avid. There had been something in them that was more than mere sight or mere appetite, which might well have been “beyond good and evil,” but held an emotion that was by no means entirely free of dread.
I’m just a head-fruit hanging on a tree, Tremeloe thought. The birds and the crocodiles still have animal bodies and animal hormones. Perhaps I have the best of it, in this far-from-the-best of all possible worlds. but if the cycle goes on forever, I’ll have it again and again and again, ad infinitum.
Such was the comforting positive nature of that thought that he did not notice that the sky had become even bluer until the murmur of mostly incomprehensible voices altered him to the fact that something was going on.
At first, he thought that the cloud was simply clearing, its remnants evaporated by the hot tropical sun that was ascending towards its zenith — but then he saw the bloated sun drift free of the brilliant white clouds to take possession of the sky, and saw that its flames were redder and angrier than he had ever known them before.
It really is much later than either of us thought, he said to himself, but then doubted the judgment, as he realized that the excessive blueness of the unclouded sky and the excessive redness of the sun were both optical illusions, caused by the fact that the sky was full of creatures; creatures that were not quite invisible, although they had to be made of something other than the kind of matter with which he was familiar: something so alien as to be almost beyond perception. The big birds were flying far away with rapid wing-beats.
Tremeloe was conscious of gravity now, although it did not seem to be tugging him in the direction of the green earth, but in the direction of the alien sky, whose no-longer-kindly light hid all the multitudinous stars of the incredibly, unimaginably vast universe within its dazzling glory. “What are they?” he said, his voice little more than a whisper.
The other heard him. “Star-spawn,” he replied. “If you could see them, the impression of shape they’d give you would be much like Cthulhu’s, on a much smaller scale: vaguely cephalopodan, with a scaly tegument and oddly tiny wings that shouldn’t work but do.”
Somehow, Tremeloe grasped what the other meant by “the impression of shape.” The star-spawn had mass, but their matter was utterly alien, obedient to different rules of dimension and form, whose relationship with the kind of matter making up his own flesh and that of the tree of which he was now a part, was essentially mysterious. and far, far beyond mere matters of good and evil.
The raptors were nowhere to be seen now. If their existential role was to protect the trees of human life and their heady harvest from giant bats, they had played their allotted parts and made their exit until the next day.
But it’s not yet noon, Tremeloe thought, wishing perversely that he were capable of terror, in order that he might feel a little more human, a little more himself. Even mayflies live for a day.
He had been a biologist, though, during his larval stage, and he knew that mayflies actually lived much longer than a day, even though their imago stage was a brief airborne climax to a life spent wallowing in mud. He knew, too, that from a detached scientific viewpoint, every mayfly had a living ancestry that stretched back through their larval stages and generation after generation of evolving living creatures, all the way back to some primordial protoplasmic blob, or some not-yet-living helical carbonic thread. Only its climax was ephemeral, and by comparison with the billion years it had taken to produce the fly, there was hardly any difference at all between an hour, a day, and fifty-six years.
Beyond good and evil, Tremeloe knew, human philosophers held that there ought to be a world in which good would no longer be refined by the absence of evil — of pain, of hunger, of thirst, and so on — but in positive terms, in terms of an active, experienced good whose mere absence would replace outdated redundant evil. But the good and evil that he had now moved beyond wasn’t human good and evil at all, and the speculations of human philosophers were only relevant to it insofar as they had helped to shape his own consciousness, his own expectations, and his own intellectual flavor.