This was the dream and now I understood why Shammat needed its transmitter there only for a short time.
I stayed with my friend for some days, getting my strength back. I understood by now a good deal of what he knew and was trying to tell me. Trembling and fearful, he told me that a great Thing had come down from the sky, and set itself on the slopes of that valley, and then horrible creatures had come - and he could not speak of them without shaking and hiding his face as if from the memory - and killed everything and broken everything. They had lit fires and let them go out of control to rage over the mountain slopes, destroying and killing. They had slaughtered for pleasure. They had caught and tortured animals... He sat by me, this poor creature, whimpering a little, and tears ran down over the fur of his big cheeks, as he stared into the flames of our fire, remembering.
And how many of them?
He held up his hands palm out, then again, and then, clumsily, for this was not an easy mode of thought for him, once again. There had been thirty of them.
How long had they stayed?
Oh, an awful time, a long, long time - but he put up his paws, or hands, to his eyes, and sat rocking and letting out small yelps of pain. Yes, he had been caught by them, and put in a cage of boughs, and they had stood around laughing and sticking sharpened branches at him... he lifted the fur of his sides to show me the scars. But he had escaped, and had let out from their cages many other animals and birds and fled away - all the animals and birds had left, and as I must have noticed, had not gone back. There were none of the creatures of the forest anywhere near that valley now. And he had crept back one dark night, and gone as silently as he could to the top of the ridge and looked over - and had seen nothing, but the emanations of the column had made him ill, so he had known that something was there... he did not know even now what it was, for he had not been able to see it, only feel it.
And the big Thing these terrible beings had come in? Had he seen it or touched it?
No, he had been too afraid to go close enough to touch. He had never seen anything like it, he had not known that anything like this could exist. It was round - and he made his arms round. It was enormous - and he spread them till he indicated the whole interior of this very large cave. And it was - he whimpered and swayed - horrible.
I could not learn more than that.
But I did not need to.
I told him that I would have to travel very far from here. He did not understand "very far." He would come with me, he said, and he did, but as day after day passed, he became silent and apprehensive, for he was a long way from the part of the mountains he knew. He was lonely, I could see that. But perhaps he had not known that he was lonely? Had there been others like him? Yes, there had been once! Many? Again he held out hands - once, twice and again and again... There had been many and they had died out, perhaps from an epidemic, and now there was only himself. If there were others now on the mountain he did not know of them. He came shambling along beside me as I walked up mountains and down them, and up them and down again, and then left them behind and went down and down, with snows behind us, and then through the marvellous untouched forests and down again through regions of flowering scented bushes - and there in front of us were the steamy southern jungles, and beyond them, but very far away, the sea. Did he know of the sea? But he could not understand anything of my attempts at explanation.
What I had to do was to walk back to the settlements of Natives who had escaped from the Round City, for there I would meet again with Sais and her father. I tried to persuade this poor animal to come with me, for I believed that the Natives would befriend him. At least Sais would. But when I reached the low foothills beyond which stretched the jungles, he became silent and morose, turning his face away from me continually, as if I had turned myself away from him, and then he came stumbling and running to me, and he clutched at my arms, and tried to hold my hands so fast in his I could not leave him. Great tears ran from his kind brown eyes, and disappeared into the fur of his cheeks, and streaked his chest with wet. He let out whimpers, then a roar of pain, and ran back, falling and getting up again, till he reached the shelter of the trees. He stood with the foothills at his back, and stared and peered after me, and shouted farewells that were a plea: come back, come back! Then he ran out a little way after me, but retreated again. I waved until he was no more than a little dot under trees that it was hard to believe from where I stood a couple of miles away were so tall. But I had to go on. And so I left him to his solitudes.
I had been gone half a year by the time I reached the settlement. I was concerned for Sais and David, but there was no news of them. It even seemed as if they had already been forgotten. I made myself a shelter of earth and logs, and waited. Meanwhile, I tried to teach those among the Natives who seemed intelligent what I could of Canopus and how they could live so as to limit the power of Shammat over them. But they could not take it in.
They were prepared, though, to learn anything I could teach in the realm of the practical arts, which they were in danger of forgetting. I taught them - or retaught them - gardening and husbandry. I taught them to tame a goatlike creature, which could give them milk, and I demonstrated butter and cheese-making. I taught them how to choose plants for their fibres, and to prepare the fibres and to weave them, and to dye them. I showed them how to make bricks from the earth and fire them. All these crafts I was teaching to creatures who had known them for thousands of years and had forgotten them a few months ago. It was hard, sometimes, to believe that they were not making fun of me, as they watched me, and then their faces lit up with amazement and delight as they saw cheese, or fired pots, or the suppleness of properly cured hides.
Two years after they had left me, Sais and David came. Even as they walked into the settlement, I could see they had had a hard time. They were wary and careful, and ready to defend themselves - which they nearly had to do, for their friends, even their family, had forgotten them. They were lean and burned brown. The girl had grown into her proper height in that journey, but was still much shorter than her father, shorter than the average of the Natives, and I saw that a reduction in height was very likely beginning.
They had succeeded in reaching most of the settlements. They had walked, ridden on the backs of animals, used canoes and boats. They had not stayed in any one place more than a day. They had done exactly what I had ordered - talked of Canopus, watched for the effect, and never used the Signature unless they had to.
In two places they had been chased away, and threatened with death if they returned.
Both talked of dead people they had seen in the settlements. It was not fear they showed, or sorrow or grief: just as the death of Sais's mother had left her more puzzled than grieved, so the evidences of the nearness of death such as an unburied corpse lying in a forest, or a group going past with a dead person on a litter, excited in them efforts at understanding. My attempts to make death real for them, by linking it with the Signature, had not succeeded. They could not believe in death for themselves, because those robust bodies knew that hundreds of years of life lay ahead, and their bodies' knowledge was stronger than the feeble thoughts of their impaired minds. They told me as if it were an extraordinary fact I could not really be expected to believe that some corpses they had seen had been killed in quarrels: yes, people killed each other! They did! There was no doubt of it!