There was something here. Daniels told himself, that, for all its alienness, still was familiar, a factor that should lend itself to translation into human terms and thus establish some sort of link between this remembering alien mind and his human mind.
The emptiness and the silence, the cold uncaring went on and on and on and there seemed no end to it. But he came to understand there had to be an end to it and that the end was here, in these tangled hills above the ancient river. And after the almost endless time of darkness and uncaring, another almost endless time of waiting, of having reached the end, of having gone as far as one might go and then settling down to wait with an ageless patience that never would grow weary.
You spoke of help, the creature said to him. Why help? You do not know this other. Why should you want to help?
“It is alive,” said Daniels. “It’s alive and I’m alive and is that not enough?”
I do not know, the creature said.
“I think it is,” said Daniels.
And how could you help?
“I’ve told you about this business of genetics. I don’t know if I can explain—”
I have the terms from your mind, the creature said. The genetic code.
“Would this other one, the one beneath the stone, the one you guard—”
Not guard, the creature said. The one I wait for.
“You will wait for long.”
I am equipped for waiting. I have waited long. I can wait much longer.
“Someday,” Daniels said, “the stone will erode away. But you need not wait that long. Does this other creature know its genetic code?”
It knows, the creature said. It knows far more than I.
“But all of it,” insisted Daniels. “Down to the last linkage, the final ingredient, the sequences of all the billions of—”
It knows, the creature said. The first requisite of all life is to understand itself.
“And it could—it would—be willing to give us that information, to supply us its genetic code?”
You are presumptuous, said the sparkling creature (although the word was harder than presumptuous). That is information no thing gives another. It is indecent and obscene (here again the words were not exactly indecent and obscene). It involves the giving of one’s self into another’s hands. It is an ultimate and purposeless surrender.
“Not surrender,” Daniels said. “A way of escaping from its imprisonment. In time, in the hundred years of which I told you, the people of my race could take that genetic code and construct another creature exactly like the first. Duplicate it with exact preciseness.”
But it still would be in stone.
“Only one of it. The original one. That original could wait for the erosion of the rock. But the other one, its duplicate, could take up life again.”
And what, Daniels wondered, if the creature in the stone did not wish for rescue? What if it had deliberately placed itself beneath the stone? What if it simply sought protection and sanctuary? Perhaps, if it wished, the creature could get out of where it was as easily as this other one—or this other thing—had risen from the mound.
No, it cannot, said the creature squatting on the ledge. I was careless. I went to sleep while waiting and I slept too long.
And that would have been a long sleep, Daniels told himself. A sleep so long that dribbling soil had mounded over it, that fallen boulders, cracked off the cliff by frost, had been buried in the soil and that a clump of birch had sprouted and grown into trees thirty feet high. There was a difference here in time rate that he could not comprehend.
But some of the rest, he told himself, he had sensed—the devoted loyalty and the mindless patience of the creature that tracked another far among the stars. He knew he was right, for the mind of that other thing, that devoted star-dog perched upon the ledge, came into him and fastened on his mind and for a moment the two of them, the two minds, for all their differences, merged into a single mind in a gesture of fellowship and basic understanding, as if for the first time in what must have been millions of years this baying hound from outer space had found a creature that could understand its duty and its purpose.
“We could try to dig it out,” said Daniels. “I had thought of that, of course, but I was afraid that it would be injured. And it would be hard to convince anyone—”
No, said the creature, digging would not do. There is much you do not understand. But this other proposal that you have, that has great merit. You say you do not have the knowledge of genetics to take this action now. Have you talked to others of your kind?
“I talked to one,” said Daniels, “and he would not listen. He thought I was mad. But he was not, after all, the man I should have spoken to. In time I could talk with others but not right now. No matter how much I might want to—I can’t. For they would laugh at me and I could not stand their laughter. But in a hundred years or somewhat less I could—”
But you will not exist a hundred years, said the faithful dog. You are a short-lived species. Which might explain your rapid rise. All life here is short-lived and that gives evolution a chance to build intelligence. When I first came here I found but mindless entities.
“You are right,” said Daniels. “I can live no hundred years. Even from the very start, I could not live a hundred years, and better than half of my life is gone. Perhaps much more than half of it. For unless I can get out of this cave I will be dead in days.”
Reach out, said the sparkling one. Reach out and touch me, being.
Slowly Daniels reached out. His hand went through the sparkle and the shine and he had no sense of matter—it was as if he’d moved his hand through nothing but air.
You see, the creature said, I cannot help you. There is no way for our energies to interact. I am sorry, friend. (it was not friend, exactly, but it was good enough, and it might have been, Daniels thought, a great deal more than friend.)
“I am sorry, too,” said Daniels. “I would like to live.”
Silence fell between them, the soft and brooding silence of a snow-laden afternoon with nothing but the trees and the rock and the hidden little life to share the silence with them.
It had been for nothing, then, Daniels told himself, this meeting with a creature from another world. Unless he could somehow get off this ledge there was nothing he could do. Although why he should so concern himself with the rescue of the creature in the stone he could not understand. Surely whether he himself lived or died should be of more importance to him than that his death would foreclose any chance of help to the buried alien.