“Tell me,” he said, “tell me what it was like, the coming into being.”
Her lashes fell over her eyes. “I was on the hillside,” she said. “By the smooth black barrier.”
To kill the long silence, he took her by the waist and settled into a horizontal position. So they lay, with their faces close together, sharing the same breath, as they had done before, and as Utliff had done with her in the days before he wore out.
He felt there was something else he should do. But in his head no prompting occurred, and his body seemed inhabited only by dreams without a name, dreams either hopelessly happy or hopelessly sad. Semary’s eyes were closed. But something told him that strange though she was, she felt the same turmoil as he.
Utliff had felt it too. When they had both lain against Semary before, Dyak had been so startled by the things in his head, he had talked about it to Utliff. He was afraid that he alone felt that strange uncertain sweetness; but Utliff admitted that he had been filled with the same things, head and body. When they tried lying close to the women of their own group, the feeling had persisted. Keen to experiment, they had lain close to each other, but then the feeling had not been there, and instead they had only laughed.
The long silence closed over them again. Semary’s smell was sweet.
Dyak lay and looked up at the trees. He saw a cicada on a branch nearby, a gigantic beast that almost bent double the bough it rested on, its body at least as long as a man’s arm. They made good food, but he was full of a hunger beyond hunger just now. The sound and feel of his world cradled him and ran through him.
Unexpectedly, she said, her voice warm in his ear, “Two people have become worn out today, in different ways. Utliff was one, Artet the other. Artet is a girl of my group. The cruncher got her. You know we are near the lair of the cruncher. He dragged Artet there, but her blood was already let.”
“Did you forget to tell me before now?”
“I was coming to tell you when the foul thing overcame Utliff. Then your warmth near me made me forget.”
Sulkily, Dyak said, “The cruncher got across the river where the waters run shallow. It used to eat the quackers, for I watched it often from our hill. Now that it has come across to this side, it is too stupid to go back. Soon it will starve to death. Then we shall all be safe.”
“It will not starve until it has eaten all of us. We cannot be safe with it, Dyak. You must let its blood and wear it out.”
He sat up, and then crouched beside her, angry. “Get your men to do the work. Why me? Our group is safe up on the hill in our deep caves. The cruncher is no bother to me. Why do you say this to me, Semary?”
She too sat up and stared at him. She brushed a remaining leaf from her breast. “I want you to do the thing because I want most to lie by you. I will always lie by you and not by our stinking men, if you shed the blood of the cruncher. If you will not do this for me, I swear I will go with the other stinking men and lie by them.”
He grasped her wrist roughly. “You shall be with no men but me, Semary! You think I am afraid to let the blood of the cruncher? Of course I am not!”
Semary smiled at him, as if she enjoyed his roughness.
II
Dr. Ian Swanwick was growing increasingly bored, and growing increasingly less reluctant to show it. Several times, he lifted his face from his scanner and looked at the gray head of Graham Scarfe, with its ears and face enveloped in the next scanner. He coughed once or twice, with increasing emphasis, until Scarfe looked up.
“Oh, Dr. Swanwick. I forgot—you have a jet to catch back to Washington. Forgive me! Once I look into the scanner, I become so engrossed in their problems.”
“I’m sure it must be engrossing if you can understand their language,” Swanwick said.
“Oh, it’s an easy language to understand. Simple. Few words, you know. Few tenses, few conjugations. Not that I’m any sort of a language specialist. We have several of them dropping in on us, including the great Professor Reardon, the etymologist. . . . I’m just—well, I’m just a model maker at heart. Not a professional man at all. I started as a child of eight, making a model of the old American Acheson, Topeka and Santa Fe steam railway, as it would have been in the early years of last century.”
Chiefly because he was none too anxious to hear about that, Dr. Swanwick said, “Well, you have done a remarkable job on this tridiorama.”
Nodding, Scarfe took the theologian’s arm and led him away from the bank of scanners with their hand controls to the rail that fringed the platform on which they stood. They were high here, so high that the distant spires of New Brasilia could be seen framed between two mountain ranges. In the other direction stretched the South American continent, leaden with a heat that the air-conditioning did not entirely keep from their tower,
“If I have done a remarkable job,” Scarfe said, gazing over the rail, “I copied it from a more remarkable one. From Nature itself.”
Scarfe’s gentle old voice, and his woolly gesture as he pointed out at the landscape before them, contrasted with the urban manner and clothes and the brisk voice of Dr. Swanwick. But Swanwick was silent for a moment as he stared over the country through which a river wound. That river flowed from distant mountains now shrouded in heat and curved below the hill on which they stood. Over on the opposite bank lay a region of swamp.
“You’ve made a good copy,” he said. “The tridiorama is amazingly like the real thing.”
“I thought you would approve, Dr. Swanwick. You especially,” Scarfe said with an affectionate chuckle.
“Oh? Why’s that?”
“Come now, the Maker’s handiwork, you know ... As a theologian, I thought that angle would especially appeal to you. Mine’s a poor copy compared with His, I know.” He chuckled again, a little confused that he was not winning a responding chuckle from Swanwick.
“Theology does not necessarily imply a sentimental fondness for the Almighty. Laymen never understand that theology is simply a science that treats of the phenomena and facts of religion. As I say, I admire the skill of your modeling, and the way you have copied a real landscape; but that is not to say that I approve of it.”
Nodding his head in an old man’s fashion, Scarfe appeared to listen to the cicadas for a minute.
Then he said, “When I said I thought you would approve, perhaps you got me wrong. What I meant was that the tridiorama could present you people at the St. Benedict’s Theological College with a chance to study a controlled experiment in your own line, as it has done to anthropologists and paleontologists and zoologists and pre-historians and I don’t know who else. I mean . . .” He was a simple man, and confused by the superiority of this man who, as he began to perceive, did not greatly like him. In consequence he slipped into a more lax way of talk. “What I mean is, that the goings-on down in the tri-di are surely something to do with you people, aren’t they?”
“Sorry, I don’t get your meaning, Mr. Scarfe.”
“Like we said in the letter to you, inviting you here. These stone-age people we’ve got—don’t you want to see how they get along with religion? I admit that as yet they don’t appear to have formed any—not even myths—but that in itself may be significant.”
Turning his back on the hills, Swanwick said, “Since your little people are synthetic, their feelings are not of interest to St. Benedict’s. We study the relationship between God and man, not between men and models. That, I’m afraid, will probably be our ultimate verdict, when I give my report to the board. We may even add a rider to the effect that the experiment is unethical.”