The bear stepped back, awed by an opponent twice its size, suddenly unsure.
She advanced.
‘No! Stop!’ Dandi cried.
Instead of fighting the bear, she fought her Mentor, hating his hate. Her mind twisted, her dim mind full of that steely fishy one, as she blocked his resolution.
‘I’m for peace!’ she cried.
‘Then kill the bear!’
‘I’m for peace, not killing!’
She rocked back and forth. When she staggered into a wall, it shook; dust spread in the old room. The Mentor’s fury was terrible to feel.
‘Get out quickly!’ Dandi called to the bear.
Hesitating, it stared at her. Then it turned and made for the window. For a moment it hung with its shaggy shabby hindquarters in the room. Momentarily she saw it for what it was, an old animal in an old world, without direction. It jumped. It was gone. Goats blared confusion on its retreat.
‘Bitch!’ screamed the Mentor. Insane with frustration, he hurled Dandi against the doorway with all the force of his mind.
Wood cracked and splintered. The lintel came crashing down. Brick and stone shifted, grumbled, fell. Powdered filth billowed up. With a great roar, one wall collapsed. Dandi struggled to get free. Her house was tumbling about her. It had never been intended to carry so much weight, so many centuries.
She reached the balcony and jumped clumsily to safety, just as the building avalanched in on itself, sending a great cloud of plaster and powdered mortar into the overhanging trees.
For a horribly long while the world was full of dust, goat bleats, and panic-stricken parakeets.
Heavily astride her baluchitherium once more, Dandi Lashadusa headed back to the empty region called Ghinomon. She fought her bitterness, trying to urge herself towards resignation.
All she had was destroyed—not that she set store by possessions: that was man trait. Much more terrible was the knowledge that her Mentor had left her for ever; she had transgressed too badly to be forgiven this time.
Suddenly she was lonely for his pernickety voice in her head, for the wisdom he fed her, for the scraps of dead knowledge he tossed her—yes, even for the love he gave her. She had never seen him, never could: yet no two beings could have been more intimate.
She missed too those other wards of his she would glimpse no more: the mole creature tunneling in Earth’s depths, the seal family that barked with laughter on a desolate coast, a senile gorilla that endlessly collected and classified spiders, an aurochs—seen only once, but then unforgettably—that lived with smaller creatures in an Arctic city it had helped build in the ice.
She was excommunicated.
Well, it was time for her to change, to disintegrate, to transsubstantiate into a pattern not of flesh but music. That discipline at least the Mentor had taught and could not take away.
‘This will do, Lass,’ she said.
Her gigantic mount stopped obediently. Lovingly she patted its neck. It was young; it would be free.
Following the dusty trail, she went ahead, alone. Somewhere far off one bird called. Coming to a mound of boulders, Dandi squatted among gorse, the points of which could not prick through her thick old coat.
Already her selected music poured through her head, already it seemed to loosen the chemical bonds of her being.
Why should she not choose an old hymn tune? She was an antiquarian. Things that were gone solaced her for things that were to come.
In her dim way, she had always stood out against her Mentor’s absolute hatred of men. The thing to hate was hatred. Men in their finer moments had risen above hate. Her death psalm was an instance of that—a multiple instance, for it had been fingered and changed over the ages, as the Mentor himself insisted, by men of a variety of races, all with their minds directed to worship rather than hate.
Locking herself into thought disciplines, Dandi began to dissolve. Man had needed machines to help him to do it, to fit into the Involutes. She was a lesser animaclass="underline" she could unbutton herself into the humbler shape of a musicolumn. It was just a matter of rearranging—and without pain she formed into a pattern that was not a shaggy megatherium body ... but an indigo column, hardly visible. . . .
Lass for a long while cropped thistle and cacti. Then she ambled forward to seek the hairy creature she fondly—and a little condescendingly—regarded as her equal. But of the sloth there was no sign.
Almost the only landmark was a faint violet-blue dye in the air. As the baluchitherium mare approached, a sweet old music grew in volume from the dye. It was a music almost as old as the landscape itself and certainly as much travelled, a tune once known to men as The Old Hundredth. And there were voices singing: ‘All creatures that on Earth do dwell. . . .’
BLUES AND BALLAD
by Theodore R. Cogswell and Gordon R. Dickson
Whether or not s-f did (before Punch-parodies) lack humor, it is certainly true that its best boffs have seldom seen print. (Or I should have said, type,) Fan magazines are usually mimeographed, and only the official programs of the annual fan conventions are ordinarily transcribed.
These Labor Day weekends are virtually Impossible to describe (without, at least, technicolor). But for spontaneous humor, song, skit, verse, quick-trigger emceeing, and sufficiency of the bon (mot or vivant), they would be hard to equal. In their songs, particularly—whether at national, international, or purely neighborly gatherings—s-f-ers in general antedated the recent return to roll-your-own, home-made music. Oddly, the music-story did not appear until recently, but s-f music (both in parody and in original) has been on-scene (behind the scenes) for years.
Herewith, a distinctive part of the tradition of the special world inside Science Fiction....
Words by Theodore R. Cogswell—Music: “John Henry” variation
Words and music by Theodore R. Cogswell
