The Stone God Awakens Read online

  She said something, and he repeated his name. It was evident that she was trying to repeat the words, though she may not have guessed that he was saying his name.

  After a while, she was able to say, "Wurisa Asiingagna Wapiira."

  That was as close as she could come to mastering English sounds.

  He shrugged. It was up to him to adapt. He would learn their language.

  "Wurisa," he said, and he smiled.

  Most of them looked puzzled, and only much later did he find out why. After all, one expects one's god to be able to speak the language of his worshipers. But here was their god and saviour, the one for whom they had been waiting for hundreds of years, no more able than a newborn to speak the tongue of the gods.

  Fortunately, the Wufea were as able to rationalise as human beings. Their chief priest and his daughter, Awina, advanced the explanation that he had been put under a spell by Wurutana, the Great Devourer, when Wuwiso, the god of the Wufea, had been turned to stone. Wuwiso had forgotten his language, but he would quickly relearn it.

  Awina was his chief instructor. She stayed by him almost all the time, and since she loved to talk, even with a god who half-terrified her, she taught him swiftly. She was intelligent—sometimes he thought she was more intelligent than he—and she conceived of many ways to speed up his learning.

  She also had a sense of humour, and when Ulysses understood a pun she made he knew that he was advancing swiftly. He was so pleased with himself, and with her, that he almost kissed her. And then he caught himself, as it were, by the back of the neck and pulled himself back. He had been growing very fond of this delicate, sinuous, laughing creature. But he did not intend to get that fond. Nevertheless, she was the focal point, an island in an unknown universe and a shifting sea, and she was very pleasant to be with. When she was gone, he felt unease ooze in, like lava beneath an iron door.

  By the time he recognised her first pun, he had become acquainted with the interior of the village and the area a few miles around it. A dozen young warriors and a priest always accompanied him. They walked in any direction for several miles, but after a certain distance, they stopped him. He wanted to go on, but on the other hand he did not feel ready to force any issues with those who were, after all, his wardens.

  North and west, the country was high rolling hills, lakes, and several small rivers and many creeks. It was like that around Syracuse. East, after a few miles of hills, was a large forest of evergreens. South, the country was hilly for two miles and then suddenly a plain began. It ran for as far as he could see from the top of a hill approximately eight hundred feet high. On the horizon was a great dark bulk that he thought might be a mountain range. Then, the second trip, he decided it was a cloudbank. The third trip, he concluded that he did not know what it could be.

  He asked Awina about it, and she looked at him strangely and said, "Wurutana!" She sounded as if she did not understand why he would have to ask her about it.

  Wurutana, he knew by then, meant the Great Devourer. It also meant something else, but he did not know the language well enough yet to catch certain subtleties.

  According to Awina, there were other Wufea villages to the north and east. Their enemies, who called themselves Wagarondit, lived to the west and the north. There were about two hundred people in this village and about three thousand Wufea altogether.

  The Wagarondit had their own language, unrelated to Wufea, but both groups used a third language, a trade language, for communication. This speech was called Ayrata.

  The Wufea neither had metal of their own, nor had they heard of it. Singing Bear's knife was the first they had seen of steel.

  Moreover, they did not know about the bow. He could not understand this. They might not know metal because there might not be any in this area.

  But even Old Stone Age peoples should have the bow and arrow. Then he remembered the Australian aborigine, who had been so technologically backward that he had not discovered the principles of archery. There was no reason why he should not have done so. He was intelligent enough. But he had not invented the bow. And then there was the Amerindian, some of whom had made wheels for the toys of their children. Yet they had never applied the principle to making big wagons or wheelbarrows or carts.

  On his trips, especially to the east, he looked around for suitable wood and found a tree that resembled the yew. He had his guards chop off branches with their stone axes, and they brought the wood back. There he got the gut and the feathers he needed and, after suitable experimentation, produced a number of bows and arrows.

  The Wufea were amazed, but they caught on to the uses of the bow quickly enough. After a little practice on the grass targets he put up, they brought out a Wagarondit prisoner. They marched him to beyond the fields and there told him to get going.

  Ulysses had hesitated, because he did not know how far he could extend his authority. He knew by then that he was some sort of a god. They had told him that and even if they had not, he could have guessed from their attitude. He had even taken part in several ceremonies in the not-as-yet-rebuilt temple. But just what kind of a god and how powerful he was, he did not know. Now seemed as good a time as any to find out. He had no reason to intercede for the Wagarondit, but he found himself unable not to. He could not stand by while the young warriors tried out their marksmanship on the racoon-man.

  At first, some of the Wufea seemed inclined to argue. They looked hard at him and a few even muttered something. But nobody openly opposed him, and when the chief priest, Awina's father, Aytheera, stormed at them, waving his wand with its serpent and big bird heads and rattling pebbles in a gourd, he succeeded in scaring them. The gist of his speech was that they were under a new regime. Their ideas of what a god should be did not necessarily coincide with the god's own ideas. If they did not straighten out quickly, they might find themselves turned to stone by lightning thrown by the god. This would reverse the procedure by which the stone god had awakened, become fleshed, and once again walked among them.

  This was the first time that Singing Bear had any hint of what had happened to him. He asked Awina about it later, couching his questions so that she would not know how deep his ignorance was. She smiled slyly and looked at him out of the corner of her huge, slit-irised eyes. Perhaps she had caught on to the fact that he did not know what had happened. But if she were intelligent enough to comprehend this, she was also intelligent enough to know that she should keep her mouth shut.

  He had been stone. He was found on the bottom of a lake that had been emptied by a great earthquake. He was attached to a stone chair, and his elbows were on a piece of stone. He was sitting in the stone chair and leaning forward. He was so heavy that it took the efforts of all the males of two villages to lift him out of the mud and drag him on rollers to the larger of the villages. There he had been set up on the granite throne which had been prepared for him many generations before.

  Ulysses Singing Bear asked her about the throne. Who had prepared it? He had seen nothing to indicate that the Wufea carved stone.

  The throne had been found in the ruins of a mighty city of the Ancients, she said. She was very vague about the identity of the Ancients or the location of the city. Somewhere to the south. In those days, twenty generations ago, the Wufea had been located many marches to the south. It was a plain then, with thousands of game animals roaming it. Then Wurutana had grown over the site of the villages and the city of the Ancients, and the Wufea had been forced to move northward to escape the shadow of Wurutana. Just as they would have had to move again in another generation if Wuwiso had not been hit by lightning and been unstoned, become fleshed.

  The lightning stroke, it seemed, had hit him during the storm that occurred when the Wagarondit attacked. It had also set fire to the temple. The other fires were set by the Wagarondit.

  That night, Ulysses went outside his new quarters in the temple. He looked up at the sky and wondered if he could be on Earth. He did not know how he could be elsewhere. But if he
was on Earth, what was the year?

  The stars formed unfamiliar constellations, and the moon seemed to be larger, as if it were nearer to Earth. Nor was it the naked, silver body he had known in 1985. In fact, it looked much like Earth as seen from a satellite. If it were the Moon, it had been terrafied. Its rocks had been treated to give it air, form soil and yield water. In history, there had been articles speculating on the possibility of terrafication, but the chances for even beginning the process would not occur until several centuries from then.

  If he was certain of one thing, other than that he was alive, it was that far more than a few centuries, or a few millennia, had passed since 1985.

  For one thing, it would take millions of years for a humanoid sentient to evolve from felines. In fact, the evolution should be, theoretically, impossible. The felines of his day were too specialised to change into these creatures. They were in a blind alley.

  It was, however, possible that the Wufea were not descended from felines. The Siamese cat appearance might be misleading. Perhaps they were descended from some other genus. Bipedal sentients might evolve from racoons. They were generalised enough. But human-handed bipedal sentients from the pussycat of his day?

  Maybe the cat-like Wufea and the racoon-like (but also cat-like) Wagarondit were descended from a racoon or maybe even a primate, a lemur, for instance. It did not seem likely, considering the eyes. In fact, it seemed impossible. And why the retention of the tails? They served no useful purpose of which he knew. Evolution had cut off the tails of the great apes of the hominids. Why had it not done so with these creatures?

  Also, there was the other animal life to consider. There were horses, smaller versions of the thoroughbreds of his day, which ranged the plains to the south. Another species, or variety, roamed the forest. They provided food for the Wufea, who had not as yet thought about riding them. The horses were unchanged in any significant features. But there was an animal with a delicate face and a giraffe-like neck that fed on the leaves of trees. He would swear that that animal was evolved from the horse.

  There was a flying squirrel, although not the gliding animal of his time; this had bat-like wings and flew like a bat. But it was a rodent, and it must have evolved from the gliding squirrel.

  There was also a bird, standing twelve feet high on very thick legs, which looked very much as if its ancestor had been the tiny roadrunner of the Southwest.

  And there were other animals whose existence meant many millions of years of evolution from the forms he had known.

  Awina had been curious about his life before he was turned into stone. He thought it better to say little about it until he found out what she expected his life to have been. She told him the few religious stories about Wuwiso. Essentially, he was one of the ancient gods, the only one to have survived a terrifying battle between them and Wurutana, the Great Devourer. Wurutana had conquered, and the other gods were destroyed. All except Wuwiso. He had escaped, but to trick his enemy, who was tracking him down, he had turned himself into stone. Wurutana had not been able to damage the stone god, but he had taken the god and buried him under a mountain where nobody would ever find him. Then Wurutana had started to grow, to cover the Earth.

  In the meantime, Wuwiso lay at the heart of the mountain, unfeeling, unknowing, uncaring. And Wurutana was happy about this. But even Wurutana was not as great as the greatest of all gods, Time. Time washed away the mountain, and eventually a river carried the stone god down a canyon and deposited him at the bottom of a deep lake. And then an earthquake tilted the lake and dumped out the waters and the Wufea found the stone god, as was prophesied. And the Wufea had been waiting for many generations, waiting for the prophesied stroke of lightning which would bring their deliverer back to life. And, finally, at the hour of the Wufea's greatest peril, as had been foretold, the storm had covered the land and the lightning stroke had freed Wuwiso from the bonds of stone.

  Ulysses Singing Bear did not doubt that there were some elements of truth in this myth.

  In 1985—how many epochs ago?—he was a biophysicist working on Project Niobe. He was halfway through getting his Ph.D. at nearby Syracuse University. The goal of the project was the development of a "matter-freezer," as it was referred to by the project workers. The device was capable of stopping for an indeterminate time all atomic movement in a piece of matter. The molecules and the atoms, and the parts that made up the atoms—the protons, neutrons and so forth—would cease all motion. A bacterium subjected to the energy complex rayed out by the matter-freezer would become a microscopic statue. It would be as if made of stone but of an indestructible stone. Nothing—acids, explosives, atomic radiation, great heat—could destroy it.

  The device had possibilities both as a preserving agent and as a "death ray," or a "life ray," if one preferred that term. But, so far, it was impractical because of its extreme short range and its demand for enormous power. Also, there was not even a theory as to how the "petrified" matter could be "depetrified."

  Bacteria, a sea urchin egg, an earthworm and a rat had been "petrified." The morning that Ulysses fell into his long sleep, he was working on an experiment in which a pygmy laboratory pig would be rayed. If the experiment was successful, the next step would be to petrify a pony.

  Everything had gone as before—up to a point. Ulysses was seated at his desk but was almost ready to get up and walk across the room to the control console he supervised. The power had been turned on, and the matter-freezer was warming up. Across his desk he could see the panel which held the power indicators and a number of other meters and gauges.

  Suddenly, the needle of the big power meter had swung around to the red. The operators had cried out, and one had jumped up. Ulysses had looked up just as the needle swung around. And that was all he remembered. There was nothing between then and the time he had opened his eyes in the burning temple.

  It was simple enough to figure out what had happened, in a general fashion. Something had given way in the complicated device; the device had blown up or shot out a thin and concentrated ray which, theoretically, it was not yet capable of producing. And he, Ulysses Singing Bear, had been caught. "Petrified." Whether the others had escaped or had also been turned into "stone," he did not know. He might never know.

  And so aeons had passed while he existed as a statue of matter harder than anything in the universe. He could have been in that form when the sun blew up and shattered the Earth and sent him tumbling among the great fragments outward through space and toward the stars. For all he knew, that very event had happened, and he had drifted for millions, maybe trillions and trillions of years, while galaxies died and new ones formed. Or all matter in the oscillating universe rushed back to form a primal atom and then blew again and he was hurled at speeds half the speed of light out, and then was caught in newly forming matter, perhaps was the nucleus of a planet. Perhaps he was inside a new star and was ejected during an unimaginably vast eruption into space and was caught by the gravity field of a planet and was sucked down and had burned up tons of air in his fall and smashed deep into the earth. And there he lay while the primeval freshwater oceans changed to saltier matter. And the continents split and floated away from each other, drifting on the face of the earth. And he was lifted up with the formation of new mountain ranges and was exposed by earthquakes, by volcanic eruptions casting him out, by erosion of wind and water many, many times. And after innumerable burials and exposures, he at last came into the hands of the Wufea. And they set him up on a granite throne. And, at last, whether due to the action of the lightning stroke only, or its combination with the naturally decaying effects of the matter-freezer, he had turned from "stone" into flesh in a microsecond. So swiftly that his heart, interrupted in its beat for God knew how many aeons, had continued the systole or diastole, not even knowing that it had been silent and frozen for ages.

  His fantasy, he thought, was a vivid one, and contained certain truths, but he did not think that he was in a new universe. He thought tha
t he was still on Earth, no matter how ancient it was. It was too much of a coincidence that this planet had a moon so much like the moon he had known or that it had horses and rabbits and many insects exactly like those he had known.

  Being born from stone was enough of a shock. It could have unhinged the minds of many men, and Singing Bear was not sure that he would be able to stay in one mental piece. But after the shock wore off, the loneliness began to hurt.

  It was painful enough to know that all your contemporaries and their grandchildren for hundreds of thousands of generations were dust. But to know that you were the only human being alive was almost unendurable.

  He could not be sure that he was the only human being on Earth, and this uncertainty kept him from plunging into despair. There was always hope.

  At least, he was not the only sentient alive. He did have many people to talk to, even if the speakers were so alien that they often repelled him, and the language contained concepts he could not quite understand, and their attitudes were sometimes puzzling or infuriating.