The spearhead groups pushed relentlessly across the gleaming blackness, and each generation grew more restless than the one before it. The restless moved ahead. The contented remained at home. Each exodus was a separation, and a selection of the malcontent.
The biped came to believe his priests. He believed the legend of the lost home. He believed that Bion had touched him with the hunger curse. How else could they explain the pressing cry of the heart? How could they interpret the clamor of the young, the tears—except as a Divine Thirst.
The star-craze. The endless search.
There was a green planet beyond the heartland, and it was ripe for bursting its human star-seed. There was a launching field, and a ship, and teeming crowd, and a fence with guards to keep the others out. A man and a girl stood at the fence, and it was nearly dawn.
He touched her arm and gazed at the shadows on the launching site.
“We won’t find it, Marka,” he said quietly. “We’ll never find it.”
“You believe the legend, Teris?” she whispered.
“The Planet of Heaven? It’s up there. But we can never find it.”
“Then why must you look?”
“We are damned, Marka.”
There was a silence, then she breathed, “It can be found. The Lord Bion promised—”
“Where is that written, Marka?” he scoffed coldly.
“In a woman’s heart.”
Teris laughed loudly. “What does the heart-writing say?”
She turned to stare at the dark shadow of the ship against the graying sky. “It says: ‘When Man is content—without his lost paradise—when he reconciles himself—Bich will forgive, and show us the road home.’”
He waved his hand fiercely at the fading stars in the west. “Ours, Marka. They’re ours! We took them.”
“Do you want them?”
He stiffened angrily and glared at the shadow of her face. “You… you make me sick. You’re a hanghacker.”
“No!” She shook her head wildly. “No!” She caught at his arm as he retreated a step. “I wish I could go! I want to go, do you hear?”
“I hear,” he snapped. “But you can’t, so there’s no use talking about it. You’re not well, Marka. The others wouldn’t let you aboard.” He backed away another step.
“I love you,” she said frantically.
He turned and stumbled away toward the sky-chariot. “I love you!”
He began to trot, then burst into a wild sprint. Afraid, she thought in triumph. Afraid of turning back. Of loving her too much.
“You’ll never find it!” she screamed after him. “You can’t find it up there! It’s here—right here!”
But he was lost in the crowd that milled about the ship. The ship had opened its hatches. The ship was devouring the people, two at a time. The ship devoured Teris and the space crew. Then it closed its mouth and belched flame from its rockets.
She gasped and slumped against a fencepost. She hung there sobbing until a guard drove her away.
A rocket bellowed the space song. The girl tore off her wedding bracelet and flung it in the gutter. Then she went home to fix breakfast for the children.
I am the Weaver of space. I am a Merchant of new fabrics in flux patterns for five-space continua. I serve the biped who built me, though his heart he steeped in hell.
Once in space, a man looked at me and murmured softly, “You are the cross on which we crucify ourselves.”
But the big hunger pushed him on—on toward the ends of space. And he encountered worlds where his ancestors had lived, and where his peaceful cousins still dwelt in symbiosis with their neighbors. Some of the worlds were civilized, some barbaric, and some were archaeological graveyards. My nomads, they wore haunted faces as they re-explored the fringes of the galaxy where Man had walked before, leaving his footprints and his peace-seeking children. The galaxy was filled.
Where could he go now?
I have seen the frantic despair in their faces when, upon landing, natives appeared and greeted them politely, or tried to kill them, or worshiped them, or just ran away to hide. The nomads lurked near their ships. A planet with teeming cities was no place for a wanderer. They watched the multifaceted civilizations with bitter, lonely eyes.
Where were new planets?
Across the great emptiness to the Andromeda galaxy? Too far for the ships to go. Out to the Magellanic clouds? Already visited.
Where then?
He groped blindly, this biped. He had forgottgn the trail by which his ancestors had come, and he kept re-crossing it, finding it winding everywhere. He could only plunge aimlessly on, and when he reached the last limit of his fuel—land. If the natives could not provide the fuel, he would have to stay, and try to pass another cycle of starward growth on the already inhabited world. But a cycle was seldom completed. The nomads intermarried with the local people; the children, the hybrid children, were less steeped in hunger than their fathers. Sometimes they built ships for economic purposes, for trade and commerce—but never for the hysterical starward sweep. They heard no music from the North End of Space, no Lorelei call from the void. The craving was slowly dying.
They came to a planet. The natives called it “Earth.” They departed again in cold fright, and a space commander blew out his brains to banish the memory. Then they found another planet that called itself “Earth”—and another and another. They smiled again, knowing that they would never know which was the true home of Man.
They sensed the nearness of the end.
They no longer sang the old songs of a forgotten paradise. And there were no priests among them. They looked back at the Milky Way, and it had been their royal road. They looked ahead, where only scattered stars separated them from the intergalactic wasteland—an ocean of emptiness and death. They could not consign themselves to its ultimate embrace. They had fought too long, labored too hard to surrender willingly to extinction.
But the cup of their life was broken.
And to the land’s last limit they came.
They found a planet with a single moon, with green forests, with thin clouds draping her gold and blue body in the sunlight. The breath of the snowking was white on her ice caps, and her seas were placid green. They landed. They smiled when the natives called the planet “Earth.” Lots of planets claimed the distinction of being Man’s birthplace.
Among the natives there was a dumpy little professor—still human, though slightly evolved. On the night following the nomad’s landing, he sat huddled in an easy-chair, staring at the gaunt nomadic giant whose bald head nearly touched the ceiling of the professor’s library. The professor slowly shook his head and sighed.
“I can’t understand you people.”
“Nor I you,” rumbled the nomad.
“Here is Earth—yet you won’t believe it!”
The giant snorted contemptuously. “Who cares? Is this crumb in space the fulfillment of a dream?”
“You dreamed of a lost Earth paradise.”
“So we thought. But who knows the real longing of a dream? Where is its end? Its goal?”
“We found ours here on Earth.”
The giant made a wry mouth. “You’ve found nothing but your own smug existence. You’re a snake swallowing its tail.”
“Are you sure you’re not the same?” purred the scholar. The giant put his fists on his hips and glowered at him. The professor whitened.
“That’s untrue,” boomed the giant. “We’ve found nothing. And we’re through. At least we went searching. Now we’re finished.”
“Not you. Its the job that’s finished. You can live here. And be proud of a job well done.”