Elven brightened. These rustic folk faintly resembled his own Wild Ones. They seemed to have a touch of that reckless, ecstatic spirit so hated by the tame folk of the sos. (Though after a while the resemblance grew too painfully strong, and with an imperious gesture he moderated their gaiety.)
Meanwhile, by observation and question, he was swiftly learning, though what he learned was astonishing rather than helpful. These four young people were the sole inhabitants of their community. They knew nothing of any culture other than their own.
They had never seen the sun or the stars. Evidently this was a planet whose axes of rotation and of revolution around its sun were the same, so that the climate was always unvarying at each latitude, the present locality being under a cloud belt. Later he might check this, he told himself, by determining if the days and nights were always of equal length.
Strangest of all, the two couples had never been beyond the clearing. The thorn forest, which they conceived of as extending to infinity, was a barrier beyond their power to break. Fires, they told him, sizzled out against it. It swiftly dulled their sharpest axes. And they had a healthy awe of its diabolically sentient thorns.
All this suggested an obvious line of questioning.
“Where are your parents?” Elven asked Kors.
“Parents?” Kors’ brow wrinkled.
“You mean the shining ones?” Tulya broke in. She looked sad. “They are gone.”
“Shining ones?” Elven quizzed. “People like yourselves?” “Oh no. Beings of metal with wheels for feet and long, clever arms that bent anywhere.”
“I have always wished I were made of lovely, bright metal,” Sefora commented wistfully, “with wheels instead of ugly feet, and a sweet voice that never changed, and a mind that knew everything and never lost its temper.”
Tulya continued, “They told us when they went why they must go. So that we could live by our own powers alone, as all beings should. But we loved them and have always been sorry.”
There was no getting away from it, Elven decided after making some casual use of his special mind- searching powers to test the veracity of their answers. These four people had actually been reared by robots of some sort. But why? A dozen fantastic, unprovable possibilities occurred to him. He remembered what Fedris had said about the mystery of the universe, and smiled wryly.
Then it was his turn to answer questions, hesitant and awestricken ones. He replied simply, “I am a black angel from above. When God created his universe he decided it would be a pretty dull place if there weren’t a few souls in it willing to take all risks and dare all dangers. So here ana there among his infinite flocks of tame angels, sparingly, he introduced a wild strain, so that there would always be a few souls who would kick up their heels and jump any fences. Yes, and break the fences down too, exposing the tame flocks to night with its unknown beauties and dangers.” He smiled around impishly, the firelight making odd highlights on his lips and cheeks. “Just as I’ve broken down your thorn fence.”
It had been pitch black outside for some time. The wine jar was almost empty. Elven yawned. Immediately preparations were made for his rest. The cat got up from the hearth and came and rubbed Elven’s legs.
The first pale glow of dawn aroused Elven and he slipped out of bed so quietly that he wakened no one, not even the cat. For a moment he hesitated in the gray room heavy with the smell of embers and the lees of wine. It occurred to him that it would be rather pleasant to live out his life here as a sylvan god adored by nymphs and rustics.
But then his hand touched his throat and he shook his head. This was no place for him to accomplish his mission—for one thing, there weren’t enough people. He needed cities. With a last look at his blanket- huddled hostesses and hosts—Sefora’s hair had just begun to turn ruddy in the increasing light—he went out.
As he had expected, the thorn forest had long ago repaired the break he had made near the stream. He turned in the opposite direction and skirted the hill until he reached the green wall beyond. There, consulting his compass, he set his course away from the wrecked spaceboat. Then he began to dust.
By early afternoon—judging time from the changing intensity of the light—he had made a dozen miles and was thinking that perhaps he should have stayed at the wreck long enough to try to patch up a levitator. If only he could get up a hundred feet to see what—if anything—was going to happen to this ridiculous forest!
For it still fronted him unchangingly, like some wizard growth from a book of fairy tales. The glassy thorns still curved back and struck whenever he swayed too close. And behind him the green shoots still pushed up through the slaty powder.
He thought, what a transition—from ultraphotonic flight in a space-boat, to this worm’s-crawl. Enough to bore a Wild One to desperation, to make him think twice of the simple delights of a lif e spent as a sylvan god.
But then he unfastened the locket at his throat and took out the tiny white sphere. His smile became an inspired one as he gazed at it gleaming on his palm.
Only one of the Wild Ones had escaped from their beleaguered planet, Fedris had said.
What did Fedris know!
He knew that before Elven reached his spaceboat, he had escaped in disguise through the tremendous cordons of the sos. That in the course of that escape he had twice been searched so thoroughly that it would have been a miracle if he could have concealed more than this one tiny tablet.
But this one tiny tablet was enough.
In it were all the Wild Ones.
Early humans had often been fascinated by the idea of an invisible man. Yet it hadn’t occurred to them that the invisible man has always existed, that each one of us begins as an invisible man—the single cell from which each human grows.
Here in this white tablet were the genetic elements of all the Wild Ones, the chromosomes and genes of each individual. Here were fire-eyed Vlana, swashbuckling Nar, softlaughing Forten—they, and a billion others! The identical twins of each last person destroyed with the planet of the Wild Ones, waiting only encasement in suitable denucleated growth cells and nurture in some suitable mother. All rolling about prettily in Elven’s palm.
So much for the physical inheritance.
And as for the social inheritance, there was Elven.
Then it could all begin again. Once more the Wild Ones could dream their cosmos-storming dreams and face their beautiful dangers. Once more they could seek to create, if they chose, those giant atoms, seeds of new universes, because of which the sos had destroyed them. Back in the Dawn Age physicists had envisioned the single giant atom from which the whole universe had grown, and now it was time to see if more such atoms could be created from energy drawn from sub-space. And who were Fedris and Elven and the sos to say whether or not the new universes might—or should—destroy the old? What matter how the tame herds feared those beautiful, sub-microscopic eggs of creation? It must all begin again, Elven resolved.
Yet it was as much the feel of the thorn shoots rising under his feet, as his mighty resolve, that drove him on.
An hour later his duster disintegrated a tangle of boughs that had only sky behind it. He stepped into a clearing a half mile in diameter. Just ahead a bubbling stream went through a little valley, where russet grain rippled. Beyond the valley was a small, orchard-covered hill. On its hither side, low gray buildings clustered raggedly. From one rose a thread of smoke. A man came around the hill, driving cattle.
Elven’s second thought was that something must have gone wrong with his compass, some force must have been deflecting it steadily, to draw him back hi a circle.