Skinhead looked aside aloofly and grumbled: “And what’s the volvox for then? Ultimately, it’s entirely possible . . . Just a bit.”
Sister pressed her hands to her breast and almost wept. The Newling sat down alongside the Judean and began to dig the earth near Manikin’s feet. Skinhead dug the sand near the head . . .
The legs, which soon appeared out of the sand, were cracked with tubules of rolled-up paint exactly like those the Newling had had not long ago . . .
She scraped away the paint. Under it was a layer of dense material, but it was damp, claylike, not at all resembling the new pink skin the Newling had discovered under her worn shell. Skinhead worked on the head, removing some tattered patches of skin or paper.
“Let me warm it up a bit.” The Judean gently moved Skinhead to the side.
“That’s a good idea,” Skinhead nodded. “Warrior, gather some tinder . . .”
The man in the military jacket nodded, and then appeared with several dry branches, which he fashioned into a vertical stack. The Judean approached, extended his arm, barely bent his finger, moved his thin lips, and the branches ignited with a bluish-white flame. They dug out the manikin. It was crude, its face poorly outlined, its arms and legs clumsily fashioned. Its sex was very distinct, and its entire configuration was expressly male, with wide shoulders, and with fingers, feet, and a penis that were disproportionately large. The figure emitted not the slightest signs of life.
“Volvox,” Skinhead said into the air, addressing no one in particular.
The Judean, having anxiously palpated the manikin’s neck and touched its stomach, frowned: “The material hasn’t set. It’s hopeless . . . We’ll all lose a stage and achieve nothing.”
Skinhead was silent for a moment, thought, and said quietly so that the Newling would not hear: “You and your Jewish caution are keeping me from doing my job. I’m a doctor, after all . . . I’m supposed to do everything possible to save the patient.”
The Judean laughed and brusquely pushed aside Skinhead with a fist to his stomach: “Fool! I told you: doctors are fallen priests. You spent your whole life practicing secular medicine and now you want to foist it on us here.”
“You’re the fool,” Skinhead snapped without malice and completely pro forma. “You believers have no sense of professional duty. You’ve dumped all your problems on the shoulders of your Lord God . . . When it comes down to it, volvox is nothing more than an exercise in energy . . .”
“Okay, okay, I don’t object,” agreed the Judean with a smile, and the Newling guessed that they were very close friends and that the connection between them was somewhat different from that among the others present here . . .
The Newling felt with the skin on her face that the usually weak wind had picked up, and grains of sand were striking her lightly in the cheeks and forehead and burying themselves in her hair. The wind bore not just sand but thin stalks of grass, weblike clumps of prickly leaves, fragile vegetative threads, and dry moss. The fire burned, inclining slightly toward the ground, but with no intention of dying out.
The human manikin lay on the ground alongside the fire, and everyone stood around, waiting for something to happen. Skinhead pulled a ball of rather coarse thread out of his pocket and passed it to Warrior standing nearby. Having gone full circle, the ball returned to Skinhead. Everyone held the thread with two hands. To the right of the Newling stood Sister; to her left—Limper. The wind intensified, its direction impossible to determine as it blew from all sides and carried more and more vegetative rubbish. They all stood motionless, and dry stalks of grass, weblike fibers, and flying seeds of unknown plants stuck to their hair and their clothes; they clung to the thread stretched between them, and after a while they formed a circular fence of vegetative rubbish, open only at the top, while at their feet, alongside the fluttering flame, the crude manikin lay motionless. The Judean raised his arm over his head toward the very center of the opening, and the opening was covered over, forming the semblance of an ancient hut. The Newling sensed that her breathing was inconsonant with that of all the others, and she held her breath in order to join their common rhythm. Having done so, she discovered that besides their common breathing, they shared a common heartbeat and a common will directed at the insensible log, which seemed even to be resisting them, at least it displayed a certain discernable resistance to their common effort, to what might even have been called work. A very strong pulsation came from Sister on one side of her, while Limper merely designated his presence. The two strongest engines were Skinhead’s and the Judean’s.
The wind continued to rise, and standing was difficult, but the thread, which had seemed to be so flimsy, was durable, and it too conducted a flow of energy. The thread began to glow slightly, with the same pale-blue light as the fire, and the Newling felt their sphere lifting off the ground and suspended in the air. The manikin lying on the ground trembled, shuddered, and rose slightly off the ground.
“There, it’s working.” She heard Skinhead’s satisfied voice. “Now we just need to breathe on it real hard.”
They blew with all their might, and from the force of their breathing their sphere even expanded and contracted slightly, as if it too were breathing, and although the wind was carrying them off in some indeterminable direction, the Newling had the happy feeling of a child doing everything well and correctly and worthy of praise . . .
The stuffed manikin down below showed yet another sign of revivaclass="underline" its chest rose in a deep breath, and its penis became obviously erect. The manikin began to breathe, the wind immediately began to die down, the sphere started to settle, and soon they touched down on the earth. The vegetative walls of their air hut collapsed, and they all stood in a circle, still clenching the thread, around the reviving manikin, which moved its arm, ran its fingers across its chest, as if scratching itself, touched its flat—as had now become apparent—head, and coughed.
“Well? Is anything happening?” the Judean asked.
“The lungs are breathing, there’s a grasp reflex, and an erection,” Skinhead responded.
“Not a lot, but better than nothing,” smirked the Judean.
Together the Judean and Skinhead dragged Manikin closer to the flame. It had become softer and now more resembled a human being in a deep sleep than a tailor’s dummy.
The Newling felt that her strength was abandoning her, and she dropped to the ground. Looking about, she noticed that all of the people looked exhausted and half-asleep. The Judean threw powdered fuel from a matchbox into the fire, which made the flame glow dark blue and emit its nourishing light even more mightily . . .
4
THE QUALITY OF THE AIR VARIED: SOMETIMES IT WAS LIGHT, dry, and “well-disposed,” as the Newling referred to it, and sometimes it grew heavy, dense, and seemingly filled with a dark moisture. When that happened, they would all move more slowly and tire more quickly. The wind, which never for a moment abandoned their caravan, also could shift: it might beat at your face, or cleverly peck at you from the side, or breathe down your neck. The light, however, always remained the same, and this more than anything else created the sensation of tiresome monotony.
“Tired of the local landscape?” the Judean quietly asked Skinhead. The Newling, who at rest stops tried to keep close to these men whose proximity made her feel more self-assured and protected, did not turn her head, although she overheard the quiet remark.
“Got anything more cheerful to propose?” Skinhead responded offhandedly.
“A small detour off the main route? Any objections?”
“That’s news to me: you mean there’s a route? And I thought that we were stomping around in a circle for some higher purpose.” Skinhead smirked. He had long ago tired of the monotonous dim transitory light that deceptively promised the approach of either total darkness or sunrise . . . “I can tolerate the landscape: a desert like any other . . . If only there were sun . . .”