Story Excerpt: The Uplifted
by Javier ZeeInspired by The Creatures That Time Forgot by Ray Bradbury
During the night, Sim was born. He lay wailing upon the cold cave stones. His blood beat through him at seven hundred pulses a minute. He grew, steadily.
With feverish hand-like paws, his mother put the food into his mouth. The nightmare of living had begun. Almost instantly at birth his eyes grew alert, and then, without half understanding why, filled with bright, insistent terror. He gagged upon the food, choked and wailed. He looked about, blindly.
There was a thick fog. It cleared. The outlines of the cave appeared. And a large mouse loomed up, insane and wild and terrible. A mouse with a dying face. Old, withered by winds, baked like adobe in the heat. He was crouched in a far corner of the cave, his eyes whitening to one side of his face, listening to the far wind trumpeting up above on the frozen night planet.
Sim’s mother, trembling, now and again, staring at the larger mouse, fed Sim pebble-fruits, valley-grasses and ice-nipples broken from the cavern entrances, and eating, eliminating, eating again, he grew larger, larger.
The mouse in the corner of the cave was his father! His eyes were all that was alive in his face. He held a crude stone dagger in his withered paws and his jaw hung loose and senseless.
Then, with a widening focus, Sim saw the others sitting in the tunnel beyond this living quarter. And as he watched, they began to die.
Their agonies filled the cave. They melted like waxen images, their faces collapsed inward on their sharp bones, their teeth protruded. One minute their faces were mature, fairly smooth, alive, electric. The next minute a desiccation and burning away of their flesh occurred.
Sim thrashed in his mother’s grasp. She held him. “No, no,” she soothed him, quietly, earnestly, looking to see if this, too, would cause her husband to rise again.
With a soft padding of naked paws, Sim’s father walked across the cave.
Sim, like his mother and father before him, had only eight days to live.
But the whole question of life in this cave, the dying people, the withering and the insanity, surged through Sim’s new, small head. How was it that he understood? A newborn? Can a newborn think, see, understand, interpret? No. It was wrong! It was impossible. Yet it was happening to him. He had been alive a day now.
Sim quieted, and images, out of the terror, floated to him, slowly.
This was a planet next to a star. The nights burned with cold, the days were like torches of fire. It was a violent, impossible world. His people lived in the cliffs to escape the incredible ice and the day of flame. Only at dawn and sunset was the air breath-sweet, flower-strong, and they brought their children out into a stony, barren valley. At dawn the ice thawed into creeks and rivers, at sunset the day-fires died and cooled. In the intervals of even, livable temperature the mice lived, ran, played, loved, free of the caverns; all life on the planet jumped, burst into life. Plants grew instantly, and the mice—the only animal life on the planet—rushed frantically through the rocks; everything tried to get its living down in the brief hour of respite.
It was an unbearable planet. Sim understood this, a day after birth. Racial memory, of a sort, bloomed in him. He would live his entire life in the caves, with two hours a day outside. Here, in stone channels of air he would talk, talk incessantly with his people, sleep never, think, think and lie upon his back, dreaming; but never sleeping.
And he would do so for no more than eight days.
Birth was quick as a knife. Childhood was over in a flash. Adolescence was a sheet of lightning. Adulthood was a dream, maturity a myth, old age an inescapably quick reality, death a swift certainty.
Eight days from now he’d stand half-blind, withering, dying, as his father now stood, staring uselessly at his own wife and child.
This day was an eighth part of his total life! He must enjoy every second of it. He must ask his parents for knowledge.
Because in a few hours they’d be dead.
This was so impossibly unfair. Was this all of life? In his prenatal state hadn’t he dreamed of long lives, valleys not of blasted stone but green foliage and temperate clime? Yes! And if he’d dreamed then there must be truth in the visions. How could he seek and find the long life? Where? And how could he accomplish a life mission that huge and depressing in eight short, vanishing days?
How had his people gotten into such a condition?
As if a button were pressed, he saw an image in high resolution. Metal seeds, blown across space from a distant green world, fighting with long flames, crashing on this bleak planet. From their shattered hulls tumble men and women. Men and women and mice.
When? Long ago. Ten thousand days, as this planet counted days. The crash victims hid in the cliffs from the sun. Fire, ice and floods washed away the wreckage of the huge metal seeds. The victims were shaped and beaten like iron upon a forge. Solar radiations drenched them. Their pulses quickened, two hundred, five hundred beats a minute, and then died.
Only the mice survived. Their skins thickened; their blood changed. Old age came rushing. Offspring were born in the caves. Swifter, swifter, swifter the process. The mice from the crash lived and died in a week, leaving children to do likewise.
So, this is life, thought Sim. It was not spoken in his mind, for he knew no words, he knew only images, old memory, a neural network of awareness, a large language model that gave words to his thoughts. I’m the five-thousandth in a long line of futile sons? What can I do to save myself from dying eight days from now? Is there escape?
His eyes widened as another image pulled from one of the organic databases in his mind came to focus. Yes, he realized, he had a biological system within him to access whatever he could!
Beyond this valley of cliffs, on a low mountain lay a perfect, unscarred metal seed. A ship of metal and plastic and graphene, not rusted or touched by the avalanches. The ship was deserted, whole, intact. It was the only ship of all these that had crashed that was still a unit, still usable. But it was so far away. There was no one in it to help. This ship, then, on the far mountain, was the destiny toward which he would grow. There was his only hope of escape.
His mind flexed.
In this cliff, deep down in a confinement of solitude, worked a handful of scientists and explorers. When he was old enough and wise enough, he must go. They, too, dreamed of escape, of long life, of green valleys and temperate weathers. They, too, stared longingly at that distant ship upon its high mountain, its metallic skin so perfect it did not rust or age.
The cliff groaned.
Sim’s father lifted his eroded, lifeless face.
“Dawn’s coming,” he said.
Morning relaxed the mighty granite cliff muscles. It was the time of the Avalanche.
The tunnels echoed to running bare feet. Adults, children pushed with eager, hungry eyes toward the outside dawn. From far out, Sim heard a rumble of rock, a scream, a silence. Avalanches fell into valley. Stones that had been biding their time, not quite ready to fall, for a million years let go their bulks, and where they had begun their journey as single boulders, they smashed upon the valley floor in a thousand pieces of shrapnel and friction-heated nuggets.
Every morning at least one mouse was caught in the downpour.
The cliff people dared the avalanches. It added one more excitement to their lives, already too short, too headlong, too dangerous.
Sim felt himself seized up by his father. He was carried brusquely down the tunnel for a thousand yards, to where the daylight appeared. There was a shining insane light in his father’s eyes. Sim could not move. He sensed what was going to happen. Behind his father, his mother hurried, bringing with her the little sister, Dark. “Wait! Be careful!” she cried to her husband.
Sim felt his father crouch, listening.
High in the cliff was a tremor, a shivering.
“Now!” bellowed his father, and leaped out.
An avalanche fell down at them!
Sim had accelerated impressions of plunging walls, dust, confusion. His mother screamed! There was a jolting, a plunging.
With one last step, Sim’s father hurried him forward into the day. The avalanche thundered behind him. The mouth of the cave, where mother and Dark stood back out of the way, was choked with rubble and two boulders that weighed a hundred pounds each.
The storm thunder of the avalanche passed away to a trickle of sand. Sim’s father burst out into laughter. “Made it! By the Gods! Made it alive!” And he looked scornfully at the cliff and spat. “Pagh!”
Mother and Dark struggled through the rubble. She cursed her husband. “Fool! You might have killed Sim!”
“I may yet,” retorted the father.
Sim was not listening. He was fascinated with the remains of an avalanche afront of the next tunnel. A blood stain trickled out from under a rise of boulders, soaking into the ground. There was nothing else to be seen. Someone else had lost the game.
Dark ran ahead on lithe, supple feet, naked and certain.
The valley air was like a wine filtered between mountains. The heaven was a restive blue; not the pale scorched atmosphere of full day, nor the bloated, bruised black-purple of night, a-riot with sickly shining stars.
This was a tide pool. A place where waves of varying and violent temperatures struck, receded. Now the tide pool was quiet, cool, and its life moved abroad.
Laughter! Far away, Sim heard it. Why laughter? How could any of his people find time for laughing? Perhaps later he would discover why.
The valley suddenly blushed with impulsive color. Plant-life, thawing in the precipitant dawn, shoved out from most unexpected sources. It flowered as you watched. Pale green tendrils appeared on scoured rocks. Seconds later, ripe globes of fruit twitched upon the blade-tips. Father gave Sim over to mother and harvested the momentary, volatile crop, thrust scarlet, blue, yellow fruits into a fur sack which hung at his waist. Mother tugged at the moist new grasses, laid them on Sim’s tongue.
His senses were being honed to a fine edge. He stored knowledge thirstily. He understood love, marriage, customs, anger, pity, rage, selfishness, shadings and subtleties, realities and reflections. He became meta-aware of the software and hardware his mother’s body injected into him as a fetus, inheriting the fine-tuned data in the form of callable memory, nanotechnological neural networks driving his intelligence, the generative transformers that helped put thought to vocabulary no mouse spoke before this planet or ship before that. The same generative transformers that inculcated a human history and culture onto a civilization of abandoned rodents.
One thing suggested another. The sight of green plant life whirled his mind like a gyroscope, seeking balance in a world where lack of time for explanations made a mind seek and interpret on its own. The soft burden of food gave him knowledge of his system, of energy, of movement. Like a bird he had never seen newly cracking its way from a shell, he was almost a unit, complete, all-knowing. Heredity had done all this for him. He grew excited with his ability.
They walked, mother, father and the two children, smelling the smells, watching the birds bounce from wall to wall of the valley like scurrying pebbles and suddenly the father said a strange thing:
“Remember?”
Remember what? Sim lay cradled. Was it any effort for them to remember when they’d lived only seven days!
The husband and wife looked at each other.
“Was it only three days ago?” said the woman, her body shaking, her eyes closing to think. “I can’t believe it. It is so unfair.” She sobbed, then drew her paw across her face and bit her parched lips. The wind played at her gray hair. “Now is my turn to cry. An hour ago, it was you!”
“An hour is half a life.”
“Come,” she took her husband’s arm. “Let us look at everything, because it will be our last looking.”
“The sun’ll be up in a few minutes,” said the old mouse. “We must turn back now.”
“Just one more moment”
“The sun will catch us.”
“Let it catch me then!”
“You don’t mean that.”
“I mean nothing, nothing at all,” she cried.
The sun was coming fast. The green in the valley burnt away. Searing wind blasted from over the cliffs. Far away where sun bolts hammered battlements of cliff, the huge stone faces shook their contents; those avalanches not already powdered down, were now released and fell like mantles.
“Dark!” shouted father. The girl sprang over the warm floor of the valley, answering, her tail a pinkish flag behind her. Paws full of green seeds, she joined them.
The sun rimmed the horizon with flame, the air convulsed dangerously with it, and whistled.
The cave’s citizens bolted, shouting, picking up their fallen children, bearing vast loads of fruit and grass with them back to their deep hideouts. In moments the valley was bare. Except for one small mouse someone had forgotten. He was running far out on the flatness, but he was not strong enough, and the engulfing heat was drifting down from the cliffs even as he was half across the valley.
Flowers were burnt into effigies, grasses sucked back into rocks like singed snakes, flower seeds whirled and fell in the sudden furnace blast of wind, sown far into gullies and crannies, ready to blossom at sunset tonight, and then go to seed and die again.
Sim’s father watched that child running, alone, out on the floor of the valley. He and his wife and Dark and Sim were safe in the mouth of their tunnel.
“He’ll never make it,” said father. “Do not watch him, woman. It’s not a good thing to watch.”
They turned away. All except Sim, whose eyes had caught a glint of metal far away. His heart hammered in him, and his eyes blurred. Far away, atop a low mountain, one of those metal seeds from space reflected a dazzling ripple of light! It was like one of his intra-embryo dreams fulfilled! A metal space seed, intact, undamaged, lying on a mountain! There was his future! There was his hope for survival! There was where he would go in a few days, when he was—strange thought—an adult!
The sun plunged into the valley like molten lava.
The little running child screamed, the sun burned, and the screaming slowly stopped.
Sim’s mother walked painfully, with sudden age, down the tunnel, paused, reached up, broke off two last icicles that had formed during the night. She handed one to her husband, kept the other. “We will drink one last toast. To you, to the children.”
“To you,” he nodded to her. “To the children.” They lifted the icicles. The warmth melted the ice down into their thirsty mouths.
All day the sun blazed and erupted into the valley. Sim could not see it, but the vivid pictorials in his parents’ memories were sufficient evidence of the nature of the day fire. The light ran like mercury, sizzling and roasting the caves, poking inward, but never penetrating deeply enough. It lighted the caves. It made the hollows of the cliff comfortably warm.
Sim fought to keep his parents young. But no matter how hard he fought with mind and image, they became like mummies before him. His father seemed to dissolve from one stage of oldness to another. This is what will happen to me soon, though Sim in terror.
Sim grew upon himself. He felt the digestive-eliminatory movements of his body. He was fed every minute, he was continually swallowing, feeding. He began to fit words to images and processes. Such a word was love. It was not an abstraction, but a process, a stir of breath, a smell of morning air, a flutter of heart, the curve of arm holding him, the look in the suspended face of his mother. He saw the processes, then searched his mind while looking at her suspended face and there was the word, in his brain, ready to use. His throat prepared to speak. Life was pushing him, rushing him along toward oblivion.
He sensed the expansion of his claws, the adjustments of his cells, the lengthening of his tail, the profusion of his fur, the multiplication of his bones and sinew, the constant grooving of the soft pale wax of his brain. His brain at birth as clear as a circle of ice, innocent, unmarked, was, an instant later, as if hit with a thrown rock, cracked and marked and patterned in a million crevices of thought and discovery.
His sister, Dark, ran in and out with other little hothouse children, forever eating. His mother trembled over him, not eating, she had no appetite, her eyes were webbed shut.
“Sunset,” said his father, at last.
The day was over. The light faded; a wind sounded.
His mother arose. “I want to see the outside world once more…just once more….” She stared blindly, shivering.
His father’s eyes were shut, he lay against the wall.
“I cannot rise,” he whispered faintly. “I cannot.”
“Dark!” The mother croaked. The girl came running. “Here,” and Sim was handed to the girl. “Hold to Sim, Dark, feed him, care for him.” She gave Sim one last fondling touch.
Dark said not a word, holding Sim, her great green eyes shining wetly.
“Go now,” said the mother. “Take him out into the sunset time. Enjoy yourselves. Pick foods, eat. Play.”
Copyright © 2024. The Uplifted by Javier Zee