Post by Cy Skywalker on Jan 26, 2006 15:04:36 GMT -5
The bass line rippled its even hypnotism through the darkling room. Yellow eyes widened, and air was sucked away.
“She’s allright.”
The eyes narrowed, and their owner left.
At the door, the guard said, “Password.”
“Were?”
“Here, you fool.”
“Fool backward is loof.”
The door opened and the girl came in, looking awkward, holding her body as if she knew what it could do, in a fight. Probably she did, though the readiness was inexperience.
At suggestion she put a book down on one of the many tables, a tome bound in brown. The page she opened to showed a leopard mid-leap around the letter L at the beginning of a small, scripted paragraph, and diagrams of the stages of human development, as it progressed through the phylogony of fish, amphibian, reptile, bird, finally mammalian humanoid. The fantastical womb was a cradle suspended in metal claws, but the bed soft and nestlike.
“Where’d you get this”
She said, “Eas’ide Public. Had to get it out of the basement.”
“You work there?”
“Aye.”
She left the book with reassurance, and passed out again into the murmuring green-lit street.
East Side Public Library smelled like ink and dust and quiet voices. Funny how undisturbed quiet smells like nothing else. The girl from the Café London walked the rows replacing books from a rack of rejects. She started at the voice that seemed to come closer than the footsteps it matched.
“The book was wrong. They try to explain it all, but can’t.”
She whispered. “So it’s just magic? Why that’s worse!”
“No it’s not. We’re not a mutation, an abomination, that way.”
“But we’re...strange.”
She didn’t mind the claws on her arm, not much anyway. “We are strange. But you, at least, are not recognized! You at least are only the nightmares of few!”
She was surprised at this show of emotion. ‘I’m sorry...”
“Forget it.”
She came to the next meeting, this one held in a lit place, a skating rink with an allied owner, a Saturday night. She looked like a leopard now, in skin and ears and teeth. Some can control what they get at neutral, some can’t. She brought a book; The Magician’s Nephew. A Spaniel tried to talk to her, but she kicked him under the table. He was probably innocent. The leader of the gathering called her aside once, near the end, and explained things.
That’s all I know about that night.
Airplanes and zeppelins are not allowed to fly over New York in the starlight, not after the near crash in the money district. The air smells like petrol enough now. It is so relaxing, going to an extreme and listening only to the air beneath wings that adjust themselves in such a way that it’s only nerve-wracking if you pay attention. Maybe children will say look mom, is that a big bat, or a vampire, or a dragon? But they do not know that their nightmare likes garlic plenty when it is on pizza with sausage, or wears a cross to remind of alliance, figurative if not literal.
I am not undead, though a technical definition of undead could be alive. Eh? There have been only a few built like me, and all modern, because we did not happen until recently. When I change completely and relax into the form that is part animal, part imagination, I have the wings of a dragon and the feet of a bat, the hands of a boy, the face of a bat, the ears of a cat. The eyes of a boy, dark. Integrationman, that’s me. It looks alright in the end, but I tend not to be attracted to others of my kind. I was human once, and human dreams are hard to kill.
My wings were cushioned on currents of air sweeping around the built canyons. I caught a flagpole with my human hands and arms and hung on, got my feet to it, spread my wings horizontal, stood there leaning backwards against nothing. Spider-man would envy me. Pink Floyd echoed from some club or pop store. I tipped the backs of my wings, like a shrug of the shoulders that somehow translated to raising of the bone-ends if it was thought about quick enough and absently enough, and movement is harder to see than standing-still.
So they had caught her. Found, coerced, saved, whatever. And they had disproved ontogony science, but not were-magic. Maybe Atlanteans were were. Watch that sentence. I didn’t realize it looked so silly until I got a typewriter. Maybe King Arthur was were. Maybe the Egyptian gods were our grandfathers, maybe they were from Mars, or Sirius, or the Pleiades.
The park had smells of garbage; worse, live garbage. Not bagged and plasiticized. Soon she would appease the were magic, and get us our lives back, or our choice. I think I would have liked this, if I had more of a choice. I would not have tried to get rid of
Andrew Kajezyk, high school, fencing, but the real kind not the preps’ foils. There was something about a song, a chant--
The wind at higher altitudes tasted like copper, not blood. Ships still cruised into the black waters. A strong someone called from the rink.
Animal forms flowed into the underground. The leopard landed on the gray concrete, warm breath casting out smoke. Armistice, the wolf who had threatened her at the first meeting, howled from the top and coiled to spring. My wing buffeted him off and he fell, twisted, he landed ungainly. Armistice is not alpha male material. Shadows rushed. Rats, birds, cats and dogs and a mink and a komodo dragon and me, sitting at the ledge, a gargoyle. I had been part of a crowd once--
Andrew Kajeyzyk, crowded hallways, scattering, warmth, a computer--
The leopard reached the heavy door. The tunnel blurred by and then back to the chill touches of standing, and Raggedy, our true leader, hauled her elephantine tortoise form toward the door. Who knows how long her human body has decayed as the tortoise one remained strong, and she suffered for the not being able to remain as one form. She was our true leader, and the girl the hero--and what I, the dark gargoyle, dragon-boy without a species, mutant, quiet one, spy, Andrew?
Which form would I chose when there was no me anymore?
Raggedy shuffled forward, pounded into a run, resonated into the metal door. Clang. Echo. Cry--of roars and things. Gold light, trickling. Inside there was a pyramid, a precipice, an animal’s throne. The leopard girl ran, joy in her human eyes, fur rippling. I could never have stopped the howls. Not now, when our groomed hero sat languid upon the tip of the pyramid suddenly slack, seeing whatever heroes see when their destiny is fulfilled, when they have left the burden of the guide behind. He dies, usually.
Then there were more man-creature shapes coalescing out of the dark from pipes’ cracks, shadows and under the murky water. Quick pain to the right and then its originator was slapped away by a reflex of my wing, and in a shaft of yellow-gentle light the leopard girl was rearing up and striking at three, five awkward forms with the ceremony still unbegun.
Fights are abhorable events. They force acute awareness of a hated body, that all the while wills itself to live and adds greater depth to the separation between the role of my bat-man and the mind behind his fearsome mask.
The One must be protected.
A path clearer up the steps when I flailed at the attackers, cursed at them, kicked their mutant faces with my mutant feet as my wings spread and one flap would take me to the dais. There were big, dark and contorted faces among them, and clever armor, and organization none of the mutant kids that I know, that sometimes gathered in hidden room, could posses.
On the top I could see how familiar forms were the ones being driven back. Claws and teeth and knives and ropes. Bodies shoved and splashed into the smelly water. Muscles tensed all over. Blink and you’ll miss life. The leopard, destined as she was, screamed in my ear and raked finger-length claws across the face of a pig man who, if I remember correctly, shot me.
It was a tranquilizer. I thought for quite a while about whether I was dead or not, in a black place where senses still slept, and it didn’t really matter. Dead or alive, both have advantages and disadvantages.
The white-walled room had a laptop computer on a plastic desk just across from the open door, and a boy sitting at the desk, whose catlike ears would occasionally swivel. The low bed sat all across the far wall from this, its foot to a curtainless window looking out on the city with Liberty standing on the horizon. It was all bare, with still white carpet, and I lay on top of the smooth bedsheets. A ribbed black wing lurched where it hung overhead, darkening the view. My wing. It shook as the other one flexed and wiggled out from underneath me, where it had been generating prickles. Both limp sets of fingers looked fine, felt sickly, and my head turned without effort.
The boy at the computer stood and bowed to the door. He wore a baseball jersey, jeans, and round geek-glasses pushed messily into his red hair. His ears, hands and tail were squirrel’s.
An adult stepped through the doorway, an adult one of us, and though I had been going to get up and do something I did not, because I could not imagine what to do in the presence of an adult mutant. How did you live, I wanted to ask, when we thought we were the only ones because hope and help were nowhere to be found?
“What’ve you captured me for, dissection?”
Squirrelboy did not respond to snarling accusation with accusation. His eyes seemed sad. “These factions are just a game we play. We choose to be the bad guys some times.”
The adult smelled like a mutant, but all the physical difference showed in a white stripe across his receding but thick black hair. He carried a briefcase and the look of anyone off the latenight subway; focused, average, shabby. He rattled off a stream of tech-speak, some if it understandable when excavated from its burial mound of old knowledge. There was a pair of earbuds dangling from his briefcase, like spiderweb.
I made my wings and all fade.
Squirrel danced his claws over the keyboard he had retreated to.
The adult looked at me as I got up like an animal warrior instead of a teenage boy. He said, “We couldn’t let your faction commit yourself to something you didn’t understand. You’ve been searching the wrong mythology, while the winds blew ancient magic from its origin, to New York City.”
Who talks like that?
The right mythology was in an open stretch of library shelves, among yellowing books and polished wood. There were sparse illustrations in these amusing, serious books, and impossibilities.
Coyote was found as a toddler, dressed in a bib and diaper with his fur sticking out al over and his little muzzle drooling as his human tongue tried to deal with it. Leopard, surprised at first, nursed him on goat’s milk and sighed, world-aware now. No one knew how the two factions had begun, except that there were two generations and Skunk, adult distributor of tampered, connective iPods from his firm, was of the first with Coyote probably the last of the second. Of course the curse was Indian mythology turning truth, and we had to go and convince the Creator, Great Chief, Sky-Spirit, that the way to solve humanity’s problems was not to reintroduce the Animal People, tricksters and shapeshifters, to the world.
Coyote’s parents hadn’t wanted him, due to the fur. Andrew’s parents had been able to keep him for longer, but then I was in the mix of hormones when I began to come into my change--
“Would you like some crackers?” The stewardess asked. I fished a packet out of the bowl on her cart. Squirrel, ingrossed in his laptop, cracked a peanut with his back teeth. He sat next to Sunk in the seat behind me, and the third member of their blood family, Rabbit, had placed herself across the aisle. We had some trouble with Raggedy, but Armistice managed to sneak her in as a compressible seat-rack-sized duffel bag. he was becoming more useful, but still held his stomach and whines as the Southwestern jet shook, turbulence unsettling our communal wings.
It seemed a bedraggled, strange summer camp that trekked through desert where leafless plants crowded the rocky sand. The horizon stretched to purple forever. The sun stared like a gigantic, omnipotent CIA eye, keeping track of everything.
Warm bodies just dropped as night fell, people curling up against each other and relaxing into grotesque beastling shapes, now gargoyles of the arroyo. Something of weariness leaked out of us there, crawling from our bodies away into the wilderness. We slept in the desert warmth.
Skunk had a map, vague and pictorial. More walking, in the yellowish landscape windstorming into the sky. Raggedy had iPod buds in her reptilian ears, escape from her torment of being passed from carrier to carrier. For the last step, Skunk burned the map and wafted the smoke toward the east. It feathered north, no matter how the wind chased the sand east. We walked north more, with the heat dripping through fur and feathers.
Soon we walked through that smoke, or more than had spawned from it. I and others flew when our legs needed to rest, and could not see the top of the obscuration. Now we had been climbing for a time.
Skunk waved a hand and the clean smoke broke. The smoke gathered to wings and tails and tall ears, as we left it. Nothing happened, long enough for feet to shuffle and ears lay back against uncomfortably hot heads. There was a cabin sitting there then, made of wood laid over skin and crude rope, complicated and the dull colors of the desert. Skunk stepped up to the low wooden stoop and then came back, stumbling, moving faster.
The man who came out through a flap of white-furred skins was the stereotypical old Indian. Tanned skin, thick hair between black and white, the clothing of a kochina. Black-lined scales were tattooed on his muscular dark arms, bear’s claws strapped to his wrists, feathers and long, strange antlers on a large headdress. I suspected angrily that he mocked us.
Skunk gave a complicated bow, while Squirrel sidled up behind him opening his computer.
The Indian said “My children.”
“It took us a long time to discover your purpose for us.” said Skunk.
This creator has no reason to help us.
Skunk continued seriously, licking his lips. “Apparently the leaping theories were correct. We’d rather like to further understand this purpose.”
So we can refuse it I would not be manipulated, not as a human--but I did not entirely feel human.
I glared at the Indian god, but his unremarkable gaze went over the crowd evenly. His voice was deep and slightly accented. “Is your purpose not clear to you? I placed your genetic signatures and potential in the city so that you could see the failings of the human race. Once the Animal People served well to aid humankind and make their lives more interesting. You tricked then when they grew foolish, taught them to be clever.”
“That isn’t the way, now.” The gnarled claw he snatched into the air look suddenly alien to my dreadful introspection. ‘You’ve ruined kids’ lives.”
The Indian’s rugged face gathered flood clouds of soft anger. “Only because they deny their purpose. If you, my children, can prove that the human race, the Second People, needs no saving then you can be relieved of your duties.” Heavy eyebrows drew down treacherously. “And perhaps what you will view as a curse as well.” For a moment there was all the disappointment of a god upon us, and in this I could believe that the Great Chief was not so powerful as was suspected. He looked cliché. After this pronouncement the wigwam, fog, god and all disappeared, and we were standing on a hill in the desert.
(end of part 1)
“She’s allright.”
The eyes narrowed, and their owner left.
At the door, the guard said, “Password.”
“Were?”
“Here, you fool.”
“Fool backward is loof.”
The door opened and the girl came in, looking awkward, holding her body as if she knew what it could do, in a fight. Probably she did, though the readiness was inexperience.
At suggestion she put a book down on one of the many tables, a tome bound in brown. The page she opened to showed a leopard mid-leap around the letter L at the beginning of a small, scripted paragraph, and diagrams of the stages of human development, as it progressed through the phylogony of fish, amphibian, reptile, bird, finally mammalian humanoid. The fantastical womb was a cradle suspended in metal claws, but the bed soft and nestlike.
“Where’d you get this”
She said, “Eas’ide Public. Had to get it out of the basement.”
“You work there?”
“Aye.”
She left the book with reassurance, and passed out again into the murmuring green-lit street.
East Side Public Library smelled like ink and dust and quiet voices. Funny how undisturbed quiet smells like nothing else. The girl from the Café London walked the rows replacing books from a rack of rejects. She started at the voice that seemed to come closer than the footsteps it matched.
“The book was wrong. They try to explain it all, but can’t.”
She whispered. “So it’s just magic? Why that’s worse!”
“No it’s not. We’re not a mutation, an abomination, that way.”
“But we’re...strange.”
She didn’t mind the claws on her arm, not much anyway. “We are strange. But you, at least, are not recognized! You at least are only the nightmares of few!”
She was surprised at this show of emotion. ‘I’m sorry...”
“Forget it.”
She came to the next meeting, this one held in a lit place, a skating rink with an allied owner, a Saturday night. She looked like a leopard now, in skin and ears and teeth. Some can control what they get at neutral, some can’t. She brought a book; The Magician’s Nephew. A Spaniel tried to talk to her, but she kicked him under the table. He was probably innocent. The leader of the gathering called her aside once, near the end, and explained things.
That’s all I know about that night.
Airplanes and zeppelins are not allowed to fly over New York in the starlight, not after the near crash in the money district. The air smells like petrol enough now. It is so relaxing, going to an extreme and listening only to the air beneath wings that adjust themselves in such a way that it’s only nerve-wracking if you pay attention. Maybe children will say look mom, is that a big bat, or a vampire, or a dragon? But they do not know that their nightmare likes garlic plenty when it is on pizza with sausage, or wears a cross to remind of alliance, figurative if not literal.
I am not undead, though a technical definition of undead could be alive. Eh? There have been only a few built like me, and all modern, because we did not happen until recently. When I change completely and relax into the form that is part animal, part imagination, I have the wings of a dragon and the feet of a bat, the hands of a boy, the face of a bat, the ears of a cat. The eyes of a boy, dark. Integrationman, that’s me. It looks alright in the end, but I tend not to be attracted to others of my kind. I was human once, and human dreams are hard to kill.
My wings were cushioned on currents of air sweeping around the built canyons. I caught a flagpole with my human hands and arms and hung on, got my feet to it, spread my wings horizontal, stood there leaning backwards against nothing. Spider-man would envy me. Pink Floyd echoed from some club or pop store. I tipped the backs of my wings, like a shrug of the shoulders that somehow translated to raising of the bone-ends if it was thought about quick enough and absently enough, and movement is harder to see than standing-still.
So they had caught her. Found, coerced, saved, whatever. And they had disproved ontogony science, but not were-magic. Maybe Atlanteans were were. Watch that sentence. I didn’t realize it looked so silly until I got a typewriter. Maybe King Arthur was were. Maybe the Egyptian gods were our grandfathers, maybe they were from Mars, or Sirius, or the Pleiades.
The park had smells of garbage; worse, live garbage. Not bagged and plasiticized. Soon she would appease the were magic, and get us our lives back, or our choice. I think I would have liked this, if I had more of a choice. I would not have tried to get rid of
Andrew Kajezyk, high school, fencing, but the real kind not the preps’ foils. There was something about a song, a chant--
The wind at higher altitudes tasted like copper, not blood. Ships still cruised into the black waters. A strong someone called from the rink.
Animal forms flowed into the underground. The leopard landed on the gray concrete, warm breath casting out smoke. Armistice, the wolf who had threatened her at the first meeting, howled from the top and coiled to spring. My wing buffeted him off and he fell, twisted, he landed ungainly. Armistice is not alpha male material. Shadows rushed. Rats, birds, cats and dogs and a mink and a komodo dragon and me, sitting at the ledge, a gargoyle. I had been part of a crowd once--
Andrew Kajeyzyk, crowded hallways, scattering, warmth, a computer--
The leopard reached the heavy door. The tunnel blurred by and then back to the chill touches of standing, and Raggedy, our true leader, hauled her elephantine tortoise form toward the door. Who knows how long her human body has decayed as the tortoise one remained strong, and she suffered for the not being able to remain as one form. She was our true leader, and the girl the hero--and what I, the dark gargoyle, dragon-boy without a species, mutant, quiet one, spy, Andrew?
Which form would I chose when there was no me anymore?
Raggedy shuffled forward, pounded into a run, resonated into the metal door. Clang. Echo. Cry--of roars and things. Gold light, trickling. Inside there was a pyramid, a precipice, an animal’s throne. The leopard girl ran, joy in her human eyes, fur rippling. I could never have stopped the howls. Not now, when our groomed hero sat languid upon the tip of the pyramid suddenly slack, seeing whatever heroes see when their destiny is fulfilled, when they have left the burden of the guide behind. He dies, usually.
Then there were more man-creature shapes coalescing out of the dark from pipes’ cracks, shadows and under the murky water. Quick pain to the right and then its originator was slapped away by a reflex of my wing, and in a shaft of yellow-gentle light the leopard girl was rearing up and striking at three, five awkward forms with the ceremony still unbegun.
Fights are abhorable events. They force acute awareness of a hated body, that all the while wills itself to live and adds greater depth to the separation between the role of my bat-man and the mind behind his fearsome mask.
The One must be protected.
A path clearer up the steps when I flailed at the attackers, cursed at them, kicked their mutant faces with my mutant feet as my wings spread and one flap would take me to the dais. There were big, dark and contorted faces among them, and clever armor, and organization none of the mutant kids that I know, that sometimes gathered in hidden room, could posses.
On the top I could see how familiar forms were the ones being driven back. Claws and teeth and knives and ropes. Bodies shoved and splashed into the smelly water. Muscles tensed all over. Blink and you’ll miss life. The leopard, destined as she was, screamed in my ear and raked finger-length claws across the face of a pig man who, if I remember correctly, shot me.
It was a tranquilizer. I thought for quite a while about whether I was dead or not, in a black place where senses still slept, and it didn’t really matter. Dead or alive, both have advantages and disadvantages.
The white-walled room had a laptop computer on a plastic desk just across from the open door, and a boy sitting at the desk, whose catlike ears would occasionally swivel. The low bed sat all across the far wall from this, its foot to a curtainless window looking out on the city with Liberty standing on the horizon. It was all bare, with still white carpet, and I lay on top of the smooth bedsheets. A ribbed black wing lurched where it hung overhead, darkening the view. My wing. It shook as the other one flexed and wiggled out from underneath me, where it had been generating prickles. Both limp sets of fingers looked fine, felt sickly, and my head turned without effort.
The boy at the computer stood and bowed to the door. He wore a baseball jersey, jeans, and round geek-glasses pushed messily into his red hair. His ears, hands and tail were squirrel’s.
An adult stepped through the doorway, an adult one of us, and though I had been going to get up and do something I did not, because I could not imagine what to do in the presence of an adult mutant. How did you live, I wanted to ask, when we thought we were the only ones because hope and help were nowhere to be found?
“What’ve you captured me for, dissection?”
Squirrelboy did not respond to snarling accusation with accusation. His eyes seemed sad. “These factions are just a game we play. We choose to be the bad guys some times.”
The adult smelled like a mutant, but all the physical difference showed in a white stripe across his receding but thick black hair. He carried a briefcase and the look of anyone off the latenight subway; focused, average, shabby. He rattled off a stream of tech-speak, some if it understandable when excavated from its burial mound of old knowledge. There was a pair of earbuds dangling from his briefcase, like spiderweb.
I made my wings and all fade.
Squirrel danced his claws over the keyboard he had retreated to.
The adult looked at me as I got up like an animal warrior instead of a teenage boy. He said, “We couldn’t let your faction commit yourself to something you didn’t understand. You’ve been searching the wrong mythology, while the winds blew ancient magic from its origin, to New York City.”
Who talks like that?
The right mythology was in an open stretch of library shelves, among yellowing books and polished wood. There were sparse illustrations in these amusing, serious books, and impossibilities.
Coyote was found as a toddler, dressed in a bib and diaper with his fur sticking out al over and his little muzzle drooling as his human tongue tried to deal with it. Leopard, surprised at first, nursed him on goat’s milk and sighed, world-aware now. No one knew how the two factions had begun, except that there were two generations and Skunk, adult distributor of tampered, connective iPods from his firm, was of the first with Coyote probably the last of the second. Of course the curse was Indian mythology turning truth, and we had to go and convince the Creator, Great Chief, Sky-Spirit, that the way to solve humanity’s problems was not to reintroduce the Animal People, tricksters and shapeshifters, to the world.
Coyote’s parents hadn’t wanted him, due to the fur. Andrew’s parents had been able to keep him for longer, but then I was in the mix of hormones when I began to come into my change--
“Would you like some crackers?” The stewardess asked. I fished a packet out of the bowl on her cart. Squirrel, ingrossed in his laptop, cracked a peanut with his back teeth. He sat next to Sunk in the seat behind me, and the third member of their blood family, Rabbit, had placed herself across the aisle. We had some trouble with Raggedy, but Armistice managed to sneak her in as a compressible seat-rack-sized duffel bag. he was becoming more useful, but still held his stomach and whines as the Southwestern jet shook, turbulence unsettling our communal wings.
It seemed a bedraggled, strange summer camp that trekked through desert where leafless plants crowded the rocky sand. The horizon stretched to purple forever. The sun stared like a gigantic, omnipotent CIA eye, keeping track of everything.
Warm bodies just dropped as night fell, people curling up against each other and relaxing into grotesque beastling shapes, now gargoyles of the arroyo. Something of weariness leaked out of us there, crawling from our bodies away into the wilderness. We slept in the desert warmth.
Skunk had a map, vague and pictorial. More walking, in the yellowish landscape windstorming into the sky. Raggedy had iPod buds in her reptilian ears, escape from her torment of being passed from carrier to carrier. For the last step, Skunk burned the map and wafted the smoke toward the east. It feathered north, no matter how the wind chased the sand east. We walked north more, with the heat dripping through fur and feathers.
Soon we walked through that smoke, or more than had spawned from it. I and others flew when our legs needed to rest, and could not see the top of the obscuration. Now we had been climbing for a time.
Skunk waved a hand and the clean smoke broke. The smoke gathered to wings and tails and tall ears, as we left it. Nothing happened, long enough for feet to shuffle and ears lay back against uncomfortably hot heads. There was a cabin sitting there then, made of wood laid over skin and crude rope, complicated and the dull colors of the desert. Skunk stepped up to the low wooden stoop and then came back, stumbling, moving faster.
The man who came out through a flap of white-furred skins was the stereotypical old Indian. Tanned skin, thick hair between black and white, the clothing of a kochina. Black-lined scales were tattooed on his muscular dark arms, bear’s claws strapped to his wrists, feathers and long, strange antlers on a large headdress. I suspected angrily that he mocked us.
Skunk gave a complicated bow, while Squirrel sidled up behind him opening his computer.
The Indian said “My children.”
“It took us a long time to discover your purpose for us.” said Skunk.
This creator has no reason to help us.
Skunk continued seriously, licking his lips. “Apparently the leaping theories were correct. We’d rather like to further understand this purpose.”
So we can refuse it I would not be manipulated, not as a human--but I did not entirely feel human.
I glared at the Indian god, but his unremarkable gaze went over the crowd evenly. His voice was deep and slightly accented. “Is your purpose not clear to you? I placed your genetic signatures and potential in the city so that you could see the failings of the human race. Once the Animal People served well to aid humankind and make their lives more interesting. You tricked then when they grew foolish, taught them to be clever.”
“That isn’t the way, now.” The gnarled claw he snatched into the air look suddenly alien to my dreadful introspection. ‘You’ve ruined kids’ lives.”
The Indian’s rugged face gathered flood clouds of soft anger. “Only because they deny their purpose. If you, my children, can prove that the human race, the Second People, needs no saving then you can be relieved of your duties.” Heavy eyebrows drew down treacherously. “And perhaps what you will view as a curse as well.” For a moment there was all the disappointment of a god upon us, and in this I could believe that the Great Chief was not so powerful as was suspected. He looked cliché. After this pronouncement the wigwam, fog, god and all disappeared, and we were standing on a hill in the desert.
(end of part 1)