George Zebrowski - Wound the Wind

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First published in Analog, May 2001

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First published in Analog, May 2001

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Don't part with your illusions.

When they are gone, you may still exist,

but you have ceased to live.

—Mark Twain

The dry veldt was a guilty patch on the planet, and no one went there much. Small plots of forest broke

it up here and there, making cooler places of shade and water. Beasts went there to avoid the blinding

sun.

We lay on our stomachs, looking over the top of a sandy, shallow rise. “From here,” I told O'Connor,

my team recruit, “we're sure to see the main group.”

“Why ‘sure'?” he asked, peering through the shimmering heat, face shadowed by the wide brim of his

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hat.

“Because they've been in their plot of forest a long time now, living off the wildlife. They have to move.”

“Quite right,” he said, then was quiet for a while, reluctant to say whatever he wanted to say to me, as if

the heat were trying to squeeze an unwelcome thought out of him. I felt his rivalry with me, but he seemed

only distantly aware of his feelings.

“Why bother,” he said finally. “They don't want our help. Never did.”

There were such pockets left all over the world, of people who still didn't want to live on beyond the old

human lifespans, as we did, making up our lives as we went along as we tried to mold the indefinite

futures. It was hard for the majority to which I now belonged to see why these backwards hid from us,

why they didn't greet us with open arms.

“They don't want us,” O'Connor said again, this time with a hint of reproach in his voice.

“Then why are you here?” I asked, thinking of the strange missionary I had become, bringing the gospel

of longlife back to the nature dwellers.

“No ... why areyou here?” he mumbled, hiding under his hat. “You've been at this longer than I have.”

I knew why. I had always known why. “It may trouble you to understand,” I said, “but their existence

still tells us who we are. It makes us think about who they are, and why they are here, and why we have

left them behind.”

He squinted at me from under his brim. “And that's your reason?”

“One of them. There is strength in these people that we should not lose.”

“Pretty abstract. I thought that somehow ... you cared, emotionally, I mean.”

“I do.”

“I don't see the care in your face,” he said.

“They're like us, as most of us were not so long ago. Still more like us than not.”

I looked out across the veldt to the forest that sat halfway to the horizon as if it had been driven to clump

there by the arid emptiness of the plain. Behind his show of detachment, O'Connor probably cared too

much, or too little. I couldn't tell which. Like most of us, he had too much life ahead of him to be

disturbed by anything near-term.

And then we saw them, the largest group of old humanity that I had ever spotted, moving out of the trees

and across the blazing Sunday afternoon like a single beast with a hundred heads. Their weakest were in

the middle of the body, where they could be helped along by the stronger.

“It's not like they don't know about us,” O'Connor said. “They know and don't want us.”

“They don't really know any better,” I said, remembering. “They don't really see us.”

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“Think so?” he asked with a laugh. “If they did, they wouldn't want to live out here like this, would

they?”

I was thinking that hunting down these people was useless, that we had gotten hot and dusty all for

nothing, in the season when it got hot and dry and the sun hammered the land and made you sure to keep

your hat on your head.

“Don't worry,” he said. “I'll do my job, if only to see how it goes.”

“It's up to us how it goes,” I said as I watched the lumbering hundred-headed beast, “whether they live

or die, whether we let them live or die out. It'll be up to us. Remember that.”

“So it's about all the rest of us,” he said grimly. “Not about them at all.”

“Since we can choose and they can't, yes, it's about us.”

“But will they all perish if we leave them alone? Is that so sure?”

I said, “The falling numbers show it—so it's up to us to prevent it. If we don't, then we will let it happen.

And there's just enough of us willing to prevent it.”

The beast with two hundred legs was well out in the open now. It looked like a ship of some kind, legs

like oars rowing through a sea of dust, obscuring the long-haired heads of the passengers. Some were

dressed in scavenged shirts and pants, sandaled feet and bare. Most carried knives of one kind or

another, some a spike or spear. The wind was toward us, hitting us with the smell of sweat and hot

animal skins.

“But can we help them?” he asked. “Seems that anything we do will be no good, or do harm. I don't

think many people will sit around feeling guilty when ... these are gone.” It troubled him to say it. He

could still go either way, and maybe take me with him.

I said, “We still have a voice, some of us. You and I are here, right now.” But I was a bit puzzled by

what was going on inside me.

He was silent for a moment, then said, “What about this bunch?”

“We're going to catch up with this group,” I said, “—and talk to them, for starters.”

He smiled under the shadow of his wide brim, and his face showed only that smile. “What if we have to

defend ourselves?”

“Maybe not with these,” I said.

“Then you know more than I do.”

“If we can talk to ... this leader ... in a certain way, then maybe we can ... make it go easier for them.”

“He's been scouted?”

“Yes,” I said. “It'll take them a while to reach that patch of forest over there. We'll wait there for them.”

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