Jack Williamson - Afterlife

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2024-11-24 0 0 96.58KB 12 页 5.9玖币

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JACK WILLIAMSON

AFTERLIFE

"WE LIVE ON FAITH," MY father used to say. "The afterlife is all we have."

I wasn't sure of any afterlife. My questions troubled my father, who was pastor of our little

church. He made me kneel with him to pray and listen to long chapters from the Bible on

the altar. That sacred book, he said, had come from the holy Mother Earth. It looked old

enough, the brittle yellow pages breaking loose from the cracked leather binding, but if its

miracles had ever really happened, that had been a hundred light-years away and long

millennia ago.

"If there is a God," I told him, "and if he heard our prayers, we'd all be dead before we ever

got his answer."

With an air of tragic sorrow, he warned me that such reckless words could put my immortal

soul in danger.

"We ourselves are miracles," he told me, "happening every day. Our whole planet was the

Lord's miraculous answer to the prayers of the first Earthmen to land here. They found it

rich in everything, and spoiled it with their own greed and folly."

I heard the history of that from our one-legged schoolmaster. Our first dozen centuries had

been a golden age. We settled both great continents, harvested the great forests, loaded

fleets of space freighters with precious hardwoods and rare metals. All that wealth was

gone two thousand years ago.

Sadly, he showed us a few precious relics he kept in the dusty cupboard he called a

museum. There was a little glass tube that he said had shone with the light of a hundred

candles when there was power to make it burn, and a dusty telephone that once had

talked around the world.

We were born poor, in a poor little village. On the Sabbaths, my father preached in the

adobe-walled church. On weekdays, he got into his dusty work clothes and ground corn

on a little grist mill turned by a high waterwheel. His pay was a share of the meal.

Wheat grew on the flat land down in the valley below us, but the soil in our hill country had

eroded too badly for wheat. Through most of the week we ate cornmeal mush for

breakfast and corn pones for bread. Sometimes my mother made white bread or even

honey cakes, when church members from the valley gave us wheat flour.

On the Sabbaths she played a wheezy old organ to accompany the hymns. I used to love

the music and the promise of a paradise where the just and good would live happily

forever, but now I saw no reason to believe it. With no life here at home, I longed to get

away into the wider universe, but I saw no chance of that.

It's seven light-years to the nearest settled star system. The trade ships quit coming long

ago, because we had nothing left to trade. There's only the mail ship, once every Earth

year. It arrives nearly empty and leaves with every sling filled with those lucky people who

find money for the fare.

It lands at the old capitol, far across the continent. I'd never been there, nor seen any kind

of starship till the year I turned twelve. That quiet Sabbath morning, the rest of the family

was gone in the wagon with my father to a revival meeting in another village down the

river. Expecting no miracle there or anywhere, I'd been happy to stay home and do the

chores.

Awakened by a rooster crowing, I was walking out to the barn to milk our three cows. I

heard something thundering across the sky. In a moment I found it, a flash of silver when it

caught the sun. I dropped the milk bucket, staring while it wheeled low over the crumbled

ruins of something that had stood on the hill west of us.

It turned and dived straight at me.

With no time to run, I stood frozen while it sank over the west pasture and the apple

orchard. It struck the cornfield and plowed on though a cloud of dust and flying rocks till it

stopped at the edge of my mother's kitchen. Its thunder ceased. It lay still, a smoking mass

of broken metal.

I stood there watching, waiting for something more to happen. Nothing did. I caught my

breath at last, and walked uneasily toward it. Nothing about it made any kind of sense until

I looked into the long furrow it had dug and found a torn and bleeding human arm. A leg

farther on, most of the skin torn off. Another naked leg, still attached to the mangled body.

Finally a hairless skull grinning from the bottom of the ditch.

Dazed by the sudden strangeness of it, I thought I ought to call my father or the constable

or the schoolmaster, but they were all away at the revival. I was still there, wondering what

to do, when I saw a carrion bird hovering over the body. I shouted and threw stones to

keep it away till some of the neighbors came from up the river. We gathered up what we

could, the smallest red scraps in my milk bucket, and carried them into the church.

The sheriff came on horseback, the doctor with him. They frowned over the body parts,

laid out on a long table made of planks laid across the benches. The doctor fitted them

closer together to see if anything was missing. The sheriff picked up pieces of broken

metal, scowled at them uneasily, threw them back in the ditch.

They all left at last, for their dinners or whatever they had to do. I think they were afraid of

too much they didn't understand. So was I, but I didn't like the flies buzzing around the

body. I went home for a sheet to cover it. After a cold corn pone and a bowl of clabbered

milk for lunch, I came back to look at the wreck again, and watch the empty sky. Nothing

else came down.

Evening came. I milked the cows again, fed the pig, found a dozen eggs in the nests. I

heard dogs barking and went back to the church to be certain the door was closed. Night

fell as I was walking home. Our planet has no moon. In the sudden darkness, the stars

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Jack Williamson - Afterlife

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