Wheelworld Page 18

  But what if that meteor had not fallen?

  What would our world be like today?

  What would our world be like? Very different, that goes without saying. But different in what ways? The dominant race would certainly not be homo sapiens, but would have to be intelligent descendants of the dinosaurs. What would they look like? How would they evolve? What would their culture be like? The questions were intriguing—and the answers should prove to be even more so. I could not consider plotting or writing the book before these questions had been answered.

  From this evolved the expanded concept of the book. Firstly I would go to the authorities. I would take advantage of the fact that modern science fiction has a vast readership drawn from all walks of life. And among these readers are professional scientists from every discipline. Astronomers, physicists, chemists. As well as anthropologists, linguists and biologists. It has been my great pleasure, in my years in and around science fiction, to meet a good number of them. Why couldn’t I enlist their aid on this project? Put together a brain trust who would work with me in developing in minute detail this world that might-have-been. It would be a great challenge—but if it worked it would produce such a wealth of material that I would be forced to write a novel about this world.

  Some years later, I am happy to report that the job is done. West of Eden is a big novel—but mainly because it embodies a gigantic theme. It has been incredibly hard work—and immensely great fun. (I have attempted to share my pleasure with the readers by including a section in the book that contains a portion of this background material.)

  Once the project began the book simply had to be written. The reality of this world grew until it was complete and three dimensional. I desperately needed to discover what happened on this alternate Earth and how its inhabitants functioned.

  The work is done, the book completed. The labors are behind me and the pleasures of realization to hand. I have never worked this hard or this long on a novel before—and have never enjoyed myself more.

  May you share some of my pleasure when you read it.

  Harry Harrison

  Turn the page for a preview of WEST OF EDEN.

  PROLOGUE: KERRICK

  I have read the pages that follow here and I honestly believe them to be a true history of our world.

  Not that belief was easy to come by. It might be said that my view of the world was a very restricted one. I was born in a small encampment made up of three families. During the warm seasons we stayed on the shore of a great lake rich with fish. My first memories are of that lake, looking across its still water at the high mountains beyond, seeing their peaks grow white with the first snows of winter. When the snow whitened our tents, and the grass around as well, that would be the time when the hunters went to the mountains. I was in a hurry to grow up, eager to hunt the deer, and the greatdeer, at their side.

  That simple world of simple pleasures is gone forever. Everything has changed—and not for the better. At times I wake at night and wish that what happened had never happened. But these are foolish thoughts and the world is as it is, changed now in every way. What I thought was the entirety of existence has proved only to be a tiny corner of reality. My lake and my mountains are only the smallest part of a great continent that stretches between two immense oceans. I knew of the western ocean because our hunters had fished there.

  I also knew about the Yilané and learned to hate them long before I ever saw them. As our flesh is warm, so is theirs cold. We have hair upon our heads and a hunter will grow a proud beard, while the animals that we hunt have warm flesh and fur or hair, but this is not true of Yilané. They are cold and smooth and scaled, have claws and teeth to rend and tear, are large and terrible, to be feared. And hated. I knew that they lived in the warm waters of the ocean to the south and on the warm lands to the south. They could not abide the cold so did not trouble us.

  All that has changed and changed so terribly that nothing will ever be the same again. It is my unhappy knowledge that our world is only a tiny part of the Yilané world. We live in the north of a great continent that is joined to a great southern continent. And on all of this land, from ocean to ocean, there swarm only Yilané.

  And there is even worse. Across the western ocean there are even larger continents—and there are no hunters at all. None. But Yilané, only Yilané. The entire world is theirs except for our small part.

  Now I will tell you the worst thing about the Yilané. They hate us just as we hate them. This would not matter if they were only great, insensate beasts. We would stay in the cold north and avoid them in this manner.

  But there are those Yilané who may be as intelligent as hunters, as fierce as hunters. And their number cannot be counted but it is enough to say that they fill all of the lands of this great globe.

  What follows here is not a nice thing to tell, but it happened and it must be told.

  This is the story of our world and of all the creatures that live in it and what happened when a band of hunters ventured south along the coast and what they found there. And what happened when the Yilané discovered that the world was not theirs alone, as they had always believed.

  AMAHAST WAS ALREADY awake when the first light of approaching dawn began to spread across the ocean. Above him only the brightest stars were still visible. He knew them for what they were; the tharms of the dead hunters who climbed into the sky each night. But now even these last ones, the best trackers, the finest hunters, even they were fleeing before the rising sun. It was a fierce sun here this far south, burningly different from the northern sun that they were used to, the one that rose weakly into a pale sky above the snow-filled forests and the mountains. This could have been another sun altogether. Yet now, just before sunrise, it was almost cool here close to the water, comfortable. It would not last. With daylight the heat would come again. Amahast scratched at the insect bites on his arm and waited for dawn.

  The outline of their wooden boat emerged slowly from the darkness. It had been pulled up onto the sand, well beyond the dried weed and shells that marked the reach of the highest tide. Close by it he could just make out the dark forms of the sleeping members of his sammad, the four who had come with him on this voyage. Unasked, the bitter memory returned that one of them, Diken, was dying; soon they would be only three.

  One of the men was climbing to his feet, slowly and painfully, leaning heavily on his spear. That would be old Ogatyr; he had the stiffness and ache in his arms and legs that comes with age, from the dampness of the ground and the cold grip of winter. Amahast rose as well, his spear also in his hand. The two men came together as they walked towards the water holes.

  “The day will be hot, kurro,” Ogatyr said.

  “All of the days here are hot, old one. A child could read that fortune. The sun will cook the pain from your bones.”

  They walked slowly and warily towards the black wall of the forest. The tall grass rustled in the dawn breeze; the first waking birds called in the trees above. Some forest animal had eaten the heads off the low palm trees here, then dug beside them in the soft ground to find water. The hunters had deepened the holes the evening before and now they were brimming with clear water.

  “Drink your fill,” Amahast ordered, turning to face the forest. Behind him Ogatyr wheezed as he dropped to the ground, then slurped greedily.

  It was possible that some of the creatures of the night might still emerge from the darkness of the trees so Amahast stood on guard, spear pointed and ready, sniffing the moist air rich with the odor of decaying vegetation, yet sweetened by the faint perfume of night-blooming flowers. When the older man had finished he stood watch while Amahast drank. Burying his face deep in the cool water, rising up gasping to splash handfuls over his bare body, washing away some of the grime and sweat of the previous day.

  “Where we stop tonight, that will be our last camp. The morning after we must turn back, retrace our course,” Ogatyr said, calling over his shoulder while his eyes remained fixed on
the bushes and trees before him.

  “So you have told me. But I do not believe that a few days more will make any difference.”

  “It is time to return. I have knotted each sunset onto my cord. The days are shorter, I have ways of knowing that. Each sunset comes more quickly, each day the sun weakens and cannot climb as high into the sky. And the wind is beginning to change, even you must have noticed that. All summer it has blown from the southeast. No longer. Do you remember last year, the storm that almost sank the boat and blew down a forest of trees? The storm came at this time. We must return. I can remember these things, knot them in my cord.”

  “I know you can, old one.” Amahast ran his fingers through the wet strands of his uncut hair. It reached below his shoulders, while his full blond beard rested damply on his chest. “But you also know that our boat is not full.”

  “There is much dried meat …”

  “Not enough. We need more than that to last the winter. The hunting has not been good. That is why we have journeyed farther south than we ever have before. We need the meat.”

  “One single day, then we must return. No more than that. The path to the mountains is long and the way hard.”

  Amahast did not speak in answer. He respected Ogatyr for all the things that the old man knew, his knowledge of the correct way to make tools and find magic plants. The oldster knew the rituals needed to prepare for the hunt, as well as the chants that could ward off the spirits of the dead. He had all of the knowledge of his lifetime and of the lifetimes before him, the things that he had been told and that he remembered, that he could recite from the rising of the sun in the morning to the setting at night and still not be done. But there were new things that the old one did not know about, and these were what troubled Amahast, that demanded new answers.

  It was the winters that were the cause of it, the fierce winters that would not end. Twice now there had been the promise of spring as the days had grown longer, the sun brighter—but spring had never come. The deep snows had not melted, the ice on the streams stayed frozen. Then there had been hunger. The deer and the greatdeer had moved south, away from their accustomed valleys and mountain meadows that now stayed tight-locked in winter’s unyielding grip. He. had led the people of his sammad as they had followed the animals, they had to do that or starve, down from the mountains to the broad plains beyond. Yet the hunting had not been good, for the herds had been thinned out by the terrible winter. Nor was their sammad the only one that had troubles. Other sammads had been hunting there as well, not only ones that his people were joined to by marriage, but sammads they had never seen before. Men who spoke Marbak strangely, or not at all, and pointed their spears in anger. Yet all of the sammads were Tanu, and Tanu never fought Tanu. Never before had they done this. But now they did and there was Tanu blood on the sharp stone points of the spears. This troubled Amahast as much as did the endless winter. A spear for hunting, a knife for skinning, a fire for cooking. This was the way it had always been. Tanu did not kill Tanu. Rather than commit this crime himself he had taken his sammad away from the hills, marching each day towards the morning sun, not stopping until they had reached the salt waters of the great sea. He knew that the way north was closed, for the ice there came to the ocean’s edge and only the Paramutan, the skin-boat people, could live in those frozen lands. The way south was open but there, in the forests and jungles where the snow never came, were the murgu. And where they were was death.

  So only the wave-filled sea remained. His sammad had long known the art of making wooden boats for summer fishing, but never before had they ventured out of sight of land or away from their camp upon the beach. This summer they must. The dried squid would not last the winter. If the hunting were as bad as that of the winter before then none of them would be alive in the spring. South, then, it must be south, and that was the way they had gone. Hunting along the shore and on the islands off the coast, in fear always of the murgu.

  The beach was wide, the fine sand almost as white as snow. Offshore the waves broke into a rumble of bubbling froth that surged far up the beach towards them. At the water’s edge were bits of wood and broken sponges, endless varicolored shells, violet snails, great green lengths of seaweed with tiny crabs clinging to them. The few small pieces of driftwood here were too tiny to bother with, so they walked on to the headland that pushed a rocky peninsula out into the sea. When they had climbed the easy slope they could look out between the trees to see that the headland curved out and around to make a sheltered bay. On the sand at the far side dark forms, they might be seals, basked in the sun.

  At the same moment they became aware that someone was standing under a nearby tree, also looking out over the bay. Another hunter perhaps. Amahast had opened his mouth to call out when the figure stepped forward into the sunlight.

  The words froze in his throat; every muscle in his body locked hard.

  No hunter, no man, not this. Man-shaped but repellently different in every way.

  The creature was hairless and naked, with a colored crest that ran across the top of its head and down its spine. It was bright in the sunlight, obscenely marked with a skin that was scaled and multi-colored.

  A marag. Smaller than the giants in the jungle, but a marag nevertheless. Like all of its kind it was motionless at rest, as though carved from stone. Then it turned its head to one side, a series of small jerking motions, until they could see its round and expressionless eye, the massive out-thrust jaw. They stood, as motionless as murgu themselves, gripping their spears tightly, unseen, for the creature had not turned far enough to notice their silent forms among the trees.

  Amahast waited until its gaze went back to the ocean before he moved. Gliding forward without a sound, raising his spear. He had reached the edge of the trees before the beast heard him or sensed his approach. It snapped its head about, stared directly into his face.

  The hunter plunged the stone head of his spear into one lidless eye, through the eye and deep into the brain behind.

  It shuddered once, a spasm that shook its entire body, then fell heavily. Dead before it hit the ground. Amahast had the spear pulled free even before that, had spun about and raked his gaze across the slope and the beach beyond. There were no more of the creatures nearby.

  Amahast’s son Kerrick joined him, standing beside him in silence as they looked down upon the corpse.

  It was a crude and disgusting parody of human form. Red blood was still seeping from the socket of the destroyed eye, while the other stared blankly up at them, its pupil a black, vertical slit. There was no nose; just flapped openings where a nose should have been. Its massive jaw had dropped open in the agony of sudden death to reveal white rows of sharp and pointed teeth.

  “What is it?” Kerrick asked, almost choking on the words.

  “I don’t know. A marag of some kind. A small one, I have never seen its like before.”

  “It stood, it walked, like it was human, Tanu. A murgu, father, but it has hands like ours.”

  “Not like ours. Count. One, two, three fingers and a thumb. No, it has only two fingers—and two thumbs.”

  Amahast’s lips were drawn back from his teeth as he stared down at the thing. Its legs were short and bowed, the feet flat, the toes claw-tipped. It had a stumpy tail. Now it lay curled in death, one arm beneath its body. Amahast dug at it with his toe, turned it over. More mystery,.for clutched in its hand he could now see what appeared to be a length of knobbed black wood.

  “Father—the beach!” Kerrick called out.

  They sought shelter under the trees and watched from concealment as the creatures emerged from the sea just below the spot where they stood.

  There were three of the murgu. Two of them very much like the one that had been killed. The third was bigger, fat and slow-moving. It lay half in and half out of the water, lolling on its back, eyes closed and limbs motionless. The other two pushed at it, rolling it further up on the sand. The large creature bubbled through its breathing flaps, the
n scratched its stomach with the claws on one foot, slowly and lazily. One of the smaller murgu thrashed its paws about in the air and made a sharp clacking sound.

  Anger rose up in Amahast’s throat, choking him so that he gasped aloud. Hatred almost blinded him as, with no conscious volition, he hurled himself down the slope with his spear thrust out before him.

  He was upon the creatures in a moment, stabbing at the nearest one. But it had moved aside as it turned and the stone point only tore through its side, glancing off its ribs. The beast’s mouth gaped and it hissed loudly as it tried to flee. Amahast’s next blow struck true.

  Amahast pulled the spear free, turned to see the other one splashing into the water, escaping.

  Throwing its arms wide and falling as the small spear hurtled through the air and caught it in the back.

  “A good throw,” Amahast said, making sure the thing was dead before wrenching the spear free and handing it back to Kerrick.

  Only the large marag remained. Its eyes were closed and it seemed oblivious to what was happening around it.

  Amahast’s spear plunged deep into its side and it emitted an almost human groan. The creature was larded with fat and he had to stab again and again before it was still. When he was done Amahast leaned on his spear, panting heavily, looking with disgust at the slaughtered creatures, hatred still possessing him.

  “Things like these, they must be destroyed. The murgu are not like us, see their skin, scales. None of them has fur, they fear the cold, they are poison to eat. When we find them we must destroy them.” He snarled out the words and Kerrick could only nod agreement, feeling the same deep and unthinking repulsion.