It was simple enough to figure out what had happened, in a general fashion. Something had given way in the complicated device; the device had blown up or shot out a thin and concentrated ray which, theoretically, it was not yet capable of producing. And he, Ulysses Singing Bear, had been caught. "Petrified." Whether the others had escaped or had also been turned into "stone," he did not know. He might never know.
And so aeons had passed while he existed as a statue of matter harder than anything in the universe. He could have been in that form when the sun blew up and shattered the Earth and sent him tumbling among the great fragments outward through space and toward the stars. For all he knew, that very event had happened, and he had drifted for millions, maybe trillions and trillions of years, while galaxies died and new ones formed. Or all matter in the oscillating universe rushed back to form a primal atom and then blew again and he was hurled at speeds half the speed of light out, and then was caught in newly forming matter, perhaps was the nucleus of a planet. Perhaps he was inside a new star and was ejected during an unimaginably vast eruption into space and was caught by the gravity field of a planet and was sucked down and had burned up tons of air in his fall and smashed deep into the earth. And there he lay while the primeval freshwater oceans changed to saltier matter. And the continents split and floated away from each other, drifting on the face of the earth. And he was lifted up with the formation of new mountain ranges and was exposed by earthquakes, by volcanic eruptions casting him out, by erosion of wind and water many, many times. And after innumerable burials and exposures, he at last came into the hands of the Wufea. And they set him up on a granite throne. And, at last, whether due to the action of the lightning stroke only, or its combination with the naturally decaying effects of the matter-freezer, he had turned from "stone" into flesh in a microsecond. So swiftly that his heart, interrupted in its beat for God knew how many aeons, had continued the systole or diastole, not even knowing that it had been silent and frozen for ages.
His fantasy, he thought, was a vivid one, and contained certain truths, but he did not think that he was in a new universe. He thought that he was still on Earth, no matter how ancient it was. It was too much of a coincidence that this planet had a moon so much like the moon he had known or that it had horses and rabbits and many insects exactly like those he had known.
Being born from stone was enough of a shock. It could have unhinged the minds of many men, and Singing Bear was not sure that he would be able to stay in one mental piece. But after the shock wore off, the loneliness began to hurt.
It was painful enough to know that all your contemporaries and their grandchildren for hundreds of thousands of generations were dust. But to know that you were the only human being alive was almost unendurable.
He could not be sure that he was the only human being on Earth, and this uncertainty kept him from plunging into despair. There was always hope.
At least, he was not the only sentient alive. He did have many people to talk to, even if the speakers were so alien that they often repelled him, and the language contained concepts he could not quite understand, and their attitudes were sometimes puzzling or infuriating.
Their attitude toward his supposed godhood made any intimacy or warmth difficult. Awina was the only exception. She regarded him with awe, but she also had an overwhelming warmth and humour.
Not even a god could be immune to that nor could Awina overcome it. She was continually saying that she should not have said such and such and would Wuwiso forgive her? She did not mean to be so nosy or so chummy and so forth. Ulysses would then assure her that he found nothing in her attitude that needed forgiving.
Awina was seventeen years old and should have been married a year ago. But her mother had died, and her father, forty years old and the chief priest, had put off forcing a marriage. He was exerting his authority close to the breaking point, because the unwritten law was that all healthy females should be mated by sixteen at the latest. Aytheera was a pleasant enough man when he got his way and was well-liked for a priest, and he succeeded in keeping his daughter in his house. Nevertheless, he could not have done so for much longer. She would have had to accept a mate and then have moved out to his longhouse. Though the chief priest had many privileges, he could not marry again. Why, no one knew. That was the custom, and custom was not often broken without immediate punishment.
Now, though he could not keep his daughter close to him all the time, Aytheera had another excuse for objecting to her marriage. She was the stone god's handmaiden, and as long as the god wanted her to serve him, she would. Did anyone in the tribe object?
No one did openly. So Awina stayed with the god until bedtime and then returned to her father's house. She sometimes complained that her father kept her up late talking and that she did not get enough sleep. When Ulysses said he would put a stop to that, she begged that he not say anything.
After all, what was a little loss of sleep compared to keeping her old father happy?
Meanwhile, Ulysses became more proficient in the Wufea speech. Its sound combinations were easy for him to master except for certain slight vowel variations used to indicate tenses "and attitudes toward tenses. He also took lessons from the Wagarondit captives in their language. This was entirely unrelated to Wufea as far as he could determine, though a scholar with access to written records (which did not exist, of course) might have traced them back to a common ancestor. After all, what tyro would suspect that Hawaiian and Indonesian and Thai were descended from the same parent? But Wagarondit contained a number of difficult phones for him. Its structure reminded him of the Algonquian languages, although of course this was only a superficial resemblance.
The trade language, Ayrata, seemed to be unrelated to either of the other two. Its sounds were simple for him, and its syntax was as uncomplicated and as regular as Esperanto. He asked Awina where it came from, and she said that the Thululiki had introduced it. Gutapa was the Wufea pronunciation of the word used by the Thululiki; she could not pronounce this. The Thululiki's own speech was beyond her; they had introduced Ayrata "all over the world." Everybody could speak some Ayrata, and trade and war councils and peace treaties were all conducted in Ayrata.
Ulysses listened to her description of the Thululiki and decided that they were beings out of her mythology. Such things could not exist.
He had also found out by then that the Wagarondit were being saved for the great annual
festival of the confederacy of the Wufea. Then the prisoners would be tortured and finally sacrificed to him. For the first time, he learned where the blood on the disc below his throne had come from.
"How many days until the festival of the stone god?" he said.
"One moon exactly," she replied.
He hesitated and then said, "And what if I forbid the torture and the killings? What if I said that the Wagarondit should be let loose?"
Awina's eyes opened widely. It was noonday, and her pupil was a black slit against the blue iris. She opened her mouth then and ran her pink rough tongue across her black lips.
She said, "Pardon, Lord. But why would you do that, what you said?"
Ulysses did not think she would understand if he tried to define concepts of mercy and compassion. She had those traits; she was very tender and empathetic and compassionate, as far as her own people went. But to her the Wagarondit were not even animals.
He could not despise her for that attitude. His own people, the Onondaga and the Senaca, had felt the same way. And so had his other ancestors, the Irish, the Danes, the French, the Norwegians.
"Tell me," he said. "Is it not true that the Wagarondit also claim me as their god? Were they not making that great raid so they could carry me off to their temple?"
Awina looked slyly at him. She said, "Who should know better than you, Lord?"
He waved his hand impatiently and said, "I've told you more than once that some of my thoughts were changed to stone, too. I do not remember some things as yet, though doubtless it will all come back to me. What I'm getting at is that the Wagarondit are as much my people as the Wufea."
"What?" Awina said, and then, in a lower tone, "My Lord?"
She was shaking.
"When a god finally speaks, he does not always say what his people expect to hear," Ulysses said. "If a god said only what everyone else knows, why have a god? No, a god sees much farther and much more clearly than mortals. He knows what is best for his people, even if they are so blind they can't see what will be good for them in the long run."
There was silence. A fly buzzed in the room, and Ulysses wondered that that pest had survived. If mankind had been intelligent enough, he would. and then he thought, well, mankind wasn't intelligent enough. Even in 1985 it looked as if starvation and pollution, mankind's progeny, would kill off man. It looked now as if all of humanity might be dead, except for one accidental survivor, himself. Yet here was the common housefly, as prosperous as his distant cousin, the cockroach, which also infested the village.
Awina said, "I do not understand what my Lord is getting at, or why the ancient sacrifices, which seemed to satisfy my Lord for so many generations, and against which he never once opened his mouth. "
"You should pray that you will be able to see, Awina. Blindness can lead to death, you know."
Awina closed her mouth and then ran the tip of her tongue over her lips. He was finding out that cloudy statements threw them into a panic, that they imagined the worst.
"Go tell the chiefs and the priests that I want to hold a conference," he said. "Within the time it would take a man walking slowly to go all the way around the village. And tell the workers to quit hammering away on this building while we are holding the conference."
Awina, shouting, ran out of the temple and inside five minutes every official who was not out hunting was inside the temple. Ulysses sat on the hard, cold granite throne and told them what he wanted. They looked shocked, but none dared object. Aytheera did say, "Lord, may I ask what you eventually intend to do with this alliance?"
"For one thing, I intend to stop this useless warfare. For another, I intend to take both Wufea and Wagarondit, the best warriors of both peoples, on an expedition against Wurutana."
"Wurutana!" they murmured in awe and no little dread.
"Yes, Wurutana! Are you surprised? Did you not expect the ancient prophecies to be fulfilled?"
"Oh, yes, Lord," Aytheera said. "It is just that, now the time is here, we find our knees shaking and our bowels turning to water."
(To the Wufea, the seat of courage was in the bowels.)
"I will be leading you against Wurutana," Singing Bear said. He wondered just what Wurutana was and what he was supposed to do to combat it. He had tried to get as much information as he could about it without letting them know how ignorant he was. He did not think that he should be using his excuse of "petrified" thoughts in the case of Wurutana. That was permissible with other, lesser, things, but Wurutana was so important that he would not have forgotten the slightest detail about it. That, at least, seemed to be the attitude of the Wufea.
"You will send a messenger to the nearest Wagarondit village and tell them that I am coming," he said, leaving it up to them to work out the practical method of approaching a deadly enemy. "You will tell them that I am coming to visit and that we will be bringing the Wagarondit prisoners, safe if not exactly unharmed, and will release them there. And the Wagarondit will release any Wufea prisoners they might have. We will hold a big conference and then go to the other Wagarondit villages and hold meetings there. Then I will pick out the Wagarondit warriors I want to accompany us, and we will go across the plains against Wurutana."
There was plenty of light inside the temple. Both big doors were open, and a big hole at one end had not yet been closed. The light showed the expressions beneath the short sleek fur on their faces and their sidewise glancing at each other. Their eyes, blue, green, yellow, orange, looked sinister and cat-like. Their tails thrashed from side to side, additionally betraying their agitation.
They had expected him to lead them in a war of extermination against the Wagarondit. Now he was proposing peace, and, worse, they would have to share their god with their ancient enemy.
Singing Bear said, "Your real enemy is Wurutana, not the Wagarondit. Now go and do as I have ordered."
A week later, he walked out through the northern gates on the hard-packed path between the fields of corn and the gardens. The old people, the younger warriors left behind to guard the village, the females and the cubs followed them, shouting and waving. Behind him were three Wufea musicians — like the spirit of '76, he thought — a drummer, a flutist, and a standard-bearer. The drum was made of wood and hide. The flute was hollowed out from the bone of some great animal. The standard was a tall spear with feathers sticking out at right angles to the shaft and the mounted heads of an eagle-like bird, a big lynx-like cat, a giant rabbit, and a horse. These heads represented the four clans, or phratries, of the Wufea. The clans resided in every village, and it was the clan system which had bound the various Wufea tribes together. As he understood it, the treaties of peace and union were between the clans of the villages, not between each tribe. Thus, for a while, the rabbit clans of each village had not fought against each other, but the lynx and the horse clans had. Then these had made peace, and the eagle clans, which had been neutral, had also agreed to join the others. Only then had the Wufea villages presented a united front against the Wagarondit. Ulysses did not understand the system; it seemed very complicated and actually non-survival, but the Wufea thought their system was the only natural one.
Behind the standard-bearer and the musicians, who played atonal music, were the chief priest and two lesser priests. These wore feathered bonnets, massive beads, and brandished wands. After them came a group of twenty-five young warriors, also decked out in feathers, beads and with chevrons of green, black, and red painted across their faces and their chests. Behind them was a band of sixty older warriors. All warriors were armed with stone knives, tomahawks and assegais, and carried bows and quivers of arrows. They were aching to try their new weapons on the Wagarondit. That is, the younger warriors were. The older ones only concealed their scorn for the new weapons when Ulysses was within hearing distance. But he heard better than they thought.