They Fly at Ciron Read Free Page B

surprised; for, as an idea to turn overand consider, like the petals of a black-eyed Susan, it had intrigued her. “Why?”
    “Well, when I was a little girl, playing in the yard of my parents’ hut in Calvicon, and I’d think about such things—death, I mean—the idea of all that nothing after my little bit of a life used to frighten me—terribly, so that my mouth would dry, my heart would hammer, and I’d sweat like I’d just run a race… from time to time I’d almost collapse with my fear of it; there it waited, at the end of my life, to swallow me into it. Nothing. Nothing for millions of billions of years more than the millions of billions of years that are no part at all of all the years there are. Really, when such thoughts were in my head, I couldn’t sing a note! But then, a little later, when I heard this other idea, it occurred to me that, really,
it
was much more frightening! If I—and you—really are that great consciousness, and really are one, that means I—the great consciousness that I am—must go through
everyone’s
pain,
everyone’s
agonies,
everyone’s
dying and death, animal as well as human, bird and fish, beast and plant, and all the unfairness and cruelty and pain in the universe: not only yours and mine, but the pain of every bug anyone ever squashed and every worm that comes out of the ground in the rain to dry up on a rock.” Naä chuckled. “Well, it’s all I can do to get through my own life. I mean, doesn’t it sound
exhausting?”
    They walked in the dust a while. Finally Rimgia said (because this was something she had thought about many times before): “I wish I could change places with thee, Naä—could just put my feet into the prints thy feet leave on the path and from there go where thou goest, see what thou seest. I wish I could become thee! And give up being me.”
    “Whatever for?” Naä knewhow much the youngsters were in awe of her; but, whenever it came out in some open way, it still surprised her.
    “Once every three years,” Rimgia said, “I’ll go on a wander for a week—maybe tramp far enough to find a village so much like Çiron that I might as well not have started out. Or I’ll sit in the woods and dream. And the most exciting thing that’ll actually happen will be that I see a Winged One from Hi-Vator pass overhead. But thou hast been to dozens of lands, Naä. And thou wilt go to dozens more. Thou hast learned the songs of peoples all over the world and thou hast come to sing them here to us—and thou makest us, for the moments of thy song, soar like men and women with wings—while all I do is go home from the fields to cook for my brother and father.” She laughed a little, because she was a good girl, who loved her father and brother even as she complained of them. “So now thou knowst why, for a while at any rate, I would be thee!”
    “Well,” Naä said, “I must cook for myself—and though most days I like it, some days are lonely. Nor is the lean-to I live in all that comfortable.” Even saying it, Naä was thinking that she wouldn’t change her life with a king’s. For the friendly, gregarious, and curious folk of Çiron made real loneliness a difficult state to maintain. “Right now, though, I’ve got to see Ienbar in his shack at the burial meadow. I told him I would come by today, once the water cart passed. But I shall see you tomorrow—and, who knows, maybe make a song about a wonderfully interesting red-headed woman who, while she cooks for her brother and father, takes her questions to… the very edge of death and back!”
    “Thou’rt the one going to the burial field,” Rimgia said, pretendingnot to be desperately pleased at the prospect of being the subject of a song. “And thou’rt the one who has heard all the strange ideas of the world—not I. Yes, I would change places with thee, if I could, Naä—though if those foreign elders’ strange idea is right, it means that I may
have
to live your life, and