to light the dense juplee forests so that hungry ifflings might continue their feasting on broad, fat leaves.
It was a blessing, the light, the broad splash of fire which appeared low in the evening sky and grew with the movement of The World to burn night away and to cover the dome of the sky with its glory.
From the lowly ifflings, God created Artonuee to love the beauty which fought the darkness. The light was good. And the Artonuee flourished and partook of God’s wisdom and flew on the wings of the sun and, coming too near, angered Her.
For to gain a world, and another, Artonuee forsook God and, in punishment, were doomed.
She spake: From the ifflings you came. To the ifflings return, and in the end, to eternal fire.
And the fires in the darkness grew as the Artonuee grew, and their thunder could be heard, and the end was ordained not quickly, but with inevitable slowness—eternal death marching down the blackness, sending messengers of light and radiation to remind the Artonuee of their transgressions.
Struggling against God’s anger, the Artonuee bellowed out into the cold void in drivers and sought refuge, but did not find it, being limited by God’s divine will.
Chapter Three
'Forgive me, Mother. I sin.'
She bowed before the shrine of Her dwelling, released her prayer. Around her, the soft silk of the walls glowed warmth and comfort, and through the spun covering of the viewer the fires of the night glowed the earth.
She had risen at a predawn hour in order to catch the shuttle driver.
Dressed for flight, her fragility cocooned in the protection of spacecloth, she pushed against the diaphragm of the entrance, felt it give, open,
caress, close behind her. There in the night the sky was a sea of fires in blues and reds and yellows. She tuned her multi-faceted eyes to drink the beauty and the awesome power of it, the variance of color and frequency, and the grim reminder, in halos of burning carbons and metals and gases, of the slow march of eternity. In her ears was the voice of God, on a non-utilitarian frequency, the scream of it, the roar of it; the tortured stars were knifing into her universe edge on, slightly inclined, wheeling star on star, worlds burning in terrible beauty.
She was young. As did all Artonuee, she reckoned her twenty years by The World out there up wind, where the ifflings crawled and fed on leaves. Maturing, she was considered beautiful. Life was sweet.
All senses open, she studied God’s grandeur. The night sky reflects the power of God, and Her anger.
She looked on it as a child, wide-round eyes registering all, ears operative on all frequencies, and she was as a child, lying on a mossy hill behind her Chosen Mother’s dwelling, hands under her head, looking up.
Individual, near stars were dimmed. The dome burned. And yet it was all so distant, the nearest flare magnified out of its importance by relative nearness. Small, insignificant stars streaming toward each other, blending, blossoming into space-eating hugeness. Flying downwind from such small stars would be, she knew, an exercise for a novice.
But to fly before the combined fury of their meeting?
She shivered. To be alive when the masses struck, to fly before the storm of winds then. On that wind she would fly forever into the impenetrable depths where life was too short. But to fly, once, on such force! To feel the beat of the wind on the wings of her flyer.
Such thoughts angered God. She pressed herself, indicating her defenseless heart to God. She felt deliciously sacreligious.
The words of the priests came back to her. 'Space is God’s dwelling,' they said. Why, she asked, are males so much more devout than females? 'You flaunt your sin before Her, flying. It is an arrogant repetition of the original sin, and it is useless. Have we not determined that we cannot flee Her? Forsake the ways of the wicked. Fight the whim in you, female, which calls you to defy Her.'
'I die,' she answered. 'All Artonuee die. We see our doom in the night sky. Our world dies day by day. Our death comes toward us slowly, as stellar distances are measured, but inevitably. Our instruments can measure it. We ourselves can sense it. I, of course, will not be alive, in this body, at the end. That is Her will. But were I alive, I would watch the nearing of the colliding star through the thick viewer of my flyer. I would sail before it, the end, using its winds. I would watch the tendrils of the solar flames reach out, touch our worlds. And as I flew there, deep in space, all wings spread, catching the fury of the death of all, using it to reach a depth never before achieved by flyer, by Artonuee, I would ask Her: Why, Mother? No. I refuse to see that my flying makes the original sin—if, indeed, it were sin—any more reprehensible. Can we be punished more than once? We die. Meanwhile, I fly.'
'God, in Her mercy, could decide to forgive.' they said.
Males. Weak. Foolish. But then, they were changed without wings, never knowing the soar of it, the view of The World from aloft on the gentle winds of the air. 'I read the Book,' she told them. 'It foretells all things and I find no promise of forgiveness. Can God, Herself, find a reversal for the inexorable movements of the universe?'
'Sacrilege,' cried the male teachers, hiding their eyes from the possibility of God’s immediate fury.
It was the nature of the female to think, to seek. During long hours under the night sky she watched the march of the galaxies and, in theory classes, talked of ways to beat God’s laws. That she could not overcome the limitation of the speed of light saddened her, as it had saddened generations of Artonuee females. Yet, saddened, she still faced the impossible distance between the Artonuee galaxy and the nearest giant wheel which swam in clean space immune to the angry retribution of the Artonuee God.
Once, with her soul mate, she calculated the size of a driver large enough to carry juplee leaves for two ifflings and a host on a voyage through time to the far galaxy. Ifflings, given an unlimited supply of food, lived through the centuries. The host could be in dormant state.
The cubic area required for food alone dwarfed her imagination. Only the growing juplee forests could supply a greedy iffling with his food, and it was beyond Artonuee technology to transship a growing forest. Not even
an imaginative Artonuee female could counter the immutable laws of a vengeful God.
You think thus, if you’re an Artonuee female standing under the fires of the night. You shiver in your spacecloth and press your heart and force the sacrilege far down inside you and think, perhaps, of the long life which the race has already enjoyed and of how far it has flown from The World, green, cool, damp, how far from the ifflings the race has risen. Yet, one is not allowed to be prideful for more than a moment, for it is there, moving at thirty-five thousand miles per second, great sheets of stellar flame as stars embrace in paroxysmal finality. It is impossible to deny it. Not even if you are Miaree, aged twenty and feeling the first thrust of the formation of pre- eggs in your body. So you tuck your tiny, now useless wings close under the snug spacecloth, pick your way down the dew-dampened vault of the garden past the night-blooming flowers. You lean now and then, if you’re Miaree and twenty, for there is no one out to see and laugh as you revert to childhood and, with your long, graceful, and marvelously flexible lips, drink nectar and laugh at yourself.
Up there the sun is beginning to light the tops of the low hills. The World wakens slowly. The first red rays reach and pierce and do battle with the cold light of the evil stars, and you tune out evil, using only part of your senses, and you run lightly to the roller where the meter shows more than enough charge to last the few moments of predawn required to drive the empty thoroughfare, wind moving the fine tendrils of your hair, dawning streets, an early riser keening a greeting, and in the burst of dawn the driver pointed upward, phallic, male, waiting and reaching.
Chapter Four
Stinkpot driver pounding upward on primitive fire blackening the atmosphere. But even pollution can, at times, be beautiful, and the pull of the enforced gravity of the drive does not detract from the sheer joy of looking back to see the long trail as the driver gains cold air and speeds, screaming, into the dark side. Behind, as night
