or maybe even a primate, a lemur, for instance. It did not seem likely, considering the eyes. In fact, it seemed impossible. And why the retention of the tails? They served no useful purpose of which he knew. Evolution had cut off the tails of the great apes of the hominids. Why had it not done so with these creatures?
Also, there was the other animal life to consider. There were horses, smaller versions of the thoroughbreds of his day, which ranged the plains to the south. Another species, or variety, roamed the forest. They provided food for the Wufea, who had not as yet thought about riding them. The horses were unchanged in any significant features. But there was an animal with a delicate face and a giraffe-like neck that fed on the leaves of trees. He would swear that that animal was evolved from the horse.
There was a flying squirrel, although not the gliding animal of his time; this had bat-like wings and flew like a bat. But it was a rodent, and it must have evolved from the gliding squirrel.
There was also a bird, standing twelve feet high on very thick legs, which looked very much as if its ancestor had been the tiny roadrunner of the Southwest.
And there were other animals whose existence meant many millions of years of evolution from the forms he had known.
Awina had been curious about his life before he was turned into stone. He thought it better to say little about it until he found out what she expected his life to have been. She told him the few religious stories about Wuwiso. Essentially, he was one of the ancient gods, the only one to have survived a terrifying battle between them and Wurutana, the Great Devourer. Wurutana had conquered, and the other gods were destroyed. All except Wuwiso. He had escaped, but to trick his enemy, who was tracking him down, he had turned himself into stone. Wurutana had not been able to damage the stone god, but he had taken the god and buried him under a mountain where nobody would ever find him. Then Wurutana had started to grow, to cover the Earth.
In the meantime, Wuwiso lay at the heart of the mountain, unfeeling, unknowing, uncaring. And Wurutana was happy about this. But even Wurutana was not as great as the greatest of all gods, Time. Time washed away the mountain, and eventually a river carried the stone god down a canyon and deposited him at the bottom of a deep lake. And then an earthquake tilted the lake and dumped out the waters and the Wufea found the stone god, as was prophesied. And the Wufea had been waiting for many generations, waiting for the prophesied stroke of lightning which would bring their deliverer back to life. And, finally, at the hour of the Wufea's greatest peril, as had been foretold, the storm had covered the land and the lightning stroke had freed Wuwiso from the bonds of stone.
Ulysses Singing Bear did not doubt that there were some elements of truth in this myth.
In 1985 — how many epochs ago? — he was a biophysicist working on Project Niobe. He was halfway through getting his Ph. D. at nearby Syracuse University. The goal of the project was the development of a 'matter- freezer,' as it was referred to by the project workers. The device was capable of stopping for an indeterminate time all atomic movement in a piece of matter. The molecules and the atoms, and the parts that made up the atoms — the protons, neutrons and so forth — would cease all motion. A bacterium subjected to the energy complex rayed out by the matter-freezer would become a microscopic statue. It would be as if made of stone but of an indestructible stone. Nothing — acids, explosives, atomic radiation, great heat — could destroy it.
The device had possibilities both as a preserving agent and as a 'death ray,' or a 'life ray,' if one preferred that term. But, so far, it was impractical because of its extreme short range and its demand for enormous power. Also, there was not even a theory as to how the 'petrified' matter could be 'depetrified.'
Bacteria, a sea urchin egg, an earthworm and a rat had been 'petrified.' The morning that Ulysses fell into his long sleep, he was working on an experiment in which a pygmy laboratory pig would be rayed. If the experiment was successful, the next step would be to petrify a pony.
Everything had gone as before — up to a point. Ulysses was seated at his desk but was almost ready to get up and walk across the room to the control console he supervised. The power had been turned on, and the matter- freezer was warming up. Across his desk he could see the panel which held the power indicators and a number of other meters and gauges.
Suddenly, the needle of the big power meter had swung around to the red. The operators had cried out, and one had jumped up. Ulysses had looked up just as the needle swung around. And that was all he remembered. There was nothing between then and the time he had opened his eyes in the burning temple.
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,
