In this Universe the night was Jailing: the shadows were lengthening toward an east that would not know another dawn. But elsewhere the stars were still young and the light of morning lingered: and along the path he once had followed, Man would one day go again.

19

             The naked woman seemed to be dead. The four-winged bird which gyred down from a pale afternoon sky thought as much. It wheeled in lazy eights with the woman at the cross point, keeping the body under its precise gaze. It flapped easily, luxuriating in the loft of thermals from the rocky bluff nearby. Its forewings canted wind into the broad, gossamer-thin hindwings, bringing an ancient pleasure. But then directives ingrained in its deepest genes tugged it back to its assigned task: to find the living humans in this area and summon aid.

             The brighter portion of its oddly shaped intelligence decided that this woman, who had not stirred for long minutes, was certainly dead. It made this decision not by reason but by a practical sense set long before it had come to know reason. The pebbles around her head were stained dark and a massive bruise had blossomed over her left ribs like a purple sunrise.

             Already the bird had seen over twenty dead humans among the trees, charred to ash, and none living. It decided not to report this body as a possible candidate. That would take valuable time, and members of this curious, unimpressive subspecies of humans were notoriously fragile.

             The four-winger had much rugged territory to cover and was running out of time. It hung for a long moment, indecisive as only a considerable intelligence can be, forewings rising as hindwings fell. Then the four-winger peeled away, eyes scanning every minute speck below.

             The afternoon shadows lengthened considerably before the woman stirred, her weak gasping lost beneath the chuckle of the nearby stream. Her breath whistled between broken teeth.

             This sound attracted a six-legged mother making her way with two cubs along the muddy bank. The woman's dying might have gained an audience then. But the sleek creatures saw that the woman distinctly resembled those who truly ruled here, though she smelled quite differently.

             The mother instructed her cubs to note and always respect that form, now broken but always dangerous. She used a language simple in words but complex in positional grammar, inflections giving layers of meaning. She augmented this with deft signs, using her midlegs.

             The family's quick flight downstream sent a tang into a crosswind which in turn roused the interest of a more curious creature. It was distantly descended from the simple raccoon, its pelt a rich symbol-laden swirl of red and auburn. This crafty intelligence quickly assessed the situation from the cover of stingbushes.

             It was cautious but not afraid. To it, the most important issue here lay in interlacing the dying woman's jarring presence with the elaborate meaning of its own life. From birth it had integrated each experience with its innate sense of balance and appropriate scale— indeed, this was the sole purpose of its conscious being. Such integration was complete and utterly beyond human ability, but emerged efl^ortlessly, the outcome of events in its evolution scattered through a billion years. The revival of its species a few centuries before had rendered with fidelity a creature in many ways superior to the pitiful figure it now watched intently.

             At last, and with proper understanding of the pattern of events which might spread from its actions like the branches of an infinite tree, unending, the raccoonlike beast padded forward. It smelled the woman. There also came the sharp bite of fresh dung nearby where a small predator had passed some hours before, hesitated a moment, and then decided that the woman was a better prospect for tonight, when she would be safely dead. This information rippled atop the usual background flavorings of sunset: a crisp aroma of granite cooling, the sweet perfume of the eternal flowers, a musty odor of fungus drawing water up the hills from the muttering stream.

             The woman's swollen skull was the worst problem. The optical disk bulged in both eyes. With long, tapered hands that echoed only faintly their origin in claws, the creature felt the unfamiliar cage of bones beneath the skin and muscle. The right arm was skewed unnaturally awry. Several ribs were cleanly snapped.

             This specific form taken from the human spectrum had not existed in the time of the raccoon-creature's origin, so it was an interesting puzzle. The body's design was archaic, a patchwork of temporary solutions to passing problems. Yet evolution had sanctified these cumbersome measures with success in the raw, natural world.

             The creature set about healing the body. It did not know how the woman came to be here or that she was in any way special. Gingerly it used techniques that were second nature, massaging points in this body which it knew emitted restoring hormones. It used its elbows—an awkward but unavoidable feature still not bettered in nature—to generate healing vibrations. The soft, swollen contusion in the right temple responded to rhythmic squeezing of the spine. The creature could feel pressures slowly relent and diffuse throughout the woman's head. Her glandular imperatives sluggishly closed internal hemorrhages. Stimuli to the neck and abdomen made her internal organs begin their filtering of the waste-clogged blood.

             Dusk brought the rustle of movement to the creature's large ears, but none of the telltale sounds implied danger. The creature sat comfortably beside the sprawled woman and slept, though even then with an alertness the woman could never know. When she began to mutter the creature realized it could understand the slurred words.

             "... get away . . . keep down . . . down . . . can't see us . . . from the air . . ."

             Much of her talk was garbled fever dreams. From brief moments of coherence the creature came to understand that the woman had been hunted remorselessly from a flyer, along with her tribe.

             The tribe had not escaped. A dry night breeze coming off the hotter plains to the west brought the sickly sweet promise of flesh rotting in tomorrow's sun. The creature closed its nostrils to the smell.

             The raccoon-being was pleasantly surprised that it could understand the woman's words. The lands here were filled with life-forms drawn from two billion years of incessant creation, and most of them could not fathom the languages of the others. This woman must have been taught—perhaps by genetic tuning—to comprehend the complex languages more advanced creatures used.

             The large creature felt that to engrain such knowledge was an error, a skewed and perhaps arrogant presumption. An early human form such as this might well be confused by such complex, disorienting craft. Language arose from a world view. The rich web of perceptions which had formed her present tongue could scarcely ride easily in her cramped mental confines.

             Normally it did not question the deeds of the advanced human forms called the Supras. But this badly mauled woman, her skin lacerated and turgid with deep bruises, raised doubts. Perhaps her injuries stemmed directly from her knowledge.

             After some contemplation, however, its innate sense that life was a dusty mirror, reflecting only passing images of truth, told it that this woman was here for no ordinary reason. So it sat and thought and monitored her body's own weak but persistent self-repairing.

             The woman lay beneath a night that gradually cleared as cumulus clouds blew in from the west and went on beyond the distant hills, as though hurrying for an appointment they could never meet. The creature sensed rising plumes of water vapor exhaled by the dense jungle and forest. These great moist wedges acted like invisible mountains, forcing inblowing air to rise and rain out its wet burden.