Dark Benediction

The biped came to believe his priests. He believed the legend of the lost home. He believed that Bion had touched him with the hunger curse. How else could they explain the pressing cry of the heart? How could they interpret the clamor of the young, the tears—except as a Divine Thirst.

The star-craze. The endless search.

There was a green planet beyond the heartland, and it was ripe for bursting its human star-seed. There was a launching field, and a ship, and teeming crowd, and a fence with guards to keep the others out. A man and a girl stood at the fence, and it was nearly dawn.

He touched her arm and gazed at the shadows on the launching site.

“We won’t find it, Marka,” he said quietly. “We’ll never find it.”

“You believe the legend, Teris?” she whispered.

“The Planet of Heaven? It’s up there. But we can never find it.”

“Then why must you look?”

“We are damned. Marka.”

There was a silence, then she breathed, “It can be found. The Lord Bion promised—”

“Where is that written, Marka?” he scoffed coldly. “In a woman’s heart.”

Teris laughed loudly. “What does the heart-writing say?”

She turned to stare at the dark shadow of the ship against the graying sky. “It says: ‘When Man is content—without his lost paradise—when he reconciles. himself—Bich will forgive, and show us the road home.’”

He waved his hand fiercely at the fading stars in the west. “Ours, Marka. They’re ours! We took them.”

“Do you want them?”

He stiffened angrily and glared at the shadow of her face. “You… you make me sick. You’re a hanghacker.”

“No!” She shook her head wildly. “No!” She caught at his arm as he retreated a step. “I wish I could go! I want to go, do you hear?”

“I hear,” he snapped. “But you can’t, so there’s no use talking about it. You’re not well, Marka. The others wouldn’t let you aboard.” He backed away another step.

“I love you,” she said frantically.

He turned and stumbled away toward the sky-chariot. “I love you!”

He began to trot, then burst into a wild sprint. Afraid, she thought in triumph. Afraid of turning back. Of loving her too much.

“You’ll never find it!” she screamed after him. “You can’t find it up there! It’s here—right here!”

But he was lost in the crowd that milled about the ship. The ship had opened its hatches. The ship was devouring the people, two at a time. The ship devoured Teris and the space crew. Then it closed its mouth and belched flame from its rockets.

She gasped and slumped against a fencepost. She hung there sobbing until a guard drove her away.

A rocket bellowed the space song. The girl tore off her wedding bracelet and flung it in the gutter. Then she went home to fix breakfast for the children.

I am the Weaver of space. T am a Merchant of new fabrics in flux patterns for five-space continua. I serve the biped who built me, though his heart he steeped in hell.

Once in space, a man looked at me and murmured softly, “You are the cross on which we crucify ourselves.”

But the big hunger pushed him on—on toward the ends of space. And he encountered worlds where his ancestors had lived, and where his peaceful cousins still dwelt in symbiosis with their neighbors. Some of the worlds were civilized, some barbaric, and some were archaeological graveyards. My nomads, they wore haunted faces as they re-explored the fringes of the galaxy where Man had walked before, leaving his footprints and his peace-seeking children. The galaxy was filled.

Where could he go now?

I have seen the frantic despair in their faces when, upon landing, natives appeared and greeted them politely, or tried to kill them, or worshiped them, or just ran away to hide. The nomads lurked near their ships. A planet with teeming cities was no place for a wanderer. They watched the multifaceted civilizations with bitter, lonely eyes.

Where were new planets?

Across the great emptiness to the Andromeda galaxy? Too far for the ships to go. Out to the Magellanic clouds? Already visited.

Where then?

He groped blindly, this biped. He had forgottgn the trail by which his ancestors had come, and he kept re-crossing it, finding it winding everywhere. He could only plunge aimlessly on, and when he reached the last limit of his fuel—land. If the natives could not provide the ‘fuel, he would have to stay, and try to pass another cycle of starward growth on the already inhabited world. But a cycle was seldom completed. The nomads intermarried with the local people; the children, the hybrid children, were less steeped in hunger than their fathers. Sometimes they built ships for economic purposes, for trade and commerce—but never for the hysterical starward sweep. They heard no music from the North End of Space, no Lorelei call from the void. The craving was slowly dying.