The Music Master of Babylon by Edgar Pangborn (best fiction novels of all time txt) 📖

of distress. He glanced at his companion, who giggled uneasily.

"The old man pretends to not know," she said, and smiled, and seemed to be waiting for the young man's permission to go on speaking. He did not give it, but she continued: "Sa, the old ones of Millstone are dead." She thrust her hand out and down, flat, a picture of finality, adding with nervous haste: "As the Old Man knows. He who told us to call him Jonas, she who told us to call her Abigail, they are dead. They are still-without-moving for six days. Then we do the burial as they told us. As the Old Man knows."

"But I don't know!" said Brian, and sat up on his pallet, too quickly, startling them. But their motion was backward, readiness for flight, not for aggression. "Millstone? Where is Millstone?"

Both looked wholly bewildered, then dismayed. They stood up with splendid animal grace, stepping backward out of the cave, the girl whispering in the man's ear. Brian caught only two words: "Is angry...."

He jumped up. "Don't go! Please don't go!" He followed them out of the cave, slowly now, aware that he might well be an object of terror in the half-dark, aware of his gaunt, graceless age and dirty hacked-off beard. Almost involuntarily, he adopted something of the flat stilted quality of their speech: "I will not hurt you. Do not go."

They halted. The girl smiled dubiously.

The man said: "We need old ones. They die. He who told us to call him Jonas said, many days in the boat, not with the sun-path, he said, across the sun-path, he said, keeping land on the left hand. We need old ones to speak the—to speak.... The Old Man is angry?"

"No, I am not angry. I am never angry." Brian's mind groped, certain of nothing. No one had come for twenty-five years. Only twenty-five? Millstone?

There was red-gold on the dirty eastern windows of the Hall of Music, a light becoming softness as it slanted down, touching the long rows of cases, the warm brown of an antique spinet, the arrogant clean gold of a 20th century harp, the dull gray of singing stones five thousand years old and a clay face much older than that.

"Millstone?" Brian pointed southwest in inquiry.

The girl nodded, pleased and not at all surprised that he should know, watching him now with a squirrel's stiff curiosity. Hadn't there once been a Millstone River in or near Princeton? He thought he remembered that it emptied into the Raritan Canal. There was some moderately high ground around there. Islands now, no doubt, or—well, perhaps they would tell him.

"There were old people in Millstone," he said, trying for gentle dignity, "and they died. So now you need old ones to take their place."

The girl nodded vigorously. A glance at the young man was full of shyness, possessiveness, maybe some amusement. "He who told us to call him Jonas said no marriage can be without the words of Abraham."

"Abr—" Brian checked himself. If this was religion, it would not do to speak the name Abraham with a rising inflection, at least not until he knew what it stood for. "I have been for a long time—" He checked himself again. A man old, ugly and strange enough to be sacred should never stoop to explain anything.

They were standing by the seven-stone marimba. His hand dropped, his thumbnail clicking by accident against the deepest stone and waking a murmur. The children drew back alarmed.

Brian smiled. "Don't be afraid." He tapped the other stones lightly. "It is only music. It will not hurt you." He was silent a while, and they were patient and respectful, waiting for more light. He asked carefully: "He who told you to call him Jonas, he taught you all the things you know?"

"All things," the boy said, and the girl nodded quickly, so that the soft brownness of her hair tumbled about her face, and she pushed it back in a small human motion as old as the clay image.

"Do you know how old you are?"

They looked blank. Then the girl said: "Oh, summers!" She held up both hands with spread fingers, then one hand. "Three fives. As the Old Man knows."

"I am very old," said Brian. "I know many things. But sometimes I wish to forget, and sometimes I wish to hear what others know, even though I may know it myself."

They looked uncomprehending and greatly impressed. Brian felt a smile on his face and wondered why it should be there. They were nice children. Born ten years after the death of a world. Or twenty perhaps. I think I am seventy-six, but did I drop a decade somewhere and never notice the damn thing?

"He who told you to call him Jonas, he taught you all that you know about Abraham?"

At sound of the name, both of them made swift circular motions, first at the forehead, then at the breast.

"He taught us all things," the young man said. "He, and she who told us to call her Abigail. The hours to rise, to pray, to wash, to eat. The laws for hunting, and I know the Abraham-words for that: Sol-Amra, I take this for my need."

Brian felt lost again, dismally lost, and looked down to the grave clay faces of the image for counsel, and found none. "They who told you to call them Jonas and Abigail, they were the only old ones who lived with you?"

Again that look of bewilderment. "The only ones, sa," the young man said. "As the Old Man knows."

I could never persuade them that, being old, I know very nearly nothing.

Brian straightened to his full gaunt height. The young people were not tall; though stiff and worn with age, Brian knew he was still a bonily overpowering creature. Once, among men, he had mildly enjoyed being more than life-size.

As a shield for the lonely, frightened thing that was his mind, he put on a phony sternness: "I wish to examine you about Millstone and your knowledge of Abraham. How many others are living at Millstone?"

"Two fives, sa," said the boy promptly, "and I who may be called Jonason and this one we may call Paula. Two fives and two. We are the biggest, we two. The others are only children, but he we call Jimi has killed his deer. He sees after them now while we go across the sun-path."

Under Brian's questioning, more of the story came, haltingly, obscured by the young man's conviction that the Old Man already knew everything. Some time, probably in the middle 2080s, Jonas and Abigail (whoever they were) had come on a group of twelve wild children who were keeping alive somehow in a ruined town where their elders had all died. Jonas and Abigail had brought them all to an island they called Millstone.

Jonas and Abigail had come originally from "up across the sun-path"—the boy seemed to mean north—and they had been very old, which might mean anything between thirty and ninety. In teaching the children primitive means of survival, Jonas and Abigail had brought off a brilliant success: Jonason and Paula were well fed, shining with health and cleanliness and the strength of wildness, and their speech had not been learned from the ignorant. Its pronunciation faintly suggested New England, so far as Brian could detect any local accent at all.

"Did they teach you reading and writing?" he asked, and made writing motions on the flat of his palm, which the two watched in vague alarm.

The boy asked: "What is that?"

"Never mind." He thought: I could quarrel with some of your theories, Mister whom I may call Jonas. "Well, tell me now what they taught you of Abraham."

Both made again that circular motion at forehead and breast, and the young man said with the stiffness of recitation: "Abraham was the Son of Heaven, who died that we might live."

The girl, her obligations discharged with the religious gesture, tapped the marimba shyly, fascinated, and drew her finger back sharply, smiling up at Brian in apology for her naughtiness.

"He taught the laws, the everlasting truth of all time," the boy recited, almost gabbling, "and was slain on the wheel at Nuber by the infidels. Therefore, since he died for us, we look up across the sun-path when we pray to Abraham Brown, who will come again."

Abraham Brown?

But—

But I knew him, Brian thought, stunned. I met him once. Nuber? Newburg, the temporary capital of the Soviet of—oh, the hell with that. Met him in 2071—he was 102 years old then, could still walk, speak clearly, even remember an unimportant concert of mine from years before. I could have picked him up in one hand, but nobody was ever more alive. The wheel?

"And when did he die, boy?" Brian asked.

Jonason moved fingers helplessly, embarrassed. "Long, long ago." He glanced up hopefully. "A thousand years? I think he who told us to call him Jonas did not ever teach us that."

"I see. Never mind." Oh, my good Doctor—after all! Artist, statesman, student of ethics, philosopher—you said that if men knew themselves, they would have the beginning of wisdom. Your best teacher was Socrates. Well you knew it, and now look what's happened!

Jonas and Abigail—some visionary pair, Brian supposed, maybe cracking up under the ghastliness of those years. Admirers of Brown, perhaps. Shocked, probably, away from the religions of the 21st century, which had all failed to stop the horrors, nevertheless they needed one, or were convinced that the children did—so they created one. There must later have been some dizzying pride of creation in it, possibly wholehearted belief in themselves, too, as they found the children accepting it, building a ritual life around it.

It was impossible, Brian thought, that Jonas and Abigail could have met the living Abraham Brown. As anyone must who faces the limitations of human intelligence, Brown had accepted mysteries, but he did not make them. He was wholly without intellectual arrogance. No one could have talked with him five minutes without hearing him say tranquilly: "I don't know."

The wheel at Nuber?

The wheel?

Brian realized he could never learn how Brown had actually died. Even if he had the strength and courage to go back north—no, at seventy-six (eighty-six?), one can hardly make a fresh start in the study of history. Not without the patience of Abraham Brown himself, who had probably been doing just that when the wheel—

An awed question from the girl pulled Brian from a black pit of abstraction: "What is that?" She was pointing to the clay image in its dusty sunlight.

Brian spoke vaguely, almost deaf to his own words until they were past recovering: "That? It is very old. Very old and very sacred." She nodded, round-eyed, and stepped back a pace or two. "And that—that was all they taught you of Abraham Brown?"

Astonished, the boy asked: "Is it not enough?"

There is always The Project. "Why, perhaps."

"We know all the prayers, Old Man."

"Yes, I'm sure you do."

"The Old Man will come with us."

"Eh?" There is always The Project. "Come with you?"

"We look for old ones," said the young man. There was a new note in his voice, and the note was impatience. "We traveled many days, up across the sun-path. We want you to speak the Abraham-words for marriage. The Old Ones said we must not mate as the animals do without the words. We want—"

"Marry, of course," said Brian feebly, rubbing his great, long-fingered hand across his face so that the words were blurred and dull. "Naturally. Beget. Replenish the Earth. I'm tired. I don't know any Abraham-words for marriage. Go on and marry. Try again. Try—"

"But the Old Ones said—"

"Wait!" Brian cried. "Wait! Let me think. Did he—he who told you to call him Jonas, did he teach you anything about the world as it was in the old days, before you were born?"

"Before? The Old Man makes fun of us."

"No, no." And since he now had to fight down physical fear as well as confusion, Brian spoke more harshly than he intended: "Answer my question! What do you know of the old days? I was a young man once, do you understand? As young as you. What do you know about the world I lived in?"

Jonason laughed. There was new-born doubt in him as well as anger, stiffening his shoulders, narrowing his innocent gray eyes. "There was always the world," he said, "ever since God made it a thousand years ago."

"Was there? I was a musician. Do you know what a musician is?"

The young man shook his head, watching Brian—too alertly, watching his hands, aware of him in a new way, no longer humble. Paula sensed the tension and did not like it.

She said worriedly, politely: "We forget some of the things they taught us, sa. They were Old Ones. Most of the