Mount Charity - Edgar Pangborn, ebook, CALIBRE SFF 1970s, Temp 1
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VERSION 1.0 dtd 032700EDGAR PANGBORNMount CharityEDGAR PANGBORN was born in New York City in 1909. His formal education consisted, he observes, of being moderately exposed to Harvard. He studied piano and composition at the New England Conservatory of Music and for a time planned a musical career before he turned to writing. Except for military service in New Guinea and the Philippines during World War II, he has worked as a free-lance writer and painter.In 1951 he received a Special Award of Merit from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. His published novels are West of the Sun, science fiction (1953); A Mirror for Observers, science fiction (1954), which won Pangborn the International Fantasy Award; Wilderness of Spring, a historical novel (1958); The Trial of Callista Blake, a novel concerned with capital punishment (1962); Davy, a novel of the future (1964); and The Judgment of Eve, a novel of the future (1966). Good Neighbors and Other Strangers (1972) is a collection of short stories.To his list of admirable science fiction stories he has now added "Mount Charity," which was a finalist in the 1971 Nebula Awards balloting.My name is Peregrine; I have two friends.Do not touch me. Feel the air stir as I move it with my wing, and understand: I am flesh.One of my friends is hiding yonder at the edge of the pines. He is Lykos. Think of a European wolf, larger and shaggier than your American timber wolves. Three thousand years ago his pelt was rich black; like my plumage it has whitened. My other friend carries on his work far from here, in a cave on one of the lower peaks of the Cascade Range. The distant ancestors of the Blackfoot Indians called that peak Mount Charity because of its good shelters, springs, areas of sweet grass, tempered winds. If you see him you will think of a tailless monkey, a Barbary ape. For his amusement and ours, after we discovered India, we named him Hanuman. He too has gone white. He was the first of us to understand that we do grow old. We already knew we could die- Once we were four.I will not stand on your wrist. You would find our flesh cold. I like this arm of your chair. I like to watch the late sun on your face, Doctor, though I notice you need to turn away from it as I never do.Speech is hard for me. I know your language well, but my throat labors over human sounds. Be patient with me.We have watched you five summers. We like these hills you call Vermont. We like the young people who come in summer with their tents; and you exploit your version of Socratic method to stir their minds. A Socratic school, isn't it?In a way. I chase them with logic. 1 want them to know fantasy and objective truth, to value both, and understand the differences. You call me Doctor, but it's fifteen years since I retired from practice. It will be hard, Peregrine, to convince me that you are not the dream of an old man fallen asleep in the sun.You may feel more certain when Lykos comes to lie at your feet, and speak in a better voice than mine.We cannot know our origin. While your science was growingarticulate we listened, in our fashion. You could explore-your miscroscopes, telescopes, mathematics, subtle method-as we never could. What we believe about our beginning is an imitation of your sort of speculation. Since nothing like us exists, so far as we know, anywhere on Earth except in our three bodies, and since our flesh can have very little in common with that of any Earthborn being, we think we may have originated from . . . let us imagine spores brought by a meteorite that fell on the Iberian Peninsula three thousand years ago. This unknown living dust was capable (we imagine) of entering a terrestrial host and growing until every part, while retaining the original design, became transmuted into our substance, whatever it is, with its unearthly long life and tenacious memory, its partly humanlike powers of reason, imagination, affection. (Sometimes, it's true, we think in ways I cannot explain to you.) And we suppose that dust did enter the grown bodies of a peregrine hawk, a wolf, a monkey, a snake. We take this hypothesis because we have none better. Maybe when we die and your experts examine us they will provide an altogether different explanation. But we hope to live for some brief time yet. And it seems to us that your wise men, confronted by their own runaway technology, by the decay of political and social responsibility, above all by the horrors of human overbreeding, have enough to' engage their energies for a long time-if a long time is still possible for any being on this planet-without bothering about three aliens, "impossible" creatures, who can only watch, reflect and finish (if we have time) a certain task.We're not even sure it would be safe for your kind to handle us. This is a new concern, taught us by your science. We have never had much physical contact with the animal life of Earth-it disturbs us; our senses shrink. We can love you, but not by touch. (If you don't understand this, let it pass: it affects us more than you.) The leaves of a few plants are the only food that sustains us. Such contact as we have made with animal life, most of it accidental, has done no harm that we know of to either side, but we never know enough. I prefer that you do not put out your hand to me. Needlessprecaution, very likely, but sooner that than harm you.The fourth of our number was killed by terrified peasants smashed with stones and sticks. They may have felt pious anger at her serpentine shape as well as fear. It happened in the twelfth century of your Christian calendar. However, we have seen men of the present day provoked to the same idiotic destructiveness, by forms they find too remote from the little human pattern and therefore to be hated.Ophis had stored her memory with knowledge of the great world below the tops of the grass. For centuries she had also been listening to the human things-under floors, behind walls, in garden hedges, beyond campfires. As much as she passed on to us is safe in Hanuman's faultless memory and in the written record that he labors over at Mount Charity. But Ophis died before we had begun that record, and so the rest of what she knew is beyond recovery.If you have any wish to convince others of our existence, even those goodhearted scholars of yours who themselves would never hurt us, I beg yon dismiss it. We dare not show ourselves. I came to you frightened, and am still frightened in spite of what we know about you. We are too familiar-forgive me-with the human habit of shooting first and then looking to see what the bullet struck.We have searched your people in every generation for those few we might dare to approach, in need. It is long since we have spoken. Lykos, three hundred and fifty years ago, wished to save a woman he found lost in the woods, and could not quiet her fear of him except by using his mild human voice. Alas, his kindness! The poor soul reeled home dazed by the holy marvel, believing it a pure experience of the presence of God; and she chattered to the wrong ears, and so was burnt for a witch on the urgent recommendation of the then Archbishop of Cologne. More than once I have seen human kindness reach out to save a moth from the flame, and the hand frightens the silly beautiful thing directly into death.We come to you now because we are truly in great need of help.What threatens us would seem trivial to most others of your breed, supposing they could first accept the fact of our existence. We know you will not think in those terms, but you might well hesitate from other reasons. You have a right to know more about us who come begging. Let me talk on about us for a while.In our time we have examined all the regions between the poles, except the seas. I have flown to the farthest islands. I know the upper air (how clean it once was!); Lykos and Hanuman for centuries searched the jungles, the prairies, steppes, tundra, and fields and pastures governed by men. They traveled everywhere with Ophis, while she lived. We have found no others of our kind. In the sea?-it's possible; there we can't go. Some of the dust that (may have) made us could have fallen there. I came to consciousness on a patch of ground near the mouth of what is called today the Guadalquivir, and the first beauty I saw and marveled at was the play of afternoon sunlight on the waters of the Atlantic; the first music I knew was counterpoint of wind and ocean. I think it was after my-should I say birth?-that a city grew up south of there; the Romans knew it as Gades, now Cadiz. Yes, there might be a few of us in the sea. I think they could hardly have discovered communication as we did; to them humanity might be no more than a fraction of the rain of death that falls slowly through the green spaces to the ooze. If the corruption of the sea by your breed threatens to destroy them, they will have no defense and no escape.However, we have found no others. The hope of doing so has not quite gone, but it is faint. Yours is a huge world. Only men stultified by impatience or indifference believe it to be small. Only the pitiably ignorant believe it has been explored.I'll tell you more of that first awareness. I came to it as mind without speech or knowledge or memory, in possession of an airy body that could fly without learning the art, see and hear keenly, discover the racing pleasures of the wind. With smell, hunger woke (nothing like a hawk's) and I pecked at leaves, drawn by this or that pungent scent, until I learned how hunger could be quieted. But though my mind was empty and waiting, it was charged by a flame of curiosity like that of no other animal, I now understand, except man. With no language, tradition or guide, no concept of communication, I watched the continuous wonderful flow of life about me, and I was able to make comparisons, elementary...
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