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."The book is for you."I think he wanted very badly to die.But life was too much of a habit, and he could not die so easily,not the Timekeeper, so he charged Soli and tried to put his knife into him.Soli threw his spear.Withhis spear he had once killed a great white bear, and now he would kill an old, old wolf of a man.Eventhough the Timekeeper tried to twist out of the way, Soli's spear caught him in the chest."So!" the Timekeeper howled out in pain.He stumbled and fell into the snow, ten feet from the edgeof the crevasse.Then Soli was all over him, kicking him in the face and throat, grabbing the spear shaft and jerkingit back and forth, the better to ruin as much flesh as possible and to work the tip deep into theTimekeeper's heart.When I began to move forward, Soli shouted, "Stay away!"I took a step closer to them, the last step, the fateful step, the step I had seen myself take a thousanddifferent times as I lay scrying in our silent snow-hut.I did not know why I took the step.I only knewthat I must, that if I stepped closer to Soli, somehow the secret I had sought for so long would berevealed to me.My foot seemed to hang in the snow as it settled downward.My muscles were nearlyfrozen.The cold air hurt my eyes.My vision of the future - the future that was now, had always beenand would always be - had taken me this far but no farther.Beyond this time, nothing.I was as blindto future moments as a child floating in his mother's womb is to light."Bastard!" Soli shouted."Stay away!"He ripped his spear from the Timekeeper's chest.There was a hole in the Timekeeper's furs as big asmy fist, an ocean of blood.With the strength of an Alaloi - or the frenzy of a madman - Soli bent lowand lifted him straight-up over his head.He staggered over to the edge of the crevasse."No, Soli!" I cried out.I moved across the snow as fast as I could, but I was remembering too muchto fall into slowtime, and therefore I moved too slowly."Soli, no!"I grabbed at Soli as he heaved and pitched the Timekeeper's body into the crevasse.I fell againsthim; both of us nearly followed the Timekeeper over, too.There was a crack and a splash as the bodybroke through the thin, new sea ice twelve feet below us.The Timekeeper plunged into black water;he sank like a stone and disappeared.The secret of life."Damn you, Soli!"The seals and fishes would scavenge the Timekeeper's body, and the secret of life would pass intothem and be lost forever somewhere in the icy deeps of the sea.I clung to Soli's furs waiting for theTimekeeper's body to rise, but it did not rise; it would never rise again."Bastard!" Soli shouted this ugliest of words as he caught his good hand up in my hair and tried tosnap my head back.Then I went mad, too.How thin the line between love and hate, reason and rage! Soli and I wentdown into the snow, tearing at each other as if we were mad dogs.I blindly grabbed for his throat.Ipunched his nose.With his two-fingered hand he must have found his spear because the bloody,frozen point dipped toward my face.I am sure he would have shoved it into my throat, but he did nothave a very good grip on it.I dropped my chin to cover my throat and jerked suddenly.Somehow theflint tip glanced across my forehead over my eyes.There was a hot pressure and a ripping sound andblood.The flint was in my blood, and his blood, the Timekeeper's blood frozen to the sharp spearpoint, melted into my blood as Soli sawed the spear across my skull.I had the eerie sensation that myblood recognized the kinship of the Timekeeper's blood, that inside me his blood was whispering tome, calling forth my deepest memories.Or perhaps it was the shock of the spear or the brilliant glareof the sun off the eastern ice that set me to remembrancing - I do not know.I grappled with Soli handto two-fingered hand, and the cold tide of memory (and rage) swept me under.I remembered a simple fact of genetics; I remembered that all human beings shared a commonancestry.The kinship of blood: Soli rolled against me, and his chest came up against mine, pressingme down through the layers of snow.I opened my mouth to scream, but the blood dripping out of hisnose got in and gagged me.I swallowed his blood, my blood, the blood of his father and grandfather,who was the Timekeeper, the grandfather of Bardo and Li Tosh, too, Perhaps even Shanidar'sgrandfather, the grandfather of the entire human race.For thirty thousand years the Timekeeper hadwandered the continents of Old Earth, all the while filling the women he took with the flood of hisloins.Filling them with godseed.How many children he had fathered across the centuries I could notguess.Perhaps tens of thousands of children.And in each one of them girl and boy, the secret of theIeldra coiled and was passed on to their children and their children's children, on and on, father to son,mother to daughter year after year so that on all the continents and oceans of all the planets of man(and on the made-worlds, too) no woman or man lived in whom the great secret did not live, lyingdormant, waiting inside.Inside me.We rolled over and over in the snow as Soli tried to stab his spear into my neck.But I locked hisarm - it was a lock the Timekeeper had taught me as a child - and I felt the joint stiffen up as hegrunted in anger and pain.Soli, too, had once taken wrestling lessons, and he broke my hold.He got aknee up and spun about.There was snow in my mouth and down the collar of my furs I wasswimming in snow.The ice points stung my naked shoulders and froze my neck.Rivulets ofsnowmelt and sodden clumps of icepaste chilled my chest.We punched and gouged and wrestledthrough the clean snow, trying to kill each other."Should I kill him?" Soli suddenly screamed [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]