The Eden Cycle by Raymond Z. Gallun

Author:Raymond Z. Gallun [Gallun, Raymond Z.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Sci-Fi, Science Fiction
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 2013-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

Jennie straightened up. “Go away, unwanted Benignity,” she ordered the thing. “We don’t need any help or any watching. So get lost!”

Hesitantly, the glow turned and wavered off in the direction from which it had come. I chuckled. My woman and I remained in firm agreement.

“Only, Jen,” I said, “we’d better figure on getting out of this part of the country very soon. For one thing, the river-level is still falling. Before long, it might be that nothing much will float on it.”

“We won’t float out in this—whatever it is,” she pronounced.

“Nope,” I seconded.

Our “boat.” Sad—we might have known. With all our efforts and hopes, our progress at hollowing out that log had been poor. There had been tough knots to cut through and unexpected cracks and rotted areas in the wood to try to plug and repair. We just hadn’t had time enough, adequate enough tools or the experience for efficient workmanship.

“Anyhow,” I said, “a raft would be lots easier and quicker to make and would serve almost as well.”

So we cut seven pine logs, lashed them side by side with rawhide, and built a flimsy shelter of poles and grass on top. By laboring like beavers, we finished the job in two days.

We launched our craft, loaded our stuff aboard it and poled it out into the stream.

The beginning days of our voyage were lazy, comfortable and beautiful. We rested, made love, sang songs, came ashore to cook, using smouldering pieces of rotten wood carried in a clay pot to light our fires. During our landings, we sometimes explored the unmemorable traces of towns, though in one of them we found another of those peculiar hillocks with a massive door in its side. This door was open, as was the first we had seen, and the chambers within were as choked from ages of accumulated, unrevealing litter. But one thing seemed evident; these constructions were frequent enough to indicate some common if mysterious purpose.

During our drifting passage downstream, we once glimpsed at a considerable distance a man and perhaps a girl, who seemed to be wearing the same sort of white coveralls we had been given at our emergence into reality. They stood staring at us but offered no hail or friendly sign, though we waved at them. Though we did crave companionship, the truth was that we didn’t feel so friendly either. We had been reminding ourselves for too long that this wasn’t SES country, but a lawless land of fact, where misjudgments about the intentions of people might be final.

And once, in the usually glimmerless dark of lonely night, while we floated by at midstream, we saw a small, red flicker. A campfire? Guardedly, we listened for voices. But all we heard was the yapping, wailing cry of a coyote.

Yes, the fleshed and embodied population of the Earth of now seemed thinly scattered.

But at one of our supper shore-stops, we did meet a shaggy character dressed in what appeared to be dried rabbit or prairie-dog pelts laced together with grass.

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