Homo Inferior. Wolf Mari

smiled. "Remember these?"

      …Walden's study. The familiar curtains drawn aside, and the shelves behind them. The rows of bright-backed, box-like objects, most of them old and spotted, quite unhygienic…

      Gwin shook her head at the perception, but Myron nodded.

      "Books. I didn't know there were any outside the museums."

      Walden smiled again. "Only mine. Books are fascinating things. All the knowledge of a race, gathered together on a few shelves…"

      "Knowledge?" Myron shrugged. "Imagine storing knowledge in those – boxes. What are they? What's in them? Just words…"

      The books faded as Walden sighed. "You'd be surprised what the old race did, with just those – boxes."

      He looked across at Eric, who was now bouncing his ball and counting, out loud, up to three, and then going back and starting again.

      "The boy can learn what's in those books. Just as if he'd gone to school back in the old times."

      Myron and Gwin looked doubtfully at each other, and then over at the corner where Eric played unheeding. Perhaps Walden could help. Perhaps…

      "Eric," Gwin said aloud.

      "Yes, mother?"

      "We've decided you're going to go to school, the way you want to. Mr. Walden here is going to be your teacher. Isn't that nice?"

      Eric looked at her and then at the old man. Strangers didn't often come out on the sunporch. Strangers usually left him alone.

      He bounced the ball again without answering.

      "Say something, Eric," his mother commanded.

      Eric looked back at Walden. "He can't teach me to be like other children, can he?"

      "No," Walden said. "I can't."

      "Then I don't want to go to school." Eric threw the ball across the room as hard as he could.

      "But there once were other people like you," Walden said. "Lots of them. And you can learn about them, if you want to."

      "Other people like me? Where?"

      Myron and Gwin looked helplessly at each other and at the old man. Gwin began to cry and Myron cursed softly, on the perception level so that Eric wouldn't hear them.

      But Walden's face was gentle and understanding as he answered, so understanding that Eric couldn't help wanting desperately to believe him.

      "Everyone was like you once," Walden said. "A long time ago."

      It was a new life for Eric. Every day he would go over to Walden's and the two of them would pull back the curtains in the study and Walden would lift down some of the books. It was as if Walden was giving him the past, all of it, as fast as he could grasp it.

      "I'm really like the old race, Walden?"

      "Yes, Eric. You'll see just how much like them…"

      Identity. Here in the past, in the books he was learning to read, in the pictures, the pages and pages of scenes and portraits. Strange scenes, far removed from the gardens and the quiet houses and the wordless smile of friend to friend.

      Great buildings and small. The Parthenon in the moonlight, not too many pages beyond the cave, with its smoky fire and first crude wall drawings. Cities bright with a million neon lights, and still later, caves again – the underground stations of the Moon colonies. All unreal, and yet —

      They were his people, these men in the pictures. Strange men, violent men: the barbarian trampling his enemy to death beneath his horse's hooves, the knight in armor marching to the Crusade, the spaceman. And the quieter men: the farmer, the artisan, the poet – they too were his people, and far easier to understand than the others.

      The skill of reading mastered, and the long, sweeping vistas of the past. Their histories. Their wars. "Why did they fight, Walden?" And Walden's sigh. "I don't know, Eric, but they did."

      So much to learn. So much to understand. Their art and music and literature and religion. Patterns of life that ebbed and flowed and ebbed again, but never in quite the same way. "Why did they change so much, Walden?" And the answer, "You probably know that better than I, Eric…"

      Perhaps he did. For he went on to the books that Walden ignored. Their mathematics, their science. The apple's fall, and the orbits of planets. The sudden spiral of analysis, theory, technology. The machines – steamships, airplanes, spaceships…

      And the searching loneliness that carried the old race from the caves of Earth to the stars. The searching, common to the violent man and the quiet man, to the doer and the dreaming poet.

      Why do we hunger, who own the Moon and trample the shifting dust of Mars?

      Why aren't we content with the worlds we've won? Why don't we rest, with the system ours?

      We have cast off the planets like outgrown toys, and now we want the stars…

      "Have you ever been to the stars, Walden?"

      Walden stared at him. Then he laughed. "Of course not, Eric. Nobody goes there now. None of our race has ever gone. Why should we?"

      There was no explaining. Walden had never been lonely.

      And then one day, while he was reading some fiction from the middle period of the race, Eric found the fantasy. Speculation about the future, about their future… About the new race!

      He read on, his heart pounding, until the same old pattern came clear. They had foreseen conflict, struggle between old race and new, suspicion and hatred and tragedy. The happy ending was superficial. Everyone was motivated as they had been motivated.

      He shut the book and sat there, wanting to reach back across the years to the old race writers who had been so right and yet so terribly, blindly wrong. The writers who had seen in the new only a continuation of the old, of themselves, of their own fears and their own hungers.

      "Why did they die, Walden?" He didn't expect an answer.

      "Why does any race die, Eric?"

      His own people, forever removed from him, linked to him only through the books, the pictures, and his own backward-reaching emotions.

      "Walden, hasn't there ever been anyone else like me, since they died?"

      Silence. Then, slowly, Walden nodded.

      "I wondered how long it would be before you asked that. Yes, there have been others. Sometimes three or four in a generation."

      "Then, perhaps…"

      "No," Walden said. "There aren't any others now. We'd know it if there were." He turned away from Eric, to the plastic wall that looked out across the garden and the children playing and the long, level, flower-carpeted plain.

      "Sometimes, when there's more than one of them, they go out there away from us, out to the hills where it's wild. But they're found, of course. Found, and brought back." He sighed. "The last of them died when I was a boy."

      Others like him. Within Walden's lifetime, others, cut off from their own race, lonely and rootless in the midst of the new. Others like him, but not now, in his lifetime. For him there were only the books.

      The old race was gone, gone with all its conflicts, all its violence, its stupidity – and its flaming rockets in the void and its Parthenon in the moonlight.

      Eric came into the study and stopped. The room was filled with strangers. There were half a dozen men besides Walden, most of them fairly old, white-haired and studious looking. They all turned to look at him, watched him gravely without speaking.

      "Well, there he is." Walden looked from face to face. "Are you still worried? Do you still think that one small boy constitutes a threat to the race? What about you, Abbot?"

      "I don't know. I still think he should have been institutionalized in the beginning."

      "Why? So you could study the brain processes of the lower animals?" Walden's thoughts were as sarcastic as he could send them.

      "No,