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They trembled as though roiling in a stream growing turbulent. Then, one by
one, they rearranged themselves. All up and down the length of the river, the
bodies shifted and moved and lifted without aid from their original positions,
and far off, where their movement to neatness could not be seen, there came
the roar of dammed-up water breaking free, surging forward, freed from its
restraining walls of once-
human flesh.
As Bright Eyes trembled, power surging through his slight frame, his eyes
seeming to wax and wane with currents of electricity, the river of corpses
freed itself from its log-jam, and was open once more.
The water poured in a great frothing wave down and down the corpse-bordered
trough of the river.
It broke out of a box-canyon to Bright Eyes left, like a wild creature penned
too long and at last set free on the wind. It came bubbling, boiling,
thrashing forward, passed the spot where he stood, and hurled itself away
around the bend in the shoreline.
As Bright Eyes felt the trembling pass, the river rose, and rose, and gently
now, rose. Covering the ghastly residue of humanity that now lay submerged
beneath the mud-blackened waters.
The eyes of the trembling creature, the eyes of the giant rat, the eyes of the
uncaring day were blessedly relieved of the sight of decay and death.
Emotions washed quickly, one after another, down his features; washed as
quickly as the river had concealed its sad wealth; colors of sadness,
imprinted in a manner no human being could ever have conceived, for the face
that supported these emotions was of a race that had vanished before man had
walked the Earth.
Then Bright Eyes turned, and with the rat, walked upstream. Toward the
morning.
When the bleeding birds went over, the sun darkened. Great irregular,
hard-edged clouds of them, all species, all wingspreads-but silent. Passing
across the broad, gray brow of the sky, heading absolutely nowhere, they
turned off the sun. It was suddenly chill as a crypt. Heading east. Not toward
warmth, or instinct, or destination...just anywhere, nowhere. Until they
wearied, expired, dropped. Not manna, garbage. Live garbage that fell in
hundredclots from the beat-winged flights.
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Many dropped, fluttering idly as if too weary to fight the air currents any
longer. As though what tiny instinctual brain substance they had possessed,
were now baked, turned to jelly, squashed by an unnameable force into an
ichorous juice that ran out through their eyes. As though they no longer cared
to live, much less to continue this senseless flight east to nowhere...
...and they bled.
A rain of bird s blood, sick and discolored. It misted down, beading Bright
Eyes, and the stiff rat fur, and the trees, and the still, silent, dark land.
Only the dead, flat no-sound of millions of wings metronomic ally beating,
beating, beating...
Bright Eyes shuddered, turned his face from the sight above, and finding
himself unable to look, yet unable to end the horror as he had the mad dogs or
the water of corpses, sought surcease in his own personal vision.
And this, which had driven him forth, was his vision:
Sleeping, deep in that place where he had lived so long, Bright Eyes had felt
the subtle altering of tempo in the air around him. It was nothing as obvious
as machinery beginning to whirr, trembling the walls around him; nor as
complex as a shift in dimensional orientation. It was, rather, a soft sliding
in the molecules of everything except Bright Eyes. For an instant everything
went just slightly out of synch, a little fuzzy, and Bright Eyes came awake
sharply. The thing that had occurred, was something his race had pre-set eons
before. It was triggered to activate itself-whatever itself was-after
certain events had possibly happened.
The fact that this shifting had occurred, made Bright Eyes grow cold and wary.
He had expected to die without its ever having come. But now, this was the
time, and it had happened, and he waited for the next phase.
It came quickly. The vision.
The air before him grew even more indistinct, more roiled, like a pool of
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