Walker in Leaves
by Scot Noel

Soft rains, given time, have rounded the angles of great towers. Generation after generation, wind borne seeds have brought down cities amid the gentle tangle of their roots. All statues of stone have been worn away.

Still one statue, not of stone, holds its lines against the passing years.

Sunlight, fading autumn light, warms the sculpture as best it can, almost penetrating to its dreaming core. The figure is that of a woman, once the fair sex of a species now untroubled and long unseen. Man sleeps the sleep of extinction. This one statue remains. Behind the grace of its ivory brow and gentle, unseeing eyes, the statue dreams.

A susurrus of voices, a flutter of images, and the dream tumbles down through the long morning. Suspended. Floating on the stream that brings from the heart of time the wandering self. Maya –for that is the statue’s name-- is buoyed by the sensation, rising within the cage of consciousness, but asleep. She has been this way for months: the unmoving figure of a woman caught in mid stride across the glade. The warmth of sunlight on her face makes her wonder if she will ever wake again.

Even at the end, there was no proper word for what Maya has become. Robot. Cybernetic Organism. Android. These are as appropriate to her condition as calling the stars campfires of the night sky and equally precise. It is enough to know that her motive energies are no longer sun and sustenance, and though Maya was once a living woman, a scientist, now she inhabits a form of ageless attraction. It is a form whose energies are flagging.

With great determination, Maya moves toward wakefulness. Flex a finger. Move a hand. Think of the lemurs, their tongues reaching out in stroke after stroke for the drip of the honeyed thorns. Though there is little time left to save her charges, Maya’s only choice is the patience of the trees. On the day her energies return, it is autumn of the year following the morning her sleep began. Maya opens her eyes. The woman, the frozen machine --that which is both-- moves once more.

Two lemur cubs tumbling near the edge of the glade take notice. One rushes forward to touch Maya’s knee and laugh. Maya reaches out with an arthritic hand, cold in its sculpted smoothness, but the lemur darts away. Leaves swirl about its retreat, making a crisp sound. The cub displays a playfulness Maya’s fevered mind cannot match. The second cub rolls between her moss covered feet, laughing. The lemurs are her charges, and she is failing them. Still, it is good to be awake.

Sugar maples and sumacs shoulder brilliant robes. In the low sun, their orange and purple hues startle the heart. Of course, Maya has no beating organ, no heart. Her life energies are transmitted from deep underground. Nor are the cubs truly lemurs, nor the sugar maples the trees of old. The names have carried for ten million seasons, but the species have changed. Once the lemurs inhabited an island off the southeast coast of a place called Africa. Now they are here, much changed, in the great forests of the northern climes.

The young lemurs seem hale, and it speaks well for their consanguine fellows. But their true fate lies in the story of DNA, of a few strands in the matriarchal line, of a sequence code-named “hope.” No doubt a once clever acronym, today Maya’s clouded mind holds nothing of the ancient codes. She knows only that a poet once spoke of hope as “the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.” Emily Dickinson. A strange name, and so unlike the agnomen of the lemurs. What has become of Giver-of-Corn?

Having no reason to alarm the cubs, Maya moves with her hands high, so that any movement will be down as leaves fall. Though anxious about Giver-of-Corn, she ambles on to finish the mission begun six months earlier. Ahead, the shadow of a mound rises up beneath a great oak. A door awaits. Somewhere below the forest, the engine that gives her life weakens. Held in sway to its faltering beat her mind and body froze, sending her into an abyss of dreams. She has been striding toward that door for half a year, unknowing if she would ever wake again.

Vines lose their toughened grip as the door responds to Maya’s approach. Regretfully, a tree root snaps, but the door shudders to a halt before its whine of power can cross the glade. Suddenly, an opening has been made into the earth, and Maya steps lightly on its downward slope. Without breathing, she catches a scent of mold and of deep, uncirculated water. A flutter like the sound of wings echoes from the hollow. Her vision adjusts as she descends. In spots, lights attempt to greet her, but it is a basement she enters, flickering and ancient, where the footfalls of millipedes wear tracks in grime older than the forest above. After a long descent, she steps into water.

How long ago was it that the floor was dry? The exactitude of such time, vast time, escapes her.

Once this place sustained great scholars, scientists. Now sightless fish skip through broken walls, retreating as Maya wades their private corridors, finding with each step that she remembers the labyrinthine path to the heart of power. A heart that flutters like dark wings. And with it, she flutters too. The closer she comes to the vault in which the great engine is housed, the less hopeful she becomes.

The vault housing the engine rests beneath a silvered arch. Its mirrored surface denies age, even as a new generation of snails rise up out of the dark pool, mounting first the dais of pearled stone left by their ancestors, the discarded shells of millions, then higher to where the overhang drips, layered in egg sacs bright as coral.

Maya has no need to set the vault door in motion, to break the dance of the snails. The state of things tells her all she needs to know. There shall be no repairs, no rescue; the engine will die, and she with it. Still, it is impossible not to check. At her touch, a breath of firefly lights coalesces within the patient dampness of the room. They confirm. The heart is simply too tired to go on. Its last reserves wield processes of great weight and care, banking the fires of its blood, dimming the furnace into safe resolve. Perhaps a month or two in cooling, then the last fire kindled by man shall die.

For the figure standing knee deep in water the issues are more immediate. The powers that allow her to live will be the first to fade. It is amazing, even now, that she remains cognizant.

For a moment, Maya stands transfixed by her own reflection. The silvered arch holds it as moonlight does a ghost. She is a sculpted thing with shoulders of white marble. Lips of stone. A child’s face. No, the grace of a woman resides in the features, as though eternity can neither deny the sage nor touch the youth. Demeter. The Earth Mother.

Maya smiles at the Greek metaphor. She has never before thought of herself as divine, nor monumental. When the energies of the base are withdrawn entirely, she will become immobile. Once a goddess, then a statue to be worn away by endless time, the crumbling remnant of something the self has ceased to be. Maya trembles at the thought. The last conscious reserve of man will soon fade forever from the halls of time.

As if hewn of irresolute marble, Maya begins to shake; were she still human there would be sobs; there would be tears to moisten her grief and add to the dark waters at her feet.

In time, Maya breaks the spell. She sets aside her grief to work cold fingers over the dim firefly controls, giving what priorities remain to her survival. In response, the great engine promises little, but does what it can.

While life remains, Maya determines to learn what she can of the lemurs, of their progress, and the fate of the matriarchal line. There will be time enough for dreams. Dreams. The one that tumbled down through the long morning comes to her and she pauses to consider it. There was a big table. Indistinct voices gathered around it, but the energy of a family gathering filled the space. The warmth of the room curled about her, perfumed by the smell of cooking. An ancient memory, from a time before the shedding of the flesh. Outside, children laughed. A hand took hers in its own, bringing her to a table filled with colorful dishes and surrounded by relatives and friends. Thanksgiving?

They’re calling me home, Maya thinks. If indeed her ancestors could reach across time and into a form not of the flesh, perhaps that was the meaning of the dream. I am the last human consciousness, and I am being called home.

With a flutter, Maya is outside, and the trees all but bare of leaves. Something has happened. Weeks have passed and she struggles to take in her situation. This time she has neither dreamed nor stood immobile, but she has been active without memory.

Her arms cradle a lemur, sheltering the pubescent female against the wind. They sit atop a ridge that separates the valley from the forest to the west, and Walker-in-Leaves has been gone too long. That much Maya remembers. The female lemur sighs. It is a rumbling, mournful noise, and she buries her head tighter against Maya. This is Giver-of-Corn, and Walker is her love.

With her free hand, Maya works at a stiff knitting of pine boughs, the blanket which covers their legs. She pulls it up to better shelter Giver-of-Corn. Beside them, on a shell of bark, a sliver of fish has gone bad from inattention.

They wait through the long afternoon, but Walker does not return. When it is warmest and Giver sleeps, Maya rises in stages, gently separating herself from the lemur. She covers her charge well. Soon it will snow.

There are few memories after reaching the vault, only flashes, and that she has been active in a semi-consciousness state frightens Maya. She stumbles away, shaking, but there is no comfort to seek. She does not know if her diminished abilities endanger the lemurs, and considers locking herself beneath the earth. But the sun is warm, and for the moment every thought is a cloudless sky. Memories descend from the past like a lost tribe wandering for home.

To the east lie once powerful lands and remembered sepulchers. The life of the gods, the pulse of kings, it has all vanished and gone. Maya thinks back to the days of man. There was no disaster at the end. Just time. Civilization did not fail, it succumbed to endless seasons. Each vast stretch of years drawn on by the next saw the conquest of earth and stars, then went on, unheeding, until man dwindled and his monuments frayed.

To the west rise groves of oaks and grassland plains, beyond them, mountains that shrugged off civilization more easily than the rest.

Where is the voyager in those leaves?

Continued on Next Page

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