CONDEMNED TO THE FUTURE

                                                                                      Chapter 1.

                                                  "...at last awake from Life, that insane Dream we
                                                                         take for waking now..."

Spiraling slowly through the air into the gray wall of Death...

If he tightened his spinal muscles a bit more, then his speed increased and the spiral straightened to linear flight. With an added effort, neither muscular nor glandular, his floating course above the ravine became an act of will rather than the plaything of the cool winds whispering in his ear. He couldn't think of his destination-—it's urgency goaded him like the prick of a stiletto.

  Yet, the grace and billowing slowness of this flight washed him with great joy! The wingless conquest of gravity, even this four-tenths G, was the ancient dream of all humans...and other sentients? Then it hit! This had happened before, many times. He'd never reach his unknown (unknowable?) goal, yet he felt only an idle frustration in not being able to stop or even divert his attention from the intense effort more than this.

 Scraps of elder replays fluttered like dying leaves through his awareness, were nothing emotionally, but began to loosen and widen his thoughts. Details were few, no sharp edges. Oddly, he knew there shouldn't be. As he strained once more not to clip the tops of the enormous blue-green plants lining both banks, he also knew that Death was waiting ahead for him...forever, again.

This was the first time he'd ever known that! A memory of non-memory? Ha, ha. His balloonlike path had to follow the rocky ditch 70 meters below, even though he could have sailed out over the thick broccoli-like canopy that spread like a frozen sea around him. This puddled runoff wash led down from the sky-topped mountain behind him to...someplace important; the only compass in a dense trackless wilderness.

Far below his dangling legs-—one instant he was naked then he was clothed and booted, the grav belt warm against his belly, the red soil and yellow-black pitted rocks passed under and backward. Now the flowing creek had reached the flatlands beyond the lowest slopes of the vast mountain and begun to meander through oxbows that created islands during high waters. Treetop blurs of small animals caught his lazy eyes now and then, but no bird or insect ever joined him above the canopy. There were also larger, tasty creatures below to fill those ground-level niches of this rainforest. That was all he had seen or would see —no!

Ahead, on what should be a large oxbow island, thrust up a peak of light-peach and dark-brown, in a pattern unmistakeable: thatched roof. A dwelling where none should be, an intelligence where none had been for millenia! And he must go there... Then the wall of gray bloomed from his vision's vanishing point. He did not note its foglike lack of detail...only felt overwhelming numbness as thoughts shut down to nothing...mere sensory packets without identity...the approach of vast empty death...again...enshrouding, cold, colder...

This was not supposed to be happening! He wasn't supposed to know or tally his dreams; in fact, he wasn't supposed to dream at all! That was not part of his punishment. The Great Voice had said so...a very, very long time ago. Fury was hot in his mind, then in his legs. This new dream had the detail and clarity of broken glass squeezed in the hand.

He burned! His limbs were scorched within by fiery needles singing in waves that rocked on into his torso. Reflexively, his head rose and slammed back down against a soft surface, his limbs thrashed air in spasms of pain. Puppet on short coiled springs. The agony swelled as had the gray wall that had sought to return him to nothingness. Yet this went on growing, far past his need and inability to scream. Then the convulsions ebbed and the wind smote him in short gusts that he couldn't feel. It was his own breath, gasps he heard as he snorted his lungs alive. Full sensation rushed in. His eyes opened. He was no longer asleep!