Read The Celestial Steam Locomotive (The Song of Earth) for Free Online Page B

Girl-withno-Name, he would shortly see her—but without realizing her significance. And he would have been horrified to think that his name would become linked with one Manuel, a barrel-chested young Wild Human who was at that moment walking along the beach ten kilometers away, lamenting the loss of his love.  
    Because Zozula esteemed himself a True Human, one of the last survivors of the First Variety of the Second Species.  
    He stood on his lofty viewpoint on the catwalk that girdled the lower part of the Dome. The upper part was curved into the clouds like the arch of the sky itself. From here he could see Pu’este in the distance, an untidy clutter of huts with a pathetic little church standing on top of a knoll.  
    It was no better than one would expect from Wild Humans, who worshipped strange gods. Zozula smiled to himself. He liked to step outside the Dome occasionally and look down and see the curious unsanitary way in which the rest of the world lived. There had been a storm, and the villagers would be repairing their roofs. Nearby, a figure trudged toward the Dome, wheeling something in a barrow.  
    They were so vulnerable down there, the Wild Humans. So much at the mercy of the sun, the wind, the atmosphere, predators, disease...  
    “Hello! You up there!” The man with the wheelbarrow had halted at the base of the ladder and was staring up at him. He was a Wild Human, of course, but dressed in a colorful robe unlike the rags that his kind usually affected.  
    Zozula was about to ask him sharply what his business was, when something familiar about the newcomer made him pause. “Haven’t I seen you before?” he called down.  
    “My name is Lord Shout,” said the man simply.  
    And with a certain pride, which made Zozula smile to himself. How could a Wild Human rise to this kind of eminence? By ruling other Wild Humans, presumably. He noticed the heavy body of the other, the telltale undershot jaw, the abundant facial hair.  
    And twenty years rolled back...  
    Lord Shout had arrived one day on some kind of quest or mission—one of those peculiar rites with which Wild Human culture was infested—and had climbed to the catwalk around the Dome. In the course of this, he had come across a transparent area in the Dome’s surface and had looked in.  
    He would never forget what he saw.  
    It was terrible in its unexpectedness. He saw thousands upon thousands of humans lying unconscious on white benches, tiered above each other and below. He could not see the bottom tier or the top; they stretched farther than the eye could discern, all bathed in a blue light, all the bodies tapped with pale tubing. It was eerie, it was unearthly, it was immense. But one thing made it more macabre, more pitiful.  
    All the people were big babies.  
    Not small, normal babies, such as the mothers in Lord Shout’s tribe might coo over, but big babies, the size of men and women. Chubby and naked and huge , plump-cheeked and round-eyed and button-nosed—but as tall as Lord Shout and probably heavier. They lay pink and quiet on their benches, and Lord Shout groaned to himself as though he felt some comment was needed. He’d known the Dome from a distance all his life. It had been part of his existence, towering from the plain, solid and permanent. And now it suddenly revealed that—all this time—it had been harboring something coldly terrifying.  
    Zozula had found Lord Shout crying.  
    “How did it happen?” Lord Shout had asked. “In God’s name, how did they get like that?”  
    Zozula had been touched by the sight of this strong, hirsute creature so shocked, and had explained to him in some detail the tragedy of the Dome, as told to him by the Rainbow.  
    “It all started a long time ago, in the fifty-fourth century Cyclic, as I understand it...”  
    That was almost 90,000 years ago. The Consumer Wars were over and Anticonsumerism had won. Shortage of fossil fuels and the high cost of travel