After Ixmal

By JEFF SUTTON
Illustrated by FINLAY
Man was gone.
For seven hundred million years Ixmal brooded over the silent earth. Then he made a discovery : He was not alone!
Ixmal lazily scanned the world from atop the rugged batholith. He felt it move several times; but because the movements were slight and thousands of years apart they caused no worry. He knew the batholith had been formed before time began by raging extrusions hurled through crustal fractures from the earth deeps. Having long since analyzed its structure, he was satisfied; it would last until time ended.
It's spring, Psychband observed from deep within him.
Yes, spring. Ixmal echoed the thought without enthusiasm. For what was spring but a second in time and ten thousand springs but a moment.
Although he found it tiresome, Ixmal allotted one small part of his consciousness to the task of measuring time. At first there had been two major categories: before time began and after time began. The first took in the long blackness before Man had brought him into existence. Man—ha! How well he recalled the term! The second, of course, was all time since. But the first category had been so long ago that it shrank into insignificance, all but erased by the nearly seven hundred million times the earth since had whirled around its primary.
Ixmal periodically became bored, and for eons at a stretch existed in semi-consciousness lost in somnolence except for the minute time cell measuring out the lonely centuries. He wouldn't have bothered with that if Psychband hadn't insisted that orientation in time was necessary to mental stability—hence he measured it by the earth's rotation, its revolutions around the sun, the quick, fury-laden ages which spewed forth mountains; the millions of years of rains and winds and erosion before they subsided again to become bleak plains. Ah, the story was old, old....
There had been a time when he'd been intensely active—when he'd first learned to free his mind from the squat impervium-sheathed cube atop the batholith. Then he had fervently projected remote receptors over the earth exploring its seared continents and eerie-silent cities, exhuming the tragic and bloody history of his Makers. Ah, how short! His first memory of Man—he had been a biped, a frantic protoplasmic creature with a zero mind and furious ego—was that of the day of his birth. How clearly he remembered!