by Nancy Kress
“Yes, sir,” Wade agreed. His grandfather was elated, as he always was when another addition arrived to the colony, and maybe this morning he would let Wade alone, let him escape the usual . . . Quickly he began eating.
Thekla finished strapping her baby into a tall wooden chair, and began putting food on her five-year-old’s plate. The little girl was rhythmically kicking her heels against the legs of the rough wooden bench, and the old man frowned.
“Stop that, Malki, right now! A Strickland is reverent when grace is said, remember that!”
Damn. No escape after all.
The grandfather swept his gaze around the table to make sure the four of them all folded their hands and bowed their heads. Thekla’s baby stared at him soberly.
“Earth, let us see you once again, green and blooming, if it is possible. If not—” there was always an agonized pause here, and Wade wondered what awful scenes of desolation howled in his grandfather’s mind, “—if not, then let us see your offspring, New Earth, and carry to her a loyal band of colonists to help prepare for the Return. If even that is not possible—” again than anguished quaver, “—then be sure that we will rebuild Earth here, preserving, above all, the great cultural traditions entrusted to us so long ago, and someday carrying them ourselves to the stars!” Wade caught Thekla’s eye out of the corner of his own; she smiled faintly and shook her head. Malki piped, “What’s a star, Great-Grandfather?”
The rheumy old eyes glared at her fiercely. “You asked that yesterday, Malki, and I told you then. It’s a big ball of fire in the sky that makes light and heat.”
The child looked at the stone fireplace, where a fire was kept constantly against the pervasive damp of the fog. She opened her mouth, her eyes full of doubt, glanced at her great-grandfather’s glowering face, and said instead, “I caught a non-frog.”
“Did you now?” the grandfather asked, amusement replacing annoyance with the fitfulness of the old, and the adults around the table relaxed. “And what did you do with him?”
“Oh, I let him go. He was pretty, though. He was tlem.”
“What?” asked the grandfather, puzzled.
“What did the non-frog say, Malki?” Thekla asked hastily.
“He went like this: kee-day, kee-day, kee-day!” The high, childish voice piped such a close imitation that even the grandfather smiled.
“After breakfast, I’ll show you a picture of a real frog, Child, in the Book. It was painted long ago, by a man called Nussivera.” He glanced lovingly at the wall, where five well-worn books were enthroned. History of Western Art, Petyk’s A Thousand Years of Painting, now cannibalized to provide the pictures on the walls; Complete Shakespeare; the Bible; and a dubious novel popular fifty-three years before, Love Until the Sky Falls. The five books that had been shelved on the rear observation deck when the Emergency Landing deteriorated into the Crash.
On a little carved bracket, set well enough below the shelf to make even the remote chance of fire impossible, a candle burned day and night.
“What’s a real frog, Grandfather?”
“It’s a small green amphibian. It looks a little like a non-frog, but it goes ‘ribbit-ribbit’.”
The little girl’s eyes grew round. “Nothing goes like that!”
Wade smiled. “Nothing that lives here, Malki. But, remember, Keedaithen isn’t the only—” he stopped abruptly, groaning inwardly, knowing it was already too late.
His grandfather rose to his feet, trembling violently. “This is not ‘Keedaithen!’ ” he shouted. This is ‘Exile’, and don’t you forget it, young man! Exile! Exile! Not a home you give a name to! A ‘home’, this dingy, mildewed . . . mildewed. . . he broke off, his face flushed hectically, his eyes straining out of their sockets. Wade’s mother hurried over to him.
“Sit down, Father, right here; it’s all right. You shouldn’t get that excited, you know it’s bad for you, the boy didn’t mean anything . . .” Her eyes signalled for Wade to leave. He was half-way to the door when his grandfather’s voice, wheezing and jagged, stopped him.
“Just a minute, boy. You think I don’t know that you kept on with that stuff you call painting. The hell I don’t—” wheeze, wheeze, “—carry on cultural heritage . . . must preserve—” wheeze, “—no composition or values or even geometric grouping . . .”
“Now, Father, just sit quietly for a few minutes and you’ll be all right. Thekla, bring a dipper of water. There, that’s better, just sit still.”
“. . . perverting sacred trust . . .” he began coughing hard.
Wade made his escape.
§ § §
All morning he hoed non-potatoes, savagely driving his hoe deeper than necessary into the spongy wet earth. In the afternoon he cut kirilwood, choosing trees set far enough into the ravines to require much heaving and pulling. By evening Wade’s back muscles ached all the way to the base of his skull, but he felt that he had control enough of himself to return to the cabin. Still, he was aware that somewhere, deep inside, his resentment was only precariously banked.
The sunset damped it down a little more. He watched the fading light raptly, leaning on his ax, his eyes glued to the soggy clouds glimpsed through the mist as they shaded from gray to tlem to slate and all the way to a delicate kipney. The fog carried the mingled smells of rainplant, decaying wet leaves, and the pungent richness of cut kirilwood.
It won’t all get into even this last painting, he thought with a curious mixture of gratitude and despair. No artist could get it all—not even me, damn it. The shaded softness, the grayness, the—the rightness of the way it looks just before dark. God, the world is so damn beautiful.
He shifted a little, gingerly flexing his cramped muscles, keeping his eyes turned upwards to the foggy sky, and the gray lichens beneath his boots crunched softly. He bent over and carefully scraped them off the rocks. What if he powdered them, maybe adding a little thinned river clay—would they mix into that silvery shade of tlem?
He began to whistle a wordless, excited little tune, unaware that he did so, as he intently rubbed the gray lichens into the back of his hand and squinted at the resulting shades. He didn’t see the figure gliding through the fog, until his mother materialized next to him.
“Wade? Are you all right?”
All his life, that had been her greeting—a tentative request for reassurance, made as though she questioned her own right to ask it. Incongruously, Wade thought of the three headstones in the little cemetery with “Beloved Child of Janice” on them, as well as that other one bearing the name of the man assigned to sire two of them and Wade himself.
“Yes, Mother, I’m all right.” He half-held out his lichen-colored hand, then drew it back. Better show Thekla instead.
They were silent, smelling the wet air, watching the way the gray mist softened the tools leaning against the stone cabin. Simple tools, simply made; the improvisations of a pioneer society starting over.
“He’s very old, Wade. You don’t always remember that,” his mother said abruptly. Wade said nothing, his lips pressed tightly. Somewhere among the rocks a non-frog shrilled: kee-day, kee-day.
“Eighty-three, by that reckoning system he insists on using.” Her voice was softer now, pleading, amost apologetic. “Eighty-three, and the last one left. We can’t know what it was like for them, Wade. Leaving behind them a world on the edge of war, taking all those books and art treasures with them to the only place of safety left, and then, after sleeping all those years—” he caught the little stumble in her voice, the psychological balk at hurdling the illogical concept, “—to miss it by so little.”
“Oh, Mother, it’s not so little,” Wade said impatiently. “It’s a whole planet away! A whole different world!”
His mother sighed. “I know it seems that way to us. But after they traveled all that way—nine ‘light years’—” again that little stumble, “—being just one planet away seems like a little. I guess.”
She stared at the darkening clouds, behind w
hich were—somewhere—that just-missed Earth-like world, with its flourishing commemorative colony, New Earth. Behind them, too, was the sun, which the grandfather insisted they refer to as “Beta Hydri,” and all the other unimaginable “stars.” Wade fidgeted impatiently. If he mixed the powdered lichens with a little pale kipney—
“You know, when I was a little girl,” his mother went on, “and all of the Five Survivors were alive, I would hear them have the same conversation over and over. I used to wonder why it was so interesting to them. Mother would wail about all the books and paintings that were destroyed in the Crash. Uncle Peter would shake his head and say how much they would have meant to New Earth. Then Father would brace his shoulders—I know you don’t remember him strong and healthy, Wade, but I do—and say in a deep, artificial voice, ‘If you were marooned on a desert island and could only take one book . . .’ The others would laugh, but not happily, and Father would add, ‘But we’ve got five of them. Well, four decent ones, anyway. A whole culture!’ and then Aunt Alia would simper and say that it wouldn’t have meant so much without a real artist and art historian like Professor James Strickland to help pass on that culture, and that even though New Earth had suffered his loss, it was Exile’s gain.”
Wade shifted his weight from one foot to the other. It was growing very dark. His mother reached up her hands and rested them on his shoulders.
“He’s not well, Wade. He never leaves the fire anymore, and he can’t bear to even look outside—and even close to the fire he coughs from the damp. And these scenes just upset him so. Yes, I know, you kept your temper this morning, but what about yesterday, or the day before? It can’t be much longer. Please, Wade.”
“Please what?” he asked through suddenly stiff lips.
“Please don’t paint those gray-mist pictures anymore. Paint the way he needs you to.”
“I can’t!”
“Then don’t paint at all. Please. I can say they need everyone for some harvest emergency or other; he can’t keep track of the work any more.”
Not to paint. Not to feel the smoothness of the whittled brush handle between your fingers, and the power flow down your arm, and the ultimate, wholly enormous satisfaction of the subtle shades drifting over the kirilwood board seemingly without even touching it and the . . .
“Please, Wade. It means so much to him, this passing on of a heritage. It’s all that’s kept him going, that’s carried him—and all of us with him, don’t you ever forget that—this far.”
Her face was completely obscured. He put out a finger and touched the worn cheeks, the skin still soft from the eternal damp but hollowed out, stretched tautly in the contours of a face that had looked steadily at backbreaking work and compulsory childbearing and the thin edge of survival every day of her life, with no space for the luxury of painting that was her son’s inheritance from her labor.
“What about you, Mother?” he asked desperately, his voice cracking from its new deep tones upward into a childish wobble. “It’s always him, everything’s always him. What about you? Don’t you have an opinion about it? What cultural heritage do you want me to have?”
She took her hands from his shoulders, and through the sodden darkness her voice was weary with all those weeks and months and years of unbroken work. “I don’t know, Wade. I don’t have one to give you.”
§ § §
He didn’t paint. He harvested non-potatoes, and hunted the small, quick glarthen, and cut kirilwood, and didn’t paint. He took his turn on the hand loom and helped roof the Ciegler cabin for the winter, and went on a foraging trip to haul rock salt, and didn’t paint. In the mild autumn evenings he sat with the others by the fireplace and listened to his grandfather read alien, outlandish plays from Shakespeare or discuss the turn-of-the century Delineists. While his grandfather talked, Wade made himself keep his eyes focused on the trembling, liver-spotted hands that would never hold a paintbrush again.
Once, almost formally, the old man showed him a seventeeth-century Tohaku in the Book. It was a pine forest, seen through early-morning mist. “See,” he quavered, “there’s a fog, but the emphasis is still on the trees, the composition and values are preserved. Now if you would use your talent to do something like that, boy, instead of those formless, colorless blobs, it would be part of a great tradition!”
For a moment Wade saw everything red, an ugly livid red that made his body recoil even while his mind winced away from the knowledge that, coming from his grandfather, this was a peace offering. Peace, when it might be years—oh, God, surely not years—before he would paint again, and the old man kept on shoving those hard ugly drawings at him and he was probably going to live till a hundred and what kind of a person would wish for another human’s death? What did that make him?
The grandfather was shrinking back on his bench, clutching the book and staring at Wade’s face. Wade shook his head convulsively, saw his mother fearfully watching him from across the room, and managed to say in a voice that was almost steady, “I wasn’t trying to paint the way a landscape looks in fog.”
There was a long, painful pause. Finally the grandfather dropped his eyes; he hardly spoke to Wade the rest of the winter.
As winter wore on, the usual stretching of provisions began. Wade lost ten pounds and his mother watched him anxiously. In the longer evenings, desperate to put some object into fingers that seemed to constantly curve into the hold for a brush, he tried to help Thekla teach Malki to read. Malki had always come to him, hanging around underfoot and fiddling with his tools, but now she climbed into her mother’s lap when Wade fixed her with his flat, tense gaze that seemed to see nothing.
§ § §
The spring came early. The fog lost its winter clamminess and chill, and smelled of new gray-green life and wet dirt. Wade, restless, took to long twilight walks, meandering aimlessly through the dank fog, refusing even Thekla’s company. As he walked, he held his right hand firmly imprisoned in his left.
He returned one night well after dark. His mother watched him as he came in, looking as though she were going to urge him again to eat something, but he avoided her eye and climbed up to the sleeping loft. She sighed and went back to helping his grandfather touch up the colors in his Terran landscapes.
“More red in that, Janice,” the old man was saying fretfully. “Can’t you see it’s too drab? The damn fog fades everything. It should be scarlet, or even crimson, damn it.”
The loft seemed cramped and suffocating. Wade lay on his pallet and stared at the peak of the kirilwood ceiling, where a nonspider was spinning an intricate gray web. He tossed to his side and examined the weave of the heavy, dull blanket. He lay on his stomach and tried to bring sleep by sheer effort of will. At last he rolled off the pallet and slowly, his calloused fingers trembling a little, opened the little cupboard he himself had built under the low eaves.
They were gone.
A few chips of dried paint shimmered on the rough shelves. His brushes were all there, and the little dippers of the powders he had made, and one thin kirilwood board, painstakingly sanded but still as yet empty. But the paintings, all of them, were, unbelievably, gone.
“Mother! Thekla! Malkil” Wade clattered down the ladder, sprang at the child bent over her lesson slate. “Malki! You were in my things again! What did you do with them, where are they, oh my God—”
Malki squealed and ran for her mother. Wade caught her by the shoulders and started shaking her violently, like a rag doll. Thekla hit at his arms, screaming, and finally her words pierced the red mist in his brain.
“She didn’t take them, Wade! She didn’t take them! Leave her alone, you’re hurting her! Wade! She didn’t take them!”
He dropped Malki, who climbed, sobbing, into Thekla’s arms. Wade straightened slowly, and slowly, leadenly, his eyes swung to his grandfather.
“No,” he whispered, “you couldn’t have.”
The old man shrank back on his bench. “You weren’t painting anything: you have talent only y
ou just don’t use it, boy; you have an obligation to the colony . . .” he began to sputter, his words slurring together as the quavering, cracked voice rose higher. “You can do it, but this damn stinking hell cast a spell on you, and they were holding you back, those other ones, don’t you see I had to burn them! I had no choice!”
Wade took a step forward, woodenly, feeling his fists clenching themselves at his sides.
“. . . and who the hell d’you think you are, anyway?” his grandfather shouted, pulling himself up with his stick. “All of us . . . obligation . . . to cult’al heritage . . . memory of Earth . . .”
“Memory of Earth!” Wade shouted. “My God, I hate the damned place! Earth! What good have your memories of Earth ever done but strangle us! This isn’t Earth, it’s Keedaithen, and you’re just too rotten stubborn to admit it! But I won’t go down with you, you hear me, old man? You destroyed my p-paintings.” he bent over in a ragged, shuddering sob, then sprang, his face demented, to the fireplace. The grandfather tried to scurry behind the table, but Wade rushed past him. He grabbed the books from their homemade altar and hurled them, one by one, into the fire.
“This is what I think of Earth! My God, my God, all my work—” The Shakespeare hit the center of the flames and sent red sparks leaping. The Bible joined it a second later and the two of them, old and brittle, blazed passionately. A Thousand Years of Painting landed a little to one side and began to char, its edges graying ghoulishly.
The grandfather started forward with a strangled cry, his face dull purple, his eyes bulging fron their sockets. Wade began to claw at the walls, ripping the prints into tatters, hurling the paper fragments into the fire. The kirilwood landscapes, more solid, hit the back of the stone fireplace with a dull ‘thunk’.
“And this damned memory, and this one, and this one! ‘Cultural heritage!’ ‘Memories of Earth!’ Damn the stinking place, it’s probably nothing but a pile of rubble by now—”
The old man fell to his knees. Spittle covered his chin and his face was ashen, but he made no sound. He seemed to fall very slowly, his body twisting from the waist, like a feather from a kel bird and floating through the shifting fog, cutting secret little paths that soundlessly closed behind it. When he hit the stone floor there was scarcely a noise at all.
