by Larry Niven
“Uh—”
“Cadmann, I know. I can accept it. But—well, sometimes it hurts.”
His hand moved to touch hers, then drew back. She held her breath. He turned away to survey his work, then turned back, a deeply satisfied smile creasing his face. “There are more reasons, but those will do for the moment.” He looked at her sharply. “Nobody’s asking you to live in it. Or to stay here.”
“I’m staying.” She stood on her tiptoes and locked her arms around his neck. “I love you, Cadmann. I lost too much coming to Avalon. I’m not losing you, too.”
He reached back to unfasten her fingers from the back of his neck, but she clung too tightly, and finally he just met her eyes squarely.
“You do things my way,” he said. “If you don’t like it, go home. Down there, things can be whatever way people decide by vote that they should be. This is not a democracy. Up here, I’m the bottom line.”
“Male chauvinist,” she said, kissing him lightly.
“I’m a me chauvinist. I’d probably be the same way if I was a woman. I just want to get this straight before we . . . start anything.”
“I love you,” she repeated. The rock dust at the corner of her eyes was slightly muddied. “Love, honor and obey. Isn’t that what women used to promise? I will, you know.”
He gave her a hard, brief hug. “Then let’s get started.”
“Aye, aye, sir. What first?”
“Defenses. Notice anything about the—our—house site?”
“Many things.”
“Boulder. That one.”
“Big.”
“And it will roll, once I dig it out. So I dig. Put chocks under it first. Levers on the chocks. Anyone wants to come up the path without permission—”
“Any one?”
“Or any thing. If it comes up and we don’t like it, we roll the boulder down.”
“I’m for that. What next?”
“Terrace down the hill. Vegetable garden. Divert some water from the Amazon to keep the vegetables happy, and us too. Then finish the house. I have to finish the excavation by hand to make sure that I have the dimensions that I want. Then I level the floor and set the corner posts. That will take about three weeks.”
She smiled uneasily. “Three weeks. Cadmann, how long are you planning to stay up here?”
It was the wrong thing to say, and she knew it instantly.
“Until I’m finished. Until I feel like going the hell back down. And the instant you don’t like it up here, go.”
Cadmann tore her hands loose from around his neck and without another word opened the box of tools and building supplies that he had skeetered up from the camp.
He was still limping.
A tireless machine, made of polished hickory and leather. That’s what Cadmann seemed to her. For all his injuries and his age, he worked on and on when she was exhausted, when the youngest, strongest men in the Colony would have collapsed and begged for rest.
He worked eight hours a day, digging, shoring, piling . . . building ridges of earth that would later become garden or upper patio. No effort was lost. He never hauled any dirt or stone uphill. He built on the hill and he planned carefully, and every wheelbarrow of earth and rock moved downhill to the growing garden structure.
In some ways, the excavation was beginning to look like a smallish swimming pool, with the deep end—nine feet deep—at the lowest part, and the shallow higher. He cut deep “steps” into the hill above the excavation, so that the entire cavity measured five meters along the bottom edge and twelve meters along each side.
When he was through with the morning’s work, Cadmann stretched and took off with Tweedledee to check the traps. (Mary Ann had found another difference between the twins. Tweedledee’s right ear was a bit—or, more precisely, a bite—short, a souvenir of a kennel brawl that had become serious.)
And here she was able to accompany him, learning to set the wire spring traps that Cadmann set for the slow, almost friendly mammaloids that Cadmann called “Dopey Joes.” He said it was a literary reference.
At first, she was able to do little but help him haul dirt, and cook the meals and clean the camp. But it was too easy for her to remember a time when she had been one of the most competent women on the expedition, and there was no way that she could remain satisfied with this new role.
She learned to set snares. Nets in the stream that ran past the site of the house from the heights of Mucking Great Mountain, a tiny ice-melt stream Cadmann had named the Amazon. With a large-mouthed basket in one hand and Tweedledee’s leash in the other, she explored the mountain, learning the paths and the patches of sliding rock. And it was among them that she found Missy.
The snares were set near any of the half dozen or so bushes and plants that showed the characteristic gnawed parallel toothmarks. One patch of plants interested her. They were green and broad-leaved, with thick yellow veins branching from a central stem. The flowers were delicate pink with tiny red berries clustered in the center. None of its flowers were chewed or gnawed, but the roots and leaves were the favorite food of some local creature. When she took a closer look at the flowers, she noted a dusting of dried insect segments, and more dead, delicately winged husks on the ground beneath the blossoms. The word “poison” flashed through her mind, and she was pleased with herself for making the connection.
Something was rustling behind the bush, and she carefully pulled the branches aside.
There, its neck caught in a chew-proof nylon spring loop, was eighteen inches of furred frustration. The Joe had huge orange eyes almost too large for its face. The eyes were imploring, terrified, confused. They reminded her of . . . what was it?
What . . .?
She stomped her foot in frustration and forgot about it. The creature was in one of the snares, bleeding from the throat, twisting and spitting at her. Tweedledee barked, and the little Joe almost broke its own neck trying to escape.
She poked it into the basket and then cut it lose from the snare. It chattered at her. “Well, Missy,” Mary Ann said. “Can’t blame you for being upset.”
Tarsier. That was the word she had searched for. An equatorial primate, the owner of the largest eyes of any mammal. Found in the forests of Malaysia and the Philippines.
She laughed in relief. It was still there. Some of the information was still in her mind, she just couldn’t call it up on command as once she had. Maybe she could restructure the way she thought . . .
She shook the cage and held it up close to her face. “Are you a good luck charm, Missy?”
Missy spat at her and tried to hide in a corner of the basket. She was more slender than a tarsier, almost like a thick, furred lizard. She lay on her back, claws out and scrabbling blindly.
On their way back down, Tweedledee suddenly strained at the leash, tugging so hard that Mary Ann almost dropped the basket. Tweedledee yipped hysterically, struggling to climb up into the rocks. Missy went absolutely apeshit, squealing and clawing in the wire cage.
“ ’Dee Dee, get back here!” Mary Ann yelled, suddenly suspicious. Reluctantly, the shepherd came back down, tail folded contritely between her legs. Mary Ann wound the leash tightly around a rock, then climbed up and took a closer look, Missy chattering more loudly.
Her ears were rewarded before her eyes. She heard a thin, mewling sound that reminded her of nothing so much as the cry of kittens starving for milk. There were six of them, curled up around each other like a tangle of hairy rope. They were just babies, barely able to wiggle. One lay still; it seemed dead. The others looked up at her with curiosity untainted by fear.
Mary Ann glanced from the wire cage to the babies, and sudden inspiration struck.
Missy was climbing up the sides of the basket, and Mary Ann thumped her back down, throwing handfuls of avalonia grass and leaves into the cage until the bottom was completely matted.
Then she carried the basket up the defile to the rocks. Missy chattered even more frantically now. Down below her, Tw
eedledee leaped and danced, yipping enthusiastically.
Mary Ann braced herself between the rocks, thankful now for hours of jogging, because her calves were starting to burn from all the climbing. She reached down into the crevice and gently drew up one of the Joe kittens. It struggled and bit her hand—a scratch, hardly enough to break the skin. Mary Ann set the fur ball back down and pulled her jacket sleeve down over her hand in a makeshift glove. This time she couldn’t feel the teeth at all when she transferred the second Joe into the basket.
Mary Ann had to knock Missy down from the side of the cage again, and then a third time when she tried to bite through the jacket. When the first baby was deposited in the cage, Missy scampered around and around in a furry flash before finally slowing down. She sniffed at her child, then licked, and finally wound herself around the kitten, enveloping it.
One at a time, Mary Ann transplanted the Joes to the cage. Then she trundled it back down to Tweedledee.
The mother chattered up at her vilely, then continued to tie her children into a ball for maximum warmth and protection. Mary Ann looked at the last small, sad body down in the crevice, and shook her head.
“Time to head back to camp, ’Dee,” she said, unleashing the dog. She stood with small fists on hips, looking around the area. What did these things eat? The adults, anyway? The Joes looked close enough to mammalian; there would be some sort of milk gland for the young.
There were several types of plants: a kind of lichen or moss seemed to be breaking down some of the rocks, and a viny thing that resembled a colony of long-legged spiders. It grew out of the rocks in symbiotic relationship with the moss. There were shrubs up here, and flowering plants, which she had noticed from the helicopter.
Which would the Joe family prefer? She took a chance: the broad-leafed plant that had concealed the snare. She tore loose a cluster of red berries and dropped them into the cage.
Nothing. Momma Joe ignored them.
Still following the hunch, she tore loose a clutch of leaves, sorted through them for the tenderest, and dropped them in.
Missy sprang on them. After careful sniffing, she began to chew.
Well, that answered that.
Feeling absurdly proud of herself, Mary Ann carried the cage back down to the camp.
The sun was unusually warm, and the air sweet, and her mind was already buzzing with ideas for cages.
There was something . . . something bothering her about the enclave she had found. What was it? It was beautiful.
More beautiful, more lush, than anything she had seen down on the flatlands.
Down on the flatlands there was little in the way of tender shrubs. Only the gnarled thorn bushes seemed to thrive down there.
More variation of plant life at a higher altitude? And come to think of it, animal life, too. That implied something, but what? What? Her mind wasn’t quite clear enough, and she cursed softly.
Damn it. Why wouldn’t it come into focus? Suddenly, all the pleasure she had felt disappeared in a welter of frustration. Why wouldn’t her mind work for her?
Hibernation Instability. There. Say it. Accept it. Don’t try to pretend that it didn’t affect you, as some of the others do. Don’t try to pretend you still have capacities that have fled. That kind of egotistical nonsense gets you laughed at or killed. Work within your limits, and learn the steps you always pitied ’tweens for having to take.
Where a Bright can lead, a ’Tween can follow. There used to be such smugness in that saying. A genius can take huge leaps, wearing intuitive seven-league boots. Then a corps of engineers and technicians can turn the theories into inventions and principles. A competently trained repairman can fix something that it took a genius to devise in the first place.
I lost my seven-league boots. But the germ plasm is still mine! We can make good kids . . .
All right. There was something wrong here. But if she had the time and the patience, she could reconstruct the thought processes that once came to her so easily. And it was important for her to reconstruct these. Very important.
With the basket in hand, she traveled back down the hill.
Mary Ann found it amazing.
In three weeks, using a constant, unvarying work schedule, Cadmann had carved the patio and shoring, tamped down the floor of his new house and covered it with layers of polyethylene sheeting. He had set the corner posts using the lightweight foamsteel braces ferried down from the zero-grav smelting facility aboard Geographic, and lined the walls with more of the polyethylene.
The roof girders and additional support beams were finally in place. Cadmann disassembled their tent and laid it across the top in a makeshift roof, and they spent their first night in the new home. The northern wall was earth, but the southern, uphill side was open to the broad, high steps that Cadmann had cut into the mountainside.
Their stove warmed the makeshift dwelling beautifully, and there was plenty of headroom and walking space, more than in some of the 1800’s pioneer cabins she had visited in Kentucky museums.
They sat cross-legged in the shelter. The stove and the body heat of the two dogs were quite enough to keep her warm as she wrote. Two sheets of paper were spread out, and on one she was listing every plant Missy had accepted as food. So far, there were six varieties.
The other sheet was blank. I ought to be recording something, but I don’t know what it is. Damn. But—I am useful. Cadmann built it, but it’s our house.
The earth that surrounded them on three sides was terrific insulation, and there was something womblike about it. So I’m missing some brain cells. I had billions to spare.
She heard Missy’s angry chattering in the distance. Four of the youngsters had survived with her and were old enough to run around the cage. If they could be bred . . .
“A garden there,” Cadmann said with vast contentment, pointing back at the series of deep, rising steps cut into the mountain behind the house. “Hanging garden . . . climbing . . . I forget what you call it. Walk path cut in the middle. We’ll be able to mount mirrors at the top. We already get full sunlight as it crosses east to west—we can do even better. Roof next, and we’ll top it with soil.” He laughed lazily. “We could plant on our roof if we wanted to.”
“It would be nice to have a little more natural light.” Mary Ann folded the sheet of paper and tucked it in with her backpack.
He sipped at his coffee, then put an arm around her. It still sent a shiver of pleasure through her to feel it.
They hadn’t slept together for the first week, and when he had finally taken her into his bedroll and made love to her it had been an angry, demanding, selfish kind of love—and she had not demanded in return. She was happy to be able to give. But now, as his house was taking form, as the Joes and turkeys filled their cages and makeshift pens, as the plot of worked land doubled and trebled, and the mesa became Cadmann’s Bluff, his personality and signature scrawled more boldly upon it hour by hour . . .
He was softer with her at the end of the day, and spoke of “us” and “we.” And she was happy, despite her frequently aching muscles.
In the weeks since the attack on the camp, Cadmann seemed to have purged his anger. It had taken useful work, done his way, in his time, to his ends. And the fruits of that labor were his. She moved closer to him, and kissed his shoulder gently.
“I’ll dig the channel tomorrow,” he said. “I need the channel before I can blast. Mary Ann, I think I can run the channel through the house, through the living room.”
“For what? Oh, the Amazon,” she remembered. He wanted to divert water for the vegetable garden. Something ticked at her memory . . .
“F-F-Falling Water.”
“What?”
“I remembered! Falling Water, a house by F-F-Frank Lloyd Wright, and the water ran right through the living room!”
“That’s what I was trying to remember. You’re amazing!”
I’ve never felt like this, she thought to herself. And I’ve been married, and in love
before, and have had . . . enough lovers to know the difference.
There was something about the darkness and the warmth. About being next to a man who had built his dwelling by the strength of his back and his wits. Something about watching Cadmann rediscovering himself, and her, that made her feel warm and small and protected.
Protected . . . A competent, civilized human being didn’t need a protector. Mary Ann Eisenhower, Ph.D. in Agricultural Sciences, had been quite capable of taking care of herself, thank you. She remembered the doctor . . . she remembered. Now she was the dependent of a brawny, self-sufficient warrior.
And yet there was no cruelty in this man, no demand for her subservience or helplessness: she was sure that he had accepted her because she could do certain things, she could take care of herself. She could go when she wished, and he made that clear. Yet he had accepted with pleasure her suggestions about breeding the Joes. She wanted to do anything for him, be everything to him—but if he ever abused her, that urge would vanish.
How strange, and how wonderful. How natural to be here, in the earth, huddled with the man she loved, who she hoped would one day love her in return.
So there, Sylvia. She grinned fiercely, briefly, and kissed his shoulder, her lips parting slightly, tongue flickering out to taste the salt dried on his skin.
He pulled her to him, and there, in their home, made love to her on the packed earth of the floor. And they rejoiced together until both were exhausted, until sleep stole the thoughts from her mind as she curled against his side. The two of them, surrounded by their home, their dogs, the whispering wind and the small night sounds. Together.
Cadmann had finished digging the French drain—the rock-filled slit, a foot wide, five feet long and three deep, at the uphill mouth of their home. It would trap rain or snow melt before it could flood their home, and was just another of the little things, the thousand little things that Cadmann had done to their home—
Their home!
—to make it safe, and warm, and ideal for her. For them.
