Franzi touched Johann on the forearm just before they reached the village. “Uncle Johann,” she said, “may I talk to you? Now, alone?”
Johann looked at the beautiful young girl whose long wet hair was everywhere. “Is anything wrong?” he asked.
“No, no,” Franzi answered. “I just want to talk in private.”
Rowen and Siegfried agreed they did not need any help making lunch. Since it was low tide, Johann and Franzi crossed the creek, headed west, and sat on the white sand beach in the lovely cove just beyond their village.
They sat side by side, facing the ocean. Johann waited for her to initiate the conversation but soon became impatient. He was thinking about all the things that still needed to be done before double full moon night. “Well, Franzi,” he said at last. “What’s on your mind?”
She took a deep breath, glanced briefly at Johann, and then looked back out at the ocean. “Do you remember the conversation we had about sex and my choice of partner, the night before we reached the nepp colony?” she said.
“Of course,” Johann replied.
“Well, I have made a decision,” the girl said. Franzi shrugged and shook her head from side to side. “Actually, it’s several decisions, and they’re kind of involved, so I need some time to explain.” She glanced back at him. “Please, Uncle Johann, will you not interrupt me until I finish? Because I don’t think what I’m going to say makes much sense unless you have heard everything.”
“Okay, Franzi,” he said. “I’ll sit here and listen until you tell me it’s time for me to talk.”
Again the girl took a deep breath and stared out at the ocean. “Between Rowen and Uncle Siegfried,” she said, “based strictly on personal compatibility, I would choose Rowen. It may be because he’s closer to my age and I still feel like a child around Uncle Siegfried, but I guess the reasons are not important.”
She paused. “However, when I think about being intimate with either of them, my stomach becomes nervous and jumpy and I feel very uncomfortable. I know it’s silly, but I feel Uncle Siegfried would be judging me, as well as comparing me with Serentha, and I think Rowen would be so shy and inept that the whole experience would be a disaster. I’m sure I could laugh if nothing worked right, but Rowen is so serious he might not be able to take a failure lightly. And he might be so embarrassed that he would not be willing to try again after a failure.”
This is amazing, Johann was thinking as he listened to Franzi. I am witnessing again how acute the feminine intuitive senses are. There is no way Franzi could have acquired this insight by any normal learning process.
“On the other hand,” Franzi continued, “if I were relaxed and comfortable and could guide Rowen, gently, without his knowing that he was being led, then the possibility of a first disaster could be averted. And Rowen would not be embarrassed.”
The girl laughed nervously. “So here’s my plan. After double full moon night I would like for you, Uncle Johann, to be my first partner and sexual teacher. We don’t necessarily even need to have sex. I just want you to show me what to do, in what order, and explain to me what makes a man feel good and comfortable. I now that with you I would be completely relaxed and that you would be a gentle and patient teacher.”
Johann didn’t know what to say. He stared at her beautiful, smiling face only a hand’s width away from him. “All right, Franzi,” he said with a nervous smile. “I guess I’ll tentatively agree to your plan. But I reserve the right to change my mind.”
He hugged her and stood up. “And now,” he said, “we must turn our attention to everything we need to do to finish our preparations for double full moon night.”
They walked hand in hand, the old man and the young teenage girl, back across the creek and into the village.
LYING IN HIS hut that night, Johann had difficulty falling asleep. In spite of his concerns about the coming double full moon, his thoughts kept returning to his conversation with Franzi. He had long ago acknowledged and accepted that his sex life was over. Still, in the aftermath of his discussion with the girl, he had experienced a couple of twinges of sexual desire that had triggered memories of intense pleasure from long ago. Perhaps we never become completely nonsexual, Johann thought. No matter how old we are.
He tossed and turned for half an hour before deciding that he would go out for a walk. Some thin clouds were rolling in from the ocean, but there was enough moonlight that he could easily see where he was going. At first Johann had no particular destination in mind, but after he started walking he found himself headed for the makeshift cemetery in the middle of the orchard.
This was not the first time that Johann had wandered into the cemetery in the middle of the night. He liked to be there alone, to immerse himself in his memories without being disturbed by others. There’s no way any of them could understand anyway, he thought as he stood in front of the larger of the two wooden plaques. I’m the only one alive who really knew all these people. Siegfried wasn’t even born until just before we left the grotto.
The first plaque was the same height as Johann. The words carved into the wood were simple and direct. “This memorial commemorates the lives of those who vanished and presumably died during the branker attack on the first double full moon night after our arrival on this planet.”
Underneath the statement, listed vertically were the names of those who had perished on that fateful night. The women were first, and then the men, each group listed in alphabetical order. Johann read the list from top to bottom very slowly. Anna. Beatrice, Keiko, Maria, Satoko, Eric, Jomo, Ravi.
There were twelve of us when we arrived here, Johann remembered. Enough that we could have survived and flourished. There was ample genetic variation. Two children had already been born. And then in one fell swoop we were reduced to six and our overall chances significantly diminished.
As he often did while standing in front of the larger plaque. Johann wondered if perhaps by his own actions he might have prevented the devastating tragedy that had occurred so soon after their arrival. We should never have become divided into two groups. I should have insisted that we all stay together Then maybe we would not be facing extinction now.
He read the list a second time, stopping at the name that had dominated his life for so many years. Maria, he said to himself. From out of the recesses of his deepest memory came a flood of images of the child he had raised from infancy and, as always, Johann’s eyes filled with tears of loss. It had been so many years now since her death, and yet all the pictures in his mind were as crisp and vivid as if they had occurred only moments before.
He remembered Maria’s first cry, the sight of her nursing at her dying mother’s breast, dozens of vignettes from their eight years alone together on the island, their frightening and adventurous boat ride at the end of which the ribbons saved them from the nozzlers, the changes in Maria after they found the others and he married Vivien, their shared experiences with the maskets, their life in the grotto, and finally, when she was no longer a child, their disturbing and painful interactions here on this planet.
I loved you like a daughter Maria, Johann heard himself say out loud. And not just because I promised your mother I would care for you. He thought again of the weathered piece of bark on the table in his hut, the bark he carried with him every time he swam out to the island on a double full moon night. It had been her last gift to him. He could barely read the writing now, but he knew the words by heart. “You were right, Johann,” it said. “Thanks for saving Stephanie. I have always loved you.”
But in the end I failed you, Johann said to himself as he stared though his tears at the five letters on the plaque. Not on the island, no. There I was an excellent companion and substitute father. Where I failed you was when we joined the others.
A voice inside his head, the beautiful, melodious voice of the only woman he had ever loved unconditionally, interceded in his interior monologue. “Dear Brother Johann,” the voice of Beatrice said, “we have been over and over
these issues so many times. When will you accept your own imperfections? When will you allow yourself to forget what you cannot possibly undo?”
Not until I die, Johann answered the voice. Not until I die.
He forced himself to walk away from the larger plaque. A few meters away a waist-high monument remembered the three who had died during the branker attack on the fifth double full moon night. Here too the names were listed vertically, from top to bottom, Stephanie, Vivien, Kwame.
Johann’s thoughts of Vivien did not bring tears into his eyes. He smiled, and occasionally laughed, as he recalled their easy years together as man and wife. You deserved more of my love, Johann told himself. But we do not always have the ability to control how much we love.
Vivien had been adaptable. She had demanded little, made almost no suggestions about how Johann should change, and had supported him in every way, even in his difficult dealings with the adult Maria. I could not have asked for a better companion, Johann thought. You brought joy, laughter and affection to my life. And gave me my only child, my son, Siegfried.
The third and final marker in the cemetery was on top of its only grave. On this plaque was inscribed, “Here lies Serentha, beloved wife of Siegfried and mother of Rowen, who died attempting to give birth to a stillborn daughter.”
Serentha’s death had been especially painful for Johann. Even though his relationship with his daughter-in-law had never been particularly close, her death had reminded Johann vividly of his own inability to save his adored Beatrice many years before. After Serentha’s death, Johann had become so depressed that he had even considered suicide. It had taken steady doses of Vivien’s love and good humor to restore Johann’s normal positive attitude.
So I lived on, Johann said to himself as he stood in front of Serentha’s grave. Another dozen years now. Long enough to know one more charming female with Beatrice’s genes.
He laughed to himself as he recalled Franzi’s proposition to him earlier in the day. He tried to picture the two of them together in an intimate situation and his laughter escalated. Vivien would have had a few hysterically funny things to say, he thought, about an eighty-year-old, withered man trying to make love to a fourteen-year-old in full bloom.
Shaking his head and chuckling to himself, Johann walked out of the orchard. At first he headed back toward his hut, but when he turned and looked up at Black Rock Promontory he suddenly had an overpowering desire to stand once more on the spot where he had had his last apparition of Beatrice.
He climbed slowly up the path, his heart and mind totally absorbed with the woman who had been the love of his lifetime. When Johann reached the summit, he began speaking out loud, to Beatrice, as if she could hear him. At the very spot where she had last appeared, he gazed intently at the few stars he could see hovering over the ocean and raised his voice.
“Please, please,” he said, “let me see you one more time. Send your ghost or spirit or whatever it was one last time, so that I can die a happy man.”
Thick clouds were rolling in quickly from the ocean, obscuring the stars and starting even to blot out the twin moons. “It has been so long now,” Johann said reflectively, “almost thirty years since your last visit.” His desire to see her was so strong that the heartache was overwhelming. “Oh, Beatrice,” he shouted. “Where are you now? Can you hear me calling your name? Do you know how very much I still love you?”
He stood motionless, staring out across the edge of the promontory into the region of the sky from which she had come so many years ago. He waited and waited for a sign. None came. The clouds continued to increase and a few drops of rain began to fall. After more than ten minutes, Johann began talking to Beatrice again, but now in a more subdued and resigned voice.
“There are only four of us left now,” he said, “and the odds favoring the extinction of our little group that left Mars have become overwhelming. Your genes, my genes, Vivien’s genes—they all seem destined to perish here on this lovely planet… Was that why your God rescued us from the dust storm descending upon Valhalla? So that we could die here, years later, on this faraway world?”
Johann waved his arms at the sky “None of this makes any sense. You must agree with me now… Remember our long arguments during your pregnancy, when you insisted that God’s angels had brought us here for some divine purpose. I told you then that everything, including the very existence of our species, was nothing but a random quirk of nature. You became angry with me and even swore that your suffering at the hands of Yasin was somehow part of God’s plan.”
A shower had begun and drops were spattering on Johann’s upturned face. “Don’t you see, Beatrice,” he shouted again. “There is no plan. Not one made by God, or anyone else. Not for our little group, not for the human species, and not for the universe. We are simply an astonishing physical phenomenon, a miraculous combination of chemicals made by dying stars that have somehow evolved into consciousness. Chemicals capable of asking questions about our origin and destiny.”
Inside his head Johann could hear her arguing with him. Passionate, alive, she was telling him that God did not make it easy for humans to have faith. That the very mind He had given them could trick them into thinking He did not exist. The argument was so real, and his feeling of her presence so strong, that Johann started to cry. He caught himself and burst out in an insane laugh.
“Yes, yes, I understand,” he said. “We do experience amazing, bewildering, transcendent emotions that we cannot explain. Like love. Without which we would be no different from the robots we have now manufactured on Earth.”
He was becoming soaked and started to pace, to stop his shivering. “So I make this pilgrimage as proof of the bizarre contradiction that is humanity, my Beatrice. I hereby proclaim, simultaneously,” he said with a shouting laugh, “both the absolute meaninglessness of everything and my undying adoration for you.”
He shook his head and wiped the water off his face with the back of his hands. “I suppose that when the day arrives that only four humans are left anywhere in the entire universe, and the whole species faces extinction as our group does now, this fundamental contradiction will remain unreconciled.”
Johann turned and walked away from the ocean. The rain pelted him as he walked and the black rock beneath his feet was becoming very slippery. He spun around when he reached the top of the path. “Good night and good-bye, my queen and angel” Johann sighed. “I would have been so delighted to have seen you one more time.”
Johann was careful on his first few steps down the wet path. But he wasn’t paying enough attention several minutes later when his front foot came down upon a loose wet rock. He lost his balance immediately and tumbled head over heels, his head and body banging frequently against the volcanic rock, until he came to rest, unconscious but still alive, about a hundred meters from the edge of the orchard at the bottom of the path.
THREE
JOHANN REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS some hours later, before it was light. The brief rainstorm had passed and the sky was full of stars. He made an aborted attempt to sit up, but the pain, especially in his right hip and leg, was overpowering. He lay back down, trembling, and realized the predicament he was in.
I will not be able to swim, he thought. I will not even be able to climb up to the caves. If the brankers come tomorrow I will die.
He started yelling for help as soon as the sky indicated dawn was coming. Rowen reached him first. Siegfried and Franzi were not far behind. “I cannot walk,” he told them. “I think both my right leg and hip are broken.”
They carried him carefully to the village and laid him on a mat close to the community kitchen. Franzi gamely fed Johann breakfast, attempting to keep the conversation as light as possible. He called them together after everyone had eaten.
“The three of you must go forward with your plan to swim to the island,” Johann said. “For obvious reasons, I will not be going with you. My only request is that you leave me in my hut when you go.”
T
hroughout the day, the other three concocted plots that would not leave Johann alone at the mercy of the brankers. Siegfried thought maybe Rowen and he, between them, were strong enough swimmers that they could tow Johann out to the island. Franzi suggested that if they worked fast maybe they could carry Johann up the hills and reach the caves before the next night.
Johann rejected all their plans as ridiculous. He told them he would not participate in any scheme that increased the risk to any of the three of them one iota. He pointed out that he was not essential to the survival of their group, but that all three of them were. By nightfall the discussions were over. Rowen, Siegfried, and Franzi would leave early the next morning to swim to the offshore island. Johann would be left in his hut as he requested.
Johann had great difficulty falling asleep because he could not find a position in which the pain was not overwhelming. Sometime in the middle of the night, he did manage to doze off for a couple of hours, but it was a light sleep, full of confusing dreams. Many of the major characters of his life made cameo appearances in those dreams, often in situations where they could not have existed in real life. Beatrice, for example, talked with him for a few minutes in the living room of his childhood home in Potsdam, but left suddenly when her pager signaled that she had a call from St. Michael of Siena.
When he awakened, Johann was immediately aware that there was a head lying gently on his chest. Franzi was stretched out perpendicular to the direction of his mat, with her head on the side of his chest and one of her hands in his. Johann stroked her long hair very gently, being careful not to wake her, and wondered when during the night she had come into his hut. Her presence next to him was very soothing and mitigated his pain.
He drifted back to sleep a second time, and was awakened in the morning by the sound of wind and rain pelting against the roof and side of his hut. Franzi had departed. Johann could already see light under his door. Listening carefully, Johann could hear Siegfried’s voice above the sound of the storm, but he could not make out any specific words.
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