The Winter Plain

by Jo Bannister

During one of her repeated visits to the little sickroom Miriam explained. “The machines trace all his vital signs and responses to treatment. Every hour they are fed into the diagnostic computer, which analyses them and prescribes accordingly.”

  “Penicillin?”

  Miriam smiled. “I think we can do rather better than that.”

  Tears sprang to Shah’s eyes all unbidden. It was not that she misunderstood. She appreciated what Miriam was saying, that Oracle had marvels to upstage magic and render the impossible commonplace, but the very word penicillin had become as a touchstone to her, holding concentrated in its slippery syllables Paul’s best hopes multiplied by her own ignorant trust, more like a spell than a medicament. Losing it was like losing a point of contact with Paul, or losing something of him. She knew it was stupid. She was very tired.

  He could not wait for her to grow stronger. His body a battleground for virile poisons and powerful drugs, his fever mounted towards crisis. Shah gripped his fingers tightly and fought his illness with an effort of will, cradling him in her mind until the spastic tremors eased.

  Miriam, dropping by to tell Shah her friends had arrived, found her battling for Paul’s survival with dogged determination, personal hatred of the thing consuming him, and virtually no reserves. As his temperature rose he had begun threshing and mumbling, gently at first but with increasing abandon. Twice his rolling dragged the drip feed out of his arm, sending droplets of solution and blood spattering across the floor. The second time the nurse wanted to tie him down, but Shah would not see him bound while she could hold him. So she held him: with her hands and her body and her mind touching the edges of his mind, finding turmoil and terror and anguish.

  When Miriam finally managed to catch her attention she said, “What are you doing?“

  Shah looked up briefly. She was not a pretty sight. Sweat plastered her hair to the brow above her sunk eyes, madly glinting coals in the pallor of her exhaustion. Her sleeves were pushed up above her elbows and her knuckles were white with effort. “He wants to die, he’s got to get past me first,” she said grimly.

  Chapter Two

  Paul did not die. In what measure his survival was due to the medical science of Oracle, to Shah’s determination to claw him back to life and to his own robust strength is incalculable, but certainly all those factors figured in his recovery. After interminable hours of having her heart scored by a sharp-taloned hope which outstripped conviction by several painful strides, when it seemed there was not remaining of Paul’s life a big enough ember to be fanned back to flame, there was a quiet time and Shah yielded finally to sleep, her head pillowed on Paul’s midriff, rising and falling gently.

  The nurse, who found such unclinical intimacy distasteful, would have roused Shah and ushered her to her waiting bed, but Miriam smiled and signalled the nurse to leave them undisturbed. Paul’s left hand had somehow wandered to Shah’s jumbled hair and Shah was – very softly – snoring.

  She awoke to the sound of her name, a whisper like an orphan zephyr wandered in off the plain. Deep weariness and a sleep fractured too soon had done little for Shah’s mental processes, but she remembered the important things – where she was, why she was there and whose stomach her chin was making dents in – before she got her eyes unglued. Her heart leapt like a bird at her name on his lips; she drank his gaze, weak and hurt but intelligent at last. “Dear God,” she murmured, her face aglow. “You’re back.”

  His eyes slipped from her and slid across the room, superficially, without weight, taking little in. “Oracle?”

  “Yes.” Shah held his good hand. “They’ve been very kind. Elaine is here.”

  “My arm —”

  “Does it hurt? It’s getting better. You’re getting better. We’re going to be all right, Paul.”

  His lost eyes found her again. The flecks gleamed like golden fish in haunted pools. “My arm. I thought – I told Lockwood —” He could not go on.

  “I know. It’s all right.” She raised his hand a little and bent her lips to it. “You’re not going to lose your arm. You’re going to get well.”

  He pulled his left hand from her gentle grasp and laid the forearm across his eyes. He drew a racking breath that shuddered the length of him. He mumbled, “I thought I was dying.” He was crying.

  Shah went to tell her companions the good news. It meant being lowered in the fretwork cradle, watching it return to its eyrie in the anachronistic bartizan, then waiting patiently outside the walls of Oracle until the miracle happened.

  It was an electronic miracle, summoned by a switch, but when a whole section of blank rose-red masonry hissed loudly and raised itself higher into the air than a camel could stretch Shah could not contain a gasp of awe and admiration.

  Behind the wall was a courtyard, inside the shelter of Oracle yet not breaching its defences. The moving curtain was only a facsimile of fortification: the real strong wall cut back behind the enclosure, holding the mews in isolation: invisible from the plain, without access to the city, it was a characteristically Oracular version of hospitality.

  Still, Shah found the travellers established in some comfort in the quarters they had discovered there. Relief from the wind was itself a luxury, but the row of snug apartments, each dominated by a great hearth so spoiled the neo-nomads that they felt guilty about enjoying them. Opposite the apartments were stables, in which the little camel family was now reunited in approximately equal, if differently engineered, comfort.

  Something strange had happened. She had been away from them – Itzhak, Lockwood and the king – barely two days. But so much had happened in that time that she now found she had grown away from them – even, in some ways, beyond them. It was not that she was less than glad to see them; it was not that they failed to share her joy. Edmund and Lockwood responded with giant grins, and Itzhak by weeping into an enormous violet silk handkerchief. They were still dear to her, each of them, because of what they had shared. But they were children. She had grown up. She had entered the tomorrow world of Paul and the Oracle women, and if time decreed she could not keep it nothing could rob her of its legacy of self-knowledge. Should she spend the rest of her life as a slave among barbarians, the memory of being among great intellects and accepted by them in a spirit approaching equality would remain a warmth and comfort to her. These were the days of her glory: she was one with eagles, and if fate should clip her wings she might walk with men again but her heart would cleave to the soaring wonder of flight.

  When she went back to Paul’s room she found him sleeping and Miriam waiting for her. Anxiety, too recently honed not to prick, stirred briefly under her skin but Miriam dismissed it with an impish smile. “Do you suppose he’ll dissolve the moment you take your eyes off him?”

  “Of course not,” replied Sah, slightly nettled. “It’s just a habit left over from the desert – looking after one another.”

  “No criticism was implied. He owes you his life.”

  “I owe him mine.”

  “And I mine. You’re right – it does become a habit.” They chuckled together like conspirators. Miriam went on, “Shah, can we talk? – not here, you might start shouting and Paul needs his sleep.”

  They went up on the roofs, entering an over-world of architectural surrealism. From the Ice Desert the filigree skyline presented a spectacle of bizarre beauty, its rosy filaments swooping and soaring with an airy grace that seemed to defy gravity. Here among the domes and pinnacles that illusion of weightlessness did not endure. The towering masonry was too solid, too massive, for fantasy. Instead, as the eye traced the monumental structures diminishing into perspective-points in the windy sky, the mind contemplated the awesome marvel of human achievement on this scale.

  The wind soughed across the domes and wailed in the high spires; buttress arches wrung from it whole phrases of alien music. The two women clutched cloaks about themselves as they walked through the petrified landscape.

  Miriam said, “Have you thought where you’ll go fro
m here?”

  “Leshkas. Paul’s taking the king there when he services their power-plant.”

  “And afterwards?”

  Shah shrugged. “The next nuclear city, I suppose.”

  “Would I be right in assuming you want to go where Paul goes?”

  Shah smiled faintly into her furs. “You would.”

  “Forgive me – has he said he’ll take you?”

  “You know him,” said Shah, her chin lifting. “What do you think?”

  “I never heard him speak of any companion other than his camel.”

  “Perhaps he’s never known a telepath before.”

  Miriam looked round at her, startled. “You? Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. I’ve been reading minds ever since I can remember. It’s a less useful accomplishment than you might imagine, but Paul was once telepathic himself.”

  “How very curious,” murmured Miriam. “And yet, perhaps I should have guessed. No matter. Indeed, all the more reason why —” She seemed to hear herself rambling and stopped, only adding a trifle abruptly, “There is an alternative for you.”

  “Really?”

  “If he won’t take you, or if you change your mind. You could stay here.”

  “Me – a nun?” Shah gave a positively lewd giggle. “I don’t think I’ve either the vocation or the qualifications.”

  Miriam grinned. “You still don’t understand about us. We are not a religious order. We are an island community whose purpose is to preserve and develop knowledge – every form of knowledge, medical, scientific, philosophical, social, aesthetic. Erudition is our forte. You cannot tell me that you have nothing to contribute, or that you would gain nothing from concourse with minds such as are here.”

  “You can’t build a life on intelligent conversation. Without wishing to be indelicate, I want a man. I want children.”

  “Many of us have children. I have three daughters.”

  Shah could not have been more taken aback if the roof beneath her had moved two feet to the left or a couple of its spires had begun to dance. Crazy thoughts lurched through her brain. She said cautiously, “Who – er – who is the father?”

  “They don’t have one. None of our children have fathers – only mothers. We do things differently here.” Miriam smiled. “I’m sorry, this can’t be making much sense to you. I will try to explain.

  “A handful of the Oracle women have the same sort of family history as you and I: conceived by the sexual congress of a man and a woman. The majority came about in the same way as my daughters, by the artificial matching of cells from the mother’s body alone. The process takes place in the laboratory. The neophyte is then returned to the womb to develop in the normal way. Because the children carry a full set of the mother’s chromosomes they are perfect genetic copies of her: identical in chemistry, appearance, intelligence, aptitudes and all inheritable features. And of course, all are daughters.”

  “Why?” whispered Shah. It did not occur to her to doubt what she was hearing, though it went against learning as basic as speech and balance. Miriam’s demeanour left no room for doubt.

  “The development of cloning from a theoretical to a practical science was initially forced upon us by the same disaster that devasted all the world. Oracle was a plague city.” High over the windy plain, her flogging clothes and still form silhouetted against the sky, the priestess spoke as if she remembered the desolate years. “We were a scientific research establishment, a self-contained township of men and women working contentedly remote from metropolitan pressures. We were physicists, biologists, chemists, and we enquired deeply into many mysteries.

  “When the plague began, we of Oracle were ideally situated to contend with it, and soon we succeeded in distilling a vaccine. There was no time for the usual exhaustive clinical trials, but with almost certain death as the alternative there was no moral dilemma. The plague’s grip on Oracle was broken and it withdrew, leaving those who had not been vaccinated dead and those who had alive. We prepared to give the world deliverance. Then we discovered the fatal flaw in our elixir. Our vaccine, while slower and more subtle in its action, was even more efficient at depopulation than the plague. It caused total male sterility.

  “The tragedy of it was overwhelming. We had fortified ourselves with the assurance that even if our partners and families in the cities were dead, if everyone in all the cities were dead, mankind need not die because we should survive and take among ourselves new partners, make new families. Now, though we might survive, our line was barren – if we were our race’s last hope it would die with us. Unless the science of Oracle, which had betrayed us into this monstrous situation, could be made to resolve it.

  “We began, naturally, by seeking a means to reverse the side effects of the vaccine. When it became obvious that none would be found, we turned our thoughts towards asexual procreation. It had been done before, with reptiles. The problem in applying the principles to people was that the human egg is very much smaller than that of an axolotl. Nevertheless, with all the specialised resources of Oracle concentrated on the programme, an answer was ultimately found. The clones inherited the earth; or at any event, this part of it.

  “As it turned out, our worst fears were groundless. Oracle was not humanity’s last chance. People had survived the plague; enough – being both men and women, and fertile – to safeguard the species. Oracle pursued no contact with them. We had always been isolated; now we were also alien – quite different, apart in every sense of the word. And – their existence underlined our loss.”

  Shah ventured an observation for the first time since Miriam’s soliloque began. “Your women could have borne children to men from outside.”

  “Indeed they could,” agreed the priestess. “That was the danger, why Oracle finally closed in on itself, turned its back upon the world. For by then the advantages of cloning were becoming apparent. The bane of science is that, because of the years it takes to assimilate great knowledge, the best work is usually done by people approaching the end of their lives. When they die their discoveries may be preserved but their thought-patterns are not. But clones are genetic replicas of their parents. Their brains are structured on identical lines – they share the same approaches, the same appreciations. A clone can acquire from her parent much more learning than a sexually conceived child, and she is much more capable of developing the dead mother’s theories.

  “The advantages conferred on a community like Oracle by clone reproduction were so significant that the risks implicit in a heterosexual society were too great to be countenanced. Making babies with a man is more enjoyable than making them with a test-tube; so the temptation of male company had to be avoided. So began Oracle’s tradition of celibacy. We have to persuade our daughters that men are undesirable, otherwise we might lose them and all the generations of achievement locked within them.”

  They had wandered beyond the forest of sculpted stone to the edge of the roof, and stood at the parapet looking out over the shimmering desert. From here, atop the landscape’s only eminence, there was no relief for the eye until the glittering ice – pale pink, now, from some evening luminescence in the sky – merged with the horizon, and not much then. It was very beautiful and quite unyielding: a world on which men made no impact. A land fit for clones, Shah thought with a momentary twinge of bitterness she did not understand.

  Miriam turned and flashed her a brilliant, tragic smile that startled Shah and plucked at her heart because she recognised it as Itzhak’s, with all the implications that entailed. “I hope I’m not depressing you with this sorry tale. It’s ancient history now, but it serves to explain what we are and why we live as we do. It should also explain why you would be particularly welcomed to our midst. If you are indeed telepathic, you have a remarkable gene to bring as dowry. And think of this: if you have daughters here, each will inherit that capacity. You couldn’t be sure that any child sexually conceived would. Even if he wanted to, Paul cannot guarantee you what
I can: a total communion of minds and spirits with daughters who will make rich your life and give you a kind of immortality afterwards.”

  There was a long pause. “It’s almost,” Shah said then, “an offer I can’t refuse. If I were five years older, or two months younger, I should stay: I should grasp this opportunity with both hands and all gratitude. I am grateful, for the invitation. It’s more reassuring than you know that someone believes I belong with them.

  “But I am a freed hawk. I must follow the wind and my own nature, at least until I learn what each of them is for. Of the world I know nothing. I want it, Miriam, I want it all: I want Oracle and I want Paul and wherever it is he’s going; but – forgive me – if I choose wrongly Oracle will still be here, but Paul will be gone.

  “It may be that in afterdays I shall rue this as folly, learning that freedom is only another burden to shoulder and that unreflected love is a leaden gift that exhausts the donor and exasperates the recipient. It may be that by leaving I shall forfeit my best chance of having children: a concubine with nothing to show for three years’work is hardly a byword for fertility. If I find I have made a mistake I shall try to return, and cast my genes upon your mercy. At Oracle I know I could enjoy comfort, content, fulfilment. But I want something more. If I can possibly find it, Miriam, I want happiness, and for that I’m willing to turn my back on security and chance everything I have and could have to the frozen wastes not only of this land but also of that man. That’s why, when Paul leaves here, I shall go with him.”

  “And that,” murmured Miriam as they walked back towards the stairway, arms linked, “is exactly what I thought you’d say.”

  They parted outside Paul’s room. Walking on, Miriam called back over her shoulder, “By the way, didn’t you know? – Harry was sterile.”

  Itzhak’s bombshell dropped soon after Miriam’s. He arrived unheralded: there was a tap at Paul’s door and when Shah opened it she found the poet standing on one leg on the threshold. She had dragged him inside out of sight before it occurred to her that the women must have admitted him in the first place and then conducted or directed him through the rabbit-warrens of the blind city.