Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS)

by James Tiptree Jr.

  “Hey, Pops, what do you think you’re doing? You know you’re not supposed to be in here. Scoot!”

  Jayakal smiled broadly in the pain of his heart. This Terran She’gan had been kind to the Joilani in his rough way. Kind and respectful. He knew them by their proper names; he had never abused their females; he fed cleanly, and did not drink abomination. He had even inquired, with decorum, into the sacred concepts: Jailasanatha, the Living-with-in-honor, the Oneness-of-love. Old Jayakal’s flexible cheekbones drew upward in a beaming rictus of shame.

  “O gentle friend, I come to share with you,” he said ritually. “You know I don’t really divvy your speech. Now you have to get out.”

  Jayakal knew no Terran word for sharing; perhaps there was none.

  “F’iend, I b’ing you thing.”

  “Yeah, well bring it me outside.” Seeing that the old Joilani did not move, the operator rose to usher him out. But memory stirred; his understanding of the true meaning of that smile penetrated. “What is it, Jayakal? What you got there?”

  Jayakal brought the heavy load in his hands forward.

  “Death.”

  “What-where did you get that? Oh, holy mother, get away from me! That thing is armed! The pin is out –”

  The laboriously pilfered and hoarded excavating plastic had been well and truly assembled; the igniter had been properly attached. In the ensuing explosion, fragments of the whole transmitter complex, mingled with those of Jayakal and his Terran friend, rained down across the Terran compound and out among the amlat fields.

  Spacers and station personnel erupted out of the post bars, at first uncertain in the darkness what to do. Then they saw torches flaring and bobbing around the transformer sheds. Small gray figures were running, leaping, howling, throwing missiles that flamed.

  “The crotting Juloos are after the power plant! Come on!”

  Other diversions were planned. The names of the Old Ones and damaged females who died thus for us are inscribed on the sacred rolls. We can only pray that they found quick and merciful deaths.

  The station commander’s weapons belt hung over the chair by his bed. All through the acts of shame and pain Sosalal had been watching it, waiting for her chance. If only Bislat, the commander’s “boy,” could come in to help her! But he could not—he was needed at the ship.

  The commander’s lust was still unsated. He gulped a drink from the vile little purple flask, and squinted his small Terran eyes meaningfully at her. Sosalal smiled, and offered her trembling, grotesquely disfigured body once more. But no: he wanted her to stimulate him. She set her emphatic Joilani fingers, her shuddering mouth, to do their work, hoping that the promised sound would come soon, praying that the commander’s communicator would not buzz with the news of the attempt failed. Why, oh why, was it taking so long? She wished she could have one last sight of the Terran’s great magical star projection, which showed at one far side those blessed, incredible symbols of her people. Somewhere out there, so very far away, was Joilani home space—maybe even, she thought wildly, while her body labored at its hurtful task, maybe a Joilani empire!

  Now he wished to enter her. She was almost inured to the pain; her damaged body had healed in a form pleasing to this Terran. She was only the commander’s fourth “girl.” There had been other commanders, some better, some worse, and “girls” beyond counting, as far back as the Joilani records ran. It had been “girls” like herself and “boys” like Bislat who had first seen the great three-dimensional luminous star swarms in the commander’s private room—and brought back to their people the unbelievable news: somewhere, a Joilani homeland still lived!

  Greatly daring, a “girl” had once asked about those Joilani symbols. Her commander had shrugged. “That stuff! It’s the hell and gone the other side of the system, take half your life to get there. I don’t know a thing about ’em. Probably somebody just stuck ’em in. They aren’t Juloos, that’s for sure.”

  Yet there the symbols blazed, tiny replicas of the ancient Joilani Sun-in-splendor. It could mean only one thing, that the old myth was true: that they were not natives to this world, but descendants of a colony left by Joilani who traveled space as the Terrans did. And that those great Joilani yet lived!

  If only they could reach them. But how, how?

  Could they somehow send a message? All but impossible. And even if they did, how could their kind rescue them from the midst of Terran might?

  No. Hopeless as it seemed, they must get themselves out and reach Joilani space by their own efforts.

  And so the great plan had been born and grown, over years, over lifetimes. Painfully, furtively, bit by bit, Joilani servants and bar attendants and ship cleaners and amlat loaders had discovered and brought back the magic numbers, and their meaning: the tau-space coordinates that would take them to those stars. From discarded manuals, from spacers’ talk, they had pieced together the fantastic concept of tau-space itself. Sometimes an almighty Terran would find a naive Joilani question amusing enough to answer. Those allowed inside the ships brought back tiny fragments of the workings of the Terran magic. Joilani, who were humble “boys” by day and “girls” by night, became clandestine students and teachers, fitting together the mysteries of their overlords, reducing them from magic to comprehension. Preparing, planning in minutest detail, sustained only by substanceless hope, they readied for their epic, incredible flight.

  And now the lived-for moment had come.

  Or had it? Why was it taking so long? Suffering as she had so often smilingly suffered before, Sosalal despaired. Surely nothing would, nothing could change. It was all a dream; all would go on as it always had, the degradation and the pain. . . . The commander indicated new desires; careless with grief, Sosalal complied.

  “Watch it!” He slapped her head so that her vision spun. “Excuse, seh.”

  “You’re getting a bit long in the tooth, Sosi.” He meant that literally: mature Joilani teeth were large. “You better start training a younger moolie. Or have ‘em pulled.”

  “Yes, seh.”

  “You scratch me again and I’ll pull ‘em myself—Holy Jebulibar, what’s that?”

  A flash from the window lit the room, followed by a rumbling that rattled the walls. The commander tossed her aside and ran to look out.

  It had come! It was really true! Hurry. She scrambled to the chair.

  “Good God Almighty, it looks like the transmitter blew. Wha—”

  He had whirled toward his communicator, his clothes, and found himself facing the mouth of his own weapon held in Sosalal’s trembling hands. He was too astounded to react. When she pressed the firing stud he dropped with his chest blown open, the blank frown still on his face.

  Sosalal too was astounded, moving in a dream. She had killed. Really killed a Terran. A living being. “I come to share,” she whispered ritually. Gazing at the fiery light in the window, she turned the weapon to her own head and pressed the firing stud.

  Nothing happened.

  What could be wrong? The dream broke, leaving her in dreadful reality. Frantically she poked and probed at the strange object. Was there some mechanism needed to reset it? She was unaware of the meaning of the red charge dot—the commander had grown too careless to recharge his weapon after his last game hunt. Now it was empty.

  Sosalal was still struggling with the thing when the door burst open and she felt herself seized and struck all but senseless. Amid the boots and the shouting, her wrist glands leaked scarlet Joilani tears as she foresaw the slow and merciless death that would now be hers.

  They had just started to question her when she heard it: the deep rolling rumble of a ship lifting off. The Dream was away—her people had done it, they were saved! Through her pain she heard a Terran voice say, “Juloo-town is empty! All the young ones are on that ship.” Under the blows of her tormentors her twin hearts leaped with joy.

  But a moment later all exultation died; she heard the louder fires of the Terran cruiser bursting into the sky.
The Dream had failed, then: they would be pursued and killed. Desolate, she willed herself to die in the Terrans’ hands. But her life resisted, and her broken body lived long enough to sense the thunderous concussion from the sky that must be the destruction of her race. She died believing all hope was dead. Still, she had told her questioners nothing.

  Great dangers came to those who essayed to lift the Dream.

  “If you monkeys are seriously planning to try to fly this ship, you better set that trim lever first or we’ll all be killed.”

  It was the Terran pilot speaking—the third to be captured, so they had not needed to stop his mouth.

  “Go on, push it! It’s in landing attitude now, that red one. I don’t want to be smashed up.”

  Young Jivadh, dwarfed in the huge pilot’s chair, desperately reviewed his laboriously built-up memory engram of this ship’s controls. Red lever, red lever . He was not quite sure. He twisted around to look at their captives. Incredible to see the three great bodies lying bound and helpless against the wall, which should soon become the floor. From the seat beside him Bislat held his weapon trained on them. It was one of the two stolen Terran weapons which they had long hoarded for this, their greatest task: the capture of the Terrans on the Dream. The first spacer had not believed they were serious until Jivadh had burned through his boots.

  Now he lay groaning intermittently, muffled by the gag. When he caught Jivadh’s gaze he nodded vehemently in confirmation of the pilot’s warning.

  “I left it in landing attitude,” the pilot repeated. “If you try to lift that way we’ll all die!” The third captive nodded, too.

  Jivadh’s mind raced over and over the remembered pattern. The Dream was an old unstandardized ship. Jivadh continued with the ignition procedure, not touching the red lever.

  “Push it, you fool!” the pilot shouted. “Holy mother, do you want to die?”

  Bislat was looking nervously from Jivadh to the Terrans. He too had learned the patterns of the amlat freighters, but not as well.

  “Jivadh, are you sure?”

  “I cannot be certain. I think on the old ships that is an emergency device which will change or empty the fuels so that they cannot fire. What they call abort. See the Terran symbol a.”

  The pilot had caught the words. ‘

  “It’s not abort, it’s attitude! A for attitude, attitude, you monkey. Push it over or we’ll crash!”

  The other two nodded urgently.

  Jivadh’s whole body was flushed blue and trembling with tension. His memories seemed to recede, blur, spin. Never before had a Joilani disbelieved, disobeyed, a Terran order. Desperate, he clung to one fading fragment of a yellowed chart in his mind.

  “I think not,” he said slowly.

  Taking his people’s whole life in his delicate fingers, he punched the ignition-and-lift sequence into real time.

  Clickings—a clank of metal below—a growling hiss that grew swiftly to an intolerable roar beneath them. The old freighter creaked, strained, gave a sickening lurch. Were they about to crash? Jivadh’s soul died a thousand deaths.

  But the horizon around them stayed level. The Dream was shuddering upward, straight up, moving faster and faster as she staggered and leaped toward space. All landmarks fell away—they were in flight! Jivadh, crushed against his supports, exulted. They had not crashed! He had been right: the Terran had been lying.

  All outer sound fell away. The Dream had cleared atmosphere, and was driving for the stars!

  But not alone.

  Just as the pressure was easing, just as joy was echoing through the ship and the first of his comrades were struggling up to tell him all was well below, just as a Healer was moving to aid the Terran’s burned foot—a loud Terran voice roared through the cabin.

  “Halt, you in the Dream! Retrofire. Go into orbit for boarding or we’ll shoot you down.”

  The Joilani shrank back. Jivadh saw that the voice was coming from the transceiver, which he had turned on as part of the lift-off procedures.

  “That’s the patrol,” the Terran pilot told him. “They’re coming up behind us. You have to quit now, monkey boy. They really will blow us out of space.”

  A sharp clucking started in an instrument to Jivadh’s right. MASS PROXIMITY INDICATOR, he read. Involuntarily he turned to the Terran pilot.

  “That’s nothing, just one of those damn moons. Listen, you have to backfire. I’m not fooling this time. I’ll tell you what to do.”

  “Go into orbit for boarding!” the great voice boomed.

  But Jivadh had turned away, was busy doing something else. It was not right. Undoubtedly he would kill them all—but he knew what his people would wish.

  “Last warning. We will now fire,” the cruiser’s voice said coldly.

  “They mean it!” the Terran pilot screamed. “For god’s sake let me talk to them, let me acknowledge!” The other Terrans were glaring, thrashing in their bonds. This fear was genuine, Jivadh saw, quite different from the lies before. What he had to do was not difficult, but it would take time. He fumbled the transceiver switch open and spoke into it, ignoring Bislat’s horrified eyes.

  “We will stop. Please wait. It is difficult.”

  “That’s the boy!” The pilot was panting with relief. “All right now. See that delta-V estimator, under the thrust dial? Oh, it’s too feking complicated. Let me at it, you might as well.”

  Jivadh ignored him, continuing with his doomed task. Reverently he fed in the coordinates, the sacred coordinates etched in his mind since childhood, the numbers that might possibly, if they could have done it right, have brought them out of tau-space among Joilani stars.

  “We will give you three minims to comply,” the voice said.

  “Listen, they mean it!” the pilot cried. “What are you doing? Let me up!”

  Jivadh went on. The mass-proximity gauge clucked louder; he ignored that, too. When he turned to the small tau-console the pilot suddenly understood.

  “No! Oh, no!” he screamed. “Oh, for god’s sake don’t do that! You crotting idiot, if you go tau this close to the planet we’ll be squashed right into its mass!” His voice had risen to a shriek; the other two were uttering wordless roars and writhing.

  They were undoubtedly right, Jivadh thought bleakly. One moment’s glory—and now the end.

  “We fire in one more minim,” came the cruiser’s toneless roar.

  “Stop! Don’t! No!” the pilot yelled.

  Jivadh looked at Bislat. The other had realized what he was doing; now he gave the true Joilani smile of pursed lips and made the ritual sign of Acceptance-of-ending. The Joilani in the passage understood that; a sighing silence rustled back through the ship.

  “Fire one,” the cruiser voice said briskly.

  Jivadh slammed the tau-tumbler home.

  An alarm shrieked and cut off, all colors vanished, the very structure of space throbbed wildly—as, by a million-to-one chance, the three most massive nearby moons occulted one another in line with the tiny extra energies of the cruiser and its detonating missile, in such a way that for one micromicrominim the Dream stood at a seminull point with the planetary mass. In that fleeting instant she flung out her tau-field, folded the normal dimensions around her, and shot like a squeezed pip into the discontinuity of being which was tau.

  Nearby space-time was rocked by the explosion; concussion swept the moons and across the planet beneath. So narrow was the Dream’s moment of safe passage that a fin of bright metal from the cruiser and a rock with earth and herbs on it were later found intricately meshed into the substance of her stern cargo hold, to the great wonder of the Joilani.

  Meanwhile the rejoicing was so great that it could be expressed in only one way: all over the ship, the Joilani lifted their voices in the sacred song.

  They were free! The Dream had made it into tau-space, where no enemy could find them! They were safely on their way.

  Safely on their way—to an unknown destination, over an unknown time, with pi
tifully limited supplies of water, food, and air.

  Here begins the log of the passage of the Dream through tauspace, which, although timeless, required finite time. . . .

  Jatkan let the precious old scroll roll up and laid it carefully aside, to touch the hand of a co-mate. He had been one of the babies in the amlat containers; sometimes he thought he remembered the great night of their escape. Certainly he remembered a sense of rejoicing, a feeling of dread nightmare blown away.

  “The waiting is long,” said his youngest co-mate, who was little more than a child. “Tell us again about the Terran monsters.”

  “They weren’t monsters, only very alien,” he corrected the child gently. His eyes met those of Salasvati, who was entertaining her young co-mates at the porthole of the tiny records chamber. It came to Jatkan that when he and Salas were old, they might be the last Joilani who had ever really seen a Terran. Certainly the last to have any sense of their terror and might, and the degradations of slavery burned into their parents’ souls. Surely this is good, he thought, but is it not also a loss, in some strange way?

  “—reddish, or sometimes yellow or brownish, almost hairless, with small bright eyes,” he was telling the child. “And big, about the distance to that porthole there. And one day, when the three who were on the Dream were allowed out to exercise, they rushed into the control room and changed the—the gyroscope setting, so that the ship began to spin around faster and faster, and everybody fell down and was pressed flat into the walls. They were counting on their greater strength, you see.”

  “So that they could seize the Dream and break out of tauspace into Terran stars!” His two female co-mates recited in unison: “But old Jivadh saved us.”

  “Yes. But he was young Jivadh then. By great good luck he was at the central column, right where the old weapons were kept, that no one had touched for hundreds of days.”

  A co-mate smiled. “The luck of the Joilani.”

  “No,” Jatkan told her. “We must not grow superstitious. It was simple chance.”