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

by James Tiptree Jr.

  They had found it. In use.

  For a day and a night they had hidden, watching the appalling animals surge upon the devastated shore. And then they had cautiously threaded their way out through the fouled shoal waters toward the outer barrier reefs.

  The shoals and keys extended far out of sight of land, and a south wind blew forever here. They shipped the sail and paddied outward under a bare mast, blinded by warm flying scud, the roar of the world-ocean ever louder. A huge hollow whistling began, like a gale in a pipe organ. They rounded the last rocky key and saw through the spume the towers and chimneys of the outmost reef.

  “My god, it’s alive!”

  One of the towers was not gray but crimson. It swayed, reared higher. Another loomed up beside it, fell upon it. There was a visceral wail. Under the two struggling pillars mountains thrashed, dwarfing the giant combers breaking over them.

  The catamaran retreated, tried another channel. And another, and another, until there was only moonlight.

  “They’re all up and down the whole damned reef.”

  “The bulls, perhaps . . . hauled up, waiting for the cows.”

  “They look more like enormous arthropods.”

  “Does it matter?” he had asked bitterly. “What matters is that they’re preparing to come ashore here too. To our clearing. They’ll destroy it as they did the other. Get the sail up, Piet. There’s enough light. We’ve got to warn them.”

  But there was not quite enough light to safely run before that wind. Piet had brought him home senseless and broken, lashed to half an outrigger.

  When he awoke he demanded, “Have they started building the sea-wall yet?”

  “The sea-wall?” Dr. Liu tossed a dressing into the waste can. “Oh, you mean your sea monsters. It’s early harvest time, you know.”

  “Harvest? Liu, hasn’t Piet told you? Don’t they realize? Get Gregor in here right now. And Hugh and Tomas. Piet too. Bring them, Liu.”

  It was sometime after they came that he began to realize he was a ghost. He’d started calmly, aware that they might think his judgment was warped by his condition.

  “The area was totally devastated,” he told them. “Approximately a kilometer square. There was a decapitated body, still living, near us. It was at least twenty meters long and three or four meters thick. That was by no means the largest. They come ashore periodically, it seems, to the same locations to lay eggs. That’s what created our clearing, not a tornado.”

  “But why should they come here, Mysha?” Gregor protested. “After thirty years?”

  “This is one of their nest sites. The time doesn’t matter, they apparently have a long cycle. Some Terran animals—turtles, eels, locusts—have long cycles. These things are gathering out there all along the reef. An early group came ashore in the south clearing; another will come here soon. We’ve got to build defenses.”

  “But maybe they’ve changed their habits. They may have been going to the south site every year, for all we know.”

  “No. The newly smashed trees were at least two decades old. They’re coming, I tell you. Here!” He heard his voice go up, saw their closed faces. “I tell you we dare not wait for the harvest, Gregor! If you had seen—Tell them, Piet! Tell them, tell them—”

  When his head cleared again, there was only Dr. Liu.

  And shortly after that he discovered that he was a dead man indeed.

  “It’s in the lymph system, Mysha. I found it in the groin when I went in to ease the inguinal ligament.” Liu sighed. “You’d have heard from it pretty soon.”

  “How long?”

  “Back home we could stretch it out awhile. Largely unpleasantly. Here—” he glanced around the little surgery, dropped his hands.

  “Outside limits. Tell me, Liu.”

  “Months. Maybe. I’m sorry, Mysha.”

  They had let him go out then. When he had found that they were still preoccupied with the harvest, he was too weak to plead. Instead he asked them to bring him up here to the noion’s grove, to silence.

  “You ripen?” the noion had asked him.

  He shrugged. “If that’s what you call it.”

  The next day Piet had carried up his tapes and there had been the music and the poetry, and time passed . . . until the day when the stuff started to come ashore. Greasy man-sized wads it was, something like ambergris, or vomit, or sloughed-off hide. Nothing they had ever seen before.

  Upon that Piet had been able to persuade Gregor to send a scouting party to the outer reefs, and then, having seen, they began calmly and gracefully to prepare the wall. Mysha found that his nagging did nothing to speed them and went back up to the grove.

  A tape of poetry had been running when it happened. He had been half listening, half tracing with his eyes the roof poles of the new shed housing the fibers and minerals the exploration team had brought in. A waterwheel was clacking in the near field. There came to him the memory of his arms lifting the capstones of the cistern arch and he frowned, recalling for the thousandth time that they were not quite trued. Next season he would—

  Next season he would be dead, leaving all this to the young brown gods. He thought fondly of their occasional curious glances at the ship and then up, up at the sky. They would never know what he knew, but they thought as civilized men. That was what he had made. Not Ozymandias; Father. His immortality. I die but do not die.

  “You do not ripen?” came the noion’s thought.

  The recorder was muttering Jeffers. “Be in nothing so moderate as in love of man. . . .”

  “You can’t understand,” he told the noion. “You build nothing, leave nothing. Nothing beyond yourself.”

  “—This is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught, they say, God when he walked on earth.”

  He slapped the thing off.

  “How could you understand?” he demanded. “A spore, a god-knows-what without species or posterity. Man is a mammal, we build nests, we cherish our young.”

  An enormous panorama of nests came to him—nests made of spittle or silk or down pulled from the breast, nests excavated, dug into rock, woven in the air, in icebergs; eggs encysted in deserts, in the deep sea mud, carried in pouches of flesh, in mouths, on backs, eggs held for frozen weeks on webbed feet, thrust into victims’ bodies, guarded on the wind-torn crags.

  “Even those monsters who are coming here,” he said. “It’s for their eggs, their young, although they die doing it. Yes, I die. But my species lives!”

  “Why do you cease?” the noion asked.

  That was when the fear started. With his mouth he said angrily, “Because I can’t help it. Can you?”

  Silence.

  His “Can you?” hung in the air, took on unintended meaning. . . . Could it, this thing he called the noion, could it do . . . something?

  An impalpable tension slighter than the pull of a star feathered his mind, the small cold seed of terror grew.

  “Can you—” he started to say, meaning can you cure me? Can you fix my body? But as he framed it he knew it wasn’t relevant. The pull was elsewhere, in a direction he did not want to look. He crouched, horrified. The noion meant, it meant—

  “You . . . ripen?”

  The tenderness opened in his mind, he felt a breach through which frightened tendrils of himself were leaking out, nakedly. He felt himself start to slip, to float into dark lightness, a vast nonspace in which were—voices?—faint beyond galaxies, the ghosts of voices, untraceable filaments of drifting thoughts, a frail webwork of—something—in time-lost immensities, in—life? Death’s-life? Immaterial energies on the winds of nonbeing, pulling, subtly pulling at him—pulling—

  No! No!

  Terrified, he clenched himself, broke, fought, gasped back to life on his hands and knees under the noion’s bough. Light, air. He gulped it, seized earth—and suddenly reached with his mind for the connection he had broken. It wasn’t there.

  “Dear mother of god, is that your immortality?”

  The n
oion hung mute. He sensed that it was spent. It had somehow held open a dimension, to show him. . . .

  To invite him.

  He understood then; his third, his last wish could be . . . this.

  He had lain unmoving while the sun ran down the sky, hearing no more sounds of the life around him. . . . To go out, naked, alone . . . To go out. Alone . . . Those voices . . . had there been meaning, some inconceivable meaning in that ultimate void? . . . To go out, forever out, to meet . . . strangeness . . . to go alone, his essence, his true self free forever from the blood and the begetting and the care. . . .

  It sang to him, a sweet cold song. Out—alone—free . . . The other voice in the double heart of man. The deepest longing of that part of him that was most human. To be free of the tyranny of species. To be free of love. To live forever . . .

  He had groaned, feeling the sky close, feeling the live blood pumping through his animal heart. He was an animal, a human animal, and his young were in danger. He could not do it.

  Before the sun set he had sighed, and raised himself.

  “No. Your way is not my way. I must stay here with my kind. We won’t speak of it again. If you can help me one last time, help me save my young.”

  That had been weeks ago, before the sea-wall had been raised. He sat looking at it now, trying to seal off the memory, the deep traitorous pull. The laser was installed, he saw, and in the same. moments heard footsteps coming up the path.

  “Father?”

  Piet towered beside him, looking out to sea. Mysha realized the whistling had grown louder. On the beach they were running now, shouting more urgently.

  “Bethel says you’re going to stay here.”

  “That’s right. I want to try, oh, something . . . where will you be?”

  “On the laser. Pavel and I drew lots. He got the raft with the repair crew.”

  “See that your mother and the girls get out, will you? All the way back to the big trees.”

  Piet nodded. “Melie and Sara are with the nursery team.”

  They stood silent, listening. . . . Louder now.

  “On my way,” Piet said. “We’re rigging an oil sprayer. We could get some carcasses burning beyond the wall.”

  He went, leaving a food parcel, and a flask. The afternoon was superbly beautiful, clear tourmaline sky melting to clear green opal sea. Only, where sea met sky, was there a stir of clouds, a faint mirage of low hills which shimmered and dissolved and formed again?

  The horizon itself was coming closer.

  Mysha peered, hearing the whistling strengthen. Under it now and then came a dim groaning, as though the reefs were in pain.

  As he watched, a file of women carrying babies and bundles came out of the colony below him and began to walk hurriedly down the path toward the jungle. The groaning came again. Two of the women broke into a trot.

  On his left the shadows of the horizon thickened, heaved. A mountain seemed to be detaching itself through the misty air. It became identifiable as five dune-sized creatures wallowing toward the shoals. Men shouted.

  The forerunners were well south of the colony, heading at the flax-oil field. As they came closer they showed as huge soft-looking lobsters with upright heads and thoraxes, their front legs dragging their distended bellies. Mysha knew them as the “cows.” They crashed and floundered across the low reefs, groaning hollowly.

  Behind them from the haze appeared their five “bulls,” staggering with heads thrown back and their enormous towerlike organs erect. It was from them that the whistling came, loud now as a rocket vent. An oddly sad mechanical bedlam . . . As they mounted the reefs Mysha saw that the males’ bodies were haggard, wasted in upon longitudinal riblike flutes. All their substance and energy seemed concentrated in their great engorged heads, bulky as houses, and in the colossal members wagging up from their front plates.

  The cows’ groaning became bellowing. They were in the last shallows now. Their mountainous abdomens heaved fully into view, sleek and streaming. Brilliant spectral colors flared and faded on their flanks. The males pitched in their wakes, closing on them fast.

  Two males lurched together, clashing. Both stopped, wailed, flung their heads completely over onto their backs so that their crimson organs reared into the sky. But the threat-response could not last, so close to their goal. Their cows plowed forward, the males’ heads came up and they followed onto the land.

  The lead cow was in the flax seedlings now, her belly gouging a canyon, her legs thrashing devastation. The two beyond her struck into jungle. Treetops flailed wildly, went down. The rending and crashing blended with the bellowing of the cows and the siren keening of the males. The last two cows were heading into the field. One struck the catamaran moorings a demolishing blow, ground on ashore.

  The lead cow in the flax field slowed. Her abdomen was slashed by gouges and wounds, ichor streaming down. Her mate reached her. His forelegs flailed hugely. He grappled her head face-to-face and mounted clumsily onto her foreparts in a parody of human coupling. Under him she began to turn ponderously in place, throwing up a ring-wall down which tumbled tree-stumps, rocks. The male’s spermatogonium battered blindly, arching. His mate continued her gargantuan churning, deeper and deeper, carrying him with her. Her head was straining back, exposing gaping frontal plates. The organ of the mounted male caught, penetrated into her thorax.

  What followed was not the convulsive orgasm of mammals, but archaic insectile rigidity. The cow’s legs continued their pistonlike churning, revolving the coupled monsters ever deeper into their crater, while the entire contents of the male’s body appeared to drain into his mate. Presently he was only a deflated husk behind his gigantic head. Slowly they went round—and now Mysha saw that the male’s forelegs were rasping, sawing at the cow’s thorax.

  In a few more revolutions he had severed it completely. Her head came loose and was held aloft, spasming. There was no laying of eggs. Instead, the male now pushed, wrenched, so that his own head and forelimbs tore free from the genital section of his body. With his female’s head held high, the bodiless head began lurching toward the sea, repeating in death the first act of his life.

  Behind him the decorticate body of the cow churned on, burying itself deeper and deeper, a living incubator for the fertilized eggs within.

  Mysha pulled his gaze with an effort from the two vast death’s-heads reeling toward the sea in a trail of membranes and fluids. In the field two others were still coupled. Something had gone wrong with one. Her body had struck rock and canted, while her jerking legs toppled her onto the male and drummed on, grinding him under her.

  Mysha shook his head, controlled his breathing. The engines of delight . . . He and Piet had seen this once before. He looked down at the colony, saw the watchers crowding the thatches, the water tower, on the pilings. “Now you know,” he muttered and tried to shout until he heard Piet’s roar, getting them moving. His pain was suddenly savage.

  More horizon had thickened, was looming closer. It was deafening now, that ceaseless bone-deep whistle. The sun shone brilliantly on the ruined field where the three huge craters quaked. The walking heads had disappeared into the shoals, leaving only the diminishing drumming of the stranded pair.

  A woman’s voice pealed. Another line of burdened figures was hurrying from the colony on the jungle path. Mysha peered, fist pressed into his pain. Martine, Lila, Hallam, Chena—biologist, weaver, mineralogist, engineer. They looked like little monkeys. Naked primates fleeing with their young. That was how it would be, once the stored heritage was gone, the tools of culture ground to dust.

  “If the wall goes, you must help me,” he told the noion. “You know how to make them turn.”

  The noion’s silence became emptiness. He understood the communication. This is the last, I can do no more. It was very weak.

  That was enough, that was all he asked. All. To save his own.

  Dead ahead of them a new mountain was rising from the sea. The bellowing rose. Six ship-sized enormities,
headed for the apex of the wall. Was this the test? They grew, loomed, floundering with surprising speed straight at the colony. Their males were following close, their phalli higher than the water tower.

  Mysha held his breath, willing Piet to fire. The lead cow heaved, dwarfing the fragile wall. No beam came from Piet’s laser. Mysha pounded helpless fists, not feeling his own pain. What was wrong with Piet?

  Then at the last moment he saw he had misjudged the angle. The lead cow mounted the last reef and stuck, churning so that her followers plowed on past. They struck the pilings a glancing blow and turned along the reef line to the near fields. The stuck cow dragged free, swerved into their trail, and the males lurched after her.

  Mysha breathed again. A new herd was coming ashore far to his right beyond the colony, their bellows almost inaudible below the rising bedlam from the field.

  But these were only the forerunners. Behind them the horizon boiled with monster shapes.

  He groaned, studying the repair crews as they dragged timbers to broken pilings; even that passing blow had done damage.

  The oncoming mountains grew, birthed new herds to right and left. Their uproar was passing the quality of sound, becoming an environment of total stress. Numbly Mysha watched a huge mass detach itself from the line and start straight toward the wall. Ten of them.

  They were larger, and the males behind them towered higher than any yet. The main herd-bulls were coming. The female in the lead crashed on, nearer and nearer. She was following the track of the first cow, which had stuck upon the reef before the wall.

  But this was a stupendous animal. The reef only slowed her, so that the next cow struck her, rebounded upon the cribs of the side wall and slewed off, spilling rocks. Then the first cow was free, making straight for the apex of the walls. Her forebody reared. The head with its huge blind-looking eyes towered ten meters above the apex, a visitation from hell.

  As it hung waiting for its limbs to churn it over, a line of light sliced out from the tower. The beam struck her thorax. Mysha saw the plates smoke. A charred crack cut across the monstrous body—it was the abscission line where the male would saw. He understood then what Piet was trying. If the abscission layer broke, the body might cease its forward motion, as they had in the fields.