Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  Elitha had food waiting when he got there; she offered it to him in silence and he accepted it the same way, thinking furiously as he ate. Considering Judith’s state of mind when last seen, there was an all too likely explanation for her disappearance; but Marc preferred to consider possibilities which offered not only hope but a line of action.

  “I don’t see how she could have known of the other place, or why she should have gone there,” he said at length, “but I’ll have to look there, too.”

  “I have already looked there, sir. She is not there,” said Elitha quietly. Marc frowned.

  “How did you know where it was?”

  “I know most of the ground above, for a long way around the garden. The second night I saw you go, I followed—I will tell you why later. I saw you go to the other hole and climb down.”

  Angry as he was, Marc had control enough not to ask whether she had seen what he had done there; he kept to the problem of his wife’s disappearance. “Then she has simply gone out into the caves.”

  “I’m afraid so, sir. I should have watched her.”

  “Now you’re sounding like Judith herself. If anyone should have watched her, it should have been I. It is not important to fix blame; what we must do is find her.”

  “And if she does not wish to be found?”

  “She must be found anyway! Even if what happened to Kyros drove her to, madness she must be found—she mourned each of the others, just as I did, but she recovered each time.”

  “But how will you find her? Even you do not know all these caves and passages. If she simply started walking with no plan, the gods alone know where she might be now. And if you did find her, how would you get her to come back if—”

  “I have persuaded her before. She will come back when I find her. Wait here, and keep food ready; I will come back to rest—I don’t say every day, because I won’t know when the days are over, but when I have to.” Elitha looked at him thoughtfully.

  “But I should help, Master. She should be found quickly, since she is without food; two of us can search more places before it is too late.” He pondered that point, and finally nodded.

  “Very well. You search the caverns closest to here. Mark your way, and start back while there is still enough oil in your lamp—”

  “I understand, Master. I will not lose myself.”

  But the search could not be continuous. Food and sleep were necessities; oil had to be replenished—sometimes from the distant village. Elitha did this errand once so that Marc could keep on looking, but she was not able to carry nearly as much as he; more time was lost than gained. Marc made the trip thereafter.

  At the end of the first week, Marc was pointing out that there was water in the caves, so Judith could still be living. At the end of the second, his tune was, “At least she won’t be moving around now. We’re more likely to find her.” Elitha made no reply to either theory, even when the third week had passed and no sane person could have expected to find the woman alive. Marc, at this point, was not sane. The girl knew it, and spoke and acted accordingly.

  On the twenty-third day he came back from one of his searches to find her waiting. This was not too unusual, but the bowl of food she handed him did catch his attention.

  “Why did you take time to cook?” he asked. “Have you stopped searching?”

  “Yes, sir. Since yesterday. Finish your food and I will explain.” Somehow she dominated him as he had dominated Judith in similar circumstances, and he emptied the bowl, never taking his eyes from her face. When he had finished and set the bowl down, she took up one of the lamps.

  “Come, my lord.” He followed dumbly. She led the way along the tunnel to the garden for a short distance, and then turned off into a narrow passage to the right. Marc could see that the route was marked with soot, as they wound their way into a region which even he scarcely knew, close as it was to the home cave. He commented after a few minutes.

  “Did she leave this trail?”

  “No, sir. I marked it during my search yesterday. I had not come this way before.”

  “Then you found her?”

  “You will see. Follow.” He obeyed, and for half an hour the pair made their way through the unnoticed beauties of the cavern.

  At length the way opened into a space some fifty feet across. The girl stopped at its center.

  “Look,” she said, pointing to the floor.

  Marc saw a clay lamp at her feet. It was dry, and the wick had clearly been left to burn down as the oil disappeared. He looked down at it briefly, then turned to the girl.

  “You found this here?”

  “Yes. It had been left where you found it now.”

  “You mean she left it here when it went dry and just wandered off in the dark?”

  “No. I think it was burning when it was put down. Look again, Master.” She gestured toward the far side of the chamber, and led the way toward it.

  A pit, a dozen feet long and half as wide, lay before them. Elitha walked around one end of it to the wall on the farther side, where a cluster of finger-thin stalactites grew. She broke one of these off, and tossed it into the hole.

  There was silence for several heartbeats, then a clatter as it struck. This was repeated several times, and terminated in a sound which might have been a splash, though it was too faint for Marc to be certain.

  Elitha pointed to another broken stalactite, a few inches from the one she had used.

  “She could have used this to find whether—whether this was deep enough,” she said gently. She regretted for a moment being on the far side of the hole, but reflected that Marc liked to be sure before he acted. She was right.

  He stood looking down into the blackness for what seemed a long time, while the girl stayed where she was, almost without breathing. Then he turned and walked back to the place where the lamp had been set. Elitha took the opportunity to round the pit again, and followed him. She waited behind him while he stood looking at the empty lamp once more, wondering whether the heartbeats she could hear were her own or his. Then he turned and began to walk slowly but purposefully back toward the pit.

  She was in front of him instantly, barring his way. He stopped, and a faint smile crossed his face.

  “Don’t fear. You can find your way back,” he said softly.

  “I know I can. That’s not it, Master. You must come, too.”

  “Why? The only thing I had left in life is down there.” He nodded toward the pit.

  “No. There is something else.”

  He raised his eyebrows, Judith’s suggestion of a few weeks before crossing his mind. He chose his words carefully.

  “Can you say just what is left for me? My family is gone. My fight is lost.”

  “No!” she almost shouted. “You’re wrong! Your fight isn’t lost—it’s scarcely begun! Can’t you see? I can’t read or write—I haven’t her wisdom—but I can hear. I heard much of what you said to her, and I learned much from what I heard. I know what you are fighting, and I know that you have already learned more about that fight than any man alive. It is still your fight, even though your own children are lost.

  “My lord, I am a woman. I may never have children of my own, but I can speak for those who have or will. I know what your fight has cost—I know what you had to do in that other pit, where you had the child you stole from the village. I know why you couldn’t tell our lady what you had done or why it had failed, until the little one was hurt—”

  “I couldn’t even tell her then,” Marc cut in. “What I told her was not true. I did get my blood into that child, and my blood killed him. How could I tell her that?”

  Elitha’s eyes opened wide. “You mean one person’s blood kills another? That Kyros was killed by his own mother’s blood?”

  “No. He might have been—I can’t tell. But he wasn’t. I don’t know whether his mother’s blood would have helped or harmed him. He died before she had opened her own vein. She used the knife to go into his arm, then put the quill
into the blood vessel she had opened; but she never put any of her own blood into the funnel. She must have seen he was gone before she could start. I don’t know what killed him; he may have been about to go anyway, or perhaps putting the empty funnel into his vein harmed him in some way I can’t imagine now. How can I learn the truth when so many things may be true? Maybe she was right—maybe the gods did curse us.”

  “Or her.”

  “No! No god that would curse a woman like Judith is worth a man’s worship.”

  “But a demon which would do so is worthy to be fought.”

  “That may be.” He pondered silently for a while. “But I don’t see how I can carry on the fight. Judith is gone, but even without her to help plan or—or hinder testing, I can’t work alone—I don’t know—I can’t think straight anymore—maybe she was right about not trying things on other people—”

  “She was wrong,” cut in Elitha. “She could not help feeling so, because she had children of her own. If I had children, I might be the same; but as it is, I can think of other women’s children, both now and in years to come. I loved your wife. I was her slave all my life that I can remember. I loved her children, though they were not mine; and because I loved children not my own, I can think of still others. I am not as wise as she was—”

  “I wonder,” he muttered inaudibly.

  “—but I am sure she was wrong and you were right about this. She could not think of your using other children, because she could think only of how she would feel if they were hers. You yourself could not use your own child. Now you would listen to her dead voice, and stop the struggle. Listen to mine, Master, and fight on—for the children and mothers of the years to come!”

  “You tell me to do what I have done—steal and kill children?”

  “I say what you once said to her. If you do not, this sickness will kill more.”

  “And you could bring yourself to help?”

  “Gladly. I saw your four sons die. I would do any thing to stop that curse.”

  “But I can’t keep stealing children from this one village. Sooner or later our work would become known. Could you face what would happen then?”

  “If necessary, I could. But you need not stay here. Go back to the mountains where you were born—there must be many places where you could live and work. If we are feared and hated, it will be worth it—though I think we can remain unknown if we move often enough.

  “You know I am right, Master. Leave her to sleep alone here, and come back to the fight.”

  The man nodded slowly, and spoke even more slowly.

  “Yes, you are right. And she was wrong. She thought the curse was her fault, and that Kyros’ injury and death were her fault, and could not forget it. I feel that her death was my fault—I didn’t tell her enough of the truth; but whether my fault or not, there is still the fight.” He looked down at the girl suddenly. “I even feel guilty for letting you join the work”—her eyes fell, and a faint smile crossed her face—“but I accept the blame. Come.”

  He, stared to pick up the empty lamp, but she forestalled him. She took it, strode to the pit, and tossed it in. Heartbeats later its crash came back to them. After a moment he nodded, took the burning lamp, and led the way from the cave. Elitha, following in his shadow, allowed a momentary expression of relief to cross her features as she wiped oil from her fingers.

  1978

  SEASONING

  The author has been a bomber co-pilot, a special weapons instructor, a teacher of chemistry, and an occasional painter of astronomical subjects; but it’s his science fiction, which he’s been selling since 1942, for which he’s best known.

  For several years I have been playing with the astronomical possibility, which seems to me quite a good probability, that there are numerous bodies a little too low in mass to be real stars and a little too big to be planets—if only because the old definition of planet says that it doesn’t shine by its own light. Such a microsun might last a long time, especially if it contained a reasonable amount of heavy radioactives, and warm one or more satellites even if it didn’t light them very well. If such a body orbited a more normal star as Jupiter orbits Sol, interesting complications would arise for the satellites.

  When Harlan Ellison put in his emergency request for a planet with interesting details, to present to a group of authors onstage at UCLA so that they could cook up story ideas, in public, I already had a good deal of background ready, therefore.

  The sun of the system is Castor C, a red dwarf eclipsing binary that we already know a good deal about, and a flare star to boot (just to provide more variation). Medea is a basically Earthlike satellite of a superjovian body which I had already worked out. Locked rotation gives a side heated by Argo, the superjovian, and a cold side heated intermittently by the Castor C suns. A tilted orbit plane supplies regions of alternate permanent light and dark like Earth’s Arctic and Antarctic regions. 1 did the arithmetic on all this, and passed it on to Poul Anderson, Larry Niven, and Fred Pohl, who fleshed out my astronomy. I won’t give all the details here; you’ll read some of the stories which have resulted in this magazine, maybe some in others, and—eventually—all of them in a nice big book, Medea: Harlan’s World, which will contain all the figures, arguments, and what have you from the UCLA meeting.

  Hal Clement

  The onshore wind had slackened, but was still strong enough to make the sturdiest bushes lean inland. The little sloop should be able to beat out against it, but Faivonen couldn’t help watching. The Fahamu was his only link with the rest of Medea’s humanity—a small population, but the only one that could mean anything to him now. Earth’s billions were no longer part of his life.

  Sullivan had promised to be back by midsummer, thirty Medean days from now. Faivonen trusted him, of course, since unreliable people had been pretty well combed out of the colony’s leadership, but any commitment on the new world carried the unspoken qualification, “If I’m still alive.” In spite of the numerous children, there were very few more human beings on the satellite than had landed two decades before. Learning as much as possible as soon as possible about the new world was admitted to be a necessity for the colony, but had been hard on individual members.

  Faivonen, though his enjoyment of society had died with Riita, had not become a misanthrope, and he could not bring himself to turn his back on his vanishing friends just yet. There would be plenty of loneliness, not mere solitude, for the next couple of thousand hours, even with Beedee along.

  The vessel was getting hard to see, but he could make out that she was going onto the starboard tack, after a long reach which had carried the individual figures of her crew well out of sight. The light was dim, probably dim enough to have made him give up the watch thirty years before; but the human eye is adaptable, and the human memory constantly edits the standards of what can be expected. Even though the principal suns were not up yet, their location below the horizon revealed only by flecks of hydrogen crimson from their vast halo of prominences, Castor A and B were nearly overhead. Together they provided less light than Earth’s full moon had done, but it was enough to satisfy him.

  “They’ll clear the bay on the next tack.” The voice was only slightly filtered by the speaker in the man’s left ear; it would have sounded perfectly human to anyone not acquainted with the being who had spoken, who could hardly have been less so. Faivonen, without even glancing down at his arm, nodded.

  “That was my guess. Are you making a linear extrapolation, or allowing for wind changes?”

  “The wind will grow weaker for hours yet. Of course I allowed for that.” There might have been indignation in the voice. “I have no reliable information on the currents, of course, but with no river flowing into this bay they should be simple. Are you going to watch the ship out of sight? That will waste valuable hours.”

  “I’ll watch for a while. There’s no use getting started until the real suns are up, and there’s nothing to check before we go. You wouldn’t have let me
forget anything important, and even if you had there’d be nothing that could be done about it now.”

  The voice made no answer; its owner knew it had taken the man’s thoughts away, to some extent, from his vanishing companions. Faivonen, however, had little else to think of for the moment. The job ahead was already planned in as much detail as possible; it was to stay alive and to learn what he could about as much of the area as he could cover—preferably, but not quite necessarily, in that order. If he didn’t actually manage to stay alive, the things he learned could still be useful as long as his body and Beedee were found. It was this fact that had gripped his thoughts for the moment—the fact, and the memory it always evoked. He himself had found Beedee on Riita’s skeleton; he had been searching for her, against the best advice. Success had made him for a time almost useless to himself, to their children, and to the colony. This time, he had extracted a firm promise from Sullivan: if Faivonen himself should fail to reappear to meet the ship, and it was decided that someone must go after Beedee and the information, it was not to be any of his and Riita’s children. It was all right if they turned out to be explorers when they got old enough—as they nearly were, he suddenly reminded himself—but that sort of picture was too much to inflict on anyone of closer status than casual friend. The kids couldn’t—

  “Watch the ship, if you must, but get your mind off that line,” Beedee’s voice cut into his thoughts. “If you have nothing more constructive, or less destructive, to do than brood, I insist on getting started. The suns are practically up.”