A volant swooped across Raksh, warm-blooded, feathered, egg-laying, yet with too many strangenesses to be a bird in anything than name. Somewhere a singing “lizard” trilled.
“Well,” said Coffin, “what is this business of yours?”
O’Malley reflected on how rude it would be to make Teresa wait, or the youngsters for that matter. He drew breath and plunged:
“Phil Herskowitz and I were running scientific survey in the deep lowlands, around the Gulf of Ardashir. Besides mapping and such, we were collecting instrument packages that completed their programs, laying down fresh ones elsewhere—oh, you know the routine. Except this trip didn’t stay routine. A cyclops wind caught us at the intermediate altitude where that kind of thing can happen. Our car spun out of control. I was piloting, and tried for a pontoon landing on the sea but couldn’t manage it. The best I could do was crash us in coastal jungle. At least that gave us some treetops to soften impact. Even so, Phil has a couple of broken ribs where the fuselage got stove in against his chair.
“We didn’t shear off much growth. It closed in again above the wreck. Nobody can land nearby. We put through a distress call, then had to struggle a good fifty kilometers on foot before we reached a meadow where a rescue car could safely settle.
“That was five days ago. In spite of not being hurt myself, I didn’t recover from the shock and exhaustion overnight.”
“Hm.” Coffin tugged his chin and glanced sideways. “Why hasn’t the accident been on the news?”
“My request. You see, it occurred to me—what I mean to ask of you.”
“Which is?”
“I don’t think a lot of the wreckage can be salvaged, damn it, but I’d like to try. You know what it’d be worth to the colony, just to recover a motor or something. Salvagers can’t feasibly clear a landing area; they’d have no way of removing the felled trees, which’d pose too much of a hazard. But they can construct a wagon and slash a path for it. That’d at least enable them to bring out the instruments and tapes more readily—I think—than by trudging back and forth that long distance carrying them in packs.”
“Instruments and tapes,” Coffin said thoughtfully. “You consider that, whether or not repairable parts of the car can be recovered, the instruments and tapes must be?”
“Oh, heavens, yes.” O’Malley replied. “Think how much skilled time was spent in the manufacture, then in planting and gathering the packages—in this labor-short, machine-poor economy of ours. The information’s tremendously valuable in its own right, too. Stuff on soil bacteria, essential to further improvement of agriculture. Meteorology, seismology—Well, I needn’t sell you on it, Josh. You know how little we know, how much we need to know, about Rustum. An entire world!”
“True. How can I help?”
“You can let your stepson Danny come along with me.”
Coffin halted. O’Malley did the same. They stared at each other. The slow dusking proceeded.
“Why him?” Coffin asked at last, most low. “He’s only a boy. We celebrated his nineteenth … anniversary … two tendays ago. If he were on Earth, that’d have been barely a couple of months past his fifteenth.”
“You know why, Josh. He’s young, sure, but he’s the oldest of the exogenes—”
Coffin stiffened. “I don’t like that word.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“Just because he was grown artificially instead of in a uterus, from donated cells instead of his parents coming here in person, he’s not inferior.”
“Sure! Understood! How would three thousand people be a big enough gene pool for the future, cut off in an environment like this, if they didn’t bring along—”
“—a potential million extra parents. When you marry, you’ll also be required to have one of them brought to term for you to adopt.”
O’Malley winced. His Norah had died in the Year of Sickness. Somehow he’d never since had more than fleeting liaisons. Probably that was because he’d never stayed put long at a time. There was too much discovery to be made, by too few persons who were capable of it, if man on Rustum was to endure.
Yet he was still, in one way, shirking a duty to wed. Man in his billions was a blight on Earth, but on Rustum a very lonely creature whose hold on existence was precarious at best. His numbers must be expanded as fast as possible—and not merely to provide hands or even brains. There is a more subtle kind of underpopulation, that can be deadly to a species. Given too few parents, too much of their biological heredity will be lost, as it fails to find embodiment in the children they can beget during their lifetimes. In the course of generations, individuals will become more and more like each other. And variability is the key to adaptability, which is the key to survival.
A partial, though vital solution to the problem lay in adoption. Spaceships had been overburdened with colonists; they would certainly not add a load of plants and animals. It sufficed to carry seeds—of both. Cold-stored, sperm and ovum could be kept indefinitely, until at last it was convenient to unite them and grow a new organism an an exogenetic tank. As easily as for dogs or cattle, it could be done for humans. Grown up, marrying and reproducing in normal fashion—for they would be perfectly normal people—they would contribute their own diverse chromosomes to the race.
This was, however, only a partial measure. The original settlers and their descendants must also do their part.
Coffin saw O’Malley’s distress, and said more gently: “Never mind. I get your point. You remembered how Danny can tolerate lowland conditions.”
The other man braced himself. “Yes,” he replied. “I realize the original cell donors were chosen with that in mind. Still, the way we lucked out with him, this early in the game—Look. The trip does involve a certain hazard. It always does, when you go down where everything’s so unearthly and most of it unknown. That’s why I’ve kept my idea secret, that Danny would be the best possible partner on this expedition. I don’t think the risk is unduly great. Nevertheless, a lot of busybodies would object to exposing a boy to it, if they heard in advance. I thought, rather than create a public uproar … I thought I’d leave the decision to you. And Teresa, naturally.”
Again Coffin bridled. “Why not Danny?”
“Huh?” O’Malley was startled. “Why, I, well, I took for granted he’d want to go. The adventure—a real springtime vacation from school … After all, when he was a tyke, he wandered down the Cleft by himself—”
“And got lost,” Coffin said bleakly. “Almost died. Was barely saved, found hanging onto the talons of a giant spearfowl that aimed to tear him apart.”
“But he was saved. And that was what proved he was, is, the first real Rustumite, a human who can live anywhere on the planet. I’ve not forgotten what a celebrity it made him.”
“We’ve gone back to a decent obscurity, him and the rest of us,” Coffin said. “I’ve seen no reason to publicize the fact that he’s never since cared to go below the clouds. He’s a good boy, no coward or sluggard, but whenever he’s been offered a chance to join some excursion down, even a little ways, he’s found an excuse to stay home. Teresa and I haven’t pushed him. That was a terrible experience for a small child. In spite of being a ninety days’ wonder, he had nightmares for a year afterward. I wouldn’t be surprised if he does yet, now and then.”
“I see.” O’Malley bit his lip. They stood a while beneath a Raksh whose mottled brightness seemed to wax as heaven darkened. The evening star trembled forth. A breeze, the least bit chilly, made leaves sough. It was not bedtime; this close to equinox, better than thirty-one hours of night stretched before High America. But the men stood as if long-trained muscles, guts, blood vessels, bones felt anew the drag upon them.
“Well, he’s got to outgrow his fears,” burst from O’Malley. “He has a career ahead of him in the lowlands.”
“Why should he?” Coffin retorted. “We’ll take generations to fully settle this one plateau. Danny can find plenty of work. We could even argu
e that he ought to protect those valuable chromosomes of his, stay safe at home and found a large family. His descendants can move downward.”
O’Malley shook his head. “You know that isn’t true, Josh. We won’t ever be safe up here on our little bit of lofty real estate—not till we understand a hell of a lot more about the continent, the entire planet that it’s part of. Remember? We could’ve stopped the Sickness at its beginning, if we’d known the virus is carried from below by one kind of nebulo-plankton. We’ll never get proper storm or quake warnings till we have adequate information about the general environment. And what other surprises is Rustum waiting to spring on us?”
“Yes—”
“Then there’s the social importance of the lowlands. We came because it was our last hope of establishing a free society. In those several generations you speak of, High America can get as crowded as Earth. Freedom needs elbow room. We’ve got to start expanding our frontiers right away.”
“I’m not convinced that a political theory is worth a single human life,” Coffin said. His tone softened. “However, the practical necessities you mention, you’re right about those. Why do you need Danny?”
“Isn’t it obvious? Well, maybe it isn’t unless you’ve seen the territory. Take my word for it, men who have to wear reduction helmets are too handicapped to accomplish much in that wilderness. I told you, Phil and I barely made it to rendezvous with our rescue craft, and we had nothing more to do than hike. Salvagers will have to work harder.”
“Who’ll accompany him?”
“Me. We haven’t got anybody else who can be spared before weather ruins the stuff. I figure my experience and Danny’s capabilities will mesh together pretty well.
“I’ve arranged about the wage, plus a nice payment for whatever we bring back. The College will be delighted to fill his pockets with gold. That equipment, that information represents too many manhours invested, maybe so many lives saved in future, that anybody would want to write it off.”
Coffin was quiet for another space, until he said, “Let’s go inside,” squared his shoulders and trudged toward the house.
Within lay firelit cheeriness, books and pictures, more room than any but the mightiest enjoyed on Earth. Teresa had tea and snacks ready; this household did not use alcohol or tobacco. (The latter was no loss, O’Malley reflected wryly. Grown in local soil, it got fierce!) Seven well-mannered youngsters greeted the visitor and settled back to listen to adult talk. (On Earth, they’d probably have been out in street gangs—or enslaved, unless barracked on some commune.) Six of them were slender, brown-haired, and fair-skinned where the sun had not scorched.
Danny differed in more than being the oldest. He was stocky, of medium height. Though his features were essentially caucasoid — straight nose, wide narrow mouth, rust-colored eyes—still, the high cheekbones, blue-black hair, and dark complexion bespoke more than a touch of Oriental. O’Malley wondered briefly, uselessly, what his gene-parents had been like, and what induced them to give cells for storage on a spaceship they would never board, and whether or not they had ever met. By now they were almost certainly dead.
Small talk bounced around the room. There was no lack of material. Three thousand pioneers didn’t constitute a hamlet where everybody knew day by day what everybody else was doing, especially when they were scattered across an area the size of Mindanao. To be sure, some were concentrated in Anchor; but on the whole, High
American agriculture could not yet support a denser settlement.
Nonetheless, an underlying tension was undisguisable. O’Malley felt grateful when Teresa suddenly asked him why he had come. He told them. Their eyes swung about and locked upon Danny.
The boy did not cringe, he grew rigid, in the manner of his stepfather. But his answer could scarcely be heard: “I’d rather not.”
“I admit we’ll face a bit of risk,” O’Malley said. “However”—he grinned—“you tell me what isn’t risky. I’m mighty fond of this battered hide of mine, son, and I’ll be right beside you.”
Teresa strained her fingers together.
Danny’s voice lifted and cracked. “I don’t like it down there!”
Coffin hardened his lips. “Is that all?” he demanded. “When you can carry out a duty?”
The boy stared at him, and away, and hunched in his chair. Finally he whispered, “If you insist, Father.”
Hours passed before O’Malley left the house, to go home and prepare himself. Meanwhile full night had come upon the highland. The air was cold, silent, and altogether clear. Raksh, visibly grown in both size and phase, stood low above the cloud-sea, while tiny Sohrab hastened in pursuit; both moons crossed the sky widdershins. Elsewhere, darkness was thronged with stars. Their constellations weren’t much changed by a score of light-years’ remove. And though it was a trifle more tilted, Rustum’s axis did not point far from Earth’s. He could know the Bears, the Dragon—and near Bootes, a dim spark which was Sol—
More than forty years away by spaceship, he thought—human cargo cold-sleeping like the cells of their animals and plants and foster children, for four decades till they arrived and were wakened back to life. But did the spaceships still fare? It had been a nearly last-gasp effort which assembled the fleet that carried the pioneers here: an effort by which the government, with their own consent, rid itself of Constitutionalist troublemakers who kept muttering about foolishnesses like freedom. Had any of those vessels ever gone anywhere else again? Radio had not had time to bring an answer to questions beamed at Earth. Nor would man on Rustum be prepared to build ships which could leave it for a much longer time to come. Quite possibly never … O’Malley shivered and hastened to his car.
Roxana was a large continent, and this trip was from its middle to the southern edge. Time dragged for Danny. They were flying high, for the most part very little below the normal cloud deck. Hence transient nimbuses, further down, often cut them off from sight of land. But then they would pass over the patch of weather and come back into clear vision—as clear as vision ever got, here.
O’Malley made several attempts at cheerful conversation. Danny tried to respond, but words wouldn’t come. At last talk died altogether. Only the hum of jets filled the cabin, or a hoot of wind and cannonade of thunder, borne by the thick atmosphere across enormous distances.
O’Malley puffed his pipe, whistled an occasional tune, sat alertly by to take over from the autopilot if there was any trouble. Danny squired in the seat beside him. Why didn’t I at least bring a book? the boy thought, over and over. Then I wouldn’t have to just sit here and stare out at that.
“Grand, isn’t it?” O’Malley had said once. Danny barely kept from yelling back, “Mo, it’s horrible, can’t you see how awful it is?”
Above, it was pearl-gray, except in the east where a blur of light marked the morning sun. Mountains reared beneath: so tall, as they climbed toward the homes of men, that their heads were lost in the skyroof. They tumbled sharply downward, though, in cliffs and crags and canyons, vast misty valleys, gorges where rivers gleamed dagger bright, steeps whose black rock was slashed by waterfalls. Ahead were their foothills, and off to the west began a prairie which sprawled around the curve of the world. A storm raged there, swart bulks of cloud where lightning flared and glared, remorseless rains driven by the great slow winds of the lowlands. Hues were infinite, for vegetation crowded all but the stoniest heights. Yet those shades of blue-green, tawny, russet were as somber in Danny’s eyes as the endless overcast above them; and the wings which passed by in million-membered flocks only drove into him how alien was the life that overswarmed these lands.
O’Malley’s glance lingered upon him. “What a shame you don’t like it here,” he murmured. “It’s your kind of country, you know. You’re fitted for it in a way I’ll never be.”
“I don’t, that’s all,” Danny forced out. “Let’s not talk about it. Please, sir.”
If we talk, I won’t be able to hide the truth from him, I’ll start shak
ing. I’ll stammer, the sweat that’s already cold in my hands and armpits, already sharp in my nose, it’ll break out so he can see, and he’ll know I’m afraid. Oh, God, how afraid! Maybe I’ll cry. And Father will be ashamed of me.
Father, who followed me down into yonder horror and plucked me free of death.
Fear didn’t make sense, Danny told himself. His mind had stated the same thing year after year, whenever a dream or a telepicture or a word in someone’s mouth brought him back to the jungle. That was what had branded him. Not heat and wet and gloom. Not hunger and thirst (once his belly had lashed him into trying fruits which were unlike those he had been warned were poisonous). Not rustlings, croakings, chatterings, roar and howl and maniacal cackle, his sole changes from a monstrous silence. Not the tusked beast which pursued him, or even—entirely—the gigantic bird of prey whose beak had gaped at him. It was the endlessness of jungle, through which he stumbled lost for hours that stretched into days and nights, nights.
Sometimes he thought a part of him had never come back again, would always grope weeping among the trees.
No, I’m being morbid, his mind scolded him before it sought shelter at home on High America.
Skies unutterably blue and clear by day, brilliant after dark with stars or aurora, the quick clean rains which washed them or the heart-shaking, somehow heart-uplifting might of a storm, the white peace which descended in winter. Grainfields rippling gold in the wind; flowers ablaze amidst birdsong. Wild hills to climb, and woods which were open to the sun. Rivers to swim in—a thousand cool caresses—or to row a boat on before drifting downstream in delicious laziness. The reach of Lake Olympus, two hours’ airbus ride whenever he could get some free time from school or farm work, but worth it because of the sloop he and Toshiro Hirayama had built; and the dangers, when a couple of gales nearly brought them to grief, those were good too, a challenge, afterward a proof of being a skilled sailor and well on the way to manhood, though naturally it wouldn’t be wise to let parents know how close the shave had been …
Orbit Unlimited Page 18
