The shuttle docked slowly with the modified lock.
“We can go in without suits,” Blackfriar said. “Wheeler and the crew are inside. They’ve sealed the ship and restored the air supply. Rob didn’t like drifting around in a suit when the ship was opened, but he was too curious to wait.”
He’s afraid for his safety, John thought.
“I’m more curious than afraid myself,” Blackfriar said. “When you’ve lived more than a few lifetimes in safety, fear becomes a dear friend.”
The log tape hissed and crackled from nearly a millennium of static deposits. A voice spoke in archaic English: “…One group after another is abandoning the ship, as fast as the shuttle can make the round trip. The world below is beautiful. The ship’s confines have been too much for many of us. A ship is not the world home was….”
“Who was he?” John asked.
“The captain, a Blackfriar,” Rob Wheeler said.
John looked at Frank, who sat listening in the command station.
“…The crew and I have the choice of taking the ship elsewhere or following the colonists down. If we go down, we’ll have to take the computers and library to locate them on the surface for future generations….” The ghostly hiss of time grew louder, the stifling sound of a universe which would always envy endurance.
Blackfriar floated around in his seat to look at Wheeler.
Rob nodded. “It’s all gone. They ripped it out and ferried it down. But there was an accident; a portion of the ship lost pressure. We found a skeleton and some mummified bodies. We did not find the shuttle.”
“Take me to this skeleton,” Blackfriar said.
Frank pushed himself away from his seat and floated after Wheeler into the passageway. John followed Blackfriar into the darkness.
Wheeler led the way up the center of the vessel, the lamp on his safety helmet casting a bright beam ahead of them. John felt that he was floating upward out of a dark hole; and just as quickly he imagined that he was falling headfirst into a bottomless pit.
In a few moments the dark shapes of Frank and Rob were gone, and he saw light streaming out of the chamber they had entered. He floated to the entrance, looked inside, and pulled himself into what seemed to be an airlock antechamber.
There was an overhead light, attached with its own power pack. John noted the fresh seal on the small hole in the ship’s side, but the repair had come centuries too late for the human skeleton which seemed to be attached to the gray metal of the floor.
Wheeler floated near the skull. He reached down and took the crew tag in his hand.
“This was James Blackfriar,” he said, and released the tag to hover on its chain.
Blackfriar approached and floated over the bones, hands open, as if at any moment he would push himself away.
“There are others,” Wheeler said.
“Could this,” Blackfriar said, “have ever answered to the same name as my own?” He reached down and pulled on the chain. The skull loosened and floated up slowly, turning to stare at him. Blackfriar grasped it with both hands and placed it gently near the skeleton’s shoulders. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “Have the remains cleared, recorded, and destroyed.”
As he followed Blackfriar and Wheeler back into the passage, John tried to forget the skeleton. Pulling himself along the way they had come, he thought of his own frame, the skull under his flesh, the brain which now tried to see death as a common event outside his world. The bones in the room behind him could not ever have been a real person; they seemed too unlikely for the fact of flesh. A man had died in that squalid corner of the starship, leaving his pitiable remains to wait there all these centuries.
Suddenly John stopped pushing himself forward on the handbar. The skeleton’s frailty, and his own, astonished him. Floating in the darkness, he thought of all the accidents awaiting him if he returned to Lea.
“John!” Wheeler called from ahead. He grasped the rail and resumed his forward motion, filled with the sudden wonder of being alive at all.
19. The Village
John looked at his calloused hands. Everything in the village had to be done with the power of human hands. The endless streaming of energy from the twin suns passed, drastically diminished, into the plant and animal life of Lea, and only a pitiable portion of that natural wealth became the strength of human muscle. His palms, finger joints, and back still ached from working on the cabin he shared with Anulka. Six local months after his arrival, long after he had become conditioned to physical effort, the only sure way to get rid of his aches and pains was to move around and do more work, at least until the suns were high enough to warm him. The nights were cold; a fire heated only one side of a human body at a time; Anulka kicked him away from her at night. His only satisfaction was that he had taken a minimal amount of help from home, though it would have been easy to go and get a portable shelter instead of building a cabin.
He had grown used to bathing in the stream during the warmest part of the day. Most of the men shaved with long knives, and the rest grew beards. No one believed him about not having to shave; Anulka seemed to think that he went up to the flitter to do so, and nothing could change her mind. Those who wore beards found the disagreement very funny. Their repeated laughter at the mention of his hair-lessness was growing tiresome. Hair, having children, and a certain capacity for violence were the signs of manhood here. Slowly the villagers were coming to regard him as a kind of visiting neuter, neither man nor woman, a kind of apprentice godling whose abilities seemed to be limited to flying through the air. I’m an intruder, he thought. I’ll never belong here because I know I can always leave.
Below him, the village huddled inside a circle of massive rocks, thirty log cabins clinging to shelter like a colony of mushrooms, each rough-hewn tree trunk marking endless hours of hand fitting and sealing with mud. Trees and bushes pushed up between the rocks, adding a barrier of foliage. Fall would curl the triangular leaves into stiff rolls filled with sweet paste; these, together with meat stored in the smokehouse and the bread bush nuts, would provide enough food to get through winter. The villagers took great pride and comfort in this achievement; the last few winters had killed a third of the smaller children and half the older people.
He sat down with his feet over the edge of the huge flat rock, with the mountains at his back. The tree-clad foothills fell away from him toward the distant plains. Southeast across the dusty grassland lay the city where he had met Anulka more than six months before. Soon it would be most of a year since his world had entered Lea’s sunspace to reproduce.
The suns eclipsed, marking noon; some of the late summer heat drained from the world. The lessening of light made him feel naked on the rock. Remembering the night, he shivered in the fur jacket which he wore over his coveralls; the thought of winter made him grateful for the rock’s warmth.
The brute facts of life on Lea had created a nervous pressure in him, every small detail triggering a reaction. The fur jacket had belonged to Anulka’s father; three of her brothers and one sister had died at birth; in a population of nearly two hundred, there were only a dozen children between the ages of five and ten; the eyes of children already held the look of their parents’ acceptance of a world that would never change. One day he had wanted to take all the children home in the flitter, just to see the change in them after a few months of life offplanet.
Every couple in the village had come to examine the cabin when he had finished it; after the visits he had learned that he and Anulka were husband and wife, and the building and visiting had been the ceremony. Anulka’s mother came to clean and cook during the day, leaving at night for her own cabin two doors away.
Time passed with a slow effort here, as if preparing to stop; winter would be a time of dead thoughts, a waiting for time to begin again. The ruined city was more than two weeks away; a month was a long time when measured by walking. It seemed an age since he had plucked Anulka from the plain.
Her future husband, J
erad, and her brother Konro had resented the flitter. After some coaxing, Anulka, Blakfar, and Konro had accepted the lift to the village; Jerad, the husband selected for Anulka by her dead father, had refused. A week after the flitter’s arrival, Jerad had come into the village, cursing and kicking children out of his way. By then Anulka’s mother had accepted her daughter’s new choice, helped by Blakfar’s approval.
Jerad had left, vowing that he would join the plains people rather than live with the humiliating loss of what was his by family promise; with Anulka’s father dead, there was no one willing to enforce the old agreement or even to confirm that it had been made. No one would risk angering the man from beyond the sky; acceptance of him would ensure that he would help the village and not its enemies. John wondered if he would have felt better if Jerad had attacked him physically; clearly, Jerad had been afraid to fight with an offworlder.
I can leave, John thought, facing again the certainty that he would leave, that even a few years here would not be a life he could accept. He felt guilty about Jerad, whose commitment to Anulka would have involved the whole of his short life. For me it’s a stop on the way. He had disrupted an older system for the preservation of life, one in which nature did not trust its intelligent organisms to do the work of life. Living bodies were joined through force or pleasurable attraction, and one body became the incubator for the new life; the mixing of genetic material was left to chance and the adaptive pressures of the environment. Here there was no real choice, except one between life and death; life always meant slavery.
He remembered the clustering of shy human forms around the flitter on the day of his arrival, the stench of wastes and unwashed bodies, Anulka’s mother, a toothless hag at less than twice her daughter’s age, people without arms, legs, or eyes. It had shaken him to calculate that Anulka’s mother was not much older than he was. Someone had died in the night four days after his arrival, had stopped breathing, had stopped thinking and dreaming in the next cabin. It had seemed impossible that such a thing could happen.
The suns had been a pyre in the noon sky, brothers to the bright fire consuming the body of Jerad’s father. The mourners stood with bare heads bowed, hands clasped neighbor to neighbor in a ring of the living, men and women wrinkle-worn by a world where the look of youth passed quickly from the human face.
He noticed that the dead man’s name was routinely avoided after the funeral. The ashes from the fire were spread into the dirt of the square by the old people. A visitor had come into the village and had left with a life. There was comfort in the sameness of hospitality toward death….
The suns drifted apart, brightening the world and warming his face. His body had waited for the now familiar event; but no amount of time would free him of the vague uneasiness he felt before natural processes. At home everything was under intelligent control of one kind or another; human will prevailed. Here it was easy to imagine that some demented god ruled the visible world; proud, wasteful, and cruel, he drove all nature toward some distant shore of time, uncaring of the cost.
I will have only one chance to leave, when my world leaves this system. There was terror in the thought. Lea would be visited again, eventually; but was he prepared to wait that long—-decades, a century? How long could he live without the med systems of home? If he stayed, he would have to persuade Projex to build a medical education station, as much for himself as for the villagers. “A little help is socially dangerous,” Frank Blackfriar had said. “You’ll have to spend time to make things work properly. Are you ready to do that? Go see for yourself what it’s like on a planet—you’ll find out who you really are.”
John took a deep breath, tasting the smell of dusty sod grass coming from the plains with a wind that promised winter, mingling with the fresh green of the foothills. Nature was often an enemy here, at its best a powerful friend who still had to be watched. At home, planetary nature was something to be cared for, a bit of mind’s past preserved for aesthetic reasons and deeply buried needs; uncontrolled nature was galactic space, the wheel of suns, gas, and debris onto whose scale of size and timelessness macrolife had recently entered.
He looked down at the winding trail that ascended to the rock and saw Anulka coming toward him. She glanced up, her blue eyes wide, black hair whipping in the rising wind. She walked with the grace of an animal, boots pushing firmly against the well-worn trail. Her coarse black body shirt was drawn together at the waist by a leather strap. He knew every muscle under that shirt, every detail of skin; he knew her smells and how she tasted when they kissed. She was as much a part of the landscape as the trees gripping the hills with their roots, the four-footed creatures prowling the forests and plains, the winged things riding the wind, mocking the high mountains. I don’t know her at all, he told himself.
Her flesh had been nourished by the protein of living things, unlike his own, which had grown on perfect foods. His body had not struggled with the poisons of plant and animal, wearing out its systems transforming foreign materials into usable structures. All the foods of home were easily assimilated; his body would never have to work very hard and would last much longer than a natural worlder’s, even without rejuvenation.
Anulka turned her face away from the wind and passed out of his sight behind a series of massive outcroppings. He would not see her until she came up behind him on the rock. He remembered how sick he had been after eating the roast meat she had prepared after his arrival. She had been horrified at his explanation, forcing him to invent a much simpler one for her benefit. The idea of chemical identity between the foodstuffs and flesh of macroworlders would have been interpreted by her as cannibalism.
Blackfriar had sent down a half year’s provisions, which now covered one wall of the cabin. Anulka would look at the packages occasionally, but she would never taste anything; there was no way to dispel her idea that his food would make her ill because her food had affected him.
He heard her coming up the trail just behind the rock. He got to his feet and walked back to the center of the flat area. She came up to him and put her arms around his waist, pressing her face into the fur of his jacket.
“You will be going soon,” she said without raising her head. The sounds of her earth-derived language seemed to vibrate against a black backdrop, giving her words the finality of a pronouncement. When he did not answer, she squeezed him roughly. Finally she let go and asked, “Why am I not with child?” She stepped back and looked up at him, humiliating him with her gaze. “You are preventing this from happening,” she said. “I can feel it. There is so much you can do—this must be easy.” He looked away from her eyes.
She put her fists on her hips and continued. “A child would bring us honor in the village, and if you left I would still have something. I gave up Jerad for you. If you leave and do not take me with you, I will be disgraced.”
He looked into her face and saw fear. How could he leave her if she had a child? Could he take them both home with him? Suddenly he felt the power of her demand, its complete tyranny, the rigidity of the method that formed their relationship not for love or pleasure, but to ensure the transmittal of genetic information.
But there was no child, and never would be unless he chose; Anulka sensed that, and it made her angry because it threatened her position in the village. How could he explain to her? There could be no children for him unless he decided to become a parent-teacher, or exemplar, dedicated to raising persons different from himself. Here children were instruments of personal power and physical necessity; there could be no future without them, but they were born only to live the past.
Anulka smiled, took his hands, and sat down, forcing him to kneel; she let go and pulled the front of her loose tunic above her waist. Dark shapes had entered the cabin during his first night with her, smiling hags leaning over to cover them with animal skins. Anulka was pulling him down on top of her. She wants me to stay forever, he thought. He had dreamed of his skeleton lying next to hers on the hot plain. He had tried to embrac
e her, but there was no flesh to move his arms. He pulled free and staggered to his feet.
Anulka stood up suddenly, made a fist, and struck him across the face. He bit his tongue involuntarily. She raised her arms to guard against his reprisal, a pathetic animal waiting for the inevitable. He stepped back to show that he would not hit her.
She dropped her arms and spat at him. “You’re a coward, afraid even to hit a woman!”
How little she thinks of herself. She was the physical focus for his guilt about dirtworlds. He had wanted to help through her, but to be effective he would always have to stand apart. Anulka had worked to draw him into the life of this world, but he knew now that he was not capable of giving that much of himself away. How could he explain his disappointment to her? How could he blame her for not being what he had wanted her to be? He had disappointed her completely, humiliating her in the eyes of the village.
She turned and marched away. He thought of those his own age and the new world they were building. He thought of the bones in the old starship. Lea had not grown to justify the sacrifice of those who had crossed space to settle here.
He watched Anulka going back down the path toward the village. He might have made love to her; it might have been kinder.
He walked to the boulder’s edge, scrambled down the dirt incline, and walked into the forest, following the uphill path toward the clearing where he kept the flitter. He needed a talk with Blackfriar. Anulka had resented his coming up here to draw food from the supply dump, so he had ferried much of what he needed down to the cabin; but she was still suspicious of his going to talk with voices in the sky.
Once she had asked him if he had grown or killed the food he ate. She had been disappointed in his description of a food factory. She would have liked visions of a strange land on the other side of the sky, a geography of beasts and jungles and hunters riding steeds as tall as mountains. More than anything she wished for powerful figures who could redeem the harshness of her life. We have solved the problems of planet life, he thought, only to become incomprehensible to those still living with those problems.
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