The Wind People
It had been a long layover for the Starholm’s crew, hunting heavy elements for fuel—eight months, on an idyllic green paradise of a planet; a soft, windy, whispering world, inhabited only by trees and winds. But in the end it presented its own unique problem. Specifically, it presented Captain Merrihew with the problem of Robin, male, father unknown, who had been born the day before, and a month prematurely, to Dr. Helen Murray.
Merrihew found her lying abed in the laboratory shelter, pale and calm, with the child beside her.
The little shelter, constructed roughly of green planks, looked out on the clearing which the Starholm had used as a base of operations during the layover; a beautiful place at the bottom of a wide valley, in the curve of a broad, deep-flowing river. The crew, tired of being shipbound, had built half a dozen such huts and shacks in these eight months.
Merrihew glared down at Helen. He snorted, “This is a fine situation. You, of all the people in the whole damned crew—the ship’s doctor! It’s—it’s—” Inarticulate with rage, he fell back on a ridiculously inadequate phrase. “It’s—criminal carelessness!”
“I know.” Helen Murray, too young and far too lovely for a ship’s officer on a ten-year cruise, still looked weak and white, and her voice was a gentle shadow of its crisp self.
“I’m afraid four years in space made me careless.”
Merrihew, brooded, looking down at her. Something about ship—gravity conditions, while not affecting potency, made conception impossible; no child had ever been conceived in space and none ever would. On planet layovers, the effect wore off very slowly; only after three months aground had Dr. Murray started routine administration of anticeptin to the twenty-two women of the crew, herself included. At that time she had been still unaware that she herself was already carrying a child.
Outside, the leafy forest whispered and rustled, and Merrihew knew Helen had forgotten his existence again. The day-old child was tucked up in one of her rolled coveralls at her side. To Merrihew, he looked like a skinned monkey, but Helen’s eyes smoldered as her hands moved gently over the tiny round head.
He stood and listened to the winds and said at random, “These shacks will fall to pieces in another month. It doesn’t matter, we’ll have taken off by then.”
Dr. Chao Lin came into the shack, an angular woman of thirty-five. She said, “Company, Helen? Well, it’s about time. Here, let me take Robin.”
Helen said in weak protest, “You’re spoiling me, Lin.”
“It will do you good,” Chao Lin returned. Merrihew, in a sudden surge of fury and frustration, exploded. “Damn it, Lin, you’re making it all worse. He’ll die when we go into overdrive, you know, as well as I do!”
Helen sat up, clutching Robin protectively. “Are you proposing to drown him like a kitten?”
“Helen, I’m not proposing anything. I’m stating a fact.”
“But it’s not a fact. He won’t die in overdrive because he won’t be aboard when we go into overdrive!”
Merrihew looked at Lin helplessly, but his face softened. “Shall we—put him to sleep and bury him here?”
The woman’s face turned white. “No!” she cried in passionate protest, and Lin bent to disengage her frantic grip.
“Helen, you’ll hurt him. Put him down. There.” Merrihew looked down at her, troubled, and said, “We can’t just abandon him to die slowly, Helen—”
“Who says I’m going to abandon him?” Merrihew asked slowly, “Are you planning to desert?” He added, after a minute, “There’s a chance he’ll survive. After all, his very birth was against all medical precedent. Maybe—”
“Captain”—Helen’s voice sounded desperate—“even drugged, no child under ten has ever endured the shift into hyperspace drive. A newborn would die in seconds.” She clasped Robin to her again and said, “It’s the only way—you have Lin for a doctor, Reynolds can handle my collateral duties. This planet is uninhabited, the climate is mild, and we couldn’t possibly starve.” Her face, so gentle, was suddenly like rock. “Enter my death in the log, if you want to.”
Merrihew looked from Helen to Lin, and said, “Helen, you’re insane!”
She said, “Even if I’m sane now, I wouldn’t be long if I had to abandon Robin.” The wild note had died out of her voice, and she spoke rationally, but inflexibly. “Captain Merrihew, to get me aboard the Starholm, you will have to have me drugged or taken by force; I promise you I won’t go any other way. And if you do that—and if Robin is left behind, or dies in overdrive, just so you will have my services as a doctor—then I solemnly swear that I will kill myself at the first opportunity.”
“My God,” said Merrihew, “you are insane!”
Helen gave a very tiny shrug. “Do you want a madwoman aboard?” Chao Lin said quietly, “Captain, I don’t see any other way. We would have had to arrange it that way if Helen had actually died in childbirth. Of two unsatisfactory solutions, we must choose the less harmful.” And Merrihew knew that he had no real choice. “I still think you’re both crazy,” he blustered, but it was surrender, and Helen knew it. Ten days after the Starholm took off, young Colin Reynolds, technician, committed suicide by the messy procedure of slicing his jugular vein, which—in zero gravity—distributed several quarts of blood in big round globules all over his cabin. He left an incoherent note.
Merrihew put the note in the disposal and Chao Lin put the blood in the ship’s blood bank for surgery, and they hushed it up as an accident; but Merrihew had the unpleasant feeling that the layover on the green and windy planet was going to become a legend, spread in whispers by the crew. And it did, but that is another story.
Robin was two years old when he first heard the voices in the wind. He pulled at his mother’s arms and crooned softly, in imitation.
“What is it, lovey?”
“Pretty.” He crooned again to the distant murmuring sound. Helen smiled vaguely and patted the round cheek. Robin, his infant imagination suddenly distracted, said, “Hungry. Robin hungry. Berries.”
“Berries after you eat,” Helen promised absently, and picked him up. Robin tugged at her arm.
“Mommy pretty, too!”
She laughed, a rosy and smiling young Diana. She was happy on the solitary planet; they lived quite comfortably in one of the larger shacks, and only a little frown line between her eyes bore witness to the terror which had closed down on her in the first months, when every new day had been some new struggle—against weakness, against unfamiliar sounds, against loneliness and dread. Nights when she lay wakeful, sweating with terror while the winds rose and fell again and her imagination gave them voices, bleak days when she wandered dazedly around the shack or stared moodily at Robin. There had been moments—only fleeting, and penanced with hours of shame and regret—when she thought that even the horror of losing Robin in those first days would have been less than the horror of spending the rest of her life alone here, when she had wondered why Merrihew had not realized that she was unbalanced, and forced her to go with them; by now, Robin would have been only a moment’s painful memory.
Still not strong, knowing she had to be strong for Robin or he would die as surely as if she had abandoned him, she had spent the first months in a somnambulistic dream.
Sometimes she had walked for days at a time in that dream; she would wake to find food that she could not remember gathering. Somehow, pervasive, the dream voices had taken over; the whispering winds had been full of voices and even hands.
She had fallen ill and lain for days sick and delirious, and had heard a voice which hardly seemed to be her own, saying that if she died the wind voices would care for Robin . . . and then the shock and irrationality of that had startled her out of delirium, agonized and trembling, and she pulled herself upright and cried out, “No!”
And the shimmer of eyes and voices had faded again into vague echoes, until there was only the stir of sunlight on the leaves, and Robin, chubby and naked, kicking in the sunlight, co
oing with his hands outstretched to the rustle of leaves and shadows.
She had known, then, that she had to get well. She had never heard the wind voices again, and her crisp, scientific mind rejected the fanciful theory that if she only believed in the wind voices she would see their forms and hear their words clearly. And she rejected them so thoroughly that when she heard them speak, she shut them away from her mind, and after a time heard them no longer, except in restless dreams.
By now she had accepted the isolation and the beauty of their world, and begun to make a happy life for Robin.
For lack of other occupation last summer—though the winter was mild and there was no lack of fruits and roots even then—Helen had patiently snared male and female of small animals like rabbits, and now she had a pen of them. They provided a change of diet, and after a few smelly unsuccessful experiments she had devised a way to supply their fur pelts. She made no effort at gardening, though when Robin was older she might try that. For the moment, it was enough that they were healthy and safe and protected.
Robin was listening again. Helen bent her ear, sharpened by the silence, but heard only the rustle of wind and leaves; saw only falling brightness along a silvered tree-trunk. Wind? When there were no branches stirring?
“Ridiculous,” she said sharply, then snatched up the baby boy and squeezed him before hoisting him astride her hip. “Mommy doesn’t mean you, Robin. Let’s look for berries.”
But soon she realized that his head was tipped back and that he was listening, again, to some sound she could not hear.
On what she said was Robin’s fifth birthday, Helen had made a special bed for him in another room of the building. He missed the warmth of Helen’s body, and the comforting sound of her breathing; for Robin, since birth, had been a wakeful child.
Yet, on the first night alone, Robin felt curiously freed. He did something he had never dared do before, for fear of waking Helen; he slipped from his bed and stood in the doorway, looking into the forest.
The forest was closer to the doorway now; Robin could fuzzily remember when the clearing had been wider. Now, slowly, beyond the garden patch which Helen kept cleared, the underbrush and saplings were growing back, and even what Robin called “the burned place” was covered with new sparse grass.
Robin was accustomed to being alone during the day—even in his first year, Helen had had to leave him alone, securely fastened in the house, or inside a little tight-fenced yard. But he was not used to being alone at night.
Far off in the forest, he could hear the whispers of the other people. Helen said there were no other people, but Robin knew better, because he could hear their voices on the wind, like fragments of the songs Helen sang at bedtime. And sometimes he could almost see them in the shadowy spots.
Once when Helen had been sick, a long time ago, and Robin had run helplessly from the fenced yard to the inside room and back again, hungry and dirty and furious because Helen only slept on the bed with her eyes closed, rousing up now and then to whimper like he did when he fell down and skinned his knee, the winds and voices had come into the very house; Robin had hazy memories of soothing voices, of hands that touched him more softly than Helen’s hands. But he could not quite remember.
Now that he could hear them so clearly, he would go and find the other people. And then if Helen was sick again, there would be someone else to play with him and look after him. He thought gleefully, Won’t Helen be surprised? and darted off across the clearing.
Helen woke, roused not by a sound but by a silence. She no longer heard Robin’s soft breaths from the alcove, and after a moment she realized something else: The winds were silent.
Perhaps, she thought, a storm was coming. Some change in air pressure could cause this stillness—but Robin? She tiptoed to the alcove; as she had suspected, his bed was empty.
Where could he be? In the clearing? With a storm coming? She slid her feet into handmade sandals and ran outside, her quivering call ringing out through the silent forest: “Robin—oh, Robin!”
Silence. And far away a little ominous whisper. And for the first time since that first frightening year of loneliness, she felt lost, deserted in an alien world. She ran across the clearing, looking around wildly, trying to decide which way he could have wandered. Into the forest? What if he had strayed toward the riverbank? There was a place where the bank crumbled away, down toward the rapids—her throat closed convulsively, and her call was almost a shriek: “Oh, Robin! Robin, darling! Robin!”
She ran through the paths worn by then—feet, hearing snatches of rustle, winds and leaves suddenly vocal in the cold moonlight around her. It was the first time since the spaceship left them that Helen had ventured out into the night of their world. She called again, her voice cracking in panic.
“Robin!”
A sudden stray gleam revealed a glint of white, and a child stood in the middle of the path. Helen gasped with relief and ran to snatch up her son—then fell back in dismay. It was not Robin who stood there. The child was naked, about a head shorter than Robin, and female.
There was something curious about the bare and gleaming flesh, as if she could see the child only hi the full flush of the moonlight. A round, almost expressionless face was surrounded by a mass of colorless streaming hair, the exact color of the moonlight. Helen’s audible gasp startled her to a stop: she shut her eyes convulsively, and when she opened them the path was black and empty and Robin was running down the track toward her.
Helen caught him up, with a strangled cry, and ran, clasping him to her breast, back down the path to their shack. Inside, she barred the door and laid Robin down in her own bed, and threw herself down shivering, too shaken to speak, too shaken to scold him, curiously afraid to question. I had a hallucination, she told herself, a hallucination, another dream, a dream. . .
A dream, like the other Dream. She signified it to herself as The Dream because it was not like any other dream she had ever had. She had dreamed it first before Robin’s birth, and been ashamed to speak of it to Chao Lin, fearing the common-sense skepticism of the older woman.
On their tenth night on the green planet (the Starholm was a dim recollection now), when Mernhew’s scientists had been convinced that the little world was safe, without wild beasts or diseases or savage natives, the crew had requested permission to camp in the valley clearing beside the river. Permission granted, they had gone apart in couples almost as usual, and even those who had no enduring liaison at the moment had found a partner for the night.
It must have been that night...
Colin Reynolds was two years younger than Helen, and their attachment, enduring over a few months of ship time, was based less on mutual passion than on a sort of boyish need in him, a sort of impersonal feminine solicitude in Helen. All her affairs had been like that, companionable, comfortable, but never passionate. Curiously enough, Helen was a woman capable of passion, of great depths of devotion; but no man had ever roused it and now no man ever would. Only Robin’s birth had touched her deeply pent emotions.
But that night, when Colin Reynolds was sleeping, Helen stayed restlessly awake, hearing the unquiet stirring of wind on the leaves. After a time she wandered down to the water’s edge, staying a cautious distance from the shore—for the cliff crumbled dangerously—and stretched herself out to listen to the wind—voices. And after a time she fell asleep, and had The Dream, which was to return to her again and again.
Helen thought of herself as a scientist, without room for fantasies, and that was why she called it, fiercely, a dream; a dream born of some undiagnosed conflict in her. Even to herself Helen would not recall it in full.
There had been a man, and to her it seemed that he was part of the green and windy world, and he had found her sleeping by the river. Even in her drowsy state, Helen had suspected that perhaps one of the other crew members, like herself sleepless and drawn to the shining water, had happened upon her there, such things were not impossible, manners and mores being what t
hey were among starship crew’s.
But to her, half dreaming, there had been some strangeness about him, which prevented her from seeing him too clearly even in the brilliant green moonlight. No dream and no man had ever seemed so living to her; and it was her fierce rationalization of the dream which kept her silent, months later, when she discovered (to her horror and secret despair) that she was with child. She had felt that she would lose the haze and secret delight of the dream if she openly acknowledged that Colin had fathered her child. But at first—in the cool green morning that followed—she had not been at all sure it was a dream. Seeing only sunlight and leaves, she had held back from speaking, not wanting ridicule; could she have asked each man of the Starholm, “Was it you who came to me last night? Because if it was not, there are other men on this world, men who cannot be clearly seen even by moonlight.”
Severely she reminded herself, Merrihew’s men had pronounced the world uninhabited, and uninhabited it must be. Five years later, hugging her sleeping son close, Helen remembered the dream, examined the content of her fantasy, and once again, shivering, repeated, “I had a hallucination. It was only a dream. A dream, because I was alone ...” When Robin was fourteen years old, Helen told him the story of his birth, and of the ship. He was a tall, silent boy, strong and hardy but not talkative; he heard the story almost in silence, and looked at Helen for a long time in silence afterward. He finally said in a whisper, “You could have died—you gave up a lot for me, Helen, didn’t you?” He knelt and took her face in his hands.
She smiled and drew a little away from him. “Why are you looking at me like that, Robin?”
The boy could not put instant words to his thoughts; emotions were not in his vocabulary. Helen had taught him everything she knew, but she had always concealed her feelings from her son. He asked at last, “Why didn’t my father stay with you?”
“I don’t suppose it entered his head,” Helen said. “He was needed on the ship. Losing me was bad enough.”
Marion Zimmer Bradley Super Pack Page 58
