Daughters of Earth and Other Stories

by Judith Merril

  DAUGHTERS OF EARTH

  First Publication: 1952.

  I

  MARTHA BEGAT JOAN, and Joan begat Ariadne. Ariadne lived and died at home on Pluto, but her daughter, Emma, took the long trip out to a distant planet of an alien sun.

  Emma begat Leah, and Leah begat Carla, who was the first to make her bridal voyage through sub-space, a long journey faster than the speed of light itself.

  Six women in direct descent—some brave, some beautiful, some brilliant: smug or simple, wilful or compliant, all different, all daughters of Earth, though half of them never set foot on the Old Planet.

  This story could have started anywhere. It began with unspoken prayer, before there were words, when an unnamed man and woman looked upward to a point of distant light, and wondered. Started again with a pointing pyramid; once more with the naming of a constellation; and once again with the casting of a horoscope.

  One of its beginnings was in the squalid centuries of churchly darkness, when Brahe and Bruno, Kepler, Copernicus, and Galileo ripped off the veils of godly ignorance so men could see the stars again. Then in another age of madness, a scant two centuries ago, it began with the pioneer cranks, Goddard and Tsiolkovsky, and the compulsive evangelism of Ley and Gernsback and Clarke. It is beginning again now, here on Uller. But in this narrative, it starts with Martha:

  Martha was born on Earth, in the worst of the black decades of the 20th century, in the year 1941. She lived out her time, and died of miserable old age at less than eighty years at home on Earth. Once in her life, she went to the Moon.

  She had two children. Her son, Richard, was a good and dutiful young man, a loving son, and a sober husband when he married. He watched his mother age and weaken with worry and fear after the Pluto expedition left, and could never bring himself to hurt her again as his sister had done.

  Joan was the one who got away.

  II

  centure easegone manlookttuthe stahzanprade eeee maythem hizgozzenn izz gahandenno thawthen izzgole...

  'It's—beautiful!'

  Martha nodded automatically, but she heard the catch in the boy's voice, the sudden sharp inhalation of awe and envy, and she shivered and reached for his hand.

  Beautiful, yes: beautiful, brazen, deadly, and triumphant. Martha stared at the wickedly gleaming flanks of the great rocket resting majestically on its bed of steel, and hated it with all the stored and unspent venom of her life.

  She had not planned to come. She had produced a headache, claimed illness, ignored the amused understanding in her husband's eyes.

  Even more, she dreaded having Richard go. But his father voiced one rarely-used impatient word, and she knew there was no arguing about the boy.

  In the end she had to do it too: go and be witness at disaster for herself. The three of them took their places in the Moon rocket—suddenly safe-seeming and familiar—and now they stood together in the shadow of that rocket's monstrous spawn, under the clear plastic skin of Moondome.

  rodwee havetrav uldsoslo lee beyewere eeyanway stfulmen

  zzz...

  The silvery span of runway that would send it off today stretched out of sight up the crater wall, the diminishing curve beyond the bloated belly already lost in the distance, it was made to mule. Cameras ground steadily; TV commentators, perched on platforms stilted high like lifeguard chairs, filled in a chattering counterpoint against the drone from the loudspeakers of the well-worn words that had launched the first Moondome expedition, how long back?

  Sixteen years? Impossible. Much longer. How many children had painfully memorized those tired words since? But here was George, listening as though he'd never heard a word of it before, and Richard between them, his face shimmering with reflections of some private glory, and the adolescent fervour of his voice—"It's beautiful!"–drawing a baritone-to-tremolo screech across the hypnosoporific of the loudspeakers' drone.

  She shivered. 'Yes, dear, it is,' and took his hand, held it too tightly and had to feel him pull away. A camera pointed at them and she tried to fix her face to look the way the commentator would be saying all these mothers here today were feeling.

  She looked for the first time at the woman next to her and caught an echo of her own effort at transformation. All around her, she saw with gratitude and dismay, were the faint strained lines at lips and eyes, the same tensed fingers grasping for a hand, or just at air.

  Back on Earth, perhaps among the millions crowded around TV sets, there could be honest pride and pleasure at this spectacle. But here—?

  The cameras stopped roaming, and a man stood up on the raised central dais.

  'The President of United Earth,' the speakers boomed sepulchrally.

  An instant's hush, then:

  'Today we are sending forth two hundred of our sons and daughters to the last outpost of the solar world—the far room from which we hope they may open an exit to the vistas of space itself. Before they go, it is proper that we pause ...'

  She stopped listening. The words were different, but it was still the same. No doubt the children would have to memorize this one too.

  Did they feel this way?

  It was a frightening, and then a cooling thought. There was no other way they could have felt, the other mothers who watched that first Moondome rocket leaving Earth.

  '... for their children's children, who will reach to the unknown stars.' Silence. That was the end, then.

  The silence was broken by the rolling syllables of the two hundred names, as each straight neat white uniform went up to take the hand of the President, and complete the ritual. Then it was over and Joan was standing before her: her daughter, a stranger behind a mask of glory. Seven months ago—seven short and stormy months—a schoolgirl still. Now—what did the President say?—an `emissary to the farthest new frontiers.'

  Martha reached out a hand, but George was before her, folding the slender girl in a wide embrace, laughing proudly into her eyes, chucking her inanely under the chin. Then Richard, still too young not to spurn sentimentality, shaking Joan's hand, suffering her kiss on his forehead, saying thickly : `You show 'em, sis!'

  It was her turn now. Martha leaned forward, coolly kissed the smiling face above the white jacket, and felt the untamed tears press up behind her eyes.

  `Joan,' she cried wildly. 'Joan, baby, aren't you afraid?'

  What a stupid thing to say! She wiped hastily at her eyes, and saw that the shine in Joan's eyes was moisture, too.

  Joan took her mother's hands, and held them tight.

  'I'm petrified,' she said, slowly, gravely, and very low. No one else heard it. Then she turned with her brave smile to Alex, standing at her side.

  'Pluto or bust!' she giggled.

  Martha kissed Alex, and George shook his hand. Then the two of them went off, in their white uniforms, to join the other couples, all in line.

  Martha felt proud.

  (Parenthesis to Carla : i)

  Josetown, Uller, 3/9/52

  Dear Carla...

  Forgive me my somewhat dramatic opening. Both the sections that preceded this were written years ago, at rather widely separated times and of course the one about Martha's farewell to Joan involved a good bit of imaginative assumption—though less of it than you may think at this point.

  Frankly, I hesitated for some time before I decided it was proper to include such bits in what is primarily intended to be an informational account. But information is not to be confused with statistics, and when I found myself uncertain, later, whether it was all right to include these explanatory asides, I made up my mind that if I were to write the story at all, it would have to be done my own way, with whatever idiosyncratic eccentricities, or godlike presumptions of comprehension might be involved.

  As you already know if you are reading this, I am putting this together for you as a sort of good-bye present for your trip. There is little you will be able to take with you, and when you leave, there will be no way to foresee the likelihood of our ever meeting again: e
ven if your trip is entirely successful and you return from it safely, we both know how uncertain the time-transformation equations are. You may be back, twenty years older, five minutes after you leave; more probably, it may be many years after my own death that you return—perhaps only a year or two older than you are now.

  But however we learn to juggle our bodies through space or time, we live our lives on a subjective time scale. Thus, though I was born in 2o26, and the Newhope landed on Uller in 2091,I was then, roughly, 27 years old—including two subjective years, overall, for the trip. And although the sixty-one years I have lived here would be counted as closer to sixty-seven on Earth, or on Pluto, I think that the body—and I know that the mind—pays more attention to the rhythm of planetary seasons, the alternations of heat and cold and radiation intensities, than to the ticking of some cosmic metronome counting off whatever Absolute Time might be. So I call myself 88 years old—and I digress, but not as far as it may seem.

  I said, for instance, that Martha died 'of miserable old age' at less than eighty, and this would seem to contradict my talk of seasons-and-subjectivity here. I am not exactly senile, and can look forward to another forty years, in all likelihood, of moderately useful life. We do learn something as we go along: a hundred years before Martha's time (indeed, even at her time, on some parts of Earth) few people lived to see sixty. (You, at twenty-eight, would have been entering middle-age.) Yet the essential rhythms of their lives were remarkably similar to our own. The advances of biophysics have enlarged our scope: we have more time for learning and living both; but we have correspondingly more to learn and live. We still progress through adolescence and education (which once ended at 14, then 18, 21, 25...) to youth, marriage, procreation, maturity, middle age, senescence and death. And in a similar way, I think, there are certain rhythms of human history which recur in (widening, perhaps enriched, but increasingly discernible) moderately predictable patterns of motion and emotion both.

  A recognition of this sort of rhythm is implicit, I think, in the joke that would not go away, which finally made the official name of the—ship?—in which you will depart The Ark (for Archaic?). In any case, this story is, on its most basic levels, an exposition of such rhythms: among them is the curious business of the generations, and their alternations: at least it was that thought (or rationale) that finally permitted me to indulge myself with my dramatic opening.

  On an equally important, though more superficial, level, my purpose in putting this together is to provide you with—this is embarrassing—a `heritage'. I had something of this sort from Joan Thurman, and found it valuable; whether this will be equally so for you, I do not know. I do know I have only two months left in which to put this together and that is little enough for an inexperienced storyteller like myself. (And glory-be! there is something I am inexperienced at. Many things, actually—but the writing of this is the first reminder I have had in a while. It feels good to be doing something new and difficult.)

  My parenthesis seems to be full of parentheses. Well, I never was what you'd call a straight-line thinker: the side-trails are often more productive, anyhow ...

  And there I go again. What I set out to tell you here, Carla, is that this story was lived over many years, and written over a shorter period, but still a long one. There are the odd bits (like the one about Martha preceding this) which I did a long time ago, as a sort of `therapy-writing' and kept, till now, to myself. Other parts, like what follows here, are adapted from Joan Thurman's papers. Some parts are new. And then there is this matter of rhythms again

  Some things in life remain vivid in minute detail till the day you die; others are of interest only as background. Some things are very personal and immediate, no matter how remote in time; others seem almost to be happening to another person, even as they occur. Thus, you will find this narrative full of sudden changes of pace and style. I find, for instance, that it is almost impossible in some sections to write about myself as `Emma' in the third person; and other places equally difficult to say 'I' and `me', but I do not think you will have too much trouble following.

  III

  I WAS BORN on Pluto, in the Earth-year 2026, and I grew up there. I was twenty-two years old when we boarded the Newhope to come to Uller. But that was such a long time ago, and so much has happened since, that the words themselves have lost all personal meaning to me. They are statistics. I am Emma Tarbell now, and have been for many years. My home is on Uller. A little girl named Emma Malook grew up on Pluto. Her mother's name was Ariadne, and her father's name was Bob. Her grandmother, Joan Thurman, was a famous pioneer, one of the first-ship colonists.

  In the normal course of events, Joan would have taken her degree that spring, and gone to work as a biophysicist until she found a husband. The prospect appalled her. Nineteen months earlier she'd started the accelerated studies, without mentioning it at home; her mother thought she was busy with the usual run of extra-curricular self-expression at school. She'd had a year of avid learning before she passed the prelims, and was ready for advanced special training. That meant a different school, and the beginning of the psych conferences and background inquiries. She had to tell her family then.

  The school was too near home for her to live in the already crowded dorms. She had to stick it out at home for six months of battle and persuasion, sleepless nights and stormy mornings. And all the time studying to be done.

  She wasn't the only one. Even the dorm residents got it; letters and telegrams and phone calls, and frantic unannounced visitations. Two thousand of them entered final training together; less than seven hundred lasted the full six months, and most of those who left did so of their own accord.

  Joan stuck it out, and she met Alex, and added to her fears and doubts: if one of them was chosen, and not the other...?

  Cautiously, they held back from commitments till the end. And then, in spite of any heaven or earth Martha could move, the decision was made. Joan had her one last month on Earth of joy and triumph: graduation, marriage, four weeks of honeymoon and fame; the planning, the packing, the round of farewells.

  Now with her hand in Alex's, she followed the others, all in their gleaming white uniforms, up the ramp to the airlock, and into the third of a waiting line of moon buggies. Ten buggies, ten passengers to each, two trips apiece, and the gaping hole in the side of the giant rocket had swallowed them all.

  The rocket was not really large, not from the inside. So much fuel, so much freight, so many passengers; the proportions were flexible only within narrow limits. Each couple passed through the airlock hand in hand, and edged along the corridor, crabwise, to their own cubicle.

  Inside, they stripped off the white snowy uniforms, folded them neatly, and piled them in the doorway for collection. Stripped to the skin, they checked their equipment for the last time, and settled themselves side by side, in the grooves and contours carefully moulded to their bodies.

  In perfect drilled co-ordination, almost ritualistically, they closed down the compartmented upper sections, starting at the feet, and leaned across each other to latch the complex fastenings. When they were enclosed up to the armpits, they laid their heads into the fitted hollow facing each other at one-quarter view, and strapped down the forehead bands and chin pads. Alex pushed the button that brought down the glassine air-dome over their upper bodies, and both of them set to work testing the supplier tubes and nozzles inside, making certain for one last extra time, that everything reached as far as it should. Then, in perfect unison, as if this too were part of the ritual they had learned, each one extended a hand for a last touch; grasped and held tight, and let loose in haste.

  Someone came down the hall—they could still see through the open doorway—collecting the uniforms to be dumped before take-off.

  They wriggled their arms down into the cushioned spaces along their sides; later, the arms could be freed again, to manipulate the supplier tubes, but during acceleration, every part of the body was enwombed, protected from shock and pressur
e, cold and heat, nauseous fear and killing radiations.

  A gong went off inside the head-dome; that meant they were sealed in now. The loudspeaker began to tick off seconds. Frantically, foolishly, Joan tried to move her hips, suddenly certain that a necessary opening in the nest had been misplaced. She never remembered to feel glorious. There was a rending blast of soundless vibration, and a pushing, squeezing pain within the flesh, and brief relief about the placing of the opening, before the blackout came.

  IV

  PLUTO, PLANET OF MYSTERY

  .. frozen dark wastes, forever uninhabitable to man? Or will our pioneering sons and daughters find a new world to live upon? No one can foretell what they will find. Our best astronomers are in dispute. Our largest and most piercing telescopes give us daily—or nightly—new information, which only contradicts the hypotheses of the night before ...

  `We literally do not know, even today—and it is now three quarters of a century since Clyde Tombaugh confirmed the existence of the planet—what the size, the mass, or the true temperature of Pluto are ... whether it has a frozen atmosphere or none ... what composes its dark surface ... or whether it is a native of our solar system at all!'

  The newspapers and broadcasters of the time speculated loudly on the likelihood that the bright remote planet was a visitor from the stars, a wandering planet caught at the very fringe of the sun's gravitation, or even a watchful outpost of some alien race, a conscious visitant, swinging in distant orbit around this star against the day when men propelled themselves beyond the boundaries of their own system.

  They even mentioned, but less often, the great likelihood that the confusing data on the planet merely meant it was composed entirely of very heavy metals. Uranium, for instance ...

  But for the far-sighted, for the world planners, the politicians and promoters who had made the trip possible, the near-certainty of heavy metals was second only to one other goal: a starship.

  The basic design of the Newhope was even then under government lock and key, a full forty years before the first step was taken in its construction. The fuel was in development. Astronomers, sociologists, metallurgists, psychologists, thousands of technicians and researchers on Earth and Mars and the Moon were tackling the thousand and one problems of development. And the entire line of work hinged on one combination: there had to be a source of heavy metals near the building site: and the building site had to be at the outer edges of the System.