Stress Pattern

by Barrett, Jr. , Neal

  This did not mean Melisa knew the answer, and held it from me. Merely that she "felt" the conversation might lead to areas which would confuse or frighten her. It was a part of Melisa's dilemma. She was a child of two worlds. Beings on her planet were born with instinctual feelings about the nature of their world. Certain things were, or were not—these things were neither questioned nor understood. They just were. Melisa, though, was a part of me, and through me, of my world. Thus, she both felt and questioned. And this ability to question was the thing that frightened and often confused her.

  At the end of the week it rained fairly hard, and this was unusual. We had grown accustomed to the continual fog, the condition of "almost raining," in which you were always wet, but had no visible weather to show for it.

  After the rain, the corpse of some large, unidentifiable animal floated by some twenty meters away, finally drifting out of sight. Whatever it was, it was a most distasteful creature, for even the silvergators wouldn't touch it.

  Melisa had been pensive and somewhat withdrawn for several days. I left her alone, thinking she might rather work out whatever it was for herself. But one morning when she was curled up in a warm golden ball against me I asked her if something was troubling her, and what I might do to help.

  She said nothing for a long moment, then, "I want you to tell me more about her."

  "More about whom?"

  "Melisa. The real one."

  She said "the real one" in such sad and lonely tones, and I pulled back a strand of wheat-colored hair and kissed her ear.

  "Hey. That sends shivers all over me." She shivered for me, and pressed somewhat closer.

  "I know it does. That's why I do it."

  "It is, huh?"

  "Right."

  "You know an awful lot of things to do, don't you?"

  "This is just kid stuff. Wait'!! I really get going."

  She stifled a laugh against her shoulder.

  "—And Melisa. Why do you want to know more about the other Melisa Mills? Because you think she was important to me? More important than you are?"

  A little pause. "I want to be what you want. So you'll love me, too."

  "Hey—" I held her away from me, then brought her close again. There were the beginnings of tears. "And what makes you think I don't love you? Already."

  She wouldn't look at me. "You love me because of her, Andrew. Because of what she was, or what you imagined her to be. Maybe I'm not the same. Or not close enough."

  "I never really loved her at all, Melisa. That's the truth. I thought about loving her, and how loving her might be—but you have to know someone for that. I didn't. It was all in my head."

  "Sometimes what's in your head is better than what's real."

  "Yes. Sometimes it is."

  "So?"

  "So this is definitely not one of those times, Melisa. You're the real one. You made me see that, right in the beginning. Remember? She's the fantasy. The one I imagined. You are no daydream, Melisa."

  "Honest?" She sniffed through tears.

  "Honest."

  She closed her eyes, and in a moment a sly grin crossed the too-wide mouth.

  "Andrew?"

  "Yes."

  "Andrew, I want to play the pornography game. I don't really know what you have to do, but I can learn if you'll show me. Just tell me what I do wrong."

  "Melisa," I said, "you are already off on the right foot. Nothing is more dear to a teacher's heart than a student's willingness to learn."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  It was a particularly gray day.

  A light rain dimpled the water, and silvergators finned cursive arcs just below the leaden surface. I sat against the outside of the hut, eyes more or less on the stilt village. The huts were dark blurs floating above the fog bank, anchored by the dim suggestion of vertical shadows.

  As I watched, one of the shadows seemed to fade, bend, and casually fold itself in two. Another, followed. Then another. All very slowly. The huts above lazily chased the collapsing stilts, tumbling in easy circles to the water.

  There was no sound track to any of this, and I guessed the fog and the distance effectively smothered any noise. Maybe a half dozen huts in all had disappeared. No doubt there were creatures inside, but of course I couldn't see them. Hopefully, the silvergators were swift and merciful.

  I had no idea what had brought this catastrophe about, but the point had been well made. The neighborhood was deteriorating, and Melisa and I were vulnerable. Of course, I said nothing to her about what had happened.

  What a change Melisa made in my life! Somehow, I had managed to pluck a bright gem from this dunghill world. How, no longer greatly mattered. She was there. She existed. And I believed she truly loved me.

  Not because she had been created for that purpose. But because she wanted to. And this was extremely important to me. I had given it a great deal of thought and felt I had points in my favor. I had patterned my fantasy and brought it to life, but now she was a separate individual, with a will of her own. She could be stubborn and petulant, moody, gay, willing, and unreasonable. Anything but a pliant, submissive toy made for Andrew's enjoyment.

  Sometimes, the thought struck me that if I had really willed Melisa into being, my unconscious self would have created her as a whole woman, with all the attendant virtues and faults. In other words, much as she was now.

  I preferred to think differently. That she sulked, pouted, laughed, and loved because she felt such emotions, and expressed them of her own free will.

  It was Melisa who noticed the water was receding. I couldn't see it at all, but I marked a spot on one of the stilts with my eye, and checked it several times during the day. On the second morning I knew she was right. Not much of a drop, but something. I made a special scratch on the bamboo slat that served as my calendar. It had been seven weeks and two days since the first drop of rain fell on the grove.

  "When it's gone, Andrew, then what?"

  Melisa knew my mind. "When it's gone, Melisa, we leave this place."

  "Leave. And go where?"

  "You know I can't answer that."?

  "But we—just go."

  "Yes."

  "But you don't know where."

  I bit off a sharp answer. It was my lack of purpose and direction involved here, not hers. Instead, I gave her a reassuring smile.

  "Listen. It'll be all right."

  "I know it will, Andrew."

  She didn't, though. She was merely passing my own assurance back to me.

  "I think it would be best if you said what you were thinking," I told her.

  She looked at me with the oversized eyes. "OK. But I don't know what I'm thinking." She bit her lip thoughtfully. "Andrew, the thing is I know what you feel, but I don't always understand why."

  "Yes, I know that."

  "I feel some of what you feel. Sometimes. But the other part of me doesn't at all."

  "And that part of you doesn't see why I have to leave. Go somewhere else."

  She shook her head and laughed nervously. "I know it's silly, but—the idea of doing anything like that scares me. Something awful. It—just doesn't seem right."

  "Melisa—"

  She leaned forward and squinted her eyes and straightened her jaw. "People go somewhere because they have a reason to go somewhere," she said flatly. "If they don't, they should stay where they are."

  I stared at her. If I hadn't known better, I would have sworn she'd memorized the lines. "Why, though?" I asked her. "There's no rule, Melisa. It doesn't make sense to say that you—"

  "It does to me!" she exploded. "Just because it doesn't mean anything to you doesn't mean it isn't true! You don't know—you don't even belong here!"

  Her hands balled up into tiny fists and I pulled her to me and buried a flood of tears.

  Small revelations emerged from my conversations with Melisa. Pieced together they formed the germ of some larger truth. I began to see Rhamik, Phretci and the others in a different light.
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br />   There were rules. Unspoken. There were ways things were done and ways people lived.

  People go somewhere because they have a reason.

  There are places for rocks and places for dirt.

  Places for Phretcis and places for Dhoolhs.

  Why? Melisa didn't know. None of them did. They lived their structured lives because that was the way of the world. No one had to tell them these things. They were born knowing what they knew. And no one asked why.

  I did, though. For instance: Why rules that set the pattern for everything from silvergators to the Great Flood? Who wound up this palsied planet in the first place?

  The water level was a great deal lower. There were fewer silvergators about, and the days were less dreary and gray. Maybe, I thought, the perpetual cloud cover has moisturized itself to death.

  The walkway was for exercising. Also for Rhamik watching. Only, never a sign of life across that gap that separated his territory from mine.

  "Andrew," Melisa announced, "the new person is doing nicely."

  "Good," I said, "that's fine, Melisa."

  "You could be a little more interested."

  "Melisa, I'm interested."

  "No, you're not."

  I grinned at her. "OK. No, I'm not. And I don't know why I bother to lie—you always know what I'm thinking."

  "Not always."

  "Often enough. And it's not that I'm not interested. It's simply that having a new pers— a child, is about as foreign to me as anything I can imagine. The possibility never crossed my mind."

  She threw out a hip and arched a brow. "It doesn't have to cross your mind, Andrew."

  "True."

  "You probably have lots of new persons running around somewhere. You just never bothered to ask."

  I laughed. "I hope not. I don't think so. Where I come from we have ways to prevent that."

  She wanted to know about "ways" and I told her. I couldn't be sure she was amused, or horrified, or a little of both.

  I had watched her, and seen her glance at the new person's place on the wall of the hut. Warm, tender looks. Typical of motherhood. Which puzzled me somewhat. Being a mother on this world wasn't all that big a deal. You plopped out a little ping-pong ball twenty-four hours after conception, fed and watered it a while, and—bang! Out jumped a full-grown adult as big as you were, who promptly walked away and went about his business. Not even a "Thanks, Mom."

  "It's not the same with me," said Melisa, and there was the defensive fire of motherhood in her eyes. "I'm Melisa Mills, Andrew—no matter where or how I was born. And that's Andrew Gavin's child over there. I love Andrew Gavin dearly, and I'll love his child, too."

  "You'd better wait and see what it looks like." I grinned. "It may be ugly as sin."

  "It will not!" She made a face. "It will be very beautiful. A little boy. Just like you."

  "God, what a thought."

  "Besides, don't blame me if it's ugly as sin—whatever sin is—you are the big pattern-maker around here, not me."

  A sobering thought, indeed. Certainly, the subject had crossed my mind before. "Pretty scary," I admitted. "I haven't the vaguest idea what I was thinking about at the time."

  "Hah." She made a mouth. "I know what you were thinking about at the time."

  "Don't change the subject."

  "I'm not. And, Andrew—I'll love your child. Our child."

  "Maybe," I said. "People don't always."

  "Andrew!" Her eyes widened. "What kind of talk is that?"

  "Real talk," I told her, and I was sorry I'd started that business, and cut it short. "It's simply one of the fun things we Earth people do, Melissa. Screw up our children."

  "How?"

  "It's like patterning. Only worse. You make a child and love it and think the things it does are very cute. Only, the more it acts like itself the less cute it becomes. The less it wants to be like you, the more you resent it. Ungrateful little bastard. So you push a little. Put a little pressure on the soft spots. Wear down some of the edges. Until—"

  I stopped. Wondering where the hell I intended to take this.

  Melisa looked at me queerly. "I thought you hadn't had a child before."

  "I haven't."

  "You're talking about somebody, though. You didn't just make that up. Not the way you said it."

  I didn't answer.

  During the night, someone pulled the plug out of our tub.

  I was up at dawn and saw it and shouted at Melisa. She came to lean over the railing with me, and grinned because I was grinning. There was less than half a meter of water below. You could see the bottom clearly, and the bits of garbage left there by the rain and the silvergators. The silvergators were nowhere to be seen, and I guessed they had all squirmed themselves back into the wet earth. Well, by God, when they defossilized themselves for the coming season, they could do it without Gavin and company. We would not be here to watch.

  To make this gala event complete, the gray clouds scudded into ragged bits and pieces as the day wore on, and in the evening, I held Melisa close and watched the first real sunset I had seen on this cloudless world.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The water was gone, but it left a dreary mess behind.

  The grove, with its green depths and cool shadow, had turned to pulp. For the first half of the morning, it was a walk through muddy spinach.

  Melisa, though, instinctively found the stuff useful. She stopped twice to pack layers of goo about the new person's small cocoon.

  This great pile of garbage was already reeking with the first touch of the sun. I was glad enough to leave it behind. From the outside edge, I looked back at the little square huts on their shaky legs. Did the villagers stay there, until a new crop of bamboo rose high enough to give them shelter? Maybe. Or perhaps there was interim housing—a third stage in the cycle. Something akin to Phretci's rabbit burrows.

  So good-bye, Rhamik, wherever you are. I suppose I will never know exactly what offended you so greatly. But even if you were here to explain it all, I could easily misunderstand, and possibly offend again.

  I had underestimated the sun, or forgotten its ferocity. It blazed out of a cloudless sky, determined to make up for lost time. We were fried mercilessly from above, while the moist earth steamed us from below. Melisa dropped in a pitiful heap every hundred meters or so, and I could have cried for her. I dug up bulbs and sponged her with water. That seemed to help for a while, but she was losing moisture faster than she could take it in. Good thinking, Andrew. You forgot Melisa was born in the rain, and has never seen the sun or felt its heat before.

  Early in the day I gave her my tattered shirt. She wouldn't take the trousers, which I had ripped into shorts the month before. So in the midst of a first-class heat stroke, she looked quite provocative.

  I kicked myself mentally. If I was in such a goddamn hurry, we could have traveled at night.

  When the day finally ended and the sun disappeared we dropped where we were and simply lay on the ground and looked at the sky.

  "Melisa, I'm sorry."

  "It's OK, Andrew."

  "Are you all right?"

  "Yes. I'm fine, Andrew."

  Which wasn't true. She looked terrible. Her dark eyes were sunken and rimmed, and she was pale through the red flush in her cheeks. Her brow was cold and clammy. When she began trembling I wrapped the light matting around her as well as I could, but of course it didn't help. The best way to treat heat stroke in the evening is to avoid the sun the preceding day. And it was a little late for that. She held the new person tightly and I wrapped myself around them both as well as I could to still the trembling.

  The night was fairly cool. But now I knew what to expect in the morning. Fact: Melisa would not live through another twelve hours of walking under the sun. I couldn't possibly get her back to the village. Even if I carried her all night—which I couldn't—we'd have to stop too many times along the way and the sun would still catch us in the open.

  I was sure,
now, we were fighting more than just the sudden return of the sun, or moisture in the ground. The heat was too intense for that. While the clouds had covered us, the world had moved closer to its star. We were in for one hell of a fine equatorial summer.

  Melisa fell into an uneasy sleep and I moved away from her quietly and plodded off across the wastelands. The star's were hard and cold in a black sky. I wished I had remembered to take a look at the rim before sundown. A lifetime ago, when I'd ridden into the grove on my Bhano, the lip of the valley was not impossibly far away. Two, maybe three days. If you were riding.

  I kicked up a spray of wet soil and cursed myself soundly. What difference did it make how far it was to the rim? By foot, Bhano, or snowshoe? What did I think I'd find when I got there?

  Melisa was right. On this world, it was foolish to want to be somewhere else, simply because it was there. There were no other places to be. Only different corners of where you were.

  When in doubt, do as the natives do. I dug. Scooped dirt with my hands and scattered it behind me like a dog after a bone. My skin was burned to a crisp and I was too weary to move. But I was properly motivated, as we say in the classroom. If I stopped, Melisa would die. Simple enough, I decided. The sun will arrive on schedule, Andrew, and you had bloody well better be ready for it.

  The ground was wet or we would never have made it. The burrow, when I stood back to inspect it, looked ominously like a grave. But this was no time for interesting mental pictures. It was a meter wide, two long, and a half meter deep. The dirt I'd removed was piled up around it, packed into a solid wall. Before the dawn blurred the east I had Melisa and the cocoon inside, and the matting stretched over the top. Then I dug up bulbs until the sun rose and piled them in one corner and collapsed beside Melisa.

  When I woke again she was watching me.

  "I'm better now, Andrew."

  "I was worried, Melisa."

  She laughed lightly and looked about. "It's a very nice home."