The Coming of the Terrans

by Leigh Brackett

  “Why would they curse me?” asked Bisha, close behind him. “Our gods, I mean.” Dressing was an easy proposition for her, with one thick garment to pull over her head, and sandals for her feet. Her hair hung over her face and the tears still dripped, and now her nose was running, and Fraser didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “They didn’t,” he said, and picked her up. “It’s only superstitious nonsense—”

  He stopped. That was not going to do. Seven years, a lifetime of training and belief, were not going to be wiped out by a few words from a stranger. He stood scowling, trying hard to think of a way to reach her, and then he became aware that she was looking at him with a child’s intense and wondering stare, sitting quite stiffly in his arms. He asked, “Are you afraid of me?”

  “I—I’ve never seen anyone like you before.”

  “Hm. And you’ve never seen a house like this one, either?”

  She glanced around, and shook her head. “No. It’s—” She had no words for what it was, only a shiver of awe.

  Fraser smiled. “Bisha, you told me the Old Men of your tribe were very powerful in magic.”

  “Oh, yes!”

  He set her down and took her hand firmly in his. “I’m going to show you a few things. Come on.”

  He didn’t know whether child psychologists and other ethical persons would approve of his method, but it was the only one he could think of. With the imposing air of one performing wonders, he introduced the child of the nomad tents to the miracles of modern gadgetry, from running water to record music and micro-books. As a climax, he permitted her to peer in through the door of the laboratory, at the mystic and glittering tangle of glass and chrome. And he asked her, “Are your Old Men greater in magic than I?”

  “No.” She had drawn away from him, her hands clutched tightly around her as though to avoid the accident of touching anything. Behind her from the living quarters Wagner’s Fire Music still roared and rippled, out of a tiny spool of wire. Suddenly Bisha was down on her knees in an attitude of complete submission. “You are the greatest doctor in the world.”

  Her word for “doctor” meant the same as “shaman.” Fraser felt contrite and ashamed. It seemed a shabby trick to impress a child. But he stuck to it, saying solemnly, “Very well, Bisha. And now that that is understood, I tell you that curses have no power in this place, and I want no more talk of them.”

  She listened, not raising her head.

  “You are safe here. You are not to be afraid. Look up at me, Bisha. Do you promise not to be afraid?”

  She looked up. He smiled, and after a little she smiled back. “I promise.”

  “Good,” he said, and held out his hand. “Let’s eat.”

  About then it dawned on Fraser that he was saddled with a child. For the four and a half months that remained of his term here he would have to feed, look after her and keep her hidden. The people of the town would hardly shelter her—Bisha’s mother hadn’t trusted them, certainly—and if they did, the nomads would only find her again when they came in for the fall trading. The only other alternative was the central government at Karappa, which would surely not condone ritual murder, but that was three hundred miles away. He had a trac-car, but the work going forward in the lab would not wait for him to trundle a slow six hundred miles up and down the desert. He could not possibly leave it.

  Four and a half months. He looked down at the small figure pattering beside him, and wondered what in the devil he was going to do with her all that time.

  At the end of the week he would have been lost without her. The awful loneliness and isolation of the Quonset was gone. There was another voice in the place, another presence, somebody to sit across the table from him, somebody to talk to. Bisha was no trouble. She had been brought up not to be a trouble, in a hard school where survival was the supreme lesson, and that same school had impressed on her young mind the wisdom of making the best of things. She was no trouble at all. She was company, the first he had had in nearly nine months. He liked her.

  Mostly she was cheerful and alert, too much engrossed in a new world of marvels to brood about the past. But she had her moods. Fraser found her one afternoon huddled in a corner, dull and spiritless, in the depths of a depression that seemed almost too deep for tears. He thought he knew what the trouble was. He took her on his lap and said, "Are you lonesome, Bisha?"

  She whispered, “Yes.”

  He tried to talk to her. It was like talking to a blank wall. At last he said helplessly, “Try not to miss them too much, Bisha. I know I’m not the same as your own family, and this place is strange to you, but try.”

  “You’re good,” she murmured. “I like you. It isn’t that. I was lonesome before, sometimes.”

  “Lonesome for what, Bisha?”

  “I don’t know. Just—lonesome.”

  Queer little tyke, thought Fraser, but then most kids are queer to adult eyes, full of emotions so new and untried that they don’t know quite how to come out. And no wonder she’s depressed. In her spot, who wouldn’t be?

  He put her to bed early, and then, feeling unusually tired after a long day’s work, he turned in himself.

  He was awakened by Bisha, shaking him, sobbing, calling his name. Leaden and half dazed, he started up in alarm, asking her what was the matter, and she whimpered, “I was afraid. You didn’t wake up.”

  “What do you mean, I didn’t wake up?” He sank back again, weighted down with the sleep he had not finished, and began to bawl her out. Then he happened to look at the clock.

  He had slept a trifle over fourteen hours.

  Mechanically he patted Bisha and begged her pardon. He tried to think, and his brain was wrapped in layers of cotton wool, dull, lethargic. He had had one drink before going to bed, not enough to put anyone out for one hour, let alone fourteen. He had not done anything physically exhausting. He had been tired, but nothing the usual eight hours wouldn’t cure. Something was wrong, and a small pinpoint of fear began to prick him.

  He asked, “How long have you been trying to wake me?”

  She pointed to a chair that stood beside the window. “When I began, its shadow was there. Now it is there.”

  As near as he could figure, about two hours. Not sleep, then. Semi-coma. The pinprick became a knife blade.

  Bisha said, so low that he could hardly hear her, “It is the sickness that was in our tribe. I have brought it to you.”

  “You might have at that,” Fraser muttered. He had begun to shiver, from the onset of simple panic. He was so far away from help. It would be so easy to die here, walled in by the endless miles of desert.

  The child had withdrawn herself from him. “You see,” she said, “the curse has followed me.”

  With an effort, Fraser got hold of himself. “It hasn’t anything to do with curses. There are people we call carriers—Listen, Bisha, you’ve got to help me. This sickness—did any of your tribesmen die of it?”

  “No—”

  Fraser trembled even more violently, this time from sheer relief. “Well, then, it’s not so bad, is it? How does it—”

  “The Old Men said they would die unless I was taken away and killed.” She had retreated even farther now, to the other side of the room, to the door. Suddenly she turned and ran.

  It was a minute before Fraser’s numbed brain understood. Then he staggered up and followed her, out into the dust and the cold night, shouting her name. He saw her, a tiny figure running between the blue-black sky and the dull red desolation, and he ran too, fighting the weakness and the chill wind and the dust, and then he overtook her. She struggled, begging to be let go, and he smacked her. After that she was quiet. He picked her up, and she wailed, “I don’t want you to die!”

  Fraser looked out across the pitiless desert and held her tight. “Do you love me that much, Bisha?”

  “I have eaten your bread, and your roof has sheltered me—” The old ceremonial phrases learned from her elders sounded odd in her young mouth, but perfectly sincere. “You
are my family now, my mother and my father. I don’t want my curse to fall on you.”

  For a moment Fraser found it hard to speak. Then he said gently, “Bisha, is your wisdom greater than mine?”

  She shook her head.

  “Is it your right to question it?”

  “No.”

  “What is your right, Bisha, as a child?”

  “To obey.”

  “You are never to do this again. Never, no matter what happens, are you to run away from me. Do you hear me, Bisha?”

  She looked up at him. “You’re not afraid of the curse, even now?”

  “Not now, or any other time.”

  “You want me to stay?”

  “Of course I do, you poor wretched little idiot!”

  She smiled, gravely, with the queer dignity he had seen in her before. “You are a very great doctor,” she said. “You will find a way to lift the curse. I’m not afraid, now.”

  She lay warm and light in the circle of his arms, and he carried her back to the Quonset; walking slowly, talking all the way. It was odd talk, in that time and place. It was about a far-off city called San Francisco, and a white house on a cliff that looked out over a great bay of blue water. It was about trees and birds and fishes and green hills, and all the things a little girl could do among them and be happy. In the past few minutes Fraser had forgotten Karappa and the authorities of Mars. In the past few minutes he had acquired a family.

  Back in the lab Fraser began work. He questioned Bisha about the sickness as she had seen it in her tribe. Apparently the seizures came at irregular intervals and involved nothing more than the comatose sleep, but he gathered that the periods of unconsciousness had been much shorter, often no more than a few minutes. That could be accounted for by acquired resistance on the part of the Martians. Bisha, of course, had never had the sickness, and Fraser imagined that the accident of natural immunity had caused her to be picked for the tribal scapegoat.

  His own symptoms were puzzling. No temperature, no pain, no physical derangement, only the lassitude and weakness, and by next morning they had passed off. He consulted his books on Martian pathology. There was nothing in them. He ran a series of exhaustive tests, even to a spinal tap on Bisha, which she took to be a very potent ritual of exorcism. He would rather have done one on himself, but that was impossible, and there might be evidence in the child of some latent organism.

  The test was negative. All the tests were negative. He and Bisha were as healthy as horses.

  Baffled but intently relieved, Fraser began to think of other explanations for the ailment. It was not a disease, so it must be a side-effect of some physical condition, perhaps the light gravitation or pressure, or the thin atmosphere, or all three, that affected Martians as well as Earthmen, but in a lesser degree. He made a detailed report, thrusting into the back of his mind as a small worry that no such side-effect had ever been observed before.

  He waited nervously for a recurrence. It didn’t come, and as the work in the lab demanded more and more of his attention he began to forget about it. The time that he woke up in his chair with an untasted drink beside him and no memory of having gone to sleep he put down resolutely to weariness and overwork. Bisha had retired with another fit of the blues, so she knew nothing about that, and he didn’t mention it. She seemed to be getting over the curse fixation, and he wanted to keep it that way.

  More time went by. Bisha was learning English, and she could name all the trees that stood around that house in San Francisco. The confinement in the small hut was getting them both down, and she was as anxious to leave as Fraser, but apart from that everything was going well.

  And, then the nomads came in from the desert for the fall trading.

  Fraser barred the doors and drew the blinds. For three days and nights of the trading he and Bisha hid inside, with the distant sound of the pipes and the shouting coming to them muffled but poignant, the music and the voices of Bisha’s own people, her own family among the tribes. They were hard days. At the end of them Bisha retired again into the remoteness of her private grief, and Fraser let her alone. On the fourth morning the nomads were gone.

  Fraser thanked whatever gods there were. Weary and dragged out, he went into the lab, hating the work now because it took so much out of him, anxious to have it finished. He started across the room to open the blind—

  He was lying on the floor. The lights were on and it was night. Bisha was beside him. She seemed to have been there a long time. His arm ached. There were clumsy wrappings on it, stained with blood. Shards of glass littered the end of the lab bench and the floor. The familiar leaden numbness pervaded his whole body. It was hard to move, hard to think. Bisha crept to him and laid her head on his chest, silently, like a dog.

  Very slowly Fraser’s head cleared, and thoughts came into it. I must have fallen across the bench. Good God, what if I had broken the virus cultures? Not only us, the whole town—I might have bled to death, and what would happen to Bisha? Suppose I did die, what would happen to her?

  It took longer this time to return to normal. He stitched up the cuts in his arm, and the job was not neat. He was afraid. He was afraid to leave his chair, afraid to smoke, afraid to operate the stove. The hours crawled by, the rest of the night, another day, another evening. He felt better, but fear had grown into desperation. He had only Bisha’s word that this illness was not fatal. He began to distrust his own tests, postulating alien organisms unrecognizable to the medical science he knew. He was afraid for himself. He was terrified for Bisha.

  He said abruptly, “I am going into the town.”

  “Then I will come with you.”

  “No. You’ll stay right here. I’ll be all right. There is a doctor in the town, a Martian healer. He may know—”

  He went out, into the bitter darkness and the blazing of the stars. It seemed a long way to the town.

  He passed the irrigated land, stripped of its harvest, and came into the narrow streets. The town was not old as they go on Mars, but the mud brick of the walls had been patched and patched again, fighting a losing battle with the dry wind and the scouring dust. There were few people abroad. They looked at Fraser and passed him by, swarthy folk, hot-eyed and perpetually desperate. The canal was their god, their mother and their father, their child and their wife. Out of its dark channel they drew life, painfully, drop by drop. They did not remember who had cut it, all the long miles from the polar cap across the dead sea bottoms, across the deserts and through the tunnels underneath the hills. They only knew that it was there, and that it was better for a man to sin the foulest sin than to neglect the duty that was on him to keep the channel clear. A cruel life, and yet they lived it, and were content.

  There were no torches to light the streets, but Fraser knew the house he wanted. The door of corroded metal opened reluctantly to his knock and closed swiftly behind him. The room was small, lit by a smoky lamp and barely warmed by a fire of roots, but on the walls there were tapestries of incalculable age and incredible value.

  Tor-Esh, the man of healing, did well at his trade. His robe was threadbare, but his belly protruded and his chops were plump, unusual things among his lean people. He was fetish-priest, oracle, and physician, and he was the only man of town who had shown any interest in Fraser and his work. It was not necessarily a friendly interest.

  He gave Fraser the traditional greeting, and Fraser said stiffly, “I need your help. I have contracted an illness—”

  Tor-Esh listened. His eyes were shrewd and penetrating, and the smile that was habitually on his face left them untouched. As Fraser talked, even that pretense of a smile went gradually away.

  When he was finished, Tor-Esh said, “Again. More slowly, please, your Martian is not always clear.”

  “But do you know what it is? Can you tell me—”

  Tor-Esh said, “Again!”

  Fraser repeated the things he had said, trying not to show the fear that was in him. Tor-Esh asked questions. Accurate questions. Fras
er answered them. For a little bit Tor-Esh was silent, heavy-faced and grim in the flickering light, and Fraser waited with his heart pounding in his throat.

  Tor-Esh said slowly, “You are not ill. But unless a certain thing is done, you will surely die.”

  Fraser spoke in anger. “Talk sense! A healthy man doesn’t die, except by accident.”

  “In some ways,” said Tor-Esh very softly, “we are an ignorant people. It is not because we have not learned. It is because we have forgotten.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—Look, I came to you for help. This is something I don’t understand, something I can’t cope with.”

  “Yes.” Tor-Esh moved to the window, dark in the thickness of the wall. “Have you thought of the canal? Not only this one, but the many canals that bind Mars in a great net. Have you thought how they must have been built? The machines, the tremendous power that would have been needed, to make a dying world live yet a little longer. We are the children of the men who conceived and built them, and yet nothing is left to us but the end product of their work, and we must grub with our hands in the channel, digging out the blown sand.”

  “I know,” said Fraser impatiently. “I’ve studied Martian history. But what—”

  “Many centuries,” said Tor-Esh, as though he had not heard. “Nations and empires, wars and pestilences, and kings beyond the counting. Learning. Science. Growth and splendor, and weariness, and decay. Oceans have rolled away into dust, the mountains have fallen down, and the sources of power are used up. Can you conceive, you who come from a young world, how many races have evolved on Mars?”