They climbed up the tall Terraces and came to the open shaft.
“We will remove the rest of the volcanic dust and crust from about them,” Fairbridge said. “And when old Beta Sun comes up, we can get a good look at them.”
“Oh, this is fine enough light for it,” Lisetta said. “Aren't they nice people, though. So friendly. We will get acquainted with them before the brighter light is on them. It's best to become acquainted with good people in dim light first, especially when they've been through an odd experience. Then they'll brighten up with the light.”
There were twelve of the people there, twelve adults. They were seated, apparently, on stone benches around a stone table. The details would be known when the rest of the volcanic dust had been cleared away and when Beta Sun was risen. The twelve were got up in a gala and festive way. They had sat eating and drinking when it came over them, but they had not been taken by surprise. It was a selective volcanic thrust that had covered them. It came only onto the Terraces that had become a shoulder of the volcano. The people needn't have been there; and they needn't have sat and waited while it covered them. The surrounding plains hadn't been covered by the volcanic thrust.
“Why, they're pleasantly dead, and not at all decayed,” Lisetta cried. “They are really such nice people. Don't they seem so to the rest of you? There is something almost familiar about a few of them — as if I had met them before.”
“How long?” Fairbridge asked Hilary Brindlesby.
“Two years, maybe. They haven't been dead longer than that.”
“You're crazy, Hilary. You are the tissue man of this party. Take tissue samples.”
“I will, of course. But they've been dead for about two years.”
“Then they were alive here when the Whiteoak party was here.”
“Likely.”
“They why didn't Commander Harry Whiteoak mention them?”
“Whiteoak was one of those, Fairbridge, who used the phrase ‘You'd never believe it,’ ” Rushmore Planda cut in. “Maybe he figured that covered it all.”
“But who are they?” Fairbridge persisted. “Every person of every expedition has been accounted for. These are our own sort of people, but they aren't people of the Whiteoak party. I've met all the Whiteoaks, and all came back.”
“Aren't they of the Whiteoak party, Fairbridge?” Blase asked with an air of discovery. “You'd better pray that the light doesn't get any better, man. You're near spooked now. There's a couple of ghosts there: an ear, a brow, a jaw slope. And that lady there, isn't she a little like another lady we met, enough like her to be a sister or daughter? I tell you that there are strong resemblances to several of the Whiteoak people here.”
“You're crazy. The Whiteoaks were here for only six standard months. If they met these mysterious people, why didn't they give an account of it?”
They didn't do much more with it till daylight. They moved some of the volcanic filler and uncovered to a little more depth.
“Can you prop under this level and leave these people here, and then excavate the layer under them?” Lisetta Kerwin asked.
“We can, but why?” Fairbridge inquired. Fairbridge was jumpy. He didn't seem to appreciate how nice it was to come onto such a nice group of people.
“Oh, I think that these people picked a spot that had been picked time and time again before them.”
Along about daylight, Judy Brindlesby and Erma Planda, with a variety of noises, came up to the other on the Terraces. “Folks, are we ever sick!” Judy sounded out. “I'm sicker than Erma, though. I go further into things than she does. Don't you wish you were sick the way we are, Lisetta?”
“But I am, I am,” Lisetta said, “and it didn't take me all night to find it out. It's fun, isn't it?”
“Sure it is. I never had so much fun being sick in my life.” And Judy retched funfully.
It was a little unusual that all three ladies should show the first signs of pregnancy at the same time. It was odd that they should all have morning sickness. Oddest of all was their being so delighted with their sickness. There was something about World Abounding that seemed to make all experience, even nausea, a happy experience. And the dead people in the Terraces—
“They are the happiest-looking dead people I ever did see,” Erma Planda declared. “I will have to know what they are so happy about. They would tell me if I had the proper ears to listen. It's hard to hear when it comes to you that way. What, dear? What are you saying?”
“I wasn't saying anything, Erma,” Rushmore told her.
“Wasn't talking to you, Rushmore,” Erma said with a flick of her golden body. “What, dear? I can't quite make it out.” And Erma Planda thumped her body as if to get better reception.
“Your ears aren't in your belly, Erma,” Rushmore reminded her.
“Oh well, maybe some of them are. No, I just get it a little at a time what they are so happy about.”
The happy dead people had been preserved by the volcanic fill, and perhaps by the essence Gorgos or some other substance of World Abounding. They didn't feel dead. They were rather waxy to the touch; they were about as warm as the air, and they hadn't any clamminess; there was even a slight resiliency to them which is usually a property of live flesh and not of dead flesh. They were clad in the light native garments of World Abounding. They were, in some manner hard to reconcile, kindred to the members of the Whiteoak expedition. They were beautiful and mysterious people, but they didn't mean to be mysterious. They'd have told you anything you wanted to know if only proper accord might be established between dead tongue and live ear. But was there not something a little bit too glib about the impressions that all these new explorers received from the dead folks? Yes, a little too glib here and there, but how could anyone be blamed for that?
“Just a minute, nevertheless,” Lisetta Kerwin was saying both to the dead people and to the live. “We all say, or we all think, that you, our good friends here, are clad in the light native garments of World Abounding. Our good commander, Fairbridge, in fact, has just scribbled those very words in his notebook. But how did we know what the light native garments of World Abounding should look like since we never saw any of them before? And since there has never been, for the record, any human native on World Abounding, never been any human being born here, hasn't this all a fishy smell? Or has it? For I recall now that the fish of World Abounding have a pleasant fruity smell. Well, take your time, folks. Being dead, you are in no hurry, and I am not; but tell us about it when you get to it.”
They sank a second shaft beside the first. They ran reinforcing timbers under the place of the pleasant dead people so that they would not be disturbed or collapsed. Then they dug the second shaft down through the volcanic fill to the next level of vegetation. There was an unexpected thing: it had been dug before. They were excavating an old excavation.
They cleared the space below the dead people (and it showed every sign of having been cleared before); they came, as they had weirdly known that they must come to such, to another clutch of dead people. They had been expecting just that, but they were stunned by it even more than by the first discovery or first report.
“How many times, do you think?” Fairbridge asked them all in real wonder.
“I guess twenty-two times,” Hilary squinted. “There are, in all, twenty-two levels to the Terraces.”
“Would a colossal joker, a demonical joker, a supernal joker, a godly joker, even an ungodly joker pull the same joke twenty-two times in a row? Wouldn't it begin to pall even on him after twenty-two times of it?”
“Not a bit of it,” Erma said. “Whoever he is, he still thinks thunder is funny, and he's pulled the thunder joke billions and billions of times. And he laughs every time. Listen for the giggle sometimes; it comes around the edge of every thunder.”
Slight differences only this time. The dead people of the second level numbered eleven adults. They had been dead a little longer than the first, but they hadn't been dead for more than four
or five years. They were as well-preserved and as happy-seeming as the upper gentry. They added a bit to the mystery.
Fairbridge and his folks and his excavators continued to excavate, about one level a day. All the shafts that they dug now had already been dug out several times before. At the fifth level down they came to the tip of the spire or steeple that John Chancel had built as monument on the plain between the volcano and the river. They knew that it was older than the Terraces, that it went all the way down to the flat land; they also knew that it was only fifty years old.
There were sixteen of the gracious and pleasantly dead people on this level. They had made a circular stone table around the tip of the spire where it came through the lower Terrace. They had wined and dined themselves there while they waited for the volcano named Merciful to cover them up. But who were these people, so beautiful and so pleasant and so dead, arranged on levels several years apart?
“The mystery gets deeper all the time,” Fairbridge said weightily.
“Yes, it gets about three meters deeper every day,” Hilary grinned. “Anybody got any strange stories to add to this?”
“Yes, I've a strange one,” Judy told them. “I know that it seems pretty short notice, and I had no idea that it could be so far along, and I'm sure that it's completely impossible, but my time is upon me right now.”
They all gaped at her.
“I said Right Now, Hilary,” Judy told her husband in an almost tight voice, “and I mean right now.”
Well, Judy was large (though shapely and graceful as a hovercraft), and the issue would apparently be quite small. But all of them had scientific eyes, trained to notice things large and small, and none of them had noticed that it would be so soon with Judy. There was no trouble, of course. Hilary himself was a doctor. So was Blase. So, come to think of it, was Lisetta Kerwin. But Lisetta herself was feeling a bit imminent.
No trouble, though. On World Abounding everything happens easily and pleasantly and naturally. Judy Brindlesby, easily and pleasantly, gave birth to a very small girl.
Well, it was less ugly then most babies, less a red lump and more of a formed thing. And quite small. There was a spate of words from all of them, but no words could convey the unusual formliness of the very little girl.
“She is really pretty, and I never thought I'd say that about a baby, even my own,” Hilary bleated proudly. “She is so small and so perfect. She is the least lass I ever saw.”
“She is wonderful, she is beautiful, there has never been anyone like her,” Judy was chanting in ecstasy, “She is perfect, she shines like a star, she sparkles like an ocean, she is the most enchanting ever, she is—”
“Oh, cool it, mother, cool it,” the Least Lass said.
2
Fairbridge Exendine reacted in absolute horror to this, and he remained in a state of horrified rejection. The others, however, accepted it pretty gracefully. Explanations were called for, of course. Well then, let us seek the explanations. “There has to be an answer to the Case of the Precocious Little Girl,” Rushmore said. “Does anyone have an answer?”
“She's yours, Judy,” Erma said. “You tell us if we heard what we thought we heard.”
“Oh, I thought she talked quite plain enough, and I'm sure you heard what she said. But why should you ask me about it when she is right here? How did you learn to talk, dear?” Judy asked her little daughter, the Least Lass.
“Five days in the belly of a chatterbox and I shouldn't have learned talk?” the Least Lass asked with fine irony for one so young. So the explanation was simple enough: the little girl had learned to talk from her mother.
But Fairbridge Exendine was still gray-faced with horror. And she didn't belong to that singling at all. Why should he be so affected by this?
“Do you know that you are the first human child ever born on World Abounding?” Judy asked her child a little later.
“Oh, mother, I'm sure you're mistaken,” Least Lass said. “I was under the impression that I was the two hundred and first.”
“Can you walk?” Blase Kerwin asked the little girl a little later yet. “Oh, I doubt it very much,” she said. “It will be a standard hour before I even attempt it. It may be a standard day before I do it perfectly.”
But Fairbridge Exendine had gone back to his digging now. He was in new horror of the mystery of the excavations, but he was still more in horror of the little girl.
Yet she was the prettiest child that anyone had ever seen — so far.
“Anything that we do is always anticlimactic to whatever Judy does,” Erma Planda said with mock complaint. Erma, with her golden body and her greater beauty, wasn't really jealous of Judy Brindlesby. Neither was Lisetta Kerwin, with her finer features and her quicker intelligence. Both knew that Judy would always anticipate them in everything. She had certainly done it in this, though by no more than a couple of hours.
“Well, it's surely a puzzle,” Rushmore Planda was talking pleasantly that day or the next. “We are all human persons. And the gestation period for humans is more than five days.” “Don't—don't talk about it,” Fairbridge stuttered. “Dig—dig, man.”
“Of course it's possible that the three conceptions took place nine months ago. That's the logical thing to believe, but a little illogic bug keeps croaking to me ‘You know better than that.’ And all three of the children say that they were in the bellies for only five days. There was certainly an extraordinary enlivening in all of us that first night here, except in you, Fairbridge.”
“Don't—damn—talk about it. Dig—damn—dig.”
“This is a miracle world, of course, and it is full of miracle substances. Nevertheless, I believe that the Miracle Master is a little grotesque in this trick. I love my own small son beyond telling, yet I feel that there is something in him that is not of myself and is not of Erma. Part of his parentage is World Abounding.”
“Don't—don't talk crazy. None—none of this has happened. Dig—dig, man.”
There was never a more frightened, more nervous man than Fairbridge. He buried himself in the digging work to get away from it; he'd buried himself nearly forty-five meters deep in the excavating work by this time. Oh, that man was edgy!
“I imagine that the same thing happens on Gaea,” Rushmore was rambling on. “We were, for most of the centuries, so close to it that we couldn't see that the planet was the third parent in every conception. We saw it only a little when we came to Camiroi and Dahae and Analos: a twenty-day shorter gestation period in the one case, a twelve-day longer one in another. We were a long time guessing that there is no such thing as biology without environment. But who could have guessed that World Abounding would be so extreme?”
“Don't—don't talk about it,” Fairbridge begged. “Thirty days, dam—dammit, and four—fourteen of them gone already. Dig, dig.”
“What thirty days, Fairbridge? Is there a thirty-day period mentioned of our expedition? I don't know of it. Fairbridge, man, you only dig because you're afraid to wonder. Whoever saw children grow so much in nine days? But then there are trees here that grow twenty meters high in one day. And look at the way the hair grows on Judy Brindlesby, and she a human! Not that the children aren't human, not that they aren't even two-thirds earth-human.
“Fairbridge, those are the three smartest children that anybody ever saw. When I was their age (oh, damn, I don't mean nine days old, I mean their apparent age of nine or ten years old), when I was their age I wasn't anything like as sharp as they are, and I was rated smart. And who ever saw such handsome people anywhere? They're on a par with the dead people here in the Terraces. Do you believe that they're of the same genesis?”
“D—dig, man, or drop dead, but don't—don't talk about it. It isn't there. It hasn't happened.”
“Erma thinks that the children have rapport with the dead people here in the Terraces. After all, they are one-third blood kindred. They all have one common parent, World Abounding. Erma also thinks that all three children are coming to
their puberty period now. She believes that the pubescent manifestations here will be much stronger, much more purposive, much more communal than anything on Gaea or Camiroi or Dahae. The useless and vestigial poltergeistic manifestations of Gaea-Earth will not compare with them at all, she believes. Was there ever such frustrating failure in communicating as the whole poltergeist business?
“Erma believes that the manifestations here will go even beyond the three-angel paradoxes of the pubescents on Kentauron-Mikron. And why should these things not go beyond? We had premonitions of such wonderful weirdnesses even on our own world. My mate Erma believes that these puberty insights (the volcano is a part and person of these insights) will begin very soon. Two more days; three at the most.”
“D—dig, man. Don't—don't think.”
Coming of age on World Abounding is a closed subject. It is not closed in the sense of being all secret or restricted, but in being a thing closed upon itself. From its very beginning it is conscious of its resolution.
Least Lass Brindlesby, Heros Planda, and Kora Kerwin were paradoxical children. It seems foolish to speak of relaxed intensity, of foolish sagacity, of placid hysteria, of happy morbidity, of lively death-desire. The children had all these qualities and others just as contradictory. They were at all times in close wordless communication with their parents and with all other persons present, and they were at the same time total aliens. The children were puzzling, but they themselves certainly weren't puzzled: they were always quite clear as to their own aims and activities. They had no more doubt of their direction than the arc of a circle has.
Lisetta Kerwin worried a little that she might have a retarded daughter. It was not that the girl was slow about things, just that she was different about things. Should a nineteen-day-old girl be called retarded because she dislikes reading? Kora could read, most of the time. Whenever her intuitions cocked their ears with a little interest she could go right to the heart of any text. But mostly all three of the children disliked the reading business.
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 120
