Capella's Golden Eyes

by Christopher Evans

  About a month after our arrival, however, tragedy struck. Alma, Junith and I, returning late one afternoon from a fishing expedition, arrived back at the cabin to find that Tomas was dead. Eilan had been away for most of the afternoon, hewing the thick savannah grass which she was weaving into carpets. Tomas had taken a knife from the kitchen and slit his throat. Eilan had found him lying in a pool of caking blood against the rear wall of the cabin; he had been dead for over an hour.

  We had all been aware of how deeply his blindness had affected him and initially we had endeavoured to ensure that someone was with him at all times. But Tomas had grown as weary of this stricture as we, and had asked to be allowed to spend some time on his own. We had agreed, assuming that it was the first sign of his recovery from the trauma. It had proved a fatal mistake.

  Eilan maintained a fragile composure as she greeted us with the news. Tomas’s body lay in the shadows beside the pool, covered with a brown woollen blanket. A cloud of flies had found it, and none of us was able to summon the courage to step forward and draw back the blanket from the face.

  That evening we constructed a rough bier and in the morning we carried the body out to the foil. Nobody spoke as we made our lugubrious voyage out into deep waters; we committed the body to the ocean without ceremony or speech. Our silence was a small measure of the common guilt we felt.

  Another month passed. We used the foil to explore the other islands of the archipelago, carefully charting their positions and contours until we had eventually built up quite a comprehensive map. Of course charts more accurate than ours existed on the mainland but that did not deter us—they had been obtained from an orbiting spacecraft whereas we were working in the spirit of the ancient mariners of Earth. If we had been forced into exile, well, then, we would make our exile an adventure.

  The other islands were much like our own, save for the larger ones which held a greater variety of plant and animal life. We encountered a relative of the tree-crawling primate which inhabited our island, this species less hairy and predominantly land-based. These creatures, discovered by earlier explorers and christened homuncules, had been the basis of much speculation on the mainland; some anthropologists felt that they were the precursors of intelligent indigenous life, while others argued that the planet lacked sufficient land-mass for the evolution of man-like creatures. Still others claimed that all Gaian life-forms were originally extrinsic to the planet and had been brought here by the M’threnni. Gaia had been a virgin planet, they said, until impregnated by alien seed. The homuncules were a timid, nervous species who darted through the savannah, semi-erect, in groups of up to twenty. They ate berries and seeds, and showed no sign that they possessed anything beyond the most rudimentary intelligence. Soon after their discovery several specimens had been brought back to the mainland but had died within months of their instalment in Helixport Zoo.

  On the whole we adapted well to island life and I must admit that for me it was as happy a period as I had ever spent. Forced to provide for our most basic needs, our lives became determined by expediency and whim, a refreshing contrast to the ritual demands of city-life. I grew a beard and let my hair go untrimmed. Most days, when we had sufficient firewood and food in store, I wandered around the island or went swimming or took a rowing boat out on an aimless voyage. Eilan and Alma, too, spent most of their time outdoors, but Junith, strange Junith, seldom emerged from the cabin. She would sit for hours with her pet bird, fondling and petting it, and constantly feeding it scraps of food until it grew grossly fat. Occasionally she would go out to the foil to check on the progress of the incoming starship but she rarely spoke of her findings unless directly asked, and even then she would seldom say more than: “It’s still on its way.”

  The weather remained good throughout our first two months on the island, a succession of bright, cloudless days. One afternoon, however, I was returning from the interior of the island when I noticed that clouds were massing in the east. A light wind soon sprang up, quickly ripening into a gale. As I hurried through the forest I could hear large drops of rain splattering the leafy canopy overhead and by the time I had reached the cabin the rain had increased to a downpour and the wind was still rising.

  Eilan and Alma had gone off to investigate a hot-water spring on one of the larger islands, Junith sat in the living-room beside a hissing fire, her bird asleep on the hearth. She did not greet me as I entered the cabin, nor did she show a flicker of interest as I stripped off my sodden clothes, rubbed myself down, and donned a fresh pair of shorts. I added more wood to the fire and put some water on to heat, dropping a handful of berries into it to provide a flavour (we had used up all our tea, one luxury that I really missed).

  The wind was gusting through the cabin with considerable ferocity so I put up the shutters which we had prepared for such an emergency; but some of the firewood must have been green, for now acrid smoke billowed into the cabin. I extinguished the fire, filled a mug with the tepid berry-juice and sat down on my rickety but serviceable stool. After some minutes water began to drip on my shoulder, I looked up; the roof was leaking badly in several places. The bird awoke and began waddling around the room, showing increasing signs of agitation. As the wind continued to rise the walls of the cabin began to sway.

  Junith looked at me with unspoken alarm.

  “I think we had better—” I began, but never finished, for suddenly there was a great slurping sound and I was knocked to the floor under a weight of water, branches and leaves.

  Slowly I disentangled myself, wincing as broken twigs bit into my flesh, and got to my feet. Junith was also up, scraping mud and leaves from her body. The four walls of the cabin were in violent motion, oscillating with the gale, and the door, its latch broken, battered itself against the jamb. Hurriedly I took Junith’s arm and we ran but of the cabin and up the incline to the cave. Scarcely had we reached it than the entire cabin was torn from its foundations by the wind, the corner-posts snapping, the walls parting from one another, the individual logs splitting apart to be carried down the hillside, tumbling and bouncing in a frenzy of motion.

  Junith and I cowered in the cave, watching the storm vent its anger on the island. The trees buckled into arcs under its onslaught, grasses and shrubs prostrated themselves, the very ground shivered. A bright vein flashed in the skies and thunder rolled in from afar. Junith dung to me, her hair matted to her face, her tunic stuck to her body like a second skin. We had moved as far inside the cave as we could; here the rain did not penetrate and there was a residual warmth from the earlier half of the day. Junith’s bird, its feathers in wet dishevelment, came waddling into the cave and hid in a cranny. Junith buried her head in my chest while I gazed dully out at the unrelenting violence of the gale. I began to stroke her hair, to clasp her closer to me.

  Our island life had been celibate up to now. Tomas had been too morose over his blindness to engage in any coupling, and I had not sought, or been sought, as a bed-partner. Eilan was old enough to have rescinded the pleasures of the flesh some time ago, while Alma was almost twice my age and inspired no lust in me (besides, I respected her liaison with Wolther, irrespective of the possibility that he was dead). This left Junith, whom I had desired in an abstract fashion on numerous occasions but had never approached because she radiated frigidity. But now circumstances had thrown us together and she seemed responsive to my touch.

  I lifted her head and kissed her on both cheeks, then ran my lips along the ridge of her jawbone. Although her mouth lolled open, she did nothing either to encourage or deter me; she seemed in a daze, almost unaware of me. I laid her flat and drew her tunic from her pale, thin body. She turned her head away while I undressed and stared out through the cave at the storm. She did not protest as I straddled her and began kissing her neck and breasts, and when I entered her she gave a short gasp, but that was all. She was barely moist, as though she felt that desire would only interfere with the mechanics of the act. It was a strange passionless coupling; not once did her
breathing quicken; not once did a murmur of pleasure issue from her throat; not once did she turn away from her glazed contemplation of the storm. When finally I was spent, it was with no sense of elation or completion, but with a feeling of shame. I felt as if I had raped her.

  The storm continued to rage, and after a while Junith fell asleep. By now my shame had transformed itself into a resentful anger at her indifference to my attentions; I felt slighted and demeaned. With a sudden resolve I leaned forward and gently eased Jax’s snake-ring from her thumb. I found my shorts and put the ring into one of the pockets.

  There was a smear of blood on my genitals, I saw, a smear duplicated on Junith’s thighs. At first I took it to be some kind of vaginal haemorrhage; but no, my penetration had not caused her pain, I was sure. Then I recalled a phrase used by many girls to describe their defloration at their majority ceremonies: they called it “the letting of the womb-blood”. Junith was a virgin.

  It was over four hours before the storm abated, and four more before Alma and Eilan returned. I had been worried that perhaps they had been taken unawares by the storm while at sea, but Alma was experienced in reading the weather and she had moored the foil in a leeward cove before the storm had reached the islands. That night we slept on board the foil, and the next day we set about rebuilding the cabin, this time setting it in the mouth of the cave where it would be better protected from future storms.

  The days bled into one another in an indolent, timeless succession. Since the storm, Junith seemed changed. She no longer confined herself to the cabin, but wandered all over the island, sometimes spending the night in the forest. She abandoned clothing, going everywhere naked, and soon she was as brown as the rest of us. As the months passed her body gradually ripened, her modest breasts increasing in size, the swell of her abdomen growing by degrees more pronounced. Alma and I were mystified by this transformation: was the forest working some strange metamorphosis on her? Although this was a ridiculous proposition, it was not easy to dismiss it lightly for by the end of the ninth month of our stay on the island the distension in her abdomen was so marked that it seemed as if she would eventually explode. One evening, while we sat around a fire outside the cabin, I asked her if she was well.

  She was sitting in a low-strung chair which I had constructed for her, the size of her belly having made it increasingly difficult for her to attain a position of comfort on the stools which we normally used. Her pet-bird, as always nestled in her lap, burbling gently under her attentions. She looked at me and said, as if surprised: “I’m quite well.”

  “But your stomach is—swollen.”

  “I am carrying a child within me.”

  Only Eilan looked unsurprised. She had kept her counsel while Alma and I had speculated on the changes in Junith’s physique; I believe she had a general fondness for being secretive.

  “How is this possible?” I asked.

  “It’s possible,” Eilan said, “because Junith never underwent the sterilization procedures designed to prevent both vaginal bleeding and the possibility of pregnancy. It’s a simple procedure—an injection administered at puberty which stops the release of ova and eliminates menstruation. Junith’s wardens were too busy with her education to pay any attention to her physical growth.”

  “I always felt ashamed because I bled,” Junith said. “For all my fine education my tutors never saw fit to teach me the basic facts about my body.”

  Which explained her coldness and reclusiveness, I thought. I tried to imagine what it would be like to feel that something as natural as, say, urinating was an unhealthy and inexplicable process. It was impossible to contemplate.

  “There have been other pregnancies in the past,” Eilan said. “On the South Bank, where people are sometimes lax in their duties towards their youth, a number of females have conceived over the past few cycles, though the embryos were all aborted before—”

  “My child will be born,” Junith said with a whispered vehemence.

  Eilan smiled. “I was not suggesting otherwise. Even if you did not want the baby, how could it be avoided? We are several thousand kilometres away from the nearest hospital; and in any case, your pregnancy is far too advanced to risk termination. Your child will be born.”

  My own reaction to this revelation was simply one of awed silence. The child growing within her had been fathered by me, but the very idea that it would be delivered from her body seemed totally preposterous and not a little repugnant. I knew that child-bearing had once been the norm among women on Earth but nonetheless it seemed a gruesome and insanitary means of propagating the human species.

  A further month passed, during which time Junith began to pay increasingly frequent visits to the foil to monitor the signals from the approaching Earth-ship. Alma and I would ferry her out in the rowing boat, treating her with extreme delicacy, as if the child inside her was as fragile as an egg. Since the announcement of her pregnancy she had become noticeably more friendly; the terrible burden of self-shame which had isolated her from other people had at last been lifted.

  One afternoon she returned from the foil with Alma, and I saw that both of them were smiling.

  “The ship’s decelerating!” Alma called.

  Eilan, who had just emerged from the cabin, put her hand on my arm and said: “I think it’s time we went home.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Ten days later we approached the harbour. The journey home had been uneventful apart from the progression of Junith’s pregnancy. The birth of her child was now imminent and we had all been hoping that she would not enter labour on the boat since none of us had any notion of what to do in such a situation. Thankfully the child remained obligingly within her womb throughout the voyage.

  A rising tide of anticipation had infected all of us as the days had passed and we had drawn closer and closer to the mainland. Whenever possible Alma had kept the engines under full power; we had been blessed with fine weather and had made good time. Two days out from shore we had begun to encounter other foils out on fishing expeditions but we had not attempted to contact them. We would sail, unannounced, into the harbour to meet whatever fate awaited us.

  Around mid-morning we moored at a central wharf in the bay. There were few people about; most of the trawler crews were out at sea, and those on shore were using the period of lull to take a siesta before the fleet returned at zenith. A few people from the city were wandering along the promenade as we disembarked but they paid us no attention, not even glancing twice at Junith. We crossed the street and began climbing Prospect Place.

  It was Spring, I realized. Our months on the island had gone by with no sense of the progression of the seasons. It occurred to me that there should be a new mayor in Helixport now; but Helmine had already secured a second term of office and if her stranglehold on the government was as strong as it had been when we had left I saw no reason why she should not still be installed in power.

  This speculation was given ominous credence when we reached the Alien Star, The restaurant was closed and its windows were shuttered. We stood on the opposite side of the road, debating whether we should knock on the door. Then suddenly a voice called: “Eilan!”

  A Napoleonic head was poking out through one of the windows above the restaurant. It vanished, and moments later the door was being opened and Roger was beckoning us in.

  “Where have you been?” he asked, hugging Eilan. “We searched everywhere for you. I had given you up for dead.”

  “Holidaying on the Antipodean Isles,” Eilan said. She told him of our sojourn on the island as he led us through the dining-area.

  The restaurant was a shell. All the fittings had been removed, the carpet rolled up along one wall, the chairs and tables stacked into one corner, We went down a narrow corridor and thence into a private room where Roger evidently resided. A long L-shaped sofa, black and sumptuously padded, ran the length of two walls, and we settled ourselves upon it while Roger went to his drinks cabinet and selected a crystal decanter fill
ed with a dark red liquid.

  “Grape-wine all right for everyone?” he asked.

  We all agreed that it would be eminently acceptable. Grapes did not grow well in our climate and could only be properly reared in hothouses; the wine was thus costly and highly prized.

  “So much has happened since you’ve been away,” Roger said, filling the glasses. “I don’t know where to start.”

  He handed out the drinks and took a seat on the corner of the sofa. He was obviously intrigued by Junith’s swollen midriff, but his propriety was stronger than his inquisitiveness and he did not comment on it.

  “Tomas?” he asked.

  “Dead,” Eilan said. “What of Wolther and Islor?”

  “Alive and well. They are presently out at sea fishing.”

  For the first time since we had reached the shore Alma visibly relaxed, a smile of pure relief forming on her face.

  Wolther and Islor had made a successful retreat from the Point after planting their explosives, Roger told us, but Islor (who was evidently a little dim-witted) had forgotten to withdraw his oar so that when they arrived back at the boat the oar was gone. After a frantic but fruitless search they had eventually cast off, but the single oar had made linear motion impossible. Every few strokes they had switched the oar to the opposite rowlock, describing a tortuous path from the shore. Their progress was slow and by the time they had made the rendezvous the foil was long gone. Weary and disconsolate, they had drifted with the current and had finally been cast up on a deserted beach some kilometres south of the Point. They had quickly vanished into the night and had eventually found their way back to the harbour where a friend of Roger’s had made provisions for hiding them.