by John Boyd
“Then you hibernate, your faculties grow dormant.”
“Our faculties cease altogether,” she said. “We die. At the speed of light, we become light. The ship flies itself from star to star, and whenever a star swings near, the ship slows, the star’s light awakens us, and we scan its solar system for habitable planets. After liftoff the ship powers itself with free hydrogen from space, but even so our fuel decays, and we need its energy for landings and liftoffs.”
She stepped into the concavity around the manhole cover and he followed, getting his back to Myra.
“We’re standing above the engine room,” Kyra said.
“The ramp elevated us only a few feet above the base,” he commented. “It doesn’t seem possible for such a small engine to lift such a mass.”
“There’s much volume here, Breedlove, but little weight. The ship’s walls are thin so as to admit the light that feeds us. The walls are thin and very strong. Here’s the power plant.”
Bending, she twisted the inset handle in the manhole cover, lifted the cover, and handed it to him. “Feel how light it is.”
He hefted the cover in his hand, saying, “On earth we could use this for a toy called a Frisbee.”
“It pleases me that you can think of such things, Breedlove, for it shows you have presence of mind. But this may surprise you. Here is our entire power plant.”
She squatted on the rim of the hole, and he stooped beside her. Inside he saw a four-spoked wheel with a plastic ball in the center. Between the spokes were four flasks with tubes leading to the ball and coiling around the tube in which the ball rested. Below the entire assemblage, but considerably deeper than ten feet, he saw the roots of trees. The ship had dug down and was resting in its own excavation.
“It’s magic,” he said.
“Actually it’s simple. Any technology is magic to a nontechnician. The wheel spins to stabilize the ship, superheated steam is vented against the ground to give the initial liftoff, and the heat comes from the fuel in the ball. Of course, the power of the steam is amplified by the forcer tubes there, which are pulsed by concentrated radioactive emissions.”
“Steam? Just steam?”
“It’s not just steam. You might call this a staser. You know what force a laser gives to light quanta. Imagine the force this gives to heavy atoms of oxygen and hydrogen. It’s quite adequate for liftoff, and the force is not needed in a free fall.”
She bent to unscrew the top hemisphere of the central ball, while continuing a casual lecture that was exploding new concepts into his untutored mind.
“Once we’re under way, the hydrogen scoops bring fuel to the ball, which is ionized into a constant thrust that impels the ship into the speed of light. At that point, for us, time stands still, and that’s why I’m younger than you are, Breedlove, although I was born thousands of years ago.”
Inside the ball she unscrewed, in a maze of silvery pipes, nested a smaller ball, its dimensions between those of a tennis ball and a grapefruit. She lifted it aloft and said, “This is the core shield. With it, you could carry drops of liquid sun in your pocket.”
She unscrewed the two halves of the ball and showed him a residue of grayish ash. “Once, if you had looked at this without protection, the results would have been more devastating than looking at Myra. Now, it’s harmless and useless.”
She spilled the ash through the spokes to the ground below and screwed the halves back together, holding aloft the small pink ball. “This is all the shield I’ll need for my uranium.”
She handed it to him to hold while she reinserted the manhole cover.
Tossing the ball in his palm, Breedlove said, “You’d better make yourself a woman’s shoulder bag to carry this in or the first child who sees it might make off with your pretty pink ball. And we have another problem. I can attest to what you’ve shown and told me, but I’ll not be able to explain anything when the technical people start asking questions. They’ll never believe us.”
Straightening, she said, “You believe me.”
“Yes, but I trust you.”
“And why do you trust me?”
She spoke in the manner of a schoolteacher probing the knowledge of her star pupil, and he groped for an answer to a suddenly difficult question. Finding none, he seized on a playful ambiguity. “Because you’re so cute.”
She had watched him seek an answer and she laughed at his evasion, but before he spoke he saw a premonitory play of mirth in her eyes. Again he had the impression that she interpreted his words before he voiced them. If she could read his mind, he thought, she had advanced beyond any conceivable level of mere technology.
“Breedlove, you are ‘they.’ If you believe me, they will also. I’ll reveal enough to your technicians to persuade them I speak the truth, but no more. Knowledge acquired too soon can be dangerous. What I say is no reflection on you as a person. Your native intelligence is as great as mine. It is simply that I am more informed on methods. I can tell from your sun that your race is newly born, and adults have to protect children from their own folly. Now, what is a shoulder bag?”
He explained with gestures. Listening, she nodded, and asked, “Is pink a fashionable color?”
“I suppose so.”
“I must make me a shoulder bag while you survey the trout population of Jones Creek.”
“Will you join me for lunch at midday?”
“No, the sunlight feeds me, but we will all join you at twilight. Now begone, or I’ll set Myra on you.”
She was laughing as she spoke, ushering him toward the door, but even her playful mention of the sentry made him emerge from the spaceship with a feeling of relief.
Later, as he fished along the creek, Breedlove’s mind entertained the implications of Kyra’s arrival. In the past winter he had read the works of Father Teilhard de Chardin, and it occurred to him that this visitor to earth supported the Jesuit’s hypothesis that mankind was evolving toward the Godhead. Her similarity to the human species indicated that the logic of evolution for higher species was cosmic, and it was benign, that her race had survived the ultimate holocaust, the death of its planet, testified that her fellow mortals of earth held within themselves the key to practical immortality. Kyra synthesized religion and science.
Gradually he forced himself to grapple with the practical problems her appearance and her request for uranium would create. He foresaw no mass hysteria arising from the visit of such an appealing space pilgrim, but if her presence became publicly known, her progress would become as dignified as a traveling freak show, and he wanted his fellow human beings to be on their best behavior for this girl—he could not think of her as other than a girl—who combined regality with such airy grace.
Peterson would have to be informed of her presence because the chief ranger was the station’s helicopter pilot. Peterson would see the reason for flying the girl to the Breedlove farm, near Spokane, and concealing her there. Once at the farm Kyra could borrow dresses from his sister, and his mother could find a wig to conceal her green hair.
He had misgivings about turning her over to the officials with a “take her, she’s yours.” Kyra trusted him. She had enlisted his aid, and she would need him to verify her story. Thinking the matter over, he saw instantly that no written deposition given by a man who lacked scientific credentials could begin to bridge this potential credibility gap, and that fact presented an opportunity. By insisting on oral reports only, he could let his sincerity be his credentials, and the need for his testimony would keep him close to Kyra.
He would not abandon her to officialdom.
His determination to stay by Kyra’s side would probably be opposed by the bureaucrats, but he was a minor bureaucrat himself, and an idea was forming in his mind that might test the limits of bureaucratic procedures to the breaking point. If he could pull if off, he would stay with Kyra. Then there was the problem of his parents’ reaction to Kyra. In what he assumed was the norm for mothers, his own mother had always been intense
ly interested in the girls he invited to his home, but she might have more than she could handle when a green-haired, green-eyed girl from another planet entered the Breedlove parlor. He had less concern for his father. With two volatile females in the house, the senior Breedlove had long ago learned the value of equanimity in emotional situations. He had no concern at all for the reactions of his sister, Matilda,—she could handle anything.
As the day moved on, he let future problems hang and turned his thoughts to the exhibition he would prepare for the visitors who would join him at twilight. He would catch enough fish to feed them all, unpack his bag, set up a pup tent, and present them with the extra C rations he had brought. A hatchet, a fishing rod, and a pair of binoculars would not be the World’s Fair, but it would give the Kanabians the idea of woodcraft.
By six the fish were caught and the exhibition readied. Stretched atop his sleeping bag, he lay watching the declining light over the snow peaks westward. The Kanabians were out of the grove and crossing the creek before he noticed them, approaching in a cluster grouped around Kyra. In the forefront was a girl who might have been Kyra’s sister, though slightly taller and more slender. There were nine of them, eight females and a boy, all nude. Only Myra was absent, and Breedlove assumed that she had been left to guard the door. Or perhaps Kyra was being very diplomatic.
Breedlove took the boy to be the equivalent of a twelve-year-old on earth. Solidly built, his body gave promise of a powerful manhood, and he walked between two females, who held his hands rather tightly, Breedlove noticed. None of the females appeared to be over thirty, earth age, and they presented a wider variance in bodily form than an equivalent group of young earth women. The girl who was taller than Kyra was almost breastless, but most were heavy-bodied, and three thrust voluminous bosoms before them, breasts out of proportion to their torsos.
He stood as they neared the mound and called, “Citizens of Kanab, welcome to earth.”
Kyra interpreted his greeting. In her language, “earth” emerged as urritha.
Ignoring the exhibits, the females broke from around Kyra, leaving her to hold the boy’s hand, and gathered around Breedlove, moving in close to inspect him. It was a thorough inspection, at times embarrassing, yet weirdly sexless. There was nothing voluptuous in the press of these naked female bodies. They pummeled his buttocks, kneaded his muscles, and stroked his hair. Only the tall girl did not seem to regard him entirely as an object. She took his hand and rubbed it against her cheek, murmuring close to his ear, “Cricket atelya.”
Escorting the boy around the milling females to the inanimate exhibit, Kyra smiled in amusement at the orgy of touching and sniffing and called out to him, “Take off your coat, Breedlove, and let them feel your fantastic muscles.”
He squirmed from his coat and handed it to the tall girl, who folded it in her arms and brushed her cheek against its fabric. Others pinched him. One tried to pluck the hairs from his wrists, but there was nothing essentially feminine about their curiosity. In their faces he read admiration, delight, and—he could have sworn—the premonitory pride of ownership.
Kyra voiced their possessiveness, calling to him, “They want to take you with us, Breedlove, but first they’d like to see you with your clothes off.”
“I’ve gone as far as I’m going, Kyra. Call them back.”
Kyra spoke once, sharply, and the females fell away reluctantly, moving toward the exhibits. The slender girl returned the coat, bending her knees in a dipping motion, in what he took to be a Kanabian curtsy, as she handed the garment to him. For a moment she stood facing him, hand on hips, and delivered her parting judgment, “Cricket atelya.”
Kyra stood apart on the mound, her arm over the shoulder of the boy. With obvious understanding of their purpose, the boy had taken Breedlove’s field glasses and was intently studying the rocky terrain to the southeast. The presence of the boy in the group aroused Breedlove’s curiosity. A well-muscled man would have contributed more to the expedition, however sophisticated its technology.
He walked over to the pair and asked Kyra, “What’s his name?”
“Karilet, which means ‘big oak.’ Usually we call him Crick.”
Et at the end of a word apparently meant “big,” he deduced, and the women had called him a Cricket. Whatever it was, he was a big Crick.
“What does Crick mean?”
“In a general way it means ‘boy,’ or ‘little man.’ In your scientific language it might mean more accurately a sperm bank.”
In their language, then, he was a big sperm bank. The term was dehumanizing.
“What does atelya mean?”
“ ‘Gorgeous,’ or ‘fantastic,’ or ‘wow.’ ”
Then the inspection had not been as objective as he thought, he decided, looking at the boy now with an understanding of the child’s future function in the group.
“Introduce me to him, Kyra.”
Kyra took the binoculars from the boy’s hands and turned his face to Breedlove, introducing the ranger as urritha cricket Brreeedlove. In an instinctively male gesture, Breedlove extended his hand to the boy, who grabbed it in both his own and clung to it, looking up at Breedlove with a beginning hope, a longing, and finally a stark plea.
“He needs a father, Kyra. May I show him how to fish before sundown?”
“No. He must stay close to us.”
The boy continued to cling to Breedlove’s hand, and the ranger was loathe to disengage the child. Kyra called over to the tall girl, “Flurea,” and the girl came. She tapped Crick’s wrist, and he released Breedlove’s hand. Flurea led him away.
Despite their meticulous cropping of the grass, the Kanabians were not herbivores. With delicate mincing bites they ate the trout he cooked, bones and all, flavoring it with sprigs of clover they plucked from the ground. They relished the cheese, jams, and jellies they found in the C rations. They only tasted the canned meat and gave Crick all the chocolate bars, which he loved, but they only tossed the candy casually toward the boy. He was watched, but he was not doted on.
After supper he gave them, through Kyra as interpreter, the standard park lecture on the geological formation of the area. They listened but asked no questions. Afterward he commented to Kyra about their lack of curiosity, at such a variance with her own, and she answered, “It is not their function to be curious. Besides, this is your planet, and they have the pride of the hungry poor who will not ogle diners at a feast to which they have not been invited.”
The pathos inherent in her remark so stirred him he veered away from the subject to ask bluntly, “And what is your function?”
“At the moment,” she said, “I function as a diplomat.”
Her reference to the function of each individual and the disparity in their shapes were altering his attitudes about evolution on Kanab. It had gone beyond earth evolution in producing differentiation and specialization. Or at least beyond the evolution of man and animals, he corrected himself. Such functional specialization did exist in some insect colonies on earth. Still, these people were far from being termites, and in time, perhaps, the social evolution of mankind would take a similar turn. There were signs of it already.
As twilight approached, the Kanabians sat in a circle atop the mound, clipping the grass with their fingernails and munching it as each in turn told a story. Without knowledge of the language, Breedlove was able to catch the moods of the speakers in the susurrations of their voices, which assumed the quality of the twilight, a wavering, evanescent ephemerality distilling the sadness of farewells. Seated beside Breedlove, Kyra whispered interpretations.
“The limbs of our trees grew long, writhing, with fronded tips imploring the sun to live. The tree trunks molded. Fungus grew. Our days were long twilights and our nights brittle with frost.”
He had never felt himself particularly gifted with a visual imagination, but under the spell of the voices he could literally see the Rousseau-like landscape of the dying planet.
Another voice sent
an iron clang of determination ringing through its melancholy. “Our great, green mother was dying, the cold ordered us to go, but the little mothers came with us to spread the web of life from star to star. Now we have seen magnificent earth with its promise of planets awaiting us, and we have touched the warm Breedlove, whose blood flows red as ours.”
As each skald recited her version of the Kanabian saga, a listener might quietly detach herself from the circle and go into the bushes briefly to attend to natural functions, but otherwise each speaker received the rapt attention of minds which, it was growing clear to Breedlove, shared with human beings the ability to feel loneliness and sadness, the terrors of the void and the wanderer’s longing for home. Yet each speaker ended on a note of affirmation, a reverence for life, and a faith that the wayfarers would survive. Atelya urritha was a promise to their faith and perhaps—as he soon surmised—more than a promise.
A group sing marked the finale of the ceremony. Kyra invited him to join hands with them for this ritual, saying, “I can’t sing and interpret too, but if you listen closely you may grasp the meaning of some words from their sounds.”
After the singing began, Breedlove had no need for an interpreter, Kanabian was indeed uniquely onomatopoetic. The song, apparently an Edda of sorts, narrated the tale of the group’s exodus, and he could recognize the rising, then long-diminishing roar of a departing spaceship. Fluting vibrations from deep within the throats of the singers projected a sensation of blurring speed which grew into a sibilant keening, like a scream in the night, that conveyed the horror felt by sentient creatures hurled into darkness at fantastic accelerations they had not been created to endure.
He could not pinpoint when his understanding began, but at some time on the flight outward he became certain of the accuracy of the images he elicited from the melodious chant and aware, too, that his mind was opening into new dimensions. He felt the awesome loneliness of interstellar darkness, felt the slow awakening to the light of his own sun, saw the blue orb of Planet Earth, and swung in tightening orbits around the globe that had given him birth. His mind descended to the majesty of mountains, verdure, and running water.
