by Joe Haldeman
The crabs were no smarter than they had to be. They stayed a few meters away while I was feeding, but when I was through with one, all I had to do was spring up, paddle sideways, and drift down on top of another. The females were best, with exquisitely sour egg cases.
Suddenly there was an explosion of pain behind the mandibles and I was jerked up away from my meal, rising faster and faster toward the surface of the sea. I was hooked! My claws found the line that was hauling me but couldn’t break it. All I could do was ease the pain by pulling back, so the barbs in the soft part of the jaw and tongue weren’t dragging all of my weight, but when I pulled, whoever was on the other end of the line jerked back.
I splashed out of the sea and onto a low flat raft. A thing twice my size but with six legs—no, four legs and two arms, one arm holding a huge club—scuttled toward me with obvious intent, while another one held the line taut. Their heads were insectoid and they had a chitinous exterior like mine, but wore boots and gloves and chains of gold and silver.
Suddenly the floating spider appeared between us, throwing out tentacles to hold itself fast to the raft, looking fragile as it bobbed in the random gusts of wind. The one with the club stopped and froze. The pink tendril floated toward me and lay across my back, then slapped a couple of times. It couldn’t make contact.
I was fading, fainting from the shock and pain—and then realized that in the confusion and panic I hadn’t breathed; I was still in the gill mode. The blowholes on my back sneezed open and I could feel the tendril slide in.
I was looking down at my bare human feet. Between them was a metal line that ended in a cluster of bloody hooks. I looked up just in time to see the two fishing creatures shriek in unison and jump off the raft. Unbalanced, the raft tilted and the cold sea splashed up between my legs—
And I was in absolute darkness, absolute silence. I tried to speak but there seemed to be no air in my lungs. I tried to feel for a pulse but there was no sense of where my hands were; neither could I feel whether the creature was still connected to me. There was no smell or taste, no sense of balance or imbalance, not even the feeling of having bone, muscle, and gut that still remains in VR when it’s set to null input.
Could I be dead? I asked the thing: Am I dead?
Nothing.
Perhaps it was giving me a chance to reflect on what I had been shown. Try to find a common thread. Antarctica and the center of the Earth were just demonstrations of its power. Then there was the dinosaur tribunal. John’s bed of pain. The transformation and hooking. Three situations about empathy, two of them also about judgment.
There was something there in the dark with me. Something large.
The spider thing was there, too. I couldn’t tell what they were doing.
I felt it enter my brain. This may be the last thing. Hold on to the rope very tightly A crude hairy rope several centimeters thick appeared in one hand. I grabbed it with both.
The darkness snapped off and I was blinded by a brilliant yellow glare from below. Gravity dragged me down and I clamped the rope between foot and ankle, wrapped it around a wrist. I swung wildly, sneezed, and coughed. The atmosphere was smoky, sulfurous with a tinge of chlorine or something.
Ten meters below me bubbled a river of molten rock, so hot it ran like syrup, bright yellow with scabs of black shot through with red. The pain on my bare soles was terrible; I could feel the skin burning, blisters swelling.
Sandra swung a few meters away, shrieking incoherently, a similar rope binding her wrists together. Younger and stronger, she pulled herself up into a gymnast’s ball, to get as much of her as far from the heat as possible, but her naked back and buttocks were angry red, blistering as I watched. Her hair started to smoke.
Hang on for twenty seconds and you will be spared. But your daughter will drop to her death. Let go and your daughter will live.
I screamed one word on the way down, maybe her name, and was surprised not to die instantly. It was blowtorch hot as I fell, but when I hit the river it was like fluid ice; I bobbed up once and saw the terrible ruin of my hands, flesh running in strings, smell of cooked meat in my throat, tried to scream but my mouth was melted closed.
They tell me that I reappeared in Dennison’s office just an instant after I had disappeared. At first, they weren’t even sure what sort of weird apparition I was, skinless, smoking—not even bipedal; my legs had fused together.
Doc Bishop saved my life with an emergency tracheotomy, slitting my throat with Dan’s knife and inserting a plastic drinking straw that was one of Dennison’s quirks. It would be some months before I could feel grateful for his action.
They could do emergency procedures on Epsilon, massive painkillers and fluid replacements. Surgeons came down from ’Home to install temporary plumbing to empty my bladder and bowels, and they set up a gel bath to keep gravity from killing me. Time crawled by in one long scream of pain.
By the time I had any sense of days passing, it was a month later and I was in ’Home’s zero-gee surgery, new skin being grafted on a patch at a time, eyes starting to work. Something like a face being constructed. My ears were just holes but they built convincing copies. ‘Home had a large file of cadavers to choose from, since crypto failures were not thrown away unless their will so specified.
Everything personal and feminine had to be rebuilt. My breasts had been seared off. Buttocks and the lips of my sex melted into seamless scar tissue. I actually came out of it looking a little better than before, breasts not sagging and a couple of kilograms less in the rear. I don’t think it will catch on as a beauty treatment, though.
Sandra was at my side all the time, as soon as her own treatment allowed her out of bed. She did experience those seconds of dangling terror, and intuited what I had done but didn’t know how it had happened. Me neither, kid. Once I had hands with skin, she held my hands and told me how well I was doing, made little jokes, kept me up on hospital gossip. There were no mirrors in my room, but from other people’s expressions I knew how dreadful I looked. Never from Sandra, though; nothing but chatty optimism and encouragement. I know what it cost her to look at me and smile, day after changeless day. I was proud that she was my daughter.
And I was proud of Evy, who had retired a month before, but came back on duty to shoo Sandra away and do the ugly and painful things that someone regularly had to do. The woman I never admitted hating when she was young became one I had to love when she was old.
For more than a hundred-day year, Daniel never came when he knew I was awake. Six times that I know of, he sat by my hammock in the darkness and wept. He and John were close as brothers and I know that daily confronting the disastrous wreck that John had become was grinding him down. And now this. His wife turned into a waxen monster. Later I found out that he had stopped drinking for the duration of my treatment, or until I died. That was both brave and smart of him.
After three hundred days they brought me a mirror and allowed me to be amazed at their handiwork. My face was like a scrupulously accurate sculpture, minus a few wrinkles and a mole. It felt a little like a mask, and not just from the slight physical awkwardness. They left the mirror with me and I stared at it for a long time before I realized what was wrong: we look at our own face and we don’t find just the features that anyone sees. We see a history reflected, joy and sorrow, love and loss. This face was missing the memory of one second of death agony and three years of necessary torture. Perhaps just as well.
Speaking of torture, my physical therapy increased, and month by month I moved down through quarter gee and half gee to where I could eventually be trusted to walk around on Epsilon and occasionally pick up something light. Dan and I resumed making love, and there were happy surprises there. Every woman should have her nervous system rewired after menopause.
I spent an hour or so every day with John. He seemed as alert as ever, though weaker. I talked with him, or at him, a lot about the strange adventure, the testing, whatever, I’d been through. I had never missed so
much his ability to talk. Of all the people I’ve known, he would be the one most likely to help me understand. That was partly his wisdom, both worldly and abstract, and partly the universe of pain we shared now.
He would be involved, soon enough. Maybe I felt that. I don’t believe in the supernatural, or tell myself that I don’t, but those creatures (the eveloi, as they told us to call them) obviously have some control over time. Maybe I was forewarned in some way.
In another year I was well enough to return to the surface. It was hard to say good-bye to John, after seeing him every day. I had my old Liaison job back, so I would see him periodically, but it was going to be the way it had been before. Afraid that each parting would be the last. He was only eighty, Earth-years-minus-cryptobiosis, but he looked and obviously felt a lot older. Besides, as we’d been warned, a person who’s had one serious stroke usually dies of another one.
But it was glorious to step out of the shuttle and into the warm breeze. I’d spent a lot more time in orbit, in hospital, then I had on the planet, but emotionally this was home. It was spring, and the perfume of blossoms was intoxicating, a mixture of transplanted Earth smells and alien ones. The lift door was an open gate now; I could look out past Hilltop and see how Lakeside had grown. Crop and orchard land had more than tripled, but it was laid out carefully with respect to the natural forest line, in accordance with the eveloi’s wishes.
Most of the eveloi had moved to an island on the other side of the planet, asking that we stay away from them for the time being. Two had remained behind with us, though, so I wasn’t surprised to see one of them among the welcoming committee at the loading dock. After my tearful embraces with Sandra and Charlee, and less emotional hellos for Odenwald, Dennison, and Doc Bishop, I saw the creature float forward and extend its pink feeler toward my head. I closed my eyes and cringed, ready for the slight pain.
It stung and there was a brief instant, a memory of the terrible blackness, but then it just left a nonverbal Welcome home and withdrew.
A lot had changed in the years I had been away. Some of the changes were decorative, like the orderly flower beds that lined the roads, but there were more functional alterations, too. The place was large enough to make vehicles convenient now. There were bicycles propped up or lying down everywhere, and a few power carts for the lazy or load-bearing. Sandra picked up a random bike and went back to work. Dan and I kept walking; I was still a little unbalanced for pedaling. Wouldn’t want to undo all that careful surgery by crashing into a tree. Wouldn’t want to redo it!
Dennison’s cobbled-together office had become an Administrative Center, a climate-controlled brick building about a hundred meters by fifty. An identical building across the street served as a hospital. They also stored meat there, which seemed bizarre and appropriate at the same time.
At least there aren’t any shops yet, or banks or insurance buildings. They do have what they call a “market,” though no money changes hands. It’s just a central place for people to bring fruit and vegetables for general distribution. People who eat meat pick it up at the hospital. Makes you feel like becoming a vegetarian. Or at least a careful meat inspector.
People cook their own meals. Seems primitive and inefficient, but I guess it’s worth the work for being able to choose a menu for yourself. Though ’Home’s weekly Chinese meal was unappetizing enough to save me a couple of thousand calories a month. If Dan cooks something awful, I guess I have to eat it.
I’ll probably learn how to cook myself. Some people on Earth thought that was funny, that I could live to the ripe old age of twenty-one and not know how to cook. Here I am almost sixty, and if you handed me an egg, I wouldn’t know which end to break.
What used to be Lakeside was now a “township,” Drake. There were two other lakeside townships, Columbus and Magellan, each one comprising all the homes along three kilometers of shoreline. Each township had its own substation for power, water, and sewage. Drake had the largest population, being closest to Hilltop and also possessing the only swimming pool and handball courts, along with a recreation building with everything from checkers to VR. The other two townships were basically a string of houses on the lake side of the road; Drake had started crawling up the hill to meet the suburbs of Hilltop crawling down.
Some brave pioneers had started a new township inland, Riverside, situated in a fertile valley on the banks of a wide slow river that emptied into the lake in the swamps east of Magellan. A new road snaked down from Hilltop to a dock on the edge of the swamp. A few people had taken up rowing; it was a healthy two-hour pull to Riverside, and then a lazy ride back. So far none of the lake monsters had been seen in the river, but it was considered reckless to go swimming in it.
Our hut looked much the same, though neater, Dan having reverted to his fussy bachelor ways. The kitchen between the two residences had become elaborate, though. It used to be just a double hot plate for coffee and reheating commissary meals. Now there was an oven, refrigerator, sink, and a pegboard with various cooking implements. On the balcony outside was a grill beside a stack of wood, and ten clay pots lined up sprouting small bushes of cooking herbs.
Their fragrance suddenly took me back to a sad time, remembering Sam; I caught at Daniel and he steadied me. I said it was just the long walk and climbing up the stairs. He sat me down on a wicker chair on the balcony, went back into the kitchen, and reappeared with a glass of cold beer.
I sipped it, exotic and homey at the same time, and looked out over the lake at the clouds billowing up on the horizon, preparing for the sunset show. While Dan busied himself in the kitchen, I watched the fantastic shapes and their reflections and tried to put a name to the way I felt—excited but comforted, feeling all this humanity around me growing, the planet in some sense allowing us to anchor here. It was good to be back, good to be part of things again.
My first day back was awkward. During my hospitalization in orbit, I’d become sort of a local legend, I suppose largely because of Sandra’s account of what she had seen. Well, I was there, too. What I had done was reflex, and we’re all lucky it was evidently the right reflex. There was a lot of pain, but I wish people wouldn’t remind me of it. Even without anybody’s help I go spinning back into that burning river ten times a day. Just for an instant; just long enough for my skin to glow cold and prickly, my guts to turn to water. The therapist at ’Home said it would be that way “for a while.” A long while, I suspect.
The first day at work was mainly talking with Constance Surio, who had temporarily taken over my job as ’Home Liaison, and her assistant, Andre Buchot. It had been a harried time for both of them, with almost two thousand tertiaries coming down from orbit, every one of them a special case.
Two months before, one of the shuttles had failed, breaking up in the atmosphere, and there was a moratorium on migration while the other shuttles, one at a time, were taken apart and put back together. There were still regular flights, but not too many people going back and forth, which did make for less liaison work.
Right now it was mostly a matter of constant but more or less civilized argument with our counterparts in orbit, the Epsilon Liaison Committee. They had a starship full of stuff they wanted to keep up there, and we tried to talk them into sending it down here, where it belonged.
Purcell would have loved the situation, the parody of economics. Both ’Home and Hilltop were self-sufficient in terms of life’s necessities, and since we have a common database, there was no information to barter. Both locales had problems, but they weren’t problems that formed a basis for exchange: I’ll trade you two brain-suckers and an aquatic constrictor for two cases of explosive decompression and a botched crypto. So it was mainly a case of us wheedling and them resisting patiently.
We could have indulged in a bit of coercion with a building slow-down, since they did have over a thousand people waiting to come down here, and they were going to need places to stay. With the moratorium, though, we didn’t have any reasonable justification for that.
The housing crew was two hundred empty dwellings ahead of the population, and had been temporarily diverted into building an overland road to Riverside, through the hills. (There was already a path along the river, but it was periodically flooded and always plagued with bugs. The overland route would be a third as long.)
The relationship between ’Home and Epsilon had changed, not subtly, and was evolving toward who-knows-where? The psychological distance had widened, as anyone could have predicted: we saw the people in orbit as conservative stay-at-homes, and they saw us as runaways. Maybe we envied them the comforts we had all grown up with; maybe they envied our freedom.
We had started out as an extension of the starship, and became for some time an embryonic gravity-bound copy. The umbilical cord didn’t suddenly one day break, but for more than a year it had been obvious that, barring catastrophe, we could survive without them.
That should translate into a kind of economic, quasi-economic, strength, since they did need us at least as a destination for their restless thousand. But we couldn’t see any practical, ethical way to exploit that. We had to plan for a future when the starship was literally a foreign land—the mother country, with all that implies. We didn’t want a revolution, people joked, not while they could drop things on us, and all we could do is duck.
Someday there might be a limited agricultural trade, since we were now growing a few exotic hybrids, but in ’Home they were understandably cautious for the time being. Even people not old enough to remember the ag plague learned about it as a disaster of mythic proportion, started by one wayward organism.
I spent a few hours at the office and then walked around town for a while. I even tried a bicycle, but though the breeze was pleasant I was still a little too wobbly not to be a hazard to myself and others.
