She looked out one more time at the sails and decided to take in the foresail. Wearily she dragged herself over the control panel with a servo-robot. She selected the right control and opened it for a week or so. She waited there, her heart buzzing, her throat whistling air, her fingernails breaking off gently as they grew. Finally she checked to see if it really had been the right one, pushed again, and nothing happened.
She pushed a third time. There was no response.
Now she went back to the master panel, re-read, checked the light direction, found a certain amount of infrared pressure which she should have been picking up. The sails had very gradually risen to something not far from the speed of light itself because they moved fast with the one side dulled; the pods behind, sealed against time and eternity, swam obediently in an almost perfect weightlessness.
She scanned; her reading had been correct.
The sail was wrong.
She went back to the emergency panel and pressed. Nothing happened.
She broke out a repair robot and sent it out to effect repairs, punching the papers as rapidly as she could to give instructions. The robot went out and an instant (three days) later it replied. The panel on the repair robot rang forth, “Does not conform.”
She sent a second repair robot. That had no effect either.
She sent a third, the last. Three bright lights, “Does not conform,” stared at her. She moved the servo-robots to the other side of the sails and pulled hard.
The sail was still not at the right angle.
She stood there wearied and lost in space, and she prayed: “Not for me, God, I am running away from a life that I did not want. But for this ship’s souls and for the poor foolish people that I am taking who are brave enough to want to worship their own way and need the light of another star, I ask you, God, help me now.” She thought she had prayed very fervently and she hoped that she would get an answer to her prayer.
It did not work out that way. She was bewildered, alone.
There was no sun. There was nothing, except the tiny cabin and herself more alone than any woman had ever been before. She sensed the thrill and ripple of her muscles as they went through days of adjustment while her mind noticed only the matter of minutes. She leaned forward, forced herself not to relax, and finally she remembered that one of the official busybodies had included a weapon.
What she would use a weapon for she did not know.
It pointed. It had a range of two hundred thousand miles. The target could be selected automatically.
She got down on her knees trailing the abdominal tube and the feeding tube and the catheter tubes and the helmet wires, each one running back to the panel. She crawled underneath the panel for the servo-robots and she pulled out a written manual. She finally found the right frequency for the weapon’s controls. She set the weapon up and went to the window.
At the last moment she thought, “Perhaps the fools are going to make me shoot the window out. It ought to have been designed to shoot through the window without hurting it. That’s the way they should have done it.”
She wondered about the matter for a week or two.
Just before she fired it she turned and there, next to her, stood her sailor, the sailor from the stars, Mr. Grey-no-more. He said: “It won’t work that way.”
He stood clear and handsome, the way she had seen him in New Madrid. He had no tubes, he did not tremble, she could see the normal rise and fall of his chest as he took one breath every hour or so. One part of her mind knew that he was a hallucination. Another part of her mind believed that he was real. She was mad, and she was very happy to be mad at this time, and she let the hallucination give her advice. She re-set the gun so that it would fire through the cabin wall, and it fired a low charge at the repair mechanism out beyond the distorted and immovable sail.
The low charge did the trick. The interference had been something beyond all technical anticipation. The weapon had cleaned out the forever-unidentifiable obstruction, leaving the servo-robots free to attack their tasks like a tribe of maddened ants. They worked again. They had had defenses built in against the minor impediments of space. All of them scurried and skipped about.
With a sense of bewilderment close to religion, she perceived the wind of starlight blowing against the immense sails. The sails snapped into position. She got a momentary touch of gravity as she sensed a little weight. The Soul was back on her course.
X
“It’s a girl,” they said to him on New Earth. “It’s a girl. She must have been eighteen herself.”
Mr. Grey-no-more did not believe it.
But he went to the hospital and there in the hospital he saw Helen America.
“Here I am, sailor,” said she. “I sailed too.” Her face was white as chalk, her expression was that of a girl of about twenty. Her body was that of a well-preserved woman of sixty.
As for him, he had not changed again, since he had returned home inside a pod.
He looked at her. His eyes narrowed, and then, in a sudden reversal of roles, it was he who was kneeling beside her bed and covering her hands with his tears.
Half-coherently, he babbled at her: “I ran away from you because I loved you so. I came back here where you would never follow, or if you did follow, you’d still be a young woman, and I’d still be too old. But you have sailed The Soul in here and you wanted me.”
The nurse of New Earth did not know about the rules which should be applied to the sailors from the stars. Very quietly she went out of the room, smiling in tenderness and human pity at the love which she had seen. But she was a practical woman and she had a sense of her own advancement. She called a friend of hers at the news service and said: “I think I have got the biggest romance in history. If you get here soon enough you can get the first telling of the story of Helen America and Mr. Grey-no-more. They just met like that. I guess they’d seen each other somewhere. They just met like that and fell in love.”
The nurse did not know that they had forsworn a love on Earth. The nurse did not know that Helen America had made a lonely trip with an icy purpose, and the nurse did not know that the crazy image of Mr. Grey-no-more, the sailor himself, had stood beside Helen twenty years out from nothing-at-all in the depth and blackness of space between the stars.
XI
The little girl had grown up, had married, and now had a little girl of her own. The mother was unchanged, but the spieltier was very, very old. It had outlived all its marvelous tricks of adaptability, and for some years had stayed frozen in the role of a yellow-haired, blue-eyed girl doll. Out of sentimental sense of the fitness of things, she had dressed the spieltier in a bright blue jumper with matching panties. The little animal crept softly across the floor on its tiny human hands, using its knees for hind feet. The mock-human face looked up blindly and squeaked for milk.
The young mother said, “Mom, you ought to get rid of that thing. It’s all used up and it looks horrible with your nice period furniture.”
“I thought you loved it,” said the older woman.
“Of course,” said the daughter. “It was cute, when I was a child. But I’m not a child any more, and it doesn’t even work.”
The spieltier had struggled to its feet and clutched its mistress’s ankle. The older woman took it away gently, and put down a saucer of milk and a cup the size of a thimble. The spieltier tried to curtsey, as it had been motivated to do at the beginning, slipped, fell, and whimpered. The mother righted it and the little old animal-toy began dipping milk with its thimble and sucking the milk into its tiny toothless old mouth.
“You remember. Mom—” said the younger woman and stopped.
“Remember what, dear?”
“You told me about Helen America and Mr. Grey-no-more when that was brand new.”
“Yes, darling, maybe I did.”
“You didn’t tell me everything,” said the younger woman accusingly.
“Of course not. You were a child.”
“But i
t was awful. Those messy people, and the horrible way sailors lived. I don’t see how you idealized it and called it a romance—”
“But it was. It is,” insisted the other.
“Romance, my foot,” said the daughter. “It’s as bad as you and the worn-out spieltier.” She pointed at the tiny, living, aged doll who had fallen asleep beside its milk. “I think it’s horrible. You ought to get rid of it. And the world ought to get rid of sailors.”
“Don’t be harsh, darling,” said the mother.
“Don’t be a sentimental old slob,” said the daughter.
“Perhaps we are,” said the mother with a loving sort of laugh. Unobtrusively she put the sleeping spieltier on a padded chair where it would not be stepped on or hurt.
XII
Outsiders never knew the real end of the story.
More than a century after their wedding, Helen lay dying: she was dying happily, because her beloved sailor was beside her. She believed that if they could conquer space, they might conquer death as well.
Her loving, happy, weary dying mind blurred over and she picked up an argument they hadn’t touched upon for decades.
“You did so come to The Soul,” she said. “You did so stand beside me when I was lost and did not know how to handle the weapon.”
“If I came then, darling, I’ll come again, wherever you are. You’re my darling, my heart, my own true love. You’re my bravest of ladies, my boldest of people. You’re my own. You sailed for me. You’re my lady who sailed The Soul.”
His voice broke, but his features stayed calm. He had never before seen anyone die so confident and so happy.
When the People Fell
“Can you imagine a rain of people through an acid fog? Can you imagine thousands and thousands of human bodies, without weapons, overwhelming the unconquerable monsters? Can you—”
“Look, sir,” interrupted the reporter.
“Don’t interrupt me! You ask me silly questions. I tell you I saw the Goonhogo itself. I saw it take Venus. Now ask me about that!”
The reporter had called to get an old man’s reminiscences about bygone ages. He did not expect Dobyns Bennett to flare up at him.
Dobyns Bennett thrust home the psychological advantage he had gotten by taking the initiative. “Can you imagine showhices in their parachutes, a lot of them dead, floating out of a green sky? Can you imagine mothers crying as they fell? Can you imagine people pouring down on the poor helpless monsters?”
Mildly, the reporter asked what showhices were.
“That’s old Chinesian for children,” said Dobyns Bennett. “I saw the last of the nations burst and die, and you want to ask me about fashionable clothes and things. Real history never gets into the books. It’s too shocking. I suppose you were going to ask me what I thought of the new striped pantaloons for women!”
“No,” said the reporter, but he blushed. The question was in his notebook and he hated blushing.
“Do you know what the Goonhogo did?”
“What?” asked the reporter, struggling to remember just what a Goonhogo might be.
“It took Venus,” said the old man, somewhat more calmly.
Very mildly, the reporter murmured, “It did?”
“You bet it did!” said Dobyns Bennett belligerently.
“Were you there?” asked the reporter.
“You bet I was there when the Goonhogo took Venus,” said the old man. “I was there and it’s the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen. You know who I am. I’ve seen more worlds than you can count, boy, and yet when the nondies and the needies and the showhices came pouring out of the sky, that was the worst thing that any man could ever see. Down on the ground, there were the loudies the way they’d always been—”
The reporter interrupted, very gently, Bennett might as well have been speaking a foreign language. All of this had happened three hundred years before. The reporter’s job was to get a feature from him and to put it into a language which people of the present time could understand.
Respectfully he said, “Can’t you start at the beginning of the story?”
“You bet. That’s when I married Terza. Terza was the prettiest girl you ever saw. She was one of the Vomacts, a great family of scanners, and her father was a very important man. You see, I was thirty-two, and when a man is thirty-two, he thinks he is pretty old, but I wasn’t really old, I just thought so, and he wanted Terza to marry me because she was such a complicated girl that she needed a man’s help. The Court back home had found her unstable and the Instrumentality had ordered her left in her father’s care until she married a man who then could take on proper custodial authority. I suppose those are old customs to you, boy—”
The reporter interrupted again. “I am sorry, old man,” said he. “I know you are over four hundred years old and you’re the only person who remembers the time the Goonhogo took Venus. Now the Goonhogo was a government, wasn’t it?”
“Anyone knows that,” snapped the old man. “The Goonhogo was a sort of separate Chinesian government. Seventeen billion of them all crowded in one small part of Earth. Most of them spoke English the way you and I do, but they spoke their own language, too, with all those funny words that have come on down to us. They hadn’t mixed in with anybody else yet. Then, you see, the Waywonjong himself gave the order and that is when the people started raining. They just fell right out of the sky. You never saw anything like it—”
The reporter had to interrupt him again and again to get the story bit by bit. The old man kept using terms that he couldn’t seem to realize were lost in history and that had to be explained to be intelligible to anyone of this era. But his memory was excellent and his descriptive powers as sharp and alert as ever…
Young Dobyns Bennett had not been at Experimental Area A very long, before he realized that the most beautiful female he had ever seen was Terza Vomact. At the age of fourteen, she was fully mature. Some of the Vomacts did mature that way. It may have had something to do with their being descended from unregistered, illegal people centuries back in the past. They were even said to have mysterious connections with the lost world back in the age of nations when people could still put numbers on the years.
He fell in love with her and felt like a fool for doing it.
She was so beautiful, it was hard to realize that she was the daughter of Scanner Vomact himself. The scanner was a powerful man.
Sometimes romance moves too fast and it did with Dobyns Bennett because Scanner Vomact himself called in the young man and said, “I’d like to have you marry my daughter Terza, but I’m not sure she’ll approve of you. If you can get her, boy, you have my blessing.”
Dobyns was suspicious. He wanted to know why a senior scanner was willing to take a junior technician.
All that the scanner did was to smile. He said, “I’m a lot older than you, and with this new santaclara drug coming in that may give people hundreds of years, you may think that I died in my prime if I die at a hundred and twenty. You may live to four or five hundred. But I know my time’s coming up. My wife has been dead for a long time and we have no other children and I know that Terza needs a father in a very special kind of way. The psychologist found her to be unstable. Why don’t you take her outside the area? You can get a pass through the dome anytime. You can go out and play with the loudies.”
Dobyns Bennett was almost as insulted as if someone had given him a pail and told him to go play in the sandpile. And yet he realized that the elements of play in courtship were fitted together and that the old man meant well.
The day that it all happened, he and Terza were outside the dome. They had been pushing loudies around.
Loudies were not dangerous unless you killed them. You could knock them down, push them out of the way, or tie them up; after a while, they slipped away and went about their business. It took a very special kind of ecologist to figure out what their business was. They floated two meters high, ninety centimeters in diameter, gently just above the land of Venus,
eating microscopically. For a long time, people thought there was radiation on which they subsisted. They simply multiplied in tremendous numbers. In a silly sort of way, it was fun to push them around, but that was about all there was to do.
They never responded with intelligence.
Once, long before, a loudie taken into the laboratory for experimental purposes had typed a perfectly clear message on the typewriter. The message had read, “Why don’t you Earth people go back to Earth and leave us alone? We are getting along all—”
And that was all the message that anybody had ever got out of them in three hundred years. The best laboratory conclusion was that they had very high intelligence if they ever chose to use it, but that their volitional mechanism was so profoundly different from the psychology of human beings that it was impossible to force a loudie to respond to stress as people did on Earth.
The name loudie was some kind of word in the old Chinesian language. It meant the “ancient ones.” Since it was the Chinesians who had set up the first outposts on Venus, under the orders of their supreme boss the Waywonjong, their term lingered on.
Dobyns and Terza pushed loudies, climbed over the hills, and looked down into the valleys where it was impossible to tell a river from a swamp. They got thoroughly wet, their air converters stuck, and perspiration itched and tickled along their cheeks. Since they could not eat or drink while outside—at least not with any reasonable degree of safety—the excursion could not be called a picnic. There was something mildly refreshing about playing child with a very pretty girl-child—but Dobyns wearied of the whole thing.
The Rediscovery of Man - The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith - Illustrated Page 17
