A Star Above It and Other Stories

by Chad Oliver

  It made no difference.

  They were alone, more alone than men had ever been. For all they knew, they were the human race. There might be survivors in other colonies on other worlds. There might be people left on earth.

  And there might not.

  They had to preserve what was left. They had to be careful. They could not afford the luxury of experiments.

  They survived. They imitated life. That was all.

  They knew a fear that was beyond calculation.

  And now, finally, they were stirring. They had found the strength to break the pattern, to make a gesture, to try, to seek …

  “He’s out there now,” Dana Bigelow said. “If only we could help him—”

  Old John Melner shook his head. “We’ve done what we can do. You know the analysis. He has to be alone. He has to be romantically—idealistically—motivated. He has to believe that it is in his hands. The decisions must be his to make. We can’t help. We can only get in his way.”

  “What can we do?”

  John Melner managed a bitter old man’s smile. “We can wait,” he said.

  Lee Melner stepped Outside.

  Something hit him, spun him around. He fell to his hands and knees, gasping.

  Wind. He knew what it was; he had studied about it. He was not prepared for the reality. He had known only still air.

  This was different. Raw, wild, strong! It smacked him like a thousand fists. It howled at his clothes. It ripped at his flesh.

  Lee’s mind reeled; he was assaulted by sensations. He could not sort them out. Smells of green and growing things, smells of wetness, smells of immense quantities of free and moving air. Light: intense flaming white light that seared his eyes. Colors: vivid greens and blacks and browns and blues. Sounds: the wind that moaned, the trees that creaked, the grasses that cracked and slithered …

  He struggled to his feet, rocking, bracing himself.

  He narrowed his eyes to slits, trying to absorb what he saw.

  Behind him, the vast arch of the dome. He could not see it all, of course. It looked peculiar to him, somehow reversed. It gleamed in the light. He could not see through it; it was a gigantic bubble of reflective glare.

  Ahead of him was a band of sterile ground, gray and grimy, that circled the bottom of the dome wall. It was narrow, less than seventy yards in most places, but it seemed formidable to Lee. There were few open spaces in the world he knew.

  Beyond that was a tremendous green plain, alive in the rivers of wind, huge beyond comprehension. Bare and jagged mountains of dark, shining rock, far away, so distant that he had no concepts to judge them by.

  And a sky, the first sky he had ever seen, a sky without a roof, a sky that went on forever, a sky that dwarfed him, a sky that held a swollen white sun that burned—

  Lee drank it in. He was beyond fear, beyond excitement. He was alive, out of the tomb! He could do anything, go anywhere.

  He yelled a wild animal yell.

  The wind ripped it from his mouth, hurled it away.

  He ran, stumbling and falling, across the sterile band. The gritty gray stuff stuck to his shoes, worked into his feet. It smeared itself on his jacket, his knees, his hands.

  He reached the green grasses and collapsed. He rolled in the damp, tough stems, feeling the moist soil beneath him. He sniffed the juices of life. The wind moaned at him, but he was under it now and it was lessening. He laughed like a madman, laughed with a strange glee that was sweeter than anything he had ever known.

  He surged to his feet, challenging the wind. He moved through the grasses at a pace somewhere between a fast walk and a trot. He felt strong, confident, and eager. He had no fixed destination; he simply moved away from the Colony. He could not get lost. The dome was so big that it hardly diminished in size no matter how far he went. Within a day’s range it would still be visible.

  He paused. The first note of caution intruded on his mood. He did not want the night to catch him Outside. He had never experienced that kind of darkness, in the open, with an invisible world pressing in on him …

  Still, there was plenty of time.

  He moved on. The sun burned his face and hands, but it was not yet painful. The wind was cool and the grasses danced, and the thick, stunted trees whispered a song to him …

  Abruptly, he came to a small clearing. There was a tiny spring of crystal-clear water that bubbled up from a rock formation. There was a path that led away from the spring, and tracks in the soft soil, many tracks.

  And there was someone—or something—in the clearing.

  Lee stopped short. He dropped to his belly and held his breath. Somehow, he had not expected this. He knew about the savages that lived Outside, of course. He had planned to contact them, one day when he knew more. But not now, not so soon, not the very first time …

  Why not? Why not today?

  He lay very still and studied the figure in the clearing.

  It was a female, he decided, and very old. She was sprawled on her side, her eyes closed. Her breathing was so shallow that she almost seemed dead. Her arms were thin and very long. Her knees were flexed under a stained yellow tunic of animal skin. There was hair on her wrinkled face.

  She was not human. She was neither good to look at nor ugly. She was just there, a half-alien thing in the dirt.

  Half alien, yes. And half something else. An old woman, alone, more dead than alive.

  Sick?

  Lee stood up. There was nothing to fear here. He came from a world where illness was something rare, and curable when it happened. He was not afraid of it. The old woman certainly could not harm him. They were alone in the clearing.

  He took a cloth and moistened it in the spring. The water was cold. He knelt beside the woman and gently bathed her wrinkled face. He made soothing noises.

  She smelled. There was an old deep scar on her forehead.

  She opened her eyes. They were astonishingly clear and a bright, hard green.

  She hissed, horribly. She raked at him with her claws.

  Lee moved back, not too fast. He saw a cluster of purple berries on a nearby bush. He had no idea whether or not they were edible, but that was unimportant. He needed to make a gesture that she would understand.

  He picked a handful of the fat berries. He bit into one, tasting it. It was sweet and juicy. He placed the berries near the woman’s head and stepped back again.

  He waited, not rushing her. The wind had died and the clean air was almost still. He could see thin eddies of blue smoke curling up in the distance. The trampled path led in that direction.

  The old woman shook her hairy head and groaned. She reached out and grabbed the berries. She crammed them into her mouth, all of them. She chewed with stained and worn-down teeth. She swallowed.

  She tried to get up and failed. She looked at Lee with those strange metallic green eyes. She seemed puzzled and confused now. Her eyes came in and out of focus.

  She tried again to rise. She could not make it. She fell back on her side. She said something harsh and guttural. It might have been a curse or a prayer or nothing at all.

  She stopped speaking. She lay perfectly still, barely breathing.

  Lee made his decision. He did not know what the old woman was doing here. He was not a fool, and he had studied something about primitive peoples; the Colony school was a good one and Lee—although he was unaware of it—had received special attention. The old woman might be sick; she could have been separated from the others to protect the village. She was very old; she could have been abandoned or crawled out herself to die. She might have come to the spring and simply been unable to return. She might be lost, although that was unlikely.

  There was no way to tell. What was certain was that he had already made contact. That had not been his plan, but plans were made to be changed.

  Lee picked up the woman and cradled her in his arms. She stiffened but had no strength to fight. There was not much meat on her bones. She smelled of sweat and soil and age.


  Carrying the woman in his arms, Lee started down the path toward the tendrils of blue smoke.

  A cluster of pithouses covered with roofs of branches and plastered mud. Hives, like miniature domes. Blending into the landscape: natural, weathered, timeless. Smells of burning wood and fire-dripping meat.

  A great white sun, blazing at the zenith.

  Sounds: cries, screams, whistles.

  People: squat hairy men with hugely muscled arms dangling below their knees, half-naked women, bright-eyed children peering from doorways.

  Weapons: long spears with stone points, clubs, flaked-stone knives with leather handles.

  Lee put the old woman down and stepped slowly back. He made no sudden moves. He kept his hands in plain sight.

  He was defenseless, of course. He had no knowledge of killing.

  He waited, looking into hard unreadable alien eyes.

  The thought came to him that he was very close to death. He felt it, deep down, but his mind rejected it. He stood quietly, resisting the impulse to run.

  The old woman groaned and stretched out a bony hand toward her people.

  A man grunted something, put down his spear, and walked to her. He stared straight at Lee but did not speak. He picked the woman up—casually, as though she were a stick of firewood—and carried her back. He put her down by the hide-covered hole that served as a doorway to one of the smoking pithouses. Hands reached out and pulled her inside.

  Lee waited. He could do nothing else.

  Time passed, slowly. The great white sun moved in the sky.

  After an age, a man moved. He was old but not feeble. He stepped into a pithouse, a knife in his gnarled hand. He emerged in a moment with a charred dripping hunk of meat impaled on the knife.

  The man walked up to Lee and stopped. Lee could smell the grease in his hair. The man extended the knife.

  Carefully, Lee put out his hand. He grasped the chunk of meat. It was hot and slippery. He pulled it from the flaked-stone blade of the knife.

  He bit into it. The meat was tough, and the flavor was strong. He chewed it as best he could and managed something resembling a smile.

  The old man smiled back. He sheathed his knife. He reached out and touched Lee, gently.

  The other men put down their spears and clubs. The women began to chatter. Children emerged from doorways.

  The vast river of wind stirred, gathering its power. Long black shadows crept across the land. The heat of the sun was fading.

  Lee did not care. He grinned broadly now.

  Something, perhaps, was over.

  Something else was ready to begin.

  Many times, Lee Melner went through the hidden exit and rejoined the Outside People.

  He studied them, hunted with them, ate with them, laughed with them. He came to know them, little by little.

  They were both less and more than he had imagined. Less, because they were not romantic creatures of an idyllic world of dreams. They were tough, brutal, and hard.

  The old woman he had saved had indeed crawled away to die; she had too many years and had become a burden. She went out again and this time she did not return.

  There was death, too, among the very young. Infants rarely survived very long. Death came to them in many guises: sudden, sure, unsentimentalized. Lee had never seen young people die before.

  But the people were more than that …

  It was curious. In the midst of death—and uncertainty and sickness and desperate hardship—there was life. There was promise. There was a quickening of the blood, laughter that eased pain, new dreams, new beginnings.

  And there was the sun and the great wind and the enormous sky and the stars and the rain …

  The contrast with the Colony was stark and clear. Inside the dome, there was order, security, peace—and decay. Under the dome, there was no real tomorrow. There was only a slow ending.

  Lee learned who had sent him from the Colony and why. He knew that he had a decision to make. The decision was not easier with his father involved.

  It was not easy, period.

  He could not just run away. He was the alien on this world, even though he had been born here. He was drastically different from the Outside People. And he was a man, with a man’s sexuality. He needed a woman of his own kind. He needed Ellen.

  He could not bring the Outside People into the Colony. They could never adapt to it, and it would be wrong to try. There was no point at all in inflicting a dead end on them.

  He could not bring the Colony to the Outside People. It was utterly impossible. The citizens of the Colony lived on a pyramid of technology; they could not move. And they were set in their ways, frozen, more fearful than any savage child huddled in the darkness and the howling wind …

  Lee knew something of history; he had been carefully taught. He knew the dangers of contacts between an advanced civilization and bands of primitive hunters. It was rough on the hunters, always. Rough, and usually fatal.

  On earth, the hunters had been obliterated. Technological civilization had triumphed.

  And now, perhaps, there was no life on earth.

  It was not an easy decision that Lee Melner had to make.

  But he made it.

  John MeIner looked at his son. “Well,” he said, his voice carefully neutral. “You have something to tell me.”

  Lee searched for the words that would not come. Old John seemed so frail, his lined face sunken beneath his fine white hair, his thin hands trembling slightly even when supported by the top of the table …

  The small room was very still.

  “It was my decision to send you out, Lee. There were no strings attached. You have had nearly a year to make up your mind. We have put no pressure on you. You asked for this audience. Come on, lad. Spit it out.”

  Lee stood there, his skin roughened by the sun and the wind. He felt strange, an outsider in the house of his own father. He could not find words that did not carry pain.

  Old John snorted. “Dammit, boy, I was born on earth. I crossed the gulf between the stars. I had the rug pulled out from under me on an alien planet. You can’t hurt me, Lee, except with silence.”

  “Okay,” Lee said slowly. “I think there is just one thing to do. I don’t like it, but there it is.”

  Old John smiled. “Where?”

  Lee did not return the smile. He had to force himself to speak. “There is no future here, in the Colony. The ships will never come back. We cannot bring the Outside People into the dome; it would kill everything that they are. The Colony itself cannot change; it is too precariously balanced, and the adults are locked into a life way they are afraid to alter. It has sustained them too long.”

  “It is a good analysis, if a trifle grim. And so?”

  Lee took a deep breath. “And so,” he said, “the young people must go Outside. They must go and try to make a new life, and they must go soon.”

  “Before they become too wise?”

  Lee shrugged. “Before they reach the same conclusions that your generation reached. Before they begin to—repeat.”

  Old John stared at his son. “All of the young people?”

  “All who wish to go. That will be most of them. It makes no difference, really. There will not be enough left behind to sustain the population.”

  “You’ve thought of that, have you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are pronouncing a sentence of death.”

  “Yes. If there were some other way—”

  “But there isn’t. Either some die, sealed in this mechanical prison, or all die. Is that it?”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  Lee hung his head. He could not face his father’s eyes. He kept remembering the emaciated old woman, out there by the spring in the sun and the wind. She, too, had faced death alone. She, too, had been abandoned by those who were young and strong …

  “When will you go?”

  “Soon. When we are ready.”

  “And
will you—say goodbye?”

  “Yes, of course. And we will come back to see you.”

  “Occasionally. That would be—helpful.”

  A long silence fell between them.

  John Melner broke it. “We will be comfortable; that is something. Extinction, after all, is just an inability to change. You are right; we cannot change. But we can let you go, if we are big enough. We can give you the gift of hope. And perhaps, one day, you will remember …”

  “We’ll remember,” Lee whispered.

  Old John stood up, his face composed. “I’m getting maudlin in my senility,” he said. “I’m proud of what you have done, Lee—and of what you will do. Now go and leave me alone for a while. We both have much to do.”

  Lee left the room and the door hissed shut behind him.

  John Melner sat down and closed his eyes. He felt very tired.

  He did not try to fool himself; he had never done that. His son’s decision was probably the right one, the only one. He would support it. But the young could be cruel, cruel …

  He shook his head. Lee had not reckoned with the possibility that he might fail. It was all very well to march off into the sunrise filled with brave hopes and dreams. But there would be many sunrises and many sunsets. Dreams had a way of fading with age. He was not optimistic.

  Still, they had a chance.

  That was the only gift he had left to give.

  And the alternative—

  “The alternative,” he said quietly, “is to be like me.”

  He opened his eyes. He felt the half-forgotten tears, the tears for what was lost and for what might have been.

  Old John Melner looked at the closed door.

  “Lee, Lee,” he whispered. “God, if I could only go with you!”

  Slowly, the old man turned back to the papers on his desk and began to do what had to be done.

  TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

  Call it a hunt.

  If that is too simple, call it a quest.

  They were coming.

  They had searched through an ocean of darkness, a night sea that floated worlds upon worlds, stars beyond number, universes that began and ended and flowed into yet other universes.