by Chad Oliver
Hold on, she told herself. Hold on!
She had never been this far from her birthplace.
When the truck rattled across the first of two bridges that spanned the San Gabriel River, she opened her red-flecked brown eyes enough to look. The cab window was low enough so that she could see. She could have reached out her handpaw and touched the lettering: FAMOUS INDOOR WRITER
They were out of the cities, through the towns.
She saw long grass and shade trees and rolling hills.
She sniffed the gentle tang of wildflowers.
Hold on!
She did not know whether she could make it or not. Somehow, the pain was worse with only a single child.
They came to a locked gate. It took Paul Shudde forever to open it. She considered jumping out of the cab, but they were still too close to the narrow paved road. It was too far to cover.
She nearly cried out in agony. She bit her tongue with her sharp, strong teeth. She tasted blood.
Dirt road now. Just a track. Rough, bouncing across a field of flowers. She could smell flowing river water. She could see stands of cedar, clumps of oaks, fans of feathery mesquite.
She caught the green smell of pecan trees. Close!
They came to a gray-white cutstone wall as high as the truck. It went on for miles. It was old, constructed without mortar. It had been built to keep something out or keep something in. She didn’t know which. She hurt too badly to care.
There was a cut in the stone wall. It was just big enough to let the truck through. It was marked by slabstone towers on each side. The towers were a couple of feet higher than the rest of the wall.
The truck started a downgrade toward the river. She could smell the fishy scent of slow-moving stream water beneath a fierce, clean sun. She could hear a faint stirring in the trees that lined the river.
Hold on!
She could not hold on. The pain was too much.
She reached for the door handle. She was able to get her clawed fingers around the handle. She did not have the strength to operate the mechanism.
She uttered a hissing scream. It was loud and it was insistent.
Old Four-Eyes looked startled. He hit the brakes, reached across the seat, and shoved the pickup door open.
She fell out of the truck, hit the ground running, and was gone.
Paul Shudde knew that he might never see her again. Pulling a disappearing act was her major talent. She had plenty of room now.
Suddenly, it was unreasonably important to him for her to stick around. If she vanished, there would be a hole in his life.
He eased the pickup to the clearing on the bank of the San Gabriel. He drank a fair amount of Scotch as he checked out his land and got a small fire going. He did not get drunk. On the other hand, he was not cold sober either.
He was not overly impressed with what he had done. He probably could not have saved his house anyway. Exploiting her would have delayed things, that was all.
It was no gigantic sacrifice.
He had gotten these eighty acres on the San Gabriel in one of those can’t-miss Texas land deals that had been prevalent a few years ago. Surprisingly, this particular deal had actually worked out. He owned the property and it had not cost him an arm and a leg.
He called it his ranch. Anything in Texas that was bigger than an acre was called a ranch. It was in fact undeveloped land a good many miles from anywhere.
There would be no construction on his ranch in his lifetime. It was not a guarantee of forever, but it was a start.
The ranch had water and fish and brush and trees and nuts and berries. It had birds nesting in the cottonwood trees. It had free animals that left criss-crossing tracks in the earth—
Everything she needed.
As for himself, he found a measure of peace here. He needed living water and growing trees and untouched animals too. They kept him at least partially sane.
Economically, he could survive. It wouldn’t be big-time, but he could make it. His lakefront lot in Lakeview Oaks was worth something even in a depressed economy. He could sell it and move into one of the empty condos that were all over Austin. They were so desperate to fill those condos that they would accept almost any offer, even one from Paul Shudde. A change of pace would be helpful for his column. It would all work out.
He could drive out here to the San Gabriel now and then. It only took a couple of hours. The ranch was his retreat from a world where he was not entirely comfortable. He wanted it left wild.
He wasn’t doing it all for her. He told himself that he wasn’t a complete idiot.
Just the same, she had exploded from his truck as though she could not stand his presence a moment longer. He hadn’t wanted or expected cringing gratitude. What the hell. But she might have made some slight gesture of farewell.
Something.
Way down inside, it hurt him.
He slept in the camper shell on the back of his pickup. He had a mattress in there and he had cleaned out the mess she had involuntarily made in her fake nest. He left the tailgate door up. It was warm enough so that the light breeze was welcome. He enjoyed listening to the liquid glide of the. river. There wasn’t much water in the San Gabriel this time of the year, but that would change with the rains that marked the end of summer.
Without his glasses, he could not see the stars.
He was tired and the whiskey worked on him some. Still, he slept restlessly. He was pleased when he woke up in the morning without a hangover.
He could not face the day without coffee, but once that task was done there was no real reason to stick around. There was no point in looking for her.
He started up the truck and headed out. There was morning moisture on the grass. The tires left distinct tracks. The trail would remain until the sun burned it away.
He kept his gaze fixed straight in front of him. He did not want to seem to be searching.
He was going through the cut in the stone wall when he saw her. She was on top of the slabstone tower on his left. The driver’s side.
He stopped, hard.
She was a little higher than he was. He had to look up at her. His glasses were playing tricks on him.
She wasn’t alone.
“My God,” Paul Shudde said. His tone was somewhere between blasphemy and reverence. “Look at that!”
Old Four-Eyes looked up. Four old eyes looked down. She had given birth. There was a child on the tower with her. It had a small bandit’s mask and still-wet velvet ears that drooped on its shoulders and ancient wondering brown eyes….
How had it gotten up there? It was less than a day old. She must have carried it—
She was trying to explain things to him. Doing it the only way she could.
Paul Shudde did not spoil it. Sometimes, he did things right. He did not get out of the truck. He did not try to pet her. He did not frighten the child.
“Hey,” he said. “I’ll be back.”
She did not move. Her gaze was steady. Her white-tipped tail may have twitched, but just barely. She wasn’t going to make a spectacle of herself.
Paul Shudde eased the truck past the stone wall. He took it slow and steady on the dirt road that wound toward the locked gate. The last thing he wanted was to alarm them.
“Old Four-Eyes,” he said aloud. He knew that she was out of hearing range, but he was getting into the habit of articulating his thoughts for her. “Another Old Four-Eyes!”
He laughed. It made no sense, but there it was.
It was the first time in years that there had been this much happiness in him that did not come out of a bottle.
She sensed the presence of an unattached male somewhere in the area. She was not sure exactly where he was, but she could tell that he was lonely.
He had been by himself for a very long time. Their kind did not cluster. They needed space to live. But it was not good to be totally alone.
He would find her. No matter how secure her hiding place, he would find her. Ther
e could be no secrets between them.
She nuzzled her cubchild. She was as relaxed as she had ever been. She knew instinctively that when they bonded it would be like the ancient times.
There would be more than one child. There would be a litter. That was as it should be.
The sunlight warmed her fur. She looked up and watched a soaring red-tailed hawk riding the thermals across the vault of the sky.
She thought about the childless man whose name was Paul Shudde. He was and was not the Enemy. They had shared pieces of their lives. There was a kind of link between them.
The manthings were not all the same. She had been right about that.
She owed him something. Whatever her life was worth. And she sensed that there was more than that.
There was a partnership here. It was not fully formed and it was something new and untested after all the countless years. It was only a beginning.
The two of them could not change a world much by themselves. But they could make a start. One controlled the immense power of technology. The other saw patterns and had the ingrained cautious wisdom to avoid the catastrophic mistake. Together—
She had no idea where the partnership might take them. She was certain that with a little luck it would go far, far beyond the banks of the San Gabriel River.
There was hope.
Call it that.
She did not know what difference, if any, the existence of one species more or less might make. Her mind did not compute in those terms. She had a sense that when one was saved it was somehow better for all of them.
There was a deep joy in her from being alive. She snuggled down into her nest. She licked her lonechild lazily. It did not lessen her love to understand that in another year or two there would be a litter.
The unbonded male was getting closer. She could feel him.
She thought again of Paul Shudde.
She was happy for him.
Old Four-Eyes was going to have lots of company.
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Also by Chad Oliver
Novels
Mists of Dawn (1952)
Shadows in the Sun (1954)
The Winds of Time (1956)
Unearthly Neighbors (1960)
The Wolf is My Brother (1967)
The Shores of Another Sea (1971)
Giants in the Dust (1976)
Broken Eagle (1989)
The Cannibal Owl (1994)
Collections
Another Kind (1955)
The Edge of Forever (1971)
A Star Above and Other Stories (2003)
Far From This Earth and Other Stories (2003)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Books don’t happen without a lot of volunteer effort: Attention must be paid!
Proof reading was provided by a stalwart band of NESFAns: Dave Anderson, Bonnie Atwood, Lis Carey, Pam Fremon, Deb Geisler, David Grubbs, Lisa Hertel, Tony Lewis, Mark Olson, Kelly Persons, Sharon Sbarsky.
But this book wouldn’t have made it to the proof readers without the efforts of Tony Lewis (research and advice) or Rick Katze (scanning). George Flynn (Proofmeister) cleaned up the mistakes in remarkably little time, and Mark Olson kept the computers (and the editor) up and running.
And special thanks to George Zebrowski for persuading me to do it, and smoothing the way.
—Priscilla Olson
June 2003
First Appearances
“Blood’s a Rover”, first printed in Astounding Science Fiction 49:3, May 1952
“The Land of Lost Content”, first printed in Super Science Stories 7:3, November 1950
“The Ant and the Eye”, first printed in Astounding Science Fiction 51:2, April 1953
“Artifact”, first printed in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 8:6, June 1955
“Any More at Home Like You?”, first printed in Star Science Fiction Stories #3, edited by Frederik Pohl, New York: Ballantine Books 96, 1954
“Rewrite Man”, first printed in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 13:3, September 1957
“The Edge of Forever”, first printed in Astounding Science Fiction 48:4, December 1951
“The Boy Next Door”, first printed in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 2:3, June 1951
“A Star Above It”, first printed in Another Kind by Chad Oliver, New York: Ballantine Books 113, 1955
“The Mother of Necessity”, first printed in Another Kind by Chad Oliver, New York: Ballantine Books 113, 1955
“Night”, first printed in Worlds of If 5:1, March 1955
“Technical Advisor”, first printed in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 4:2, February 1953
“Between the Thunder and the Sun”, first printed in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 12:5, May 1957
“The One That Got Away”, first printed in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 16:5, May 1959
“Transfusion”, first printed in Astounding Science Fiction 63:4, June 1959
“Guardian Spirit”, first printed in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 14:4, April 1958 [reprinted as “The Marginal Man”]
“The Gift”, first printed in Future Kin: Eight Science Fiction Stories, edited by Roger Elwood, Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1974
“To Whom It May Concern”, first printed in A Spadeful of Spacetime, edited by Fred Saberhagen, New York: Ace Books 0-441-77766-X, February 1981
“A Stick for Harry Eddington”, first printed in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 29:2, August 1965
“Old Four-Eyes”, first printed in Synergy 4, edited by George Zebrowski, San Diego: A Harvest/HBJ Original, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 0-15-687703-1, May 1989
Dedication
To Chad—
For leaving us so much of himself
in these stories
Chad Oliver (1928–1993)
Chad Oliver was the working name that US anthropologist and writer Symmes Chadwick Oliver used for his SF titles. He was born in Ohio but spent most of his life in Texas, where he studied for his MA. He later took a PhD in anthropology at the University of California, which lead to his appointment as a professor of anthropology at the University of Texas, Austen. Oliver’s SF work reflected both his professional training and personal roots: much of it is set in the outdoors of the US Southwest and most of his characters are deeply involved in outdoor activities. Oliver was also always concerned with the depiction of Native American life. His first published story, “The Land of Lost Content”, appeared in Super Science Stories in November 1950.
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Chad Oliver 2003
All rights reserved.
This edition prepared using files supplied by NESFA Press.
The right of Chad Oliver to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2015 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DZ
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 12606 0
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any f
orm of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
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