by Chad Oliver
Human?
Rick searched for the magic words and could not find them. Oh, more than a memory and more than a dream. Here they were. It was a situation that had not existed on Earth in his lifetime. Archeology come to life. Not stones and bones and sterile museum reconstructions. People. Or—
A man detached himself from the huddle around the fire and walked toward him. Rick had never seen such a man. He was dizzy with shock.
Human, yes. He could see that now. But the man was more than old: he looked old. Rick had never known a person who actually showed the signs of age. And the man was sick. He was crippled. His body was hunched forward, his spine locked into a frozen arch. In the world Rick knew, there were only healthy, perfect people.
The man had lost his hair. The skin on his skull was white and taut and blotched. Rick could see the lumps and depressions in the bone. Rick had seen plenty of skulls in his time. This one was within the range of variation for H. sapiens. Just one of the gang. But aged, stressed, showing the telltale signs of a body chemistry too long ignored by medical attention.
There was still power in the man: a raw physical strength and an unyielding force that went down deep. The shoulders were uneven, but they were massive. The gnarled hands were like chunks of rock. The man’s belly was creased and lined; it looked like an old leather apron. The legs were thin, all bone and gristle and sinew and knobby knees.
The man’s swollen nose was too big for his face; the nostrils flared and the veins were distended. When he breathed, there was a slight bubbling noise that seemed to gurgle down and lose itself in the flaps of wrinkled skin on his chest.
His eyes were bloodshot and there was pain in them. There was more than pain. It was not hate. It was not anger. It was certainly not fear.
Resignation? Weariness? Something of that, perhaps.
But much more.
Call it pride. A hard, flinty, uncompromising pride.
Call it determination, a will that would not break.
Call it hope.
The man was now so close that he could have reached out and touched Rick Malina. Rick could smell his decaying breath.
The man stopped.
The bloodshot eyes stared at Rick.
“So,” the old man said. His voice was flat. “You have come back.”
In a strange kind of way, Caroth felt that it was over. He experienced a sense of letdown. All the waiting, all the planning, all the suffering—
And now this.
A child from Outside. So young, so perfect, so unmarked. There was intelligence there, of course. But the mind had never had to fight. It didn’t know what endurance was. It was no match for Caroth.
He had him. It was too easy. It was like throwing a net over a young pig.
Caroth could get into Rick’s head. He could twist him around and tie him in a knot. There were no barriers, no defenses. He could smother him, absorb him. He took a lot with very little effort: a name, a general life history, a swirling blur of impressions.
Caroth was not overly pleased. He had much to give. He wanted a man for his son, not a pliable lump of mud.
Caroth had to struggle with his disappointment. It would be easy to let go. He was hurting.
Quickly he rechecked the others. No, they were not an improvement. He had the right one. The leader.
Some leader. A child …
There had been one stroke of luck. Caroth took a certain satisfaction from that: he was entitled to one break. The colony had been founded by English speakers. He would not have to master a new language. The words had not changed much.
Caroth did what he had to do. He got his head jammed up against the startled face of the young man. He turned on the power, gulping at his mind.
“You are Rick,” he said. “I am Caroth. I will now tell you what you are going to do.”
Rick Malina felt as though he had been hit in the head with a hammer. His brain pulsed with flashes of light. The palms of his hands were dripping wet. His legs trembled.
His reaction was instinctive. He could not think.
He reached out with his two slippery hands and touched Caroth squarely on the chest. The old man’s skin was rough and dry. It had iron under it.
Rick shoved Caroth back. It was not a monumental push, but it was hard enough to get the job done.
The bloodshot eyes were shocked and surprised. It had been a long, long time since any man had put a hand on Caroth.
Rick did not know what to do next. He shook his head, trying to clear it. The fuzziness would not let him go.
Still, he had a corner of his mind back. There was some grit in there, and some anger. Rick did not entirely recognize himself.
He fought without knowing what he was fighting, or why. There seemed to be three distinct personalities churning in his head. One belonged to an arrogant old man who had lived a life that was strange almost beyond belief. One still belonged to Rick Malina. Rick Malina. Who was he? What was he? Hang on: thirty-two years old, six feet tall, black hair, brown eyes, free from disease, archeologist, involved with several women, occasional drinker, fond of cats—
Nothing?
And a third personality. Detached, watching, taking it all in.
Laughing?
Here he was. He was in the big fat middle of an intact society of hunters and gatherers. It was the find of the century, the opportunity of a lifetime.
And what was he doing? He was in a pushing and shoving contest with a sick old man whose breath stank. He was struggling just to think.
His brain swirled. There were memories in there that did not belong to him. He remembered the ancestors of Caroth, people who had stayed behind when the exodus began. He saw a small population that had dwindled with the generations. He felt the changes. When industrial systems became pointless, the people farmed. When they were too few to maintain the crops, they hunted the feral pigs and cattle. When the bubble-houses failed, they built their own shelters. When they had nothing else, they found the security of ancient fires.
Oh, the fires were good. The fires threw the shadows back. The flames kept the chimps at a distance. The strong and patient and waiting chimps …
He looked extinction in the eye. It was a cold and frozen and unblinking eye. There were no more children—
Rick shuddered. He wrenched his mind free, isolating it.
He had some measure of control now.
Hang on, hang on.
Rick spoke. His voice was almost steady.
He said: “Okay. You are Caroth, and I am Rick. That’s a beginning between us. I think it’s kind of early for either one of us to start giving orders. Let’s slow down, shall we? How about it?”
Caroth was not displeased. He could have crushed the young Outsider with little effort, but that was not the point. Caroth wanted a son.
He had not become the leader of his people by brute force alone. He had mental powers that were beyond Rick’s understanding. He also had some diplomatic skills.
He used them.
“Come now, Rick,” he said. His tone was as warm as he could make it. “You are welcome here. We have been waiting for you. Your people will be the guests of my people. Together, we will decide what we should do. Is that satisfactory?”
Caroth had the advantage, and he knew it. He preferred a more direct approach, but he could play with words as well as the next man. The pain bothered him. He ignored it; he had lived with pain for most of his life. He had a wedge in Rick Malina’s mind. He could manipulate him to some extent.
The old man caught an errant sense impression from one of the chimpanzees, standing flat-tooted and knuckle-handed outside the range of the flickering firelight. Waiting, watching. Damn chimpanzees. He hated their guts. They kept on breeding, mocking the people. And they were so strong. They could tear a man apart. They had done so, more than once.
Caroth silently told the chimp exactly what he thought of him and his mother and his mother’s mother. Then he turned his attention back to Rick Malina.
“Are you hungry?” he asked. He went back to the fire and retrieved a chunk of bloody, half-cooked meat. He held it out to Rick. “Is this not also a good way to begin?”
The life-scarred old man was not without a sense of humor. Rick’s fight to conquer his revulsion tickled him.
Rick took the meat. He ate some of it and passed the rest to his companions. He did not vomit.
Caroth smiled and tried to look harmless. He studied Rick with something that was fairly close to respect.
They might get along.
That was just as well. Caroth had no intention of leaving his world with his people. He wasn’t going anywhere.
And neither was Rick Malina.
Not yet.
For Rick Malina, time began to move along two separate tracks.
In one dimension, he did the best he could to cope with what he had found. He seemed to himself to be entirely rational. He made the moves he had to make and he got the expected results.
Sandy managed to get the communications equipment going again and they re-established contact with Earth. That was when the fur began to fly.
At a time when the starships came in almost daily with tales of wonder, it took one hell of a story to make a splash. This was that kind of story.
Rescue was the name of the game. There had always been a kind of lingering guilt about the abandoned O’Neills. Here was a colony that dated from the early days of space exploration. It still had people in it. They were caught in a lifeway that was almost forgotten on Earth. They were sick and they had come to the end of the line, but they were alive.
They had survived.
They were instantly heroic.
Rescue, yes. But rescues can get complicated. The doctors had their certain-sure input. The media people were drooling with anticipation. The politicians smelled votes. And the scientists—well, this thing was too big to be left in the hands of a junior archeologist.
Rick did what had to be done. He had Ann and Pete measure everything from the oxygen content of the greasy air to the depth of the mold-growths that sheathed the processing machinery. Fran and Sandy took the photographs and did the interviewing.
Get it all. Get it all now.
It was a hectic time, a time without sleep.
In another dimension, Rick knew that he was reacting oddly. He was not sure what reality was—or where.
That damned old man was in his head.
Rick absorbed the stalking of a pig through a dripping jungle of slime-wrapped plants. He felt the pain that gnawed at his failing body. He lived with the patient chimpanzees, always gliding through the dark shadows. He exulted in the protection of the orange-yellow fires. He loved the shifting pale pastel colors of the closed-in sky.
And he remembered so much. A lifetime of memories: the Sorceress when she was young, the time when Stalker had tried to fly too far, the warm rain that had pelted down when there could be no rain—
Continuity. That was what it was all about. Rick had been on the fringes of it before, extracting an ancient artifact and holding it in his hand. He was not immune to wonder. He had his day dreams. But this was genuine. So had all the countless generations been, back on Earth, back through the immense spans of time that archeologists tagged so glibly as the Neolithic and the Paleolithic….
He knew that his work here would not end when the rescue ships came. His life was bound up with that of Caroth. The two of them were linked.
Caroth would stay in his world, of course.
Rick would stay with him. It was their world now.
Until—
Caroth had tears in his bloodshot eyes. He was ashamed of them.
The ships that came from Earth were impressive. These were no mundane shuttles on ho-hum runs. These were sleek metal fish that flashed through space with their figurative flags flying.
Caroth could not have cared less.
For a time, there were Important People in the O’Neill. There was enough hot air from speeches to raise the temperature of the galaxy a fraction of a degree.
Caroth did not listen to the fancy words.
The farewells were hard on him. He said little. He embraced some and simply touched others. One Eye, Lansing, Floater, Lundelius, Smoke-Eater, Lastborn, Dreaming Woman …
His people.
He would not see them again.
Maybe the doctors could help them. Maybe not. They could not help him in what was left for him to do.
He did not forget the Outsiders. He could not feel strongly about Fran and Pete and Ann and Sandy. Still, they had been understanding. One of them might have been chosen….
He knew what Rick was thinking. They were together.
When the airlock closed and the ships left, there was a terrible silence.
Two men cannot fill an O’Neill, and there were no words.
The Important People had not been happy with Rick Malina.
Rick was not overly concerned about their opinions. He had plenty of other things to worry about.
The law was quite specific. As long as an O’Neill was intact, no inhabitant could be forced to leave without a vote by the local citizens. An O’Neill was a world.
There were other laws. One of them stated that the senior archeologist on a salvage project made the final decisions about what was to be done. Not forever, no. But for a reasonable period of time—and it was up to the courts to figure out what “reasonable” meant.
They could not expel Caroth until they blew the place up.
Rick could go when he was good and ready.
Just the same, Rick had not endeared himself to his superiors. He had not behaved Professionally. He had allowed himself to become Emotionally Involved.
He had also become, as one stern gentleman had so elegantly put it, a pain in the butt. A glory hound.
Rick Malina didn’t care.
That was all part of another world.
His world was here and now: the twisted oily-green vegetation that seemed to grow before his eyes, the stained bubble-houses, the spongy rot beneath his feet, the soft colors of a shifting sky.
And one irascible old man, trying to knot the final loop in his life.
Rick’s mind was almost clear. He was not entirely himself—he knew that he never would be again—but he was not a puppet dancing on an invisible wire. He had the capacity of choice, and that was a kind of freedom.
He wanted to be where he was, and what he was.
He looked at Caroth. Physically the old man was the same: the locked and tortured spine, the bald and lumpy skull, the swollen nose, the massive and uneven shoulders, the curiously fragile legs. The eyes were still bloodshot, and pain lurked behind them.
The sight of him no longer affected Rick. It was hard for him to remember his first sense of shock.
Something had grown between them.
Call it trust.
Fear was gone from Rick Malina. In its place was expectation. More than that: exhilaration, eagerness, joy.
He had never really known his father.
He hadn’t known one hell of a lot of joy either.
Rick was ready. He nodded at Caroth.
“Okay, Pops”, he said. “It’s your move now.”
Caroth had waited for a very long time.
Now that the waiting was over, an alien emotion crept through the old man: doubt.
It was Caroth who felt fear.
What if it didn’t work? What if it all fell flat? What if Rick Malina could not absorb it?
What if he laughed?
The two of them were alone. Caroth would not get another chance.
He spat, disgusted with himself. He had come this far. He would not show weakness now.
“Come,” he said.
Ignoring his pain, he took Rick to see the world.
Rick suspended his will and followed Caroth. It was not easy. He lost count of how many times he slept. He ate when Caroth brought him food.
The old man seemed tireless. He did not try to
save himself. He used it all.
Rick was intensely alive. He found a strength he had never known before. He felt as though his whole life was converging on this place, this time, this event.
He knew that Caroth was showing him more than a world. He was showing him a life.
Rick understood, and was grateful.
He opened himself and took it all in.
There was a dark sea without waves that curved like heavy oil toward the horizon. Nameless things swam and scuttled in its shallow basin. The sea had pinpoints of light that reflected on its glassy surface.
Starlight.
The other side of the rim was translucent across that section, of course.
You could actually see Outside.
That didn’t matter.
What counted was Inside.
The sea that would have been a small lake on Earth was a beginning. Caroth had been born in a nest on its shores.
Rick saw it, felt it. The nest was snug and dry and lined with flowers. Then it was sticky with blood. Caroth was a healthy and unscarred baby, but his mother died within hours. Caroth was nursed by another woman whose child had been stillborn.
Caroth survived. There were few children then, and he was indulged.
Rick followed the years of childhood. It had been a happy time: gliding through the bright corridors that were the spokes leading to the hub of the O’Neill wheel, exploring the silent and mysterious processing labs, playing the hunting game of two-on-a-side.
Caroth had not been lonely. Smoke-Eater was almost his own age; his name had been Owens then. There had been others young enough to share his life—Mac who laughed so readily, Snare who had been quick but not quick enough, Blossom who had done just that. Blossom had changed from a girl into a woman very rapidly, and she discovered sex. That had been fun for them all.
Caroth’s childhood ended with the storm.
He had been looking forward to the Acknowledgment. But the storm came first.
The storm was a freak and therefore awesome beyond belief. There was not even a memory of such a thing, and the O’Neill was full of memories. Rick could feel the horror. He relived it with Caroth.
Electrical charges built up in the atmosphere. The clouds turned dark and sullen. There was wind in the O’Neill: a river of wind that moaned through the rim of the colony. It was strong enough to snap trees.
