by Chad Oliver
Greer could not resist a touch of sarcasm. “It must be tough for you down here with the savages.”
“It is,” she said.
The truth of her statement got to him. Dammit, she was a human being. She was hurting.
“I’m sorry. There. I don’t say that very often either. We’ll talk some. Fair enough?”
“It is a beginning, Greer.”
How strange his name sounded in her voice.
Trapped, he sat down.
There was an intensity about her that went beyond pain. Her interest in him had a desperate quality to it. It was not physical, certainly. It was not the kind of curiosity that has its roots in problem-solving. It was really not intellectual at all.
Then what?
Greer had no idea. He knew that he felt rotten. He knew that he had not asked her to be where she was or what she was.
Still, he found that he cared. It was annoying.
“I’ll give it to you straight,” he said.
“You have my appreciation.” Irony? Maybe.
“Ellyn, it’s not personal. I never heard of you before you got off that ship. I accept that as part of my own ignorance. I know that you must be someone special, good at what you do. They would never have sent you otherwise.”
“Perhaps,” she said.
“It took courage for you to come down here. I know this is the hellhole of the universe to you. But sometimes they have to send someone down. A surrogate won’t do. They need the votes, they need the credits, they need the lifeline. You got stuck with it. You came. You’ll do the job. It’s all politics. Why can’t we just leave it at that?”
“That isn’t enough. I have to understand—you.”
Greer got up and paced. That too bothered him. She could not move without great effort. It put him at a disadvantage. It made him smaller than he was.
“You don’t have to understand me. What are you going to do—give a seminar report? You’re miserable right now, out of your element biologically and culturally. Again, I’m sorry. But you’re tough. You’ll survive. You can go back to your nice organized cocoon and that will be the end of it for you. I’m not part of your life. You’ll get what you came after.”
“Don’t treat me like a child, Greer.” Her voice was weaker, almost a whisper. “Why would I ask you to tell me what I already know? You’re not answering my question.”
“Which is?”
“Give me a moment. I am—searching—for the idiom.” She paused. The silence was long enough to be awkward. “Greer, what do you get of the deal? Why do you do what you do?”
That nearly stopped him. Surely there was no need to explain the obvious. Had he misjudged her intelligence?
He said the words. “The spacer comes down. That’s you. Magnificent public suffering for the handout—dramatize the common bond and all that. I mobilize the troops. We stage a demonstration. We give Garcia some live ammunition—votes on the hoof. Nobody gets hurt; that would tip the balance. Both sides win. We show the legislature that we have some power. We get our share of the funds. That’s what I get out of the deal: a piece of the pie. Pardon me. A piece of the action.”
“I know pie,” Ellyn said. She shut her eyes in despair. There was more blood when she opened them. “I know pie.”
There didn’t seem much to say to that, and so Greer remained silent. His pause was awkward. He felt her disappointment. No, it wasn’t disappointment.
Anguish.
God, what did she want of him? Soul confessions?
She slumped in her great chair. That damnable, earthbound chair. Greer was afraid that she might have passed out.
He started to move toward her.
Sandy Sandoval materialized from somewhere. He must have been listening. Of course.
“Better leave her now,” Sandy said.
Greer hesitated, then turned to go. He didn’t want to stay, did he?
She forced open those bloodstained eyes just as he reached the door.
“I can’t go back,” Ellyn said very quietly. “Don’t you understand? I can’t go back.”
He did not see her again for some days, even though they were both housed in the same state building complex just east of the Capitol dome. He had legal problems that he could not ignore. She was busy with doctors and platoons of public relations types.
He talked to her once on the intercom system. It was a brief conversation and profoundly unsatisfactory.
He watched her several times on the tri-di.
She was good on camera, making her pitch. She was so good that he could hardly believe it, knowing what he knew.
It was not uncommon for the deep space people to develop conditions that made a readjustment to Earth difficult or even impossible. Given a few generations out there, the barriers were formidable. The psychological effects of moving from a totally planned, predictable universe to the chaos of Earth were devastating. Freedom—or relative freedom—is tough to handle if you have never experienced it. When an animal adapts to one environment, it is by definition not adapted to a different ecological situation.
That includes the human animal.
You can calibrate the spin to simulate gravity on the “floor” of a cylinder, you can regulate the atmosphere, you can compensate for the calcium to some degree, you can twiddle with the computer programs.
You can’t turn a Colony into Earth.
All that was elementary. It was like knowing that energy came from the sun or how to design an android
The joker in the ecological deck was that some animals failed to adapt. In the case of human beings, this was not altogether surprising. Primates have a built-in flexibility, but they also have a heritage of millions of years of terrestrial evolution. They can’t just shrug it off at will.
Sometimes they cannot change quickly enough. Sometimes they change in the wrong direction.
Even on Earth there were more extinct species than living ones. And Earth has certain undeniable advantages if you once called it home.
In the abstract, Ellyn’s problem was simple. She had adapted culturally and psychologically to her Colony. It was the only lifeway she knew, or wanted to know.
She hadn’t made it biologically. For purely physical reasons, she could not remain in the Colony and live.
Therefore:
She was expendable to her own people. She would make an excellent one-way missionary.
She could never go back into space.
She had a slim chance on Earth. She hated it. In her body and in her mind she was an alien.
There was one other small item.
His name was Greer Holbrook, and Ellyn had turned his world upside down.
As he saw himself, Greer was a strange mixture of a man. Maybe half rational, half dreamer, and half plagued by convictions. That was at least one half too many and it made his life complicated.
He was not in love with Ellyn. There was no physical attraction between them. He was not blinded by pity.
He was stuck.
Ellyn’s people. He knew them, the glorious starbound ones: proud, smug, superior, contemptuous, sure.
Runaways.
It wasn’t that they had left billions of human beings behind to rot. That was just one of those things, a little question of logistics. It was that they didn’t care.
They remembered, yes. They remembered on politically expedient occasions. And they mocked. They were very good at that, and perhaps very human. The jokes and stories found their way back. Lightspeed was no barrier to the words that hurt.
Did you hear the one about the downer who …
Once there was this downer who wondered what the stars were made of…
Then there was this stowaway downer who found herself in the cargo hold of a spaceship, see …
Greer’s own father and his older sister had dreamed the dream. They were not immune. But they hadn’t been smart enough, clever enough, lucky enough.
Downers. Losers. Trash all their lives.
S
o many others, known and unknown. Even a crowded planet has plenty of room for broken dreams.
Greer himself was not immune. He was not anti-space. That would have been stupid, and he was not a stupid man. Greer was pro-Earth. They needed each other.
He could hear the song of the stars.
Oh, Ellyn, I know you.
And here you are. Not by choice. Here just the same. If I turn away, am I any better than what your people became?
Damn you, Ellyn!
Ellyn, you have become us.
Welcome to the third planet.
“I want you to come with me,” he said to her.
She looked up from the prison of her chair. “That’s impossible.”
“I’ve checked with your doctors. I’ve rigged the car. You can move. You need to get out of here.”
Ellyn was shocked. “I can’t—just go.”
“Yes you can. Just go. Just like that.”
He watched her trying to grapple with his amazing suggestion. In all her life Ellyn had never done anything spontaneous. Her world had been planned to the last decimal point. In a Colony, you always knew the precise outcome of any action. If you didn’t, you stayed put. She had learned in childhood that to act on impulse was blasphemy.
“You won’t destroy the Earth,” he said. “You won’t endanger yourself. You asked me some questions. I want to show you the answer.”
She was breathing so rapidly that the booster lung had to reset itself. “Show me, then. Put it on the screen. Bring it here.”
“Not good enough. Believe me, it won’t work that way.”
“I’m—scared. I’m sick.”
“I’ll take care of you. You have to trust me, Ellyn.”
“For God’s sake, why?”
“You sent for me first, remember? You wanted me to explain some things. I misunderstood you, right? I talked to you about politics and tactics. I had you figured wrong. It was cruel and I’m sorry. You were asking me a different question. How can a reasonably intelligent person live on Earth? What keeps me going? Why have I fought your people? What am I trying to do?”
“Those were the questions,” she said weakly.
“Your world is closed to you. Everything you believe in has been taken away. Your future is here, the last place you want to be. Is there anything in it? Anything worth having?”
The droplets of blood smeared at her eyes. She did not attempt to answer him.
Greer smiled. It was not his professional smile, “You see. I do understand, a little. We may be slow down here, but we do catch on eventually. I can show you. All we have to do is get that butt of yours out of the chair.”
Ellyn shook her head. The flesh pulled at her skull. “Greer, I can’t.”
He hit her with it. There was nothing else to do. “No guts, Ellyn? I don’t believe it. You lost everything that mattered to you. You rode that ship down here, which wasn’t pleasant. You were attacked, shattered, torn apart psychologically. You didn’t quit. You did your job and did it well. You made their case. You even sent for me, the ogre. That wasn’t easy. Guts? You’ve got your share. If you won’t try now there’s just one reason. You’re dead, inside and out. You’re not worth saving. Are you dead, Ellyn? We can’t even recycle you here. You’re useless.”
There were tears mixed with the blood. The words had hammered her into the chair. The final word had been too much. Greer had used it deliberately. He knew something about conditioning.
“Not—useless.” She was shaking.
“Get mad, Ellyn. Fight. You’re not dead. You’re not useless.”
She looked away from him. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“I do. I need you.” He reached out and touched her. “Wipe that damned blood out of your eyes. Get ready.”
She did.
It was not a long drive south along the old San Antonio highway, well within the range of his battery. There was virtually no traffic, of course. Greer knew the route by heart. including all the broken stretches and detour markers attached to corroded Interstate 35 signs, and in truth there was not a great deal to see.
For him, it was strictly ho-hum.
For Ellyn, it was white-knuckle time. She would not have noticed if a dinosaur had wandered onto the road at San Marcos. She was so frightened that she forgot to worry about the effectiveness of the car’s special life-support equipment.
The trip was totally outside her experience.
Greer turned off on the dirt road that led to Canyon Dam. It was rough and the car bounced.
“My place,” he said with a touch of pride. “The project. You’re in it now.”
She tried to look. Some of her fear yielded to a sense of bewilderment.
There was a hot sun in a cloudless blue sky. There was no wind but the air was not as heavy as in humid Austin. The grass, what there was of it, was scorched and summer-brown. Ancient wire fences had collapsed around the sagging walls of deserted wooden farm houses. The cedars had a rich piney smell to them. Some of the mesquites were coming back and their green-feather leaves broke the desolation a little.
Nothing moved in the heat.
“It’s empty,” she said.
“Looks that way,” he said cheerfully. “Wait.”
She didn’t have much choice. The car jolted along and there was a faint smell of water in the air.
Soon—within six kilometers of the highway turnoff—they began to see things.
There were weathered rock walls in good repair. There were stock tanks and cattle swishing flies with their tails. Incredibly, there was a brightly painted store by the side of the road. It had a sign that read: BOB’S GENERAL MERCHANDISE.
There was a great shining translucent dome that swelled like a blister out of the ground. It was big enough to hold twenty space stations. It hummed with power.
“We make things there,” Greer said.
There were dwellings. Some stood alone and others formed clusters. Conical tipis. Squat yurts. Huts with walls of wattle-and-daub and roofs of tawny thatch. Towers of multi-colored glass. Adobe apartment houses. Rectangles and cubes and blocks of cool metal that turned back the rays of the sun …
The car climbed through an old cut; the strata in the rocks were clearly visible, stacked there by millions of years of geological time. The road dropped down along a gentle slope. The land was greener now and there was a welcome stirring of breeze. They saw a man on horseback. He looked like a cowboy was supposed to look and he had a rifle in his saddle scabbard. He took off his crushed and sweaty hat and waved.
“Calls himself Slim,” Greer said. “Not an android. You might say he’s our police force.”
Ellyn held on tightly. She was smothered in sense impressions. She could not sort them out.
People. Crazy people. People dressed in shorts or togas or deerskins or nothing at all. In the shade, in the sun. Children. She had never seen so many children. Playing games. It was obscene.
Greer stopped the car for a moment on a bridge. It was terrible. There was water under it. Fast green water. She could hear it.
“The Guadalupe River,” Greer said happily. “See the limestone on the bottom? See the cypress trees? Look at those twisted roots! They’ve been here forever.”
There were people fishing in the river. Some of them were standing right out in it. The rushing water curled around their legs.
Ellyn shut her eyes. The bleeding was starting up again.
Greer got the car moving again. Ellyn did not open her eyes. She didn’t want to see any more. He noticed that the graphite assembly on the ridge was coming along nicely but decided that she was in no condition to take it in.
“Greer,” she whispered.
“Well?”
“It’s awful. I hate it all.”
“Thank you,” he said. He was hurt in spite of himself.
“I can’t help it.”
“Takes some getting used to,” he admitted and kept on driving.
“Super grok,” he said.
<
br /> Ellyn was somewhat calmer now, seated at a wooden table in Greer’s home. Her portable lung booster was working well and she was surprised to find that she was hungry. She could not face the thought of meat but the bread was fresh, moist, and delicious. She drank water instead of milk. It tasted as though it had things in it.
“That’s what you expected, wasn’t it?” he asked. “A kind of hive mind. Downers groping in the grass. The works.”
Ellyn searched for words. She stared at the paintings on the walls: a dark little fish with whiskers finning in a green current, a whirling abstraction that was an explosion of colors, a frosted star cluster that she recognized on black velvet. Had he done them?
It was a lived-in house, rustic and incredibly roomy by her standards. So much space and yet somehow not threatening. Bright throw-rugs on the hardwood floors. A soft couch that extended the length of one wall. Shelves of books that looked real. Some of them must be very old. Lights from individual bulbs. Not harsh. No …
She knew that she had hurt the man who had built this house. He had shown her—whatever it was. He had been proud of it. She hadn’t laughed. She had recoiled.
“I don’t know,” she said. She still could not find the right words. Perhaps they did not exist, between the two of them. “I don’t think I expected anything—specific. Greer, I am not trying to be insulting. God, I want to find something. I must. I just cannot grasp it. Don’t you see? Your—project, whatever it is called. This plan—”
“There is no plan,” he said with a touch of weariness. “It has no name.”
“That’s impossible.”
“You’re sitting in the big fat middle of it, aren’t you?”
“Well, you have a point. But, Greer, you’re the leader—”
“No. I just fix it so things can happen.”
“There has to be a plan.” There was an edge of stubbornness in her voice.
“Why? Because that’s the way you have lived? That’s the way you did it on your island?”
“I am not ignorant, Greer. I have studied social systems.”
“Oh, wow. Cheers. Applause.”
“That’s not fair. You know that there must be structure. Without it, a group cannot do anything. It cannot go anywhere.”
“It’s not a group. It’s many groups. We don’t have to go anywhere. We’re here.”
