Selected Stories (11 page)

He knew, for this was an old intimacy between them. He laughed and followed the ritual: “How precious?”

She cupped her hands and brought them together, to make of them an ivory box. She raised the hands and peeped into them, between the thumbs, as if at a rare jewel, then clasped the magic tight and hugged it to her breast, raising tear-filled eyes to him. “That precious,” she breathed.

He looked at the sky, seeing somewhere in it the many peak moments of their happiness when she had made that gesture, feeling how each one, meticulously chosen, brought all the others back. “I used to hate this place,” he said. “I guess it’s changed.”

“You’ve changed.”

Changed how?
he wondered. He felt the same, even though he knew he looked older. …

The years passed, and the children grew. When Sol was fifteen Earth-years old, short, heavy-shouldered, powerful, he married Carl’s daughter Libra. Teague, turning to parchment, had returned to his hermitage from the temporary stimulation of his researches on what they still called “the mushroom.” More and more the colony lived off the land and out of the jungle, not because there was any less to be synthesized from their compact machines, but out of preference; it was easier to catch napping frogs or umbrella-birds and cook them than to bother with machine settings and check-analyses, and, somehow, a lot more fun to eat them, too.

It seemed to them safer, year by year.
Felodon,
unquestionably the highest form of life on Viridis, was growing scarce, being replaced by a smaller, more timid carnivore April called
Vulpidus
(once, for it seemed not to matter much any more about keeping records) and everyone ultimately called “fox,” for all the fact that it was a reptile.
Pterodon
was disappearing too, as were all the larger forms. More and more they strayed after food, not famine-driven, but purely for variety; more and more they found themselves welcome and comfortable away from the compound. Once Carl and Moira drifted off for nearly a year. When they came back they had another child—a silent, laughing little thing with oddly long arms and heavy teeth.

The warm days and the glowing nights passed comfortably and the stars no longer called. Tod became a grandfather and was proud. The child, a girl, was albino like April, and had exactly April’s deep red eyes. Sol and Libra named her Emerald, a green name and a ground-term rather than a sky-term, as if in open expression of the slow spell worked on them all by Viridis. She was mute—but so were almost all the new children, and it seemed not to matter. They were healthy and happy.

Tod went to tell Teague, thinking it might cheer the old one up a little. He found him lying in what had once been his laboratory, thin and placid and disinterested, absently staring down at one of the arthropodal flying creatures that had once startled them so by zooming into the Coffin chamber. This one had happened to land on Teague’s hand, and Teague was laxly waiting for it to fly off again, out through the unscreened window, past the unused sprays, over the faint tumble of rotted spars which had once been a palisade.

“Teague, the baby’s come!”

Teague sighed, his tired mind detaching itself from memory episode by episode. His eyes rolled toward Tod and finally he turned his head. “Which one would that be?”

Tod laughed. “My grandchild, a girl. Sol’s baby.”

Teague let his lids fall. He said nothing.

“Well, aren’t you glad?”

Slowly a frown came to the papery brow. “Glad.” Tod felt he was looking at the word as he had stared at the arthropod, wondering limply when it might go away. “What’s the matter with it?”

“What?”

Teague sighed again, a weary, impatient sound. “What does it look like?” he said slowly, emphasizing each one-syllabled word.

“Like April. Just like April.”

Teague half sat up, and blinked at Tod. “You don’t mean it.”

“Yes, eyes red as—” The image of an Earth sunset flickered near his mind but vanished as too hard to visualize. Tod pointed at the four red-capped “mushrooms” that had stood for so many years in the test-boxes in the laboratory. “Red as those.”

“Silver hair,” said Teague.

“Yes, beau—”

“All over,” said Teague flatly.

“Well, yes.”

Teague let himself fall back on the cot and gave a disgusted snort. “A monkey.”

“Teague!”

“Ah-h-h … go ’way,” growled the old man. “I long ago resigned myself to what was happening to us here. A human being just can’t adapt to the kind of radioactive ruin this place is for us. Your monsters’ll breed monsters, and the monsters’ll do the same if they can, until pretty soon they just won’t breed any more. And that will be the end of that, and good riddance. …” His voice faded away. His eyes opened, looking on distant things, and gradually found themselves focused on the man who stood over him in shocked silence. “But the one thing I can’t stand is to have somebody come in here saying, ‘Oh, joy, oh happy day!’”

“Teague …” Tod swallowed heavily.

“Viridis eats ambition; there was going to be a city here,” said the old man distinctly. “Viridis eats humanity; there were going to be people here.” He chuckled gruesomely. “All right, all right, accept it if you have to—and you have to. But don’t come around here celebrating.”

Tod backed to the door, his eyes horror-round, then turned and fled.

April held him as he crouched against the wall, rocked him slightly, made soft unspellable mother-noises to him.

“Shh, he’s all decayed, all lonesome and mad,” she murmured. “Shh. Shh.”

Tod felt half-strangled. As a youth he had been easily moved, he recalled; he had that tightness of the throat for sympathy, for empathy, for injustices he felt the Universe was hurling at him out of its capacious store. But recently life had been placid, full of love and togetherness and a widening sense of membership with the earth and the air and all the familiar things which walked and flew and grew and bred in it. And his throat was shaped for laughter now; these feelings hurt him.

“But he’s right,” he whispered. “Don’t you see? Right from the beginning it … it was … remember Alma had six children, April? And a little later, Carl and Moira had three? And you, only one … how long is it since the average human gave birth to only one?”

“They used to say it was humanity’s last major mutation,” she admitted, “Multiple births … these last two thousand years. But—”

“Eyebrow ridges,” he interrupted. “Hair … that skull, Emerald’s skull, slanting back like that; do you see the tusks on that little …
baboon
of Moira’s?”

“Tod!
Don’t!
”

He leaped to his feet, sprang across the room and snatched the golden helix from the shelf where it had gleamed its locked symbolism down on them ever since the landing. “Around and down!” he shouted. “Around and around and down!” He squatted beside her and pointed furiously. “Down and down into the blackest black there is; down into
nothing.
” He shook his fist at the sky. “You see what they do? They find the highest form of life they can and plant it here and watch it slide down into the muck!” He hurled the artifact away from him.

“But it goes up too, round and up. Oh, Tod!” she cried. “Can you remember them, what they looked like, the way they flew, and say these things about them?”

“I can remember Alma,” he gritted, “conceiving and gestating alone in space, while they turned their rays on her every day. You know
why
?” With the sudden thought, he stabbed a finger down at her. “To give her babies a head-start on Viridis, otherwise they’d have been born normal here; it would’ve taken another couple of generations to start them downhill, and they wanted us all to go together.”

“No, Tod, no!”

“Yes, April, yes. How much proof do you need?” He whirled on her. “Listen—remember that mushroom Teague analyzed? He had to
pry
spores out of it to see what it yielded. Remember the three different plants he got? Well, I was just there; I don’t know how many times before I’ve seen it, but only now it makes sense. He’s got four mushrooms now; do you see? Do you see? Even back as far as we can trace the bugs and newts on this green hell-pit, Viridis won’t let anything climb; it must fall.”

“I don’t—”

“You’ll give me basic biology any time,” he quoted sarcastically. “Let me tell you some biology. That mushroom yields three plants, and the plants yield animal life. Well, when the animal life fertilized those heterowhatever—”

“Heterokaryons.”

“Yes. Well, you don’t get animals that can evolve and improve. You get one pitiful generation of animals which breeds back into a mushroom, and there it sits hoarding its spores. Viridis wouldn’t let one puny newt, one primitive pupa build! It snatches ’em back, locks ’em up. That mushroom isn’t the beginning of everything here—
it’s the end!
”

April got to her feet slowly, looking at Tod as if she had never seen him before, not in fear, but with a troubled curiosity. She crossed the room and picked up the artifact, stroked its gleaming golden coils. “You could be right,” she said in a low voice. “But that can’t be all there is to it.” She set the helix back in its place. “They
wouldn’t.
”

She spoke with such intensity that for a moment that metrical formation, mighty and golden, rose again in Tod’s mind, up and up to the measureless cloud which must be a ship. He recalled the sudden shift, like a genuflection, directed at them, at
him,
and for that moment he could find no evil in it. Confused, he tossed his head, found himself looking out the door, seeing Moira’s youngest ambling comfortably across the compound.

“They
wouldn’t?
” he snarled. He took April’s slender arm and whirled her to the door. “You know what I’d do before I’d father another one like
that?
” He told her specifically what he would do. “A lemur next, hm? A spider, an oyster, a jellyfish!”

April whimpered and ran out. “Know any lullabies to a tapeworm?” he roared after her. She disappeared into the jungle, and he fell back, gasping for breath. …

Having no stomach for careful thought nor careful choosing, having Teague for an example to follow, Tod too turned hermit. He could have survived the crisis easily perhaps, with April to help, but she did not come back. Moira and Carl were off again, wandering; the children lived their own lives, and he had no wish to see Teague. Once or twice Sol and Libra came to see him, but he snarled at them and they left him alone. It was no sacrifice. Life on Viridis was very full for the contented ones.

He sulked in his room or poked about the compound by himself. He activated the protein converter once, but found its products tasteless, and never bothered with it again. Sometimes he would stand near the edge of the hilltop and watch the children playing in the long grass, and his lip would curl.

Damn Teague!
He’d been happy enough with Sol all those years, for all the boy’s bulging eyebrow ridges and hairy body. He had been about to accept the silent, silver Emerald, too, when the crochety old man had dropped his bomb. Once or twice Tod wondered detachedly what it was in him that was so easily reached, so completely insecure, that the suggestion of abnormality should strike so deep.

Somebody once said,
“You really need to be loved, don’t you, Tod?”

No one would love this tainted thing, father of savages who spawned animals. He didn’t deserve to be loved.

He had never felt so alone.
“I’m going to die. But I will be with you too.”
That had been Alma. Huh! There was old Teague, tanning his brains in his own sour acids. Alma had believed something or other … and what had come of it? That wizened old crab lolling his life away in the lab.

Tod spent six months that way.

“Tod!” He came out of sleep reluctantly, because in sleep an inner self still lived with April where there was no doubt and no fury; no desertion, no loneliness.

He opened his eyes and stared dully at the slender figure silhouetted against Viridis’ glowing sky. “April?”

“Moira,” said the figure. The voice was cold.

“Moira!” he said, sitting up. “I haven’t seen you for a year. More. Wh—”

“Come,” she said. “Hurry.”

“Come where?”

“Come by yourself or I’ll get Carl and he’ll carry you.” She walked swiftly to the door.

He reeled after her. “You can’t come in here and—”

“Come on.” The voice was edged and slid out from between clenched teeth. A miserable part of him twitched in delight and told him that he was important enough to be hated. He despised himself for recognizing the twisted thought, and before he knew what he was doing he was following Moira at a steady trot.

“Where are—” he gasped, and she said over her shoulder, “If you don’t talk you’ll go faster.”

At the jungle margin a shadow detached itself and spoke. “Got him?”

“Yes, Carl.”

The shadow became Carl. He swung in behind Tod, who suddenly realized that if he did not follow the leader, the one behind would drive. He glanced back at Carl’s implacable bulk, and then put down his head and jogged doggedly along as he was told.

They followed a small stream, crossed it on a fallen tree, and climbed a hill. Just as Tod was about to accept the worst these determined people might offer in exchange for a moment to ease his fiery lungs, Moira stopped. He stumbled into her. She caught his arm and kept him on his feet.

“In there,” she said, pointing.

“A finger tree.”

“You know how to get inside,” Carl growled.

Moira said, “She begged me not to tell you, ever. I think she was wrong.”

“Who? What is—”

“Inside,” said Carl, and shoved him roughly down the slope.

His long conditioning was still with him, and reflexively he sidestepped the fanning fingers which swayed to meet him. He ducked under them, batted aside the inner phalanx, and found himself in the clear space underneath. He stopped there, gasping.

Something moaned.

He bent, fumbled cautiously in the blackness. He touched something smooth and alive, recoiled, touched it again. A foot.

Someone began to cry harshly, hurtfully, the sound exploding as if through clenched hands.