Selected Stories (12 page)

“April!”

“I told them not to. …” and she moaned.

“April, what is it, what’s happened?”

“You needn’t … be,” she said, sobbed a while, and went on, “… angry. It didn’t live.”

“What didn’t … you mean you … April, you—”

“It wouldn’t’ve been a tapeworm,” she whispered.

“Who—” he fell to his knees, found her face. “When did you—”

“I was going to tell you that day, that very same day, and when you came in so angry at what Teague told you, I specially wanted to, I thought you’d … be glad.”

“April, why didn’t you come back? If I’d known. …”

“You
said
what you’d do if I ever … if you ever had another … you meant it, Tod.”

“It’s this place, this Viridis,” he said sadly. “I went crazy.”

He felt her wet hand on his cheek.

“It’s all right. I just didn’t want to make it worse for you,” April said.

“I’ll take you back.”

“No, you can’t. I’ve been … I’ve lost a lot of … just stay with me a little while.”

“Moira should have—”

“She just found me,” said April. “I’ve been alone all the—I guess I made a noise. I didn’t mean to. Tod … don’t quarrel. Don’t go into a lot of … It’s all right.”

Against her throat he cried.
“All right!”

“When you’re by yourself,” she said faintly, “you think; you think better. Did you ever think of—”

“April!” he cried in anguish, the very sound of her pale, pain-wracked voice making this whole horror real.

“Shh, sh. Listen,” she said rapidly. “There isn’t time, you know, Tod. Tod, did you ever think of us all, Teague and Alma and Moira and Carl and us, what we are?”

“I know what I am.”

“
Shh.
Altogether we’re a leader and mother; a word and a shield; a doubter, a mystic. …” Her voice trailed off. She coughed and he could feel the spastic jolt shoot through her body. She panted lightly for a moment and went on urgently, “Anger and prejudice and stupidity, courage, laughter, love, music … it was all aboard that ship and it’s all here on Viridis. Our children and theirs—no matter what they look like, Tod, no matter how they live or what they eat—they have that in them. Humanity isn’t just a way of walking, merely a kind of skin. It’s what we had together and what we gave Sol. It’s what the golden ones found in us and wanted for Viridis. You’ll see. You’ll see.”

“Why Viridis?”

“Because of what Teague said—what you said.” Her breath puffed out in the ghost of a laugh. “Basic biology … ontogeny follows phylogeny. The human fetus is a cell, an animalcule, a gilled amphibian … all up the line. It’s there in us; Viridis makes it go backward.”

“To what?”

“The mushroom. The spores. We’ll be spores, Tod. Together … Alma
said
she could be dead, and together with Teague! That’s why I said … it’s all right. This doesn’t matter, what’s happened. We live in Sol, we live in Emerald with Carl and Moira, you see? Closer, nearer than we’ve ever been.”

Tod took a hard hold on his reason. “But back to spores—why? What then?”

She sighed. It was unquestionably a happy sound. “They’ll be back for the reaping, and they’ll have us, Tod, all we are and all they worship: goodness and generosity and the urge to build; mercy; kindness.

“They’re needed too,” she whispered. “And the spores make mushrooms, and the mushrooms make the heterokaryons; and from those, away from Viridis, come the life-forms to breed us—
us,
Tod! into whichever form is dominant. And there we’ll be, that flash of old understanding of a new idea … the special pressure on a painter’s hand that makes him a Rembrandt, the sense of architecture that turns a piano-player into a Bach. Three billion extra years of evolution, ready to help wherever it can be used. On every Earth-type planet, Tod—millions of us, blowing about in the summer wind, waiting to give. …”

“Give! Give what Teague is now, rotten and angry?”

“That isn’t Teague. That will die off. Teague lives with Alma in their children, and in theirs … she
said
she’d be with him!”

“Me … what about me?” he breathed. “What I did to you. …”

“Nothing, you did nothing. You live in Sol, in Emerald. Living, conscious, alive … with me. …”

He said, “You mean … you could talk to me from Sol?”

“I think I might.” With his forehead, bent so close to her, he felt her smile. “But I don’t think I would. Lying so close to you, why should I speak to an outsider?”

Her breathing changed and he was suddenly terrified. “April, don’t die.”

“I won’t,” she said. “Alma didn’t.” She kissed him gently and died.

It was a long darkness, with Tod hardly aware of roaming and raging through the jungle, of eating without tasting, of hungering without knowing of it. Then there was a twilight, many months long, soft and still, with restfulness here and a promise soon. Then there was a compound again, found like a dead memory, learned again just a little more readily than something new. Carl and Moira were kind, knowing the nature of justice and the limits of punishment, and at last Tod was alive again.

He found himself one day down near the river, watching it and thinking back without fear of his own thoughts, and a growing wonder came to him. His mind had for so long dwelt on his own evil that it was hard to break new paths. He wondered with an awesome effort what manner of creatures might worship humanity for itself, and what manner of creatures humans were to be so worshipped. It was a totally new concept to him, and he was completely immersed in it, so that when Emerald slid out of the grass and stood watching him, he was frightened and shouted.

She did not move. There was little to fear now on Viridis. All the large reptiles were gone, and there was room for the humans, the humanoids, the primates, the … children. In his shock the old reflexes played. He stared at her, her square stocky body, the silver hair which covered it all over except for the face, the palms, the soles of the feet.
“A monkey!”
he spat, in Teague’s tones, and the shock turned to shame. He met her eyes, April’s deep glowing rubies, and they looked back at him without fear.

He let a vision of April grow and fill the world. The child’s rare red eyes helped (there was so little, so very little red on Viridis). He saw April at the spaceport, holding him in the dark shadows of the blockhouse while the sky flamed above them.
We’ll go out like that soon, soon, Tod. Squeeze me, squeeze me … Ah,
he’d said,
who needs a ship?

Another April, part of her in a dim light as she sat writing; her hair, a crescent of light loving her cheek, a band of it on her brow; then she had seen him and turned, rising, smothered his first word with her mouth. Another April wanting to smile, waiting; and April asleep, and once April sobbing because she could not find a special word to tell him what she felt for him … He brought his mind back from her in the past, from her as she was, alive in his mind, back to here, to the bright mute with the grave red eyes who stood before him, and he said, “How precious?”

The baby kept her eyes on his, and slowly raised her silken hands. She cupped them together to make a closed chamber, looked down at it, opened her hands slightly and swiftly to peer inside, rapt at what she pretended to see; closed her hands again to capture the treasure, whatever it was, and hugged it to her breast. She looked up at him slowly, and her eyes were full of tears, and she was smiling.

He took his grandchild carefully in his arms and held her gently and strongly. Monkey?

“April,” he gasped. “Little Ape. Little Ape.”

Viridis is a young planet which bears (at first glance) old life-forms. Come away and let the green planet roll around its sun; come back in a while—not long, as astronomical time goes.

The jungle is much the same, the sea, the rolling savannahs. But the life. …

Viridis was full of primates. There were blunt-toothed herbivores and long-limbed tree-dwellers, gliders and burrowers. The fish-eaters were adapting the way all Viridis life must adapt, becoming more fit by becoming simpler, or go to the wall. Already the sea-apes had rudimentary gills and had lost their hair. Already tiny forms competed with the insects on their own terms.

On the banks of the wandering rivers, monotremes with opposed toes dredged and paddled, and sloths and lemurs crept at night. At first they had stayed together, but they were soon too numerous for that; and a half dozen generations cost them the power of speech, which was, by then, hardly a necessity. Living was good for primates on Viridis, and became better each generation.

Eating and breeding, hunting and escaping filled the days and the cacophonous nights. It was hard in the beginning to see a friend cut down, to watch a slender silver shape go spinning down a river and know that with it went some of your brother, some of your mate, some of yourself. But as the hundreds became thousands and the thousands millions, witnessing death became about as significant as watching your friend get his hair cut. The basic ids each spread through the changing, mutating population like a stain, crossed and recrossed by the strains of the others, co-existing, eating each other and being eaten and all the while passing down through the generations.

There was a cloud over the savannah, high over the ruins of the compound. It was a thing of many colors and of no particular shape, and it was bigger than one might imagine, not knowing how far away it was.

From it dropped a golden spot that became a thread, and down came a golden mass. It spread and swung, exploded into a myriad of individuals. Some descended on the compound, erasing and changing, lifting, breaking—always careful to kill nothing. Others blanketed the planet, streaking silently through the green aisles, flashing unimpeded through the tangled thickets. They combed the riverbanks and the half-light of hill waves, and everywhere they went they found and touched the mushroom and stripped it of its spores, the compaction and multiplication of what had once been the representatives of a very high reptile culture.

Primates climbed and leaped, crawled and crept to the jungle margins to watch. Eater lay by eaten; the hunted stood on the hunter’s shoulder, and a platypoid laid an egg in the open which nobody touched.

Simian forms hung from the trees in loops and ropes, in swarms and beards, and more came all the time, brought by some ineffable magnetism to watch at the hill. It was a fast and a waiting, with no movement but jostling for position, a crowding forward from behind and a pressing back from the slightest chance of interfering with the golden visitors.

Down from the polychrome cloud drifted a mass of the golden beings, carrying with them a huge sleek ship. They held it above the ground, sliced it, lifted it apart, set down this piece and that until a shape began to grow. Into it went bales and bundles, stocks and stores, and then the open tops were covered. It was a much bigger installation than the one before.

Quickly, it was done, and the golden cloud hung waiting.

The jungle was trembling with quiet.

In one curved panel of the new structure, something spun, fell outward, and out of the opening came a procession of stately creatures, long-headed, bright-eyed, three-toed, richly plumed and feathered. They tested their splendid wings, then stopped suddenly, crouched and looking upward.

They were given their obeisance by the golden ones, and after there appeared in the sky the exquisite symbol of a beauty that rides up and up, turns and spirals down again only to rise again; the symbol of that which has no beginning and no end, and the sign of those whose worship and whose work it is to bring to all the Universe that which has shown itself worthy in parts of it.

Then they were gone, and the jungle exploded into killing and flight, eating and screaming, so that the feathered ones dove back into their shelter and closed the door. …

And again to the green planet (when the time was right) came the cloud-ship, and found a world full of birds, and the birds watched in awe while they harvested their magic dust, and built a new shelter. In this they left four of their own for later harvesting, and this was to make of Viridis a most beautiful place.

From Viridis, the ship vaulted through the galaxies, searching for worlds worthy of what is human in humanity, whatever their manner of being alive. These they seeded, and of these, perhaps one would produce something new; something which could be reduced to the dust of Viridis, and from dust return.

“C
OME IN, PURSER. AND
shut the door.”

“I beg your pardon, sir?” The Skipper never invited anyone in—not to his quarters. His office, yes, but not here.

He made an abrupt gesture, and I came in and closed the door. It was about as luxurious as a compartment on a spaceship can get. I tried not to goggle at it as if it was the first time I had ever seen it, just because it was the first time I had ever seen it.

I sat down.

He opened his mouth, closed it, forced the tip of his tongue through his thin lips. He licked them and glared at me. I’d never seen the Iron Man like this. I decided that the best thing to say would be nothing, which is what I said.

He pulled a deck of cards out of the top-middle drawer and slid them across the desk. “Deal.”

I said, “I b—”

“And don’t say you beg my pardon!” he exploded.

Well, all right. If the skipper wanted a cozy game of gin rummy to while away the parsecs, far be it from me to … I shuffled. Six years under this cold-blooded, fish-eyed automatic computer with eyebrows, and this was the first time that he—

“Deal,” he said. I looked up at him. “Draw, five-card draw. You do play draw poker, don’t you, Purser?”

“Yes, sir.” I dealt and put down the pack. I had three threes and couple of court cards. The skipper scowled at his hand and threw down two. He glared at me again.

I said, “I got three of a kind, sir.”

He let his cards go as if they no longer existed, slammed out of his chair and turned his back to me. He tilted his head back and stared up at the see-it-all, with its complex of speed, time, position, and distance-run coordinated. Borinquen, our destination planet, was at spitting distance—only a day or so off—and Earth was a long way behind. I heard a sound and dropped my eyes. The Skipper’s hands were locked behind him, squeezed together so hard that they crackled.