The Genocides (21 page)

Now, however, she was pursuing a less weighty subject: “There was another movie, I can’t remember the name now, where she was poor and had this funny accent, and Laurence Harvey was a medical student who fell in love with her. Or else it was Rock Hudson. She had him right in the palm of her hand, she did. He’d have done anything she said. I can’t remember how that one ended, but there was another one I liked better, with James Stewart—remember him?—where she lived in this beautiful mansion in San Francisco. Oh, you should have seen the dresses she had. And such lovely hair! She must have been the most beautiful woman in the world. And she fell down from a tower at the end. I
think
that’s how it ended.”

“You must have seen just about every movie Kim Novak ever made,” Maryann said placidly while the baby nursed at her breast.

“Well, if there was any I missed, I never heard about them. I wish you’d loosen these ropes.” But Maryann never replied to her complaints. “There was one where she was a witch, but not, you know, old-fashioned. She had an apartment right on Park Avenue or someplace like that. And the most beautiful Siamese cat.”

“Yes, I think you’ve told me about that one already.”

“Well, why don’t you ever contribute to the conversation? I must have told you about every movie I’ve ever seen by now.”

“I never saw many movies.”

“Do you suppose she’s still alive?”

“Who—Kim Novak? No, I don’t suppose so. We may be the very last ones. That’s what Orville says.”

“I’m hungry again.”

“You just ate. Can’t you wait till Buddy is finished nursing?”

“I’m
hungry
, I tell you! Do you think I
like
this?”

“Oh, all right.” Maryann took up the basket by its one remaining handle and went off to a more wholesome section of the tuber. Filled, the basket weighed twenty pounds or more.

When she could no longer hear Maryann nearby, Greta burst out into tears. “Oh God, I
hate
this! I hate
her!
Oh, I’m so
hungry!”
Her tongue ached to be covered with the beloved, licorice-flavored slop, as a three-pack smoker’s tongue craves nicotine on a morning when he has no cigarettes.

She was not able to wait for Maryann’s return. When she had driven away the worst of her hunger, she stopped cramming the stuff in her mouth and moaned aloud in the darkness. “Oh Ga, how I hay myself!
Myself
, thas who I hay!”

They had hauled Greta a long way, only stopping to rest when they had reached the uppermost tuber in which they had spent the first night of their subterranean winter. The relative coolness at this height was a welcome relief from the steamy heat blow. Greta’s silence was an even more welcome contrast. All during the ascent she had complained that the harness was strangling her, that she was caught in the vines and they were pulling her apart, that she was hungry. As they passed through each successive tuber, Greta would stuff the pulp into her mouth at a prodigious rate.

Orville estimated that she weighed four hundred pounds. “Oh, more than that,” Buddy said. “You’re being kind.”

They would never have been able to get her as far as they had, if the sap coating the hollow of the roots had not been such an effective lubricant. The problem now was how to hoist her up the last thirty, vertical feet of the primary root. Buddy suggested a system of pulleys, but Orville feared that the ropes at their disposal might not be able to support Greta’s full weight. “And even if they can how will we get her out through that hole? In December, Maryann was barely able to squeeze in through it.”

“One of us will have to go back for the axe.”

“Now? Not
this
one of us—not when we’re this close to the sunlight. I say let’s leave her here where there’s food ready at hand for her and go up the rest of the way ourselves. Later is time enough to be Good Samaritans.”

“Buddy, what’s that sound?” Maryann asked. It was not like Maryann to interrupt.

They listened, and even before they heard it, they feared what it might be, what it was. A low grating sound—a whine—a rasp not so loud a noise as the metal sphere had made trying to push its way into the cave, because, for one thing, it was farther away, and for another, it did not seem to be having the same difficulty purchasing entrance. The whine grew louder; then a vast flushing sound ensued, as when a swimming pool begins to drain.

Whatever it was, it was now in the tuber with them.

With a fury sudden as their terror, a wind sprang up and bowled them to their knees. Tides of liquid fruit rose from the floor and walls and dropped from the ceiling; the wind swept off the crest of each successive wave and carried it toward the far end of the tuber, like the superfluous suds that spill out of an automatic washer. All that could be seen in the lamplight were white flashes of the blowing froth. Maryann clutched her child to her breast convulsively, after a blast of wind had almost lifted him from her arms. Assisted by Buddy, leaning into the wind, she made her way to the sanctuary of a root that branched off from the tuber. There they were sheltered from the worst effects of the gale, which seemed to howl still more fiercely now.

It was left to Orville to attempt Greta’s rescue, but it was a hopeless task. Even under ordinary circumstances, it was difficult to pull her weight across the slippery floor of the fruit; alone, against the wind, he could not budge her. In fact, she seemed to be moving into the vortex with the pulp of the fruit. After a third quixotic attempt, he surrendered willingly to Blossom’s mute entreaties and they joined Buddy and Maryann in the root.

Greta’s ponderous weight slid forward with the other matter of the fruit. Miraculously, the lamp which had been entrusted to her during the rest period was still burning. Indeed it burned brighter than before.

Though her vision was beginning to flicker like badly spliced film, she was certain in the last moments of consciousness that she could see the great, palpitant maw of the thing, a brilliant rosy orange that could only be called Pango Peach and, superimposed over it, a grille of scintillating Cinderella Red. The grille seemed to grow at an alarming pace. Then she felt the whole mass of her being swept up in the whirlwind, and for a brief, weightless moment she was young again, and then she spattered over the grille like a cellophane bag of water dropped from a great height.

In the root they heard the popping sound distinctly. Maryann crossed herself, and Buddy mumbled something.

“What’d you say?” Orville shouted, for the tempest had reached its height, and even here in the root they were clinging to the vines to keep from being sucked back into the tuber.

“I said there’ll be worms in the cider tonight,” Buddy shouted back.

“What?”

“Worms!”

The rasping sound, which had ceased or been inaudible during the storm, was renewed, and as abruptly as the wind had sprung up, it died. When the rasping sounds had diminished to a reassuring level, the five of them returned to the tuber. Even without the lantern, the change was evident: the floor was several feet lower than it had been; voices echoed from the surfaces, which were hard as rock; even the thick rind of the fruit had been scraped loose. In the center of this larger space, at about the level of their heads, a large tube or pipeline stretched from the upper root opening to the lower. The tube was warm to the touch and was in constant movement—down.

“That was some vacuum cleaner,” Orville said. “It scoured this place as clean as a whistle. There’s not enough left here to feed a mouse.”

“The harvesters have come,” Buddy said. “You didn’t think they’d plant all these potatoes and leave them to rot, did you?”

“Well, we better go up to the surface and see what Farmer MacGregor looks like.”

But they were strangely reluctant to leave the dry tuber. An elegiac mood had settled over them. “Poor Greta,” Blossom said.

They all felt better when the simple memorial had been pronounced. Greta was dead, and the whole old world seemed to have died in her person. They knew that the world to which they would now ascend would not be the same as the one they’d left behind.

Just as a worm passing through an apple may suppose that the apple, its substance and quality, consists merely of those few elements which have passed through his own meager body, while in fact his whole being is enveloped in the fruit and his passage has scarcely diminished it, so Buddy and Maryann and their child, Blossom and Orville, emerging from the earth after a long passage through the labyrinthine windings of their own, purely human evils, were not aware of the all-pervading presence of the larger evil that lies without, which we call reality. There is evil everywhere, but we can only see what is in front of our noses, only remember what has passed through our bellies.

The gray basketballs, pumped full of the pulp of the fruit, had risen from an earth that was no longer green. Then, like primitives clearing their lands, the machines that served the alien farmers turned that earth into a pyre. The towering stalks of the great Plants were consumed, and the sight had all the grandeur of a civilization falling to ruins. The few humans who remained retreated into the earth one more time. When they re-emerged, the pall that hung over the scorched earth made them welcome the total eclipse of night.

Then a wind moved in from the lake, and the pall thinned to reveal the heavy cumulus above. The rains came. The pure water cleared the skies and washed the months’ encrustations from their bodies and soaked into the black earth.

Out came the sun and dried the rain, and their bodies gloried in its tenuous April warmth. Though the earth was black, the sky was blue, and at night there were stars—Deneb, Vega, Altair—brighter than anyone had remembered. Vega, particularly, shone bright. In the false dawn, a sliver of moon rose in the east. Later the sky would lighten, and once more the sun would rise.

It all seemed very beautiful to them, for they believed that the natural order of things—that is to say, their order—was being restored.

There were expeditions down into the roots to search out traces of fruit that the harvesters had overlooked. Such traces were rare, but they existed; by rationing out these scraps of rind sparingly, they might hope to survive the summer at least. For the time being, there was also the water and weeds in the lake, and as soon as it became warmer, they planned to make their way down along the Mississippi, to the warm southlands. There was also the hope that the ocean would still be fruitful.

The lake was dead. All along the fire-blackened shore, shoals of stinking fish were heaped memorially. But that the ocean might be in the same condition—that was unthinkable.

Their chief hope was that the Earth had survived. Somewhere there must be seeds sprouting in the warm soil, survivors like themselves, from whose flowering the earth might be made green again.

But their cardinal hope without which all hopes else were vain, was that the Plant had had its season, long though it had been, and that that season was over. The armored spheres had left with the rape of a planet, the fires had burnt over the stubble, and the land would now wake from the nightmare of that second alien creation. That was their hope.

Then everywhere the land was covered with a carpet of the richest green. The rains that had washed the sky clean of the smoke of the burning had also borne the billion spores of the second planting. Like all hybrids, the Plant was sterile, and could not reproduce itself. A new crop had to be planted every spring.

In two days the Plants were already ankle-deep.

The survivors spread out over the flat green uniformity of the plain resembled the figures in a Renaissance print illustrating the properties of perspective. The nearest three figures, in the middle distance, comprised a sort of Holy Family, though moving closer, one could not help but note that their features were touched by some other emotion than quiet happiness. The woman sitting on the ground was, in fact, weeping bitterly, and the man on his knees behind her, his hands planted on her shoulders as though to comfort her, was barely able to restrain his own tears. Their attention was fixed upon the thin child in her arms, who was futilely puffing at her dry breast.

A little farther on was another figure—or should we say two?—without any iconographic parallel, unless we allow this to be a Niobe sorrowing for her children. However, Niobe is usually depicted alone or in the prospect of all fourteen children; this woman was holding the skeleton of a single child in her arms. The child had been about ten years of age when it died. The woman’s red hair was a shocking contrast to the green everywhere about her.

Almost at the horizon one could make out the figures of a man and woman, nude, hand in hand, smiling. Certainly these were Adam and Eve before the Fall, though they appeared rather more thin than they are usually represented. Also, they were rather ill-matched with respect to age: he was forty if he was a day; she was barely into her teens. They were walking south, and occasionally they would speak to each other.

The woman, for instance, might turn her head to the man and say, “You never told us who your favorite actor is.” And the man would reply, “David Niven, I always liked David Niven.” Then how beautifully they would smile!

But these figures were very, very small. The landscape dominated them entirely. It was green and level and it seemed of infinite extent. Vast though it was, Nature—or Art—had expended little imagination upon it. Even viewed closely, it presented a most monotonous aspect. In any square foot of ground, a hundred seedlings grew, each exactly like every other, none prepossessing.

Nature is prodigal. Of a hundred seedlings only one or two would survive; of a hundred species, only one or two.

Not, however, man.

THE END