Collected Short Fiction, page 682
“If we—” The simple truth staggered me. “If we had only understood—”
“That’s why the snakes were here.” Her urgent voice came faster, faster, in a way that made me think of Nick. “They’re well-meaning and more or less intelligent—though I don’t think they ever knew what they were doing to our aircraft. They were trying to communicate. The breakthrough came when they were able to explain the situation to our transgalactic friends. You should have seen the happy way they dived around the terminal when the Venusians began pulling back the fog.”
“Why bother about the fog—” bitterness croaked in my throat—“when the human race is dead? Why not just invite our space friends to take over the planet?”
“Uncle Kim!” She made a face at me. “Things aren’t that bad. The Venusians were pretty humane, by our old military standards. They concentrated their forces around our space centers—at Skygate and the Sino-Soviet installations in the Gobi. There was no mass slaughter. Though the snakes did stop air travel and the fog drove men off the sea, we’ve found most of the human race alive and well, on dry land.”
I stared down at my red-caked hands and blankly back at her.
“So the world didn’t end.” Her rapid voice had slowed, and she had time for a quizzical smile. “If you can stand the shock! Our big job’s done and we’ve got a short vacation. The ambassadors are off to call on our neighbor planets. Your enterprising brother has invited my poor mother to try the new snow on the Sandia slopes. Nick is on his way to visit old friends at Fairfax—enough of Guy is left in him so that he had to see those women again. Won’t Billie Fran be surprised!”
SHE laughed, shrugged. That careless gesture may have hidden more feeling than she showed, but the liquid flow of her golden body nearly stopped my heart.
“And I came out to look for you again, though everybody else had given you up.” Halfway down the black gangway she paused to study me. “About time, too. If you could see yourself—a perfect scarecrow!”
She laughed at me. Wading to meet her, I stopped again, stung by her look of sheer delight.
“Kim!” Concern erased her laughter. “What’s the matter?”
“I’m just a man, for one thing.” My own sardonic voice surprised me. “I’m afraid I don’t belong on your bright new superhuman world.” I saw her hurt protest and raised my gritty voice. “For another thing, I believe my gamma-form infection has come back.”
“Our new health service will soon cure that.” She left the ramp and picked her way across the slick red rocks to the brink of the blood-colored stream. Pausing there, golden hands on golden hips, she surveyed me from enigmatic eyes.
“There’s a quicker treatment.” Her warm amusement was mixed with something else. “One we might both enjoy. You know I was born with a natural immunity to all sorts of infection. There’s a way I can use it to cure you—though your doctor might frown at the method.”
Waiting to discover what she meant, I stood admiring her tawny loveliness. I felt my pulses throbbing and wondered vaguely if her unearthly power had already begun to lift me out of my long exhaustion. Fond recollections were dancing in my brain like champagne bubbles—images of Kyrie’s infant elfin charm, of her tiny hand trustingly in mine, of her secret delight in her own peculiar music, of her strange games with little Nick, of that magic moment when the touch of the nexode made her a woman. Now the sunlight gilded her breasts and thighs and I was shaken with a spasm of unexpected lust. Dismayed, suddenly conscious of my hungry stare, I tried to turn away.
“You needn’t feel so damned incestuous!” Her ringing laugh mocked my confusion. “After all, you’re not my real uncle.” Her eyes turned grave and almost sad. “You see, Kim, the nexode showed me long ago how you felt about me. I think I’ve always understood you better than you understand yourself—and loved you more than you dare love anybody. That’s why I’ve come to find you.”
Her impish look faded into a cool directness that took my breath.
“That’s the reason for my only reservation now. I don’t want to hurt you more than you’ve been hurt. Whatever——” She paused as if to weigh me. “Whatever we do, I hope you won’t let it matter too much.”
I waited in a daze.
“First of all, there’s something I must tell you.” Her voice fell soberly. “Nick and I will be leaving on the tachyon ship. We’re to represent our whole group of planets. I don’t know when we’ll be back.”
Her face reflected my pain.
“I’m sorry, Kim. I don’t like leaving you, my mother, or Uncle Yuri and Aunt Carolina. But it’s part of the job we were born to do, and we’re both excited about it. It’s another big mission, helping all our worlds adjust to the culture of the stars.”
I nodded bleakly as that sank in.
“I thought you ought to know,” she said. “Because no other creature can follow until certain problems of health and law have been cleared up. We’ll have to leave you here.”
She came toward me through the clotted mud. I dropped the rifle.
She kissed me—Kyrie kissed me.
I followed her out of the mud. The shrilling of the ants was suddenly a joyous song.
THAT day and night are special in my memory, too precious for any bare description. Drunk with the wine of her lilac-like scent, wedded to all her golden wonder, for that tiny time I was more than merely mortal.
Kyrie! Giving me that taste of superhuman joy, how could she have asked me not to let it matter? Her farewell left a desolate ache in my heart. Blind with tears, all I saw was a blur of blue when she opened the door of the globe.
“The starship is loading on the top stage now.” Her voice was hurried and uneven. “The air up there is too thin for you. I’ll have to leave you here.” Her cool arms caught me in a last quick embrace. “Don’t forget me, Kim.”
Had she ever been far from my mind?
Looking out, I saw that the globe had brought me down to the middle of a vast white plain with only blue fog around it. A chill wind bit my nakedness. A forlorn desolation seized me and I turned back for a final glimpse of Kyrie.
“You’ll be okay, Kim.” Her voice had the edge I needed. “After all, you’re a big boy now. I know you’re well—and strong enough!”
I heard the love beneath her impish malice and suddenly it struck me as a monstrous fault that I had never properly told her how I loved her. I tried to speak, then remembered that she knew all I felt. I waved and strode down the gangway.
The blue glow had died and now the cloudy dawn revealed the distant loom of the central tower, lifting forever to that higher stage where the air was too rare for me. In a moment the beacon was burning through the gray clouds again—a glow of rose, a shower of gold, a floodlight flowing over all the unearthly magnificence around me. I saw Yuri Marko and Carolina riding up a ramp to meet me, undismayed at being left behind, waving and grinning greenly as the beacon changed. With a certain reluctant eagerness, I stepped into the future I had fled.
1973
Doom Ship
Sol One . . . where men live faster than light—and as often as they dare!
I
THE meeting and the funeral had both run long and Ben Charles Pertin was late. Because of this and because what he was late for was a date with the girl he loved and hoped to marry he was trying to make up time.
On Sun One trying to hurry was both easy and unwise. The easy part was physical. Sun One’s gravity ran about three per cent of Earth’s even at the center, so you could leap thirty yards at a time on the straightaway and never bother with stairs or elevators in going from shell to shell of the great sphere. The unwise part lay in the fact that most of Sun One’s population, composed of fifty strange races from all over the galaxy, was also in a hurry—you ran the risk of collision all the time. Humanity was a junior race in the galaxy. Pertin’s instructions had been most explicit about avoiding offense when possible.
He was also in a difficult mood because of the combined impact of the morning’s events. The funeral had been his boss’s, Ray Sam Barnett’s. Pertin had liked him only generally and defensively—there had been no close personal tie. Nevertheless, Sam’s death had been an unwelcome reopening of ancient insomniac questions having to do with what death really amounted to under the special circumstances of Sun One. As Pertin hurried down from the shell where Barnett’s shrouded body had been consigned to the matter banks of the tachyon transmitters he found the old puzzle of identity clouding his mind.
Sun One had begun as an asteroid circling a young blue-white giant star in the great diffuse gas cloud that Earthly astronomers called the Orion Nebula. Over a period of centuries it had been built upon, sheathed over and tunneled into until it had been converted into a great hivelike artifact. It was the closest thing there was to a central headquarters of the loose association of intelligent races in the galaxy which had made contact with each other. Ben Pertin and all the other forty or fifty human beings there were newcomers to Sun One and to the galactic confraternity—Earth was the newest planet to achieve contact. When a Sirian or a T’Worlie died half of Sun One was likely to come out to do him honor. At the funeral of Pertin’s boss the only mourners—if “mourners” was the right term—had been a handful of humans and not more than six representatives of all other known sentients. Not even all the humans had troubled to show up—probably, Pertin thought, because they did not want to stimulate, again that endless questioning about who it was who had died, when the nature of tachyon travel meant that exact duplicates of Pertin’s boss still lived at a dozen places in the galaxy. As they did for everyone on Sun One, since each of them had come there in the same way.
NEVERTHELESS the death did have some concrete implications and one of them touched Pertin very closely. That had been the subject of the brief staff meeting that followed the funeral.
The most unpleasant part was yet to come—Pertin had to tell his fiancée about the results of the meeting. She was sure to dislike it. Still, as he came closer to where she was waiting for him the unpleasant, aspects began to fade from his mind and he began to feel the joy of seeing Zara Doy again. Bisexual love, it had turned out; was not very common in the galaxy, most, of whose races either reproduced in impersonal ways or reserved their emotional commitments for functions other than procreation. But Pertin and Zara Doy were deeply in love all the same. They planned to marry as soon as they could and rather enjoyed the fact that this made them objects of interest to such beings as possessed personal curiosity at all.
So they were watched as Pertin spotted Zara Doy and launched himself toward her in a shallow gravity dive over the heads of a thing like a dragon, a creature composed mostly of a single great blue eye and a couple of scurrying collective creatures from one of the core stars. “Sorry,” he cried down at them, caught the laughing girl’s hand and stopped hard beside her.
“Ouch,” she said, releasing a holdfast with her other hand. “I’d appreciate a little less enthusiasm next time.”
He kissed her and took her arm. “It’s part of the image,” he said cheerfully. “You know what the chief of delegation says. Make them know we’re here. Earth may be the newest planet in the association but it isn’t going to be the least important. We have a duty to Earth to make ourselves known throughout the galaxy and a duty to the galaxy to contribute our strength and our know-how.”
“I think,” said the girl, “that if you’re going to talk like that you’d better buy me a drink.”
At this shell of Sun One the curvature of the spherical surface they walked on was noticeably sharp. It was easier to leap than to stroll. To travel arm in arm, which is how Ben Charles Pertin chose to walk with his girl, required practice and a lot of discomfort, not only to them but to the other sentients in the concourse. Pertin and Zara shifted grips, so that each had an arm around the other’s waist—then Pertin caught the holdfast webbing with his free hand and partly tugged, partly kicked them into the air. They shot past the dragonlike creature, narrowly missed a steelwork vertical strut, touched down again next to something that looked like a soft-bodied beetle with three dozen legs and were in sight of the little refreshment platform they liked. Pertin said “Hi!” to a thing like a green bat as it flapped by. It hissed something shrill that his personal translator repeated into his ear as, “I recognize your identity, Ben Charles Pertin.” The girl nodded, too, although all members of that particular race, which was called the T’Worlie, looked alike to her, and in any event the T’Worlie did not have the custom of nodding since they had no more neck than bats.
As they waited for traffic to clear Zara asked, “How did things go this morning?”
He hesitated, then said, “About as usual. Things are all fouled up on the probe.” He was watching a tumbling boxlike robot coming toward them on a tangent, correcting its course with methodical jets of steam from the faces of its cubical body, but the tone of his voice made the girl look at him sharply.
“What is it, Ben?”
“I’ll tell you when we sit down.”
“You’ll tell me now.”
“Well—” He hesitated, then cried. “All right, we can make it now!” But the girl wrapped her fingers around the webbing of the holdfast.
“Ben!”
He relaxed and looked at her. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to.
“Ben! Not again!”
He said defensively, “I have to, Zara. The other copy of me is dying. Barnett promised he’d go instead of me—because of how you feel—but now he’s dead here. There’s nobody from Earth on the probe now to represent us. So I agreed to carry the ball.” He gazed appraisingly at the traffic of aliens, then back at her—and frowned in sharp surprise.
Zara seemed close to crying. He said, “What are you making a big thing about? It’s nothing we haven’t done before.”
“I know,” she said and blinked hard. “It’s only—well, it’s sort of silly. It’s just that I hate the idea of your dying out there while we’re on our honeymoon.”
Pertin was touched. He patted the girl’s hand and said seriously. “Honey, one of the traits I like best in you is that you’re not afraid to be sentimental at the right time. Don’t knock it. I love you for it. Now let’s go get that drink.”
THE little cafe was nearly empty. That was one of the things they liked about it. It had actual waiters—Purchased People; they didn’t have much personality to display, but they were actually human, genetically speaking—and Pertin and his fiancée enjoyed ordering in their rudimentary Italian. It was not their own language, to be sure, but at least it was one for which they did not need the I’mal translators.
Pertin pulled his feet up, crossed them in air and settled gently onto his chair. They looked about while waiting for their drinks to be brought. Pertin had been on Sun One for more than two years now, the girl for several months. Even so, familiarity had not dulled their interest in the place. Zara was a newscaster, broadcasting to Earth every week on the stereo stage. Pertin was an engineer. His job on Sun One didn’t involve much engineering. It did involve an interesting mixture of skills—he functioned partly as a legalized spy, partly as a goodwill ambassador from Earth to the rest of the universe.
The mere fact that a job like his existed was still secretly thrilling to Ben Charles Pertin. He was old enough to remember the time when humans had thought themselves alone in the galaxy. The old “nations” had put up their chemical rockets and sent them chugging to Venus, Mars and the moon in his grandfather’s time. They had looked for life and come up empty every time. Nuclear probes, a generation later, had investigated the outer planets, the satellites and even the asteroids with the same result. No life. By the time Ben had been twelve the juice had run out of space travel.
Contact had come as Ben Pertin was turning thirteen. Something had been found on Pluto—an artifact, half-buried under Pluto’s mirror of ice—and Earth had suddenly looked outward again. The stereo stages had been full of the Find, of the First fumbling attempts to patch it together, the First daring experiment at putting power through it. Everybody had talked about it. Ben and his parents had watched the glowing figure on their stage, enthralled. The kids in school had made it the main subject of every class.
And when the ancient communicator had come to life and the First alien face had peered out of its screen and looked into the face of a human, Earth had gone mad.
“I DON’T want to hear any A more of that cockamamie Earthman’s Burden talk,” said Zara Doy, “I heard too much of it when I was a kid. I don’t want you going out to die. Stay here with me.
Pertin said fondly, “You’re sweet, Zara. But this is important. The situation on the probe is exploding—the beings are Fighting. They’re dying uselessly. I can’t back out just for some sentimental idea of—”
“Sentiment be damned! Look. When we get married I want you right in bed with me—all of you. I don’t want to be thinking about part of you dying way off in nowhere.”
“I’ll be with you, honey. All of me.
“You know what I mean,” she said angrily.
He hesitated. The last thing he wanted was to quarrel with his fiancée two days before they were to get married. He rubbed his troth ring and said, “Zara, I have to go to the probe. First, I said I would and the boss has passed the word to all the other top brass on Sun One. Second, it’s important. It’s not ‘Earthman’s Burden.’ It’s simple logic. We’re new and pretty far behind, compared to the Scorpians or the methane crowd or the T’Worlie. But look at what we’ve done already: We have Earth people on every major planet, working in every big project, taking part in everything that’s happening. The others are getting used to us. They consult us now. Who else is there to go if I back out? Earth won’t be represented.”
“I don’t care.”
“It’s not as if I haven’t done it before—”
