Collected Short Fiction, page 797
He wasn’t listening.
“That—that hideous thing!” His voice went thick with baffled fury. “A devil from—from I don’t know where. I believe it came down in that first balloon we saw. Hunting her. We’ve been hiding. Running from it.” He stopped to calm his quivering voice. “I can’t let it take her.”
His scarred fists were knotted, but he was barely able to stand. He limped with me back to the plane and let me clean his wounds and spray them with healant. He must have been sick from some poison or virus, but half his weakness came from hunger.
“She found fruit for us,” he said. “Something like big red grapes, full of juice we could suck. I liked the taste. It gave me a sort of high, but it wasn’t meant for humans. There’s no strength in it.” He devoured two meal packs and a banana the robots had grown in our hothouse, and poured himself a stiff shot of the moonshine El Chino had taught him to distill. He said it eased his pain. Groggy with exhaustion, he was still too jittery to sleep. He wanted to talk about Mona. Or Monas. The human refugee who boarded the escape plane with El Chino and the gold-winged alien had somehow run together in his mind.
“She sang to me, Dunk. Not with words, her language has no words. Not even with any tune I ever heard. But she made me sense what she felt for me. We were speaking with something better than words.” He paused to shrug at the questions on my face. “I don’t know how. It doesn’t matter. Listening, I saw what she saw. Heard what she heard. I understood the trees when they sang to her.”
I got up to brew a pot of tea.
“Dunk!” His voice rose impatiently. “If you think I’m out of my head, it’s because you never heard her sing. But damn those trees!” He made a bitter face. “They don’t like me. Maybe because I’m not a tree. They say I don’t belong. They’re afraid I’ll take her away. But she loves me, Dunk. She loves me.”
His voice had fallen into silence, and he sat staring away at nothing till I touched his arm to offer the mug of hot tea. He jumped as if that startled him.
“Sorry, Dunk. I forget where I am.” He gave me an apologetic grin and sloshed a shot of his moonshine into the tea. “She gave me dreams.” Sipping at the tea, he let his voice fade absently. “Memories, really, at night when I slept with her arms around me.”
He stopped to squint at my shock and doubt.
“It’s real, Dunk.” His voice fell soberly. “Nothing I can even try to explain or understand, but it’s real as anything. Don’t you remember how it was when we were kids back at the station? How our holo parents used to talk about their lives before the impact? I listened to my clone Dad’s holo and read the papers he’d left for me. I used to dream about him and all he had been, till I knew in my heart that El Chino was alive again in me.”
I had to nod. Growing up so close together, and so close to our holo parents, we knew each other very well. Tanya had known I loved her before I ever dared say so, and I’d felt sick because I already knew what she had decided to say. Dian used to call it telepathy. I doubted the reality of that because I knew no way to explain it. Casey had been another skeptic, until now.
“Mona—” He tipped his head and looked away as if he heard her speaking. “The Mona in those dreams was the same Mona that talked to me out of the holo tank. The same Mona that got on the escape plane with me, just ahead of the mobs. The Mona I’ve always hoped to meet again when we are cloned together. In the dreams I remembered things that happened back on Earth when we really were together. Remembered more than she and El Chino ever told me.
“Things like that fight—” He paused to nod as the recollections came. “The gunfight in that Medellin nightclub when El Matador was coming on to Mona. And then another gun battle with the men guarding his jet. One of them took his last bullet. Another murder rap on my record if they’d caught me, but we got off a minute or so ahead of the cops. We flew north in the dark out over the Pacific, around the fringe of a hurricane. The fuel tanks were empty when we glided down to a private strip near La Paz.”
He reached for his map.
“That was a city in Baja California, here near the tip of the peninsula. A center of the ding trade. I had an old friend there. El Yankee Rosa. Man I met in a Colombian jail. I swapped him the jet for the help we needed. He got our passports fixed and offered me a good spot in his own grupo.
“El Matador was offering to pay big money for our tattoos. Proof we’d been knocked off. Yankee could have sold us out, but he knows him for the diamondback he is. He wanted to sign me on for his own war with El Matador’s gang. He promised to help Mona get back to the States.
“She wouldn’t go.” He turned to gaze through the window at the forest, a dark wall of shadow beneath the stain of a blood-colored sunset. “Because she loved me.” He whispered that, turning slowly back to me. “Dunk, one night together on that flight, and she already loved me. Live or die, all I wanted was to keep her with me. Yankee called us dos locos because we wouldn’t split up, but he found us a car and told us vaya bien.
“Fifty kilometers up the peninsula we hit a road block. Had to leave the car and run for it. Blazing summer heat in a killer cactus desert. The cops gave up the chase, but the next three days were no fun for us. Mona passed out once, nearly dead for water. The hurricane rain saved her. Up the coast, we stole a fishing boat and headed out into ugly weather.
“The gulf was wider then, all the oceans higher, but we made it across. Beached the boat and limped into Los Mochis. A tourist spot. Mona had worked as a travel guide. Her wits and know-how got us into a tour-group. We rode a train across Copper Canyon to Chihuahua.” He pointed at his map. “A city that stood about where we are right now. We got a flight from there to El Paso and lay low till we heard El Yankee had knocked El Matador off. Finally, by great good luck, we were at Cal DeFort’s Moon base when the bolide hit.”
He tipped more moonshine into his mug, drained it straight, and turned to stare again into the silent forest and the fading sunset.
“Memories.” He murmured the word and turned back to me.
“Memories from a million years ago, but real as yesterday.” His gaze grew piercing. “You don’t believe me, Dunk? You think all that was just another crazy dream?”
“I don’t know.” I looked out into the thickening dark and back at him. “I’ve heard the forest singing. I saw the balloon that brought that—brought your Mona, if you want to call her that. I watched that creature knock you out and take her away. They’re nothing natural to this Earth. I’ve got no way to understand them or what they can do.”
“No matter.” He paused to sit up straighten “They’re here. Great stuff for your next report to the robots, if you think the robots want to hear you. As for Mona—” He clenched his fists. “I won’t give her up. Not to that beast, or those crazy woods. I’m going back after her.
“But not tonight—”
He yawned and stretched and sank into sleep.
HIS SEAT WAS EMPTY AGAIN WHEN I WOKE. I CLIMBED DOWN to the blue-green carpet. The air was still and cool, with a bracing scent a little like the wine Arne used to make from the grapes the robots grew. The forest was silent, a great wall of red and golden fire in the morning sunlight.
I found Casey lying on his back under the plane. He climbed out with a long metal bar he had cut out of the landing cradle. At work without a shirt, he looked gaunt. Drops of darkening blood had oozed through the sealant film over his scars. Yet he was energetically busy, using his torch to trim one end of the bar to a jagged point and taping the other for a grip. Trying the balance of it, he turned to grin bleakly at the forest.
“Viva!” he muttered. “Viva la Mona!”
The forest darkened. I heard a faint, far-off sigh like wind in the treetops, though I felt no wind, then a deep-pitched rumble like distant thunder, altogether tuneless and coldly forbidding. I retreated to the ladder and Casey shook his lance.
“Any fuel left in the tanks?” I asked him. “Could you move us to a safer place?”
“Run from that hairy devil?”
His dark jaw sagged in astonishment, and stiffened instantly. He shrugged my reaching hand away, stood a moment looking into the silent forest, and shouldered his lance. His face worked, and his sober voice was almost apologetic when the spoke.
“You don’t—you don’t understand.” His voice trembled and he made a quick wipe at his eyes. “I’m sorry for you, Dunk.”
Before I could find anything to say, he lifted his free hand in a sort of salute and walked off toward the trees. Ahead of him, their alien voice rose in a solemn song that had no melody or harmony until a muffled drumbeat came into it, keeping time to his feet.
8.
HE NEVER CAME BACK. I BELIEVE I AM the only man on Earth. Perhaps the only man alive anywhere. Or perhaps Arne Linder still reigns as the alpha male on the Moon, lording it over his three companions. I’ll never know, but I intend to keep on transmitting these reports so long as I survive, trusting the robots to receive and record them for our heirs.
My own will to live endures, even here and now. I exist in a kind of comfort. The seasons are so mild, without frost or drought, that I wonder if the trees don’t influence the weather. My home is the disabled spaceplane. When the supplies ran short, I often thought of DeFoe’s marooned hero in the old paper book my holo father used to read aloud when we complained of loneliness.
I’ve learned to grow my own food. Needing tools to till the soil, I cut metal from the landing cradle to make spades and hoes. My first garden had to be abandoned because the nearer trees flashed red and cried out as if in pain when my spade bit into the velvet sod, but I found uncovered ground a mile or so south, where a cold spring flows out across the floor of a shallow valley.
We had brought seed from the station: com, beans, peanuts, squash, tomatoes, even peppers and the okra for the gumbo my holo father learned to love when he was a child in the old city of New Orleans. When my diet seems monotonous, I sometimes venture into the fringe of the woods to look for those red, juice-filled fruits. Although the forest floor is always clean, two or three often fall near where I am searching, as if dropped as a gift for me.
Although their bittersweet tang seemed sharp and strange at first, I have come to enjoy them more and more. Perhaps they contain some protein or vitamin lacking from my diet. They leave me with a renewed sense of vigor and well-being, though they never satisfy hunger, and the brief euphoria they bring is never enough to erase my longing for the station and the friends I left on the Moon.
I miss Pepe, always asking for another chess game and taking forever to decide his moves. I miss Dian, always eager to recite some trivial bit of ancient Earth history that nobody cared to hear. I even miss Arne, who had a power of mind I admired when he was in his better moods. And Tanya—I long for her most of all.
I keep a picture of her over my bed in the plane, a little pencil drawing she let me make on the day we turned 16. Though I’m no artist, I thought it caught the sly quirk of her lips and the bright mischief in her smile. It can wake a haunting recollection of the kiss she gave me the day I dared to say I loved her, the taste of her lips, the scent and softness of her dark hair, the warmth of her body in my arms.
But that fond recollection is hard to hold. Pepe was the one she loved. When I look up at the drawing, trying to bring that bright moment back, her image is likely to fade into Mona’s as I used to see her in the holo tank, golden-haired, taller than Tanya, more alluringly shaped.
Although I never knew her except as that luminous ghost in the tank, smiling at El Chino and blind to us, I often dream of them. The gunfight in Medellin, the night flight to Mexico in the stolen jet, the desperate trek through the cactus desert, the battle to get on the escape plane before the impact: The drama of their lives is as vivid to me as if I had shared it with them.
GROWN MORE TOLERANT NOW, THE TREES NO LONGER GROWL OR thunder at me. They seem to sense my moods. One night when I lay sunk in bitter despair, contemplating suicide, they sang to call me out of the plane and greet me with a symphony of light and sound that captured and contained me in a way I have never understood. It left me content with my exile, at least for the moment, and happy to have them near.
At dusk on another evening a year or so later, they invited me away from the plane. Though I felt no wind, they sighed and whispered as if to one another. The gold and crimson splendor of the sunset flowed down into the treetops as darkness thickened, and their rising chorus spoke to me in a way I had never heard before.
Yielding to them without purpose or intention, I climbed down the ladder and started toward them. Their pealing voices rose. As if to hurry me on, a rosy light swept the shadows out of a majestic avenue through the towering trunks ahead. I followed it into an opening where a single young sapling stood. Its bronze bole, arrow-straight, was no thicker than my arm, but the glowing foliage rose to twice my height, pulsing with waves of vivid color that kept the rapid rhythm of my heart.
The gleam of metal caught my eye. Casey’s lance lay beside the trunk, between two white skulls. Two skeletons, when I looked more closely, had sunk half into the leafless turf. I saw objects it had not absorbed: Casey’s boots, his pocket knife, the gold watch his clone father had brought to the Moon. The bones of his right arm extended to the lance; remnants of the finger bones were still curled around the taped handle.
The other skeleton looked weirdly semihuman, but larger and heavier than his. Half gone, it still had the alien’s three-toed chicken feet, the cruel black claws, the blood-red spurs. The skull was longer than Casey’s, flatter, heavy-jawed, a sharp ridge across the crown. The lance had gone into the right eye socket; the jagged point jutted through a crack at the back of the skull.
I stood a long time there under the shimmering leaves, trying to imagine how they died. Casey must have been mauled, but when I knelt to search his bones for damage, they were half melted away and stuck fast in the turf. I found none broken, no clue to the actual manner of his death.
The voice of the little tree had fallen into a solemn monody that died slowly into silence. Its glowing leaves dimmed, their light gathering around its roots. Getting off my knees, I found another, smaller skull among the brittle fragments of a slighter skeleton. The bones of Casey’s gold-winged Mona. Thin scraps of the wings, not yet eaten by the turf, lay beside her arm bones. They were stretched toward Casey’s skeleton.
The little tree had grown up through the slender relics of her rib cage. I stood there in the dark, groping to understand their story, till the voices of the forest rose again in a dirge that reflected my dazed bewilderment. The shimmer of the treetop dimmed and flickered out. The only light left to me was the glow along the avenue that had brought me there. I followed it back toward the ship.
THAT NIGHT THE FOREST SANG TO ME WITH A VOICE I KNEW, THE human voice of Mona’s image in the holo tank, and I dreamed of the little tree. In the dream, I pulled my boots on and climbed down out of the plane. The night lay clear and bright under a full Moon that washed the immensity of the plain and the long forest wall with a mystic splendor I had never felt before. I stood spellbound until a great chorus rose to call me into the darkness under the trees. They glowed ahead to light a road for me.
I followed it again in the dream, back to that small tree in the clearing. The skeletons were gone. Mona stood with Casey where his bones had been. Not the gold-winged being who had come down in the balloon, but now the tall, blonde, and lovely Mona whose holo ghost I had known. She looked lovely in a long crimson gown, with a red rose in her hair. A breathless hush filled the forest when she saw me, and she ran to throw her human arms around me.
I felt the warmth of her arms and caught the sweetness of the rose, the fragrance of those the robots had grown for Tanya in the hothouse at the station. Her lips were warm and moist when she kissed me, her hand warm and strong when she caught my own to lead me on to Casey and the tree.
Casey was El Chino now. He was thick and black and naked to the waist as he had been when he brought her aboard the escape plane at the White Sands Moon Base. He wore the same faded jeans, the same heavy work boots, the same jaunty crimson tarn. The golden shimmer of the tree caught the tattooed flags of Mexico and China on his wide, black chest. The red-ridged scars from the poison thorns and the vampire’s fangs were gone.
“Hi, Dunk!” Grinning warmly, he strode to catch my hand in a grip that left my fingers aching. He stood a moment appraising me, a smile of affection in his Chinese eyes. “For a Crusoe with no Friday, you’re looking good.” He caught Mona’s hand and turned to look at the little tree. “Meet our son, Leonardo.”
“Our little Leo.” With a smile of tender adoration, Mona lifted her face to the tree. “Our child that never lived. We have him with us now.”
Casey waved me closer.
“Our good friend Dunk,” he told the tree. “Duncan Yare. He came down with me from the Moon. He may seem strange to you, but he’s OK. Marooned here alone, he’ll need a new companion.”
I heard a whisper through the leaves above me, as if from wind I didn’t feel. Light pulsed through it, brightening to match the rose in Mona’s hair. The whisper became a singing voice, almost too soft for me to hear. I heard tones like Mona’s, then like Casey’s, but neither words I understood nor anything like the music I had learned to love when Dian played her holo records.
Sometimes it had a fleeting rhythm that matched my heartbeat, sometimes my breathing. The sheer strangeness of it held me till it was no longer strange at all. I began to feel comfort in it, and something more, perhaps even love. My father told me once that his mother used to speak and sing to him before he was born. Our own education begins in the maternity lab. We don’t remember, but I’m sure it helps to make us what we are. In some way, I think, the tree was reaching me.
I don’t know how long I stood there, awed and wondering. The forest picked up the small tree’s song, faintly at first but finally with a rolling crescendo so great that it seemed to vibrate through me before it reached its peak and died away. The glowing tree-tops faded. The small tree was left silent and dark. When I looked around for Casey and Mona, they were gone.
