Collected Short Fiction, page 803
He turned back to his instruments, plotting our path. Taking off from a different point, we were on another great circle route, flying far north of the diminished Mediterranean. We were already high, and I found the rim of the north Asian icecap. Laura was brewing tea and warming squash-and-tofu packs she had found in the food locker. Pepe asked for more about the friends who freed us.
“We had heard of your problem with the Regent.” She gave us a wry little smile. “My editor wanted another story if he could get it through the censors. I didn’t want to see you with bugs on your faces. When I slipped back for another look at your machine, Casey let me in. We talked. And then—”
She paused for a glance at the sky beyond the windows, dark purple now, the white glare of ice and cloud far beneath us.
“I’ve never dared say so,” she went on, “but we are what they call Scienteers. Or loonies. Or traitors to the Regent. Names they use when they can catch and bug us. We call ourselves colonials. If you care about our history, the colonists had a hard start. They landed in the vale. A lovely spot, fertile and well watered, secure inside its mountain walls, but too near the ice as it lay at the time.
“The first winter was severe. Unexpected avalanches buried their original site and nearly wiped them out. The survivors were able to build a lab and clone new people. The vale remained the center of what government there was as the colony grew, but communication was poor. The generations that began to settle farther south were at first independent, but they prospered. Those on the coast built ships and began exploring. Their future looked bright till they reached the shores of Africa and met the black masters.
“One of Arne Linder’s descendants escaped from Africa with a bug in his head. Looking for a way to fight the masters, they learned to hatch the eggs and finally to plant them in people. Alfred Linder worked them on a plantation that covered Sri Lanka. His son Roscoe built a fleet of ships and found that trading fluorides to the masters paid better than war against them.
“That horrified the colonial government. They outlawed slavery, but Roscoe stayed out of reach. He changed his name to Arne, declared himself Arne the First, Regent of the Moon and legal ruler of Earth. His rebellion went on until his clone armies captured the vale. A few colonials held out along the frontiers. More migrated to America and set up a free nation there. His successor sent expeditions to make them slave territory. Regency politics!”
She made a sardonic shrug.
“The black masters need the Regents the way the Regents need them. With their alien biochemistry, they need fluorides to feed themselves, more fluorides than they’ve found in Africa. Their red thorn jungle keeps on spreading. They hide in it and ride their killer beasts out to snatch the men trying to bum it or hack it down, yet they can’t afford to wipe the Regents out. As for the American war, it’s pure politics, fought to spread rider slavery to one more continent.” She shrugged forlornly. “That war they’re winning.”
“But Mona!” Casey turned from the controls, his voice grown sharp. “She’s out there. We’ve got to find her.”
“If we can.” Laura looked doubtful. “It’s a big continent.”
I asked Laura if she knew any more.
“Not much. A mountain climber saw their flyer come down. He thought it was from the Moon. The news alarmed the Regent. They were hunted. Casey was another black clone, with no chance to escape. The Scienteers found Mona and got her on the underground railway to America.”
“That’s where she is.” Casey nodded hopefully. “Fighting with the rebels.”
“Where she was.” Laura shrugged. “News from America is hard to get. Our Freetown correspondent has disappeared. His last reports were censored and delayed for months. My friends were willing to risk their lives for you, but I don’t know—”
“We’ll find her.” Casey bent back to his instruments. “We must.”
WE LEFT THE ICE BEHIND, BROWN MOUNTAINS ROSE OUT OF GRAY haze, and brown desert turned an odd blue-green. I saw Casey frowning over his charts, copies of those we had faxed to the Moon before we died here.
“The forest,” I heard him mutter. “I can’t find the forest.”
I remembered the singing trees that must have come from somewhere off the Earth, remembered the balloons they had grown to carry their seed, remembered the gold-winged seed that Casey called Mona and the little sapling that had grown from her body after she died.
He studied his maps and studied the ground ahead.
“The forest is gone,” he muttered again. “The forest where we landed.”
I tried to look. The earth below looked flat and brown. I thought I saw flecks of color along the hazy horizon far ahead, snow on a mountain cone farther still, but not much else.
“See those lines?” He pointed, but I found no lines. “Railways, I think. They run south. Toward seaports, I imagine.” He squinted ahead. “Confusing, but the rivers and the lay of the land should show us the spot were we came down.”
He dropped us at last into bellowing steam. It cleared to reveal a bleak landscape. Huge stumps where trees had stood, all charred black, black ash around them. Bitterly silent, he opened the door and unfolded the landing stairs. We followed him down into blazing Sun and an acrid reek of fire.
Not far off, steel rails gleamed. He pointed north across the stumps, toward a plume of white smoke. We waited in silence while a steam locomotive thundered past. I saw a line of smoke-grimed clones passing great blocks of wood from the tender to the boiler. The engineer leaned out of his cab to stare and blew a whistle blast that startled me.
Enormous logs were loaded on the long train of flatcars behind it. We stood there with Casey in the hot, wet, reek of smoke till the last car had rumbled past. Then, without another word, he stalked across the tracks. We stumbled after him along the bank of a narrow stream when he stopped to stare down at one wide stump.
“That was Leo.” His face had twisted under the glassy glint of the sealant over his rider wound, and his voice was hoarse and slow. “Our son.”
Pepe reached to touch his shoulder. A flash of anger set his face, as if he thought we were about to laugh.
“I’m sorry,” Pepe whispered. “Terribly sorry.”
The anger gone, he turned back to the stump.
“I had to come,” he muttered. “I had to know.” He stood there a long time, staling down at the charred stump, and finally shrugged and swung back to us. “Not that it matters.” He shook his head, and I saw tears in his eyes. “When you hear what I have to tell you now, you’ll see that it no longer matters at all.”
8.
CASEY STOOD THERE A LONG TIME SILENT, BENT DOWN over the black stump. Smoke and dust had turned the cloudless sky to copper, and a red Sun blazed hot on the charred desolation around us. The motionless air had an acrid taint of fire. Far off, a dust devil lifted a small black spiral. The only sound was the rush of the little stream over a rocky ledge behind us.
“Come.” Pepe finally caught Casey’s arm. “Let’s go.”
“Go on,” Casey snapped harshly at him. “Leave me here.”
We clambered back across the rails and climbed aboard the plane. When I looked from the landing, he was kneeling by the stump as if in prayer. Laura had stayed aboard. She made a fresh pot of tea and we sipped it while we waited.
“What now?” I asked.
Pepe shrugged. “Quien sabe?”
“Our correspondent reported the Moon Lady leading the rebels in this area,” Laura said. “But that was months ago.”
Casey came plodding back at last. He stopped on the landing for another long look back across the burned past before he came inside. Yet, seeming dry-eyed and composed, he sat down, and accepted a mug of tea.
“I’m sorry if I was sharp with you.” Wryly, he shook his head at Pepe. “It’s hard to say how hard this hit me. I’ve known the Leo story all my life, but I never quite believed it. Not till now.” He nodded at the dark waste beyond the windows. “Not till I recognized that crook in the creek and found the little waterfall where the tree had stood.” He grinned and sipped his tea. “It was nearly too much, but I’m OK now.”
“Ready to look for Mona?” Pepe asked. “If you have a clue?”
“No clue.” He shrugged. “Not really. But rebel refugees were reported hiding in the forest still standing west of us. I saw the color of live trees on the highlands west. We can hope she saw us. If she’s still there. If she has time enough to get here.”
“Time?” Pepe raised his voice. “You had something else to tell us?”
“Something I don’t like to say.” Casey drained his mug, set it down, and took a moment more before he went on. “You know Tycho Station was set up to watch for approaching objects that might impact the Earth. The computer is programmed to carry the mission on while we sleep—”
Sharply, Pepe broke in, “It has found something?”
“Nearly 40 years ago.” Soberly, Casey nodded. “That’s why we were cloned—the computer had meant to give the colony a thousand years before it sent us back to look.”
“Why weren’t we told?”
Casey shrugged. “It makes its own decisions.”
“What about this object?”
“It’s probably a drifter from the Kuiper cloud, out beyond Neptune.” Casey frowned, careful with his words. “Some 30 miles in mean diameter. Big enough for the impact to devastate the planet, maybe erase all life. Any impact was uncertain at first. We were awakened just to be ready for whatever happened.”
His face set harder.
“It’s going to happen.” He glanced at me. “Dunk, you know your holo father is sometimes the computer’s voice. He told Mona and me before we left the Moon—”
“You knew?” Pepe stared at him, “and didn’t tell us?”
“He said the computer would inform you of whatever you needed to know.”
“The danger?” Laura whispered. “That’s certain now?”
“He said it is. The early observations had been refined. The destruction is predicted to be total, with no chance for human survival. He advised us not to create a panic. The truth would disrupt the life of the colony to no purpose. Our errand was simply to file a bit of history that ought to be remembered.”
“When?” She stared into his face. “How much time before the impact?”
He glanced at the watch on my wrist.
“Today is August 14,” he said. “The impact is forecast for noon on August 17, Kashmir time. That would be about midnight here.”
We sat in dazed silence for a time.
“Three days.” Laura shook her head. “Just three days. So much to think about.” She shrugged. “No use to think of anything, but I need to walk.”
Pepe and I went with her down the stairs. We walked along the rail line, our feet stirring little clouds of soot-black dust. We didn’t talk until I heard her brittle laugh.
“World to end in three days!” She laughed again, too loudly. “A great headline. Anybody who dared print it back at home would have been branded a Scienteer and bugged for high treason.”
Pepe caught her hand, and they walked on to get her.
Casey had stayed on the plane, watching the dark horizon. Back there with him, we prepared a final transmission to the station. Laura dictated a brief history of the colony. Pepe reported our meetings with the Regent and the rider broker. Casey gave a terse description of his experience under the bug. I summed up our situation and sent the message when the Moon had risen.
That night we took turns on guard. We saw nothing till early next morning Casey found a smudge of smoke up the railway north of us. It became another train, approaching slowly as if wary of us and halting a few miles away. With binoculars we made out half-a-dozen flat cars crowded with black clones in military gear, a long-barreled cannon on the last car. The gun crew trained it on us.
“We’re dead,” Pepe muttered. “If they fire.”
They didn’t fire, but presently a little rail car came on toward us, flying the green-and-white regency flag. It earned a white officer and two black clones pumping handlebars to drive it.
“They’re here to kill us.” Pepe looked at Laura with a sudden grin, and turned anxiously to Casey and me. “Let’s take off for the Moon while we can.”
“Not quite yet.” Casey shook his head. “I won’t leave Mona. Go on if you like. I’m heading into the standing forest west on the chance she’s there.” He looked at me. “Coming with me, Dunk?”
“I’m coming.”
We found a canteen and a few ration packs. Laura hugged us both. Pepe shook our hands and wished us luck. The officer on the hand-car fired a handgun as we crossed the track. The bullets sang past our heads and we tramped on. A few miles across the stumps we came into trees still standing, but dead.
“You should have seen them live.” Casey shook his head in dismal regret. “They were magnificent. Somehow sacred.”
They had been magnificent. The straight black trunks, thicker than the body of our plane, towered up forever, and my neck ached from craning to trace the dense web of dead black branches that laced the sky. A thick carpet of unburned leaves covered the ground, spicing the air with an odd fragrance of decay. In the heavy and depressing silence, I felt an awed sense that we were entering an abandoned temple, built for the worship of some dead and forgotten deity.
There was no sign of fire here. I wondered what had killed the trees.
“They were sentient,” Casey said. “Sentient and all of them kin. I think they were all a single conscious being. Even the ground cover somehow belonged to it. If you won’t call me crazy, I’d say it died of grief.”
Tramping on, we came through a stand of trees where leaves still hung, though yellowed and bleached. Farther, we climbed a rise and came out that dead silence into a murmur of life. The ground was still covered with a soft, moss-like, blue-green carpet, the high canopy still bright with live and varied color. Although there was no wind, I heard a faint sighing in the treetops and then a note of song, high and faint and far away.
“They know us.” Casey stopped. “They remember Leo.”
We stood there a long time, listening. The song swelled louder till it filled the forest, a changing melody I had never heard, somehow touching me with emotions I had never felt. I saw rapture on Casey’s lifted face, as if it moved him deeply. Fading finally into silence, it left me with a painful ache of emptiness and loss.
He turned solemnly to me.
“They know Mona,” he whispered. “They are reaching to find her. If we wait, they will try to guide her.”
We waited. When I asked how long she would be on the way, he shrugged and said the trees had no language of words or numbers, no human sense of time. Later in the day they sang again, still with no meaning I could catch though sometimes I caught a sense of aching sorrow. We drained the canteen and finished our ration packs. When darkness began to thicken, we went back a little way to gather armfuls of the great dry leaves to make a bed. The voice of the trees had faded into a stillness that seemed hushed with expectation. Listening uneasily for anything, for Mona’s voice, the boom of the camion on the flatcar, the thunder of the plane lifting off without us. I heard nothing at all.
All next day we waited. The trees sang again, sometimes with slow and solemn rhythms that pierced me with wordless pangs of loss and death and left my mind filled with sharpened images of the desolate desert of dead stumps and the fires that had charred the land. Yet toward the end they puzzled me with a thunderous chorus that seemed to echo a solemn triumph.
“They know about the asteroid,” Casey said. “Perhaps they sensed it. Perhaps Mona told them. They are grieving for themselves and their failure here, but not for us or the future of Earth. They have felt the evil of the black masters and sensed a sort of justice in their destruction. Happy with that, they will live on in the greater being that set them here. Although the loss is painful to them, they can accept death as the dark side of life. They expect the future of Earth to be better than its past.”
That second night was endless. I heard no wind, no voice from the trees, yet sometimes I thought I felt a ghostly presence in the faint moonlight that filtered through their branches, something so elusive that it vanished when I tried to grasp it. Listening in vain for any sound at all, I dozed and woke to a sad conviction that we were insane, trusting our lives to the imagined mind of a dying forest.
“It’s the last day,” I reminded Casey when he woke. “If Pepe and Laura still have the plane, they can’t afford to wait till the impact kills them. Shouldn’t we get back?”
He got to his feet, stretching the stiffness out of his bones. “Mona’s on her way,” he insisted. “We have till midnight.”
That brought me small comfort, but I waited with him and felt a little relieved when I heard a soothing crooning from the trees and then the plop of something falling. He walked away and came back with two of the big golden fruits that I recalled from our lives here. Their tangy sweetness eased my thirst and hunger, but the day seemed a century. Daylight was fading from the treetops when we heard a distant shout.
Casey answered, and a little band of ragged, wildly bearded men emerged from the thickening dusk. They carried crudely forged swords, rough lances, a few stolen military weapons. One had his arm in a blood-clotted sling, another was stumbling on a broken branch. Two or three were black clones, dirty headbands hiding the scars where their bugs had been. Cautious of us, they stopped under a tree some distance off.
“Casey?” A hoarse and anxious voice. “Is it you?”
“Mona!” Casey yelled. “Thank God! Or thank the trees.”
Her companions stared at us for a moment and melted back into the forest.
She limped on toward us. In tattered fragments of a jacket and jeans, she was drawn thin, dark with soot and dried blood, her filthy hair jaggedly clipped. Yet her white teeth flashed in the dusk with a smile as bright as it had been on the Moon.
She hugged me briefly before Casey took her in his arms. With no time for talk, we helped her back through the dying trees and the dead into open moonlight. The spaceplane stood where we had left it, a thin silver pillar on the stark waste of stumps. Before we reached the stairs I heard a faint and far-off chant from the trees behind us and thought I caught a monody of fond farewell.
