Collected Short Fiction, page 820
“Why the devil should you care?”
“I care for her.” He laid a holo card on the desk. The image of a woman’s head sprang into the air above it, feebly smiling. She might have been beautiful once, but her pale features looked wasted, her blonde hair thin and dull. “She’s dying, sir, unless something off that planet can save her.”
What’s that to me?
“Sir, you’ll forgive me—” LeZarr took a moment to scan McDervik’s damaged body. “Suppose the planet’s real? Suppose we could all be young again? Just think about it.”
I saw a flash of anger, but McDervik caught himself to squint at the holo image, scrutinize the license again, riffle through the book. He finally scowled at the ancient date and tossed the book back at LeZarr with a grimace from some chronic ache.
“I think it’s a trap for greedy idiots.”
LeZarr caught the book and held it to his heart.
“Only five skips, sir. Be there in a day. Back in another if it’s just a mirage. I’ll guide you there for nothing, sir.”
McDervik had a nose for luck.
“What’s to lose?” He squinted at the book. “You lead the way. I’ll pay your charter fees. Leave your flight plan with my pilot. Signal him if you find the planet, which ain’t likely. Wait in orbit if you do, till I can join you for the landing.”
He paid the charter fees and we waited for the signal.
“Planet reached,” it ran. “Fits description. Waiting in polar orbit for your arrival.”
We followed in his star yacht and found LeZarr safe in orbit. He docked with us and came aboard. McDervik greeted him with a doubtful scowl.
“So what have we got?”
“A perfect planet!” LeZarr gestured at the planet, a great blue globe, splashed with green continents and bright cloud spirals, spinning lazily beneath us. “But people?” He frowned and shook his head. “No cities I can see. No railways. No big dams. No industrial smoke. I called to identify myself. Asked for a landing permit. Got no reply.”
“Permit or not, I’m going down.”
We launched a lander and glided down. Skimming the forests on the continent, we saw no marks of civilization. LeZarr set us down on a wide meadow between a ridge of sandstone cliffs and a tall wall of trees. He unsealed the lock and cycled out to test the air.
“As fresh as a Terran spring,” he reported. “I heard a trilling like a lark in the sky.”
McDervik limped off the lander armed for battle, a wrinkled warrior gnome in a camouflage-dyed safari suit, weighed down with a leather ammunition harness, a long-barreled projectile launcher hung at one hip and a wicked-looking knife sheathed at the other. A holocam was slung around his skinny neck.
We found no foes. Animals I took for Terran zebras were grazing peacefully across the meadow, but the enormous bird standing in a waterhole was nothing imported from old Earth. As tall as I was, it had a graceful body that caught the morning sun like burnished silver. Long-legged and long-necked, it was feeding, stabbing at something in the water with a needle-keen beak.
It ignored us at first, but took flight when McDervik unslung the holocam, spreading great wings in an explosion of crimson and gold and flapping off across the treetops. LeZarr caught my arm, pointing to a monster striding out of the forest. Lizard-like and long-tailed, it came stalking on two massive legs. Its towering body was armored with wide green plates, its great-jawed head topped with a saw-toothed crimson crest.
McDervik snatched for his gun.
“Sir, don’t shoot!” LeZarr warned him sharply. “Not unless you have to.”
The monster stalked past us and on through the little herd of grazing zebras. Some of them moved to give it room, but they showed no alarm. A flight of tiny, bright blue birds came to whirl around us, singing like canaries, and followed it into the trees.
“An actual Eden!” LeZarr whispered. “Like the missionary said. I’ve seen a hundred worlds, and still I can’t believe it!”
“If it’s Eden, show me the angels.” McDervik scowled at the empty meadow and stopped to point with a shriveled arm. “What’s that?”
I caught a silver flash, where the sun struck a dome of something like polished silver, almost lost in a grove of blue-blooming trees.
“A dwelling?” LeZarr shaded his eyes. “And people!”
A woman in something red came walking toward us from beyond the waterhole. McDervik raised his binoculars to watch a dozen others following out of the forest. They were gaily clad in rainbow-colored saris, their arms and heads uncovered. Some of them carried baskets.
“They look young enough.” He lowered the glasses, frowning. “But where are any children?”
“They wouldn’t have children,” LeZarr said. “Not if they’re actually immortal. Children would overcrowd the planet.”
“Forget the kids!” McDervik muttered. “We’re here on business.”
We had moved to meet them, but they trooped on beyond us to crowd like children around the lander, pointing at the skip engines, fingering the bright silver trim. I caught scraps of carefree talk, the accents oddly soft but our own English.
LeZarr sighed. “I wish my wife could be that happy.”
THE WOMAN IN RED came back to us. Well revealed by the tight sari, she was vigorous and attractive, with long, ginger-colored hair that fell free behind her back.
“You come from the stars?” She frowned sharply at McDervik and his weapons. “We want no conflict here.”
“Neither do we.” He had a wolfish charm when he chose to use it. He turned it on her now, and got a childish smile. “We are only students touring the galaxy. We came here in search of the famous Planet of Youth. Have we found it?”
“Youth?” She gave him a puzzled frown. “We are not young.”
“You look young. And very lovely.” He waited for her to smile again. “If I may ask—” His yellow eyes narrowed shrewdly. “Are you immortal?”
“Immor—” The word seemed to baffle her. “What is that?”
“Do people die?”
“Die?”
She was still bewildered. McDervik shook his head and turned to LeZarr for help.
“They stop breathing,” LeZarr said. “Stop moving. Fall down. Decay.”
“Animals do, sometimes.” She nodded. “Unless Doc Scott is there to fix them.”
“Ho!” McDervik nudged LeZarr in the ribs. “I think we’re in business.” Eagerly, he turned back to her. “Can you tell what he does for animals?”
“How would I know?” Vaguely, she shrugged. “I’m not a doctor.”
“We must see him. Can you help us find him?”
“Tomorrow, perhaps.”
McDervik scowled. “Why not right now?”
“We’re on our way to the songfest.”
“May we come with you?”
Uncertainly, she turned to look at her companions.
He warmed his voice and used his charm. “Please!”
That captured her. Her name was Aranda. She called her friends away from the ship and told them we were guests from the stars. They smiled politely and shook our hands in the way of Earth, but seemed to care nothing for the stars.
LeZarr refused to leave the lander unguarded, but McDervik and I went on with Aranda, following a footpath toward the cliffs. We found a gathering crowd below a sort of natural stage outside a shallow cave eroded into a wall of red sandstone.
Groups were spreading mats on the grass, opening baskets filled with food and bottled wine. They were vegetarians, the dishes strange to us. There were huge crimson mushrooms with almost the flavor of a rare beefsteak, wide flat mushrooms with the taste of freshly buttered toast, tart green fruits, bowls of honey-sweet purple berries.
McDervik unslung the holocam and thrust it at me.
“Get it all. A vision of paradise! I want it for promotion and sales.”
He had me shoot a panorama of our ship and the waterhole and the forest around us, then the singers on their natural stage. He wanted close-ups of the food baskets and Aranda in her red sari. He posed with his stringy arm around her.
“Evidence!” He was exultant. “Evidence to convince the universe.”
He was ignoring the songs. I caught few of the words, but I began to hear emotion in the voices, tension and triumph, finally a sense of calm contentment. Aranda opened a bottle of wine. His doctors on Earth had forbidden alcohol, and at first he refused it.
“It can’t hurt you,” she urged him. “Not if Doc Scott can fix you the way he does the animals.”
Perhaps he was yielding to the spell of the songs. He drank a glass, asked for another, and finally went to sleep lying beside her on the grass. The afternoon sun had sunk low before the songfest ended and people began gathering their baskets and rolling the mats. McDervik roused himself to ask when we could see the doctor.
“Tomorrow morning,” Aranda promised. “I’ll come to take you.”
We slept on the lander, and woke to a songbird serenade. A warm sun was climbing into a clear blue sky, the fresh air fragrant from the many-colored blooms that spangled the meadow. LeZarr took a deep breath when we came outside, and borrowed the holocam to shoot a little herd of African impala drinking at the waterhole.
“It looks too perfect!” He shook his head. “Too perfect to be true.”
Aranda was late. McDervik fumed all morning, hobbling around the lander and watching for her. The sun was almost overhead before she arrived in a sleek golden sari. With no apology, she caught him in a close embrace, kissed both his wrinkled cheeks, and asked if he was ready to see the doctor.
LeZarr stayed again to guard the lander. She led us into the forest, along a gravel footpath neatly curbed with colored stones. The trees were spaced well apart, bright with flowering vines that draped the lower branches. When we saw a dozen antelope grazing across a sun-dappled glade, Aranda stopped to call out as if she knew them by name. They raised graceful heads to look for a moment, and grazed again.
The doctor’s house stood in an open clearing, a small stone building roofed with red tile. A faded sign above the door read Carter Scott, M. D. We found him spading a vegetable garden behind it. Lean, dark-haired, and tall, he wore a T-shirt and faded jeans. He greeted Aranda with a kiss and turned to smile at us.
“Guests from outside.” She gave him our names. “They seem worn and broken, like unlucky animals.” She waited for him to scan McDervik’s bent and shrunken frame. “Can you repair them?”
“A nanorob transfer? It should be possible.”
He beckoned us toward wicker chairs on a veranda that looked out across the clearing to a solitary tree, dead but aflame with flowering vines. “We seldom see outsiders. Tell me about yourselves.”
“Dirk McDervik. I own McDervik Pan-Galactic.” Expansively, he gestured at the sky. “You may have heard of it.”
The doctor looked blank. McDervik shrugged and asked about nanorob transfers.
“The nanorobs are microscopic robots,” he said. “Expert physicians, really, that replicate themselves and circulate through the body. They function to heal or replace damaged cells. The technology was developed back on Earth a thousand years ago, but outlawed by a backward government.”
“Outlawed? What went wrong?”
“The rulers.” Scott sighed and sat for a moment staring off into the cloudless sky. “They tried to exterminate us and our nanorobs, but nanorobs are hard to kill. We were finally allowed to charter ships and migrate to this planet, remote from everywhere. There was only one condition, that we never leave.”
He shrugged and grinned at McDervik.
“So here we’ll be forever.”
“You are a doctor?”
“Trained back on Earth, before the nanorobs. Internist and cardiac surgeon. I was good at it.” I thought he looked wistful. “There’s no need for surgery here. I do bandage up a few accidental flesh wounds until the nanorobs can close them, or set an occasional broken bone. Most of my patients are the native creatures or the few terrestrial animals we brought with us. I let the nanorobs do the actual healing.”
McDervik leaned eagerly forward.
“Can they heal me?”
“If you like. They don’t fail.”
“Then I’m your patient. Just name your fee.”
“We’ve no use for money here.” He waved it away. “I recall the foolish money games we used to play back on Earth. Here I’ve found a more rewarding sport. Higher math. That’s a world of infinite complexities that can challenge you forever, with no loss or pain to anybody else.”
He led us into his house, through a long, sparsely furnished room with a fireplace at one end and bookshelves at the other, the walls painted with mural landscapes of ancient Earth. We came into a smaller room that was evidently both kitchen and office. Pots and pans hung around a big ceramic stove at one end. Shelves of bottles, glassware, and bright metal instruments surrounded a high table at the other.
McDervik stopped to squint at them doubtfully.
“Low-tech.” Scott shrugged a vague apology. “Creating the nanorobs took the best technology we had, but here we can be content with simpler things.”
He washed his hands at the kitchen sink and came back to light a little lamp and sterilize a needle. Aranda and McDervik sat on the edge of the table. He swabbed their arms with alcohol, drew a drop of her blood on a glass slide, and pressed it against a scratch on his, and said that was all.
“All?” McDervik was incredulous.
“The nanorobs will multiply,” Scott said. “Come back if you have questions.”
McDervik was jubilant when we got back to the lander.
“The secret of eternity!” he greeted LeZarr. “I’ll own the universe! As soon as my attorneys can lock up the patent rights! Men will stand in line to mortgage their souls for immortality.”
Feeling high through the afternoon, he made a big meal from a basket that Aranda had left for us. He drank most of a bottle of wine, expanding great schemes to franchise the nanorobs on every settled planet. Generously, he offered to make LeZarr a franchisee, with free immortality for his wife. We went to sleep on the lander. He woke me about midnight, hunched over the controls and screaming at LeZarr.
“Take us off!” Glaring at us, his eyes were wide and wild. “That scheming quack! He’s poisoned me! Coming now to steal the ship!”
“Sir, please!” LeZarr tried to calm him. “The lock’s sealed. We’re safe inside. I’m afraid you’re out of your head.”
McDervik swung back to the controls. LeZarr tried to pull him away. He struck back and sent LeZarr staggering. I tried to help. He fought us off with a strength that seemed superhuman, till suddenly he crumpled to the deck and lay there gasping, his eyes rolling back in his head. We lifted him into a berth. Hot with fever, he lay there the rest of the night, sometimes limply lifeless, sometimes tossing, striking blindly out at nothing, moaning, screaming that he was dying.
“Stop—stop the bugs!” He sat up once, yelling hoarsely. “They’re in my blood! Burning—burning my skin! Crawling in my veins. Eating—eating my brain!”
He calmed at last, begged for water and seemed to sleep, hoarsely snoring. Once again he woke in a better mood, laughing at nothing, shouting in a strange voice, trying to sing a song we had heard. He sank at last into a coma so deep we couldn’t rouse him, still hot and drenched with sweat.
Aranda came at dawn. She felt his forehead and promised to send for Dr. Scott. Some of her friends brought food he couldn’t eat, and carried him off the lander to a cot under a little tent, where they hoped the fresh air would help him. Scott came that afternoon, put a stethoscope to his heart, and told us not to worry.
“A strong reaction to the nanorobs,” he said. “A lot of physical abuse and decay to be repaired, but they’re taking hold. His future health should be perfect. Call me if you need me.”
WE WERE THERE another week. Aranda came every day to bathe McDervik, give him water when he could drink, hold his hand when he moaned in distress. On the third day he woke from his coma. Weak at first, he soon had a ravenous appetite for the fruits and mushroom she brought us, though he wanted nothing from the ship’s supplies.
His blighted arm was suddenly strong again, his wrinkles smoothed into a youthful smile. He walked without his cane to watch the zebras coming to the waterhole. Aranda brought food and wine to celebrate his recovery, and we sat around folding tables set up beside the ship. Dr. Scott took his pulse and called him fit as a kid.
“And free to go if the nanorobs will let you.”
“Why should we go?” Grinning with elation, he glanced at me. “We’ve found all we ever longed for. The perfect life on the perfect planet! We’re immortal as the gods we used to imagine, free of pain, immune to trouble. Why throw it all away?”
“There’s Pan-Galactic,” I told him. “Your responsibilities.”
“Pan-Galactic?” He squinted off into the empty sky. “Why bother?” He grinned at Aranda and turned to me.
“Tell LeZarr he can go. Unless he wants to stay here with us.”
I found LeZarr on the ship, checking his star charts.
“The hell with ‘em!” he exploded. “I’m getting back to my wife, but not to murder her with bugs in her brain. You want to know why these zombies never die? They’re already dead. Meat machines, run by those little devils swarming in their blood. No wonder they were shipped way out here.”
He offered me a starkiss nut.
“My own poison of choice. Let McDervik pick his own. But tell him I can’t take off without a signed release from his charter contract. Proof for the authorities that I didn’t abandon him to die on some airless rock.”
McDervik was in no hurry to sign anything. Aranda had opened her basket and a bottle of wine.
“Drink all you want,” Scott told him. “No headaches here.”
McDervik sat beside Aranda and let her feed him tidbits. We sat there till dusk with the feast and wine, learning her folksongs. The planet is deep in the star cluster, and the night sky was suddenly ablaze with more stars and brighter stars than I had ever seen. When I marveled at them, Aranda left McDervik with another bottle of wine and caught my hand.
