Continuum 3, page 3
part #3 of Continuum Series
“I assure you, Eyre, that we’re not planning anything more,” Polar said in a high-pitched voice. “Not against you, not in a positive manner, I mean. We know we can’t do anything to you. So we’re just going to keep you here until, by the grace of God, we can reach a satisfactory solution.”
Polar was lying, of course.
“Die! Die!” Eyre shouted, forgetting in another burst of anger his gladness of a moment ago.
Polar screamed and ran out of sight. A moment later, the screen went blank. Eyre quit laughing and stretched out on the floor. He closed his eyes but opened them almost at once. This time, the light was coming not from his skin but from deep within himself. And it was not steady but pulsing.
There was horror again, though it was as much less as the light was more. Or so it seemed to him. And the metamorphosis went so swiftly that his head would have swum — if he had had a head. Suddenly, he didn’t. It had collapsed and withdrawn and changed.
He rose from the floor humming. He was rotating or at least aware that he was, but he had at the same time no sense of dizziness or disorientation. Without eyes, he could see. The room around him was a black sphere, not a cube. The furniture was violet bowls. The electrical wiring within the walls was helixes of pulsing blue. The window was hexagonal, and the light from the flood lights was mauve, and the stars were of many colors and many shapes. One was a huge russet doughnut.
He had no hands to feel his shell, but he could feel with a sense strange to him. The shell was far more resistant than steel but as flexible as rubber.
He thought, Forward, and the shatterproof glass flew out from in front of him, the shards flaming and falling like comets with green tails. As they struck the yellow pavement below, they became brown.
If he had had a voice, he would have shouted with exultation. Instead, a tiny electric spark seemed to pass through him. It glowed as it traveled from one edge of his shell to the other, sputtered, and was gone.
Where were his eyes, his ears, his arms, his legs, his mouth, his genitals? Who cared? He certainly did not, as he swept out and up, curving almost vertically into the air. His change of angle brought visions of a lightning streak, colored scarlet. He was riding on it. Below, machine-gun bullets made orange pyramids that became increasingly brown as gravity carried them back to Earth. When they landed, they became flat hexagons.
Babies play, and Eyre played for a long time. Up and down, in and out, skimming the fields, climbing above the atmosphere where the sun blazed azure and space blazed greenly, down again, the air moving around him like snow on a TV screen, the snow melting as he slowed down, down into a river, moving through the blood-colored water, fishes pentagons of dark violet, the weeds upside-down beige towers of Babel. And up and out again, through clouds that looked like cerulean toadstools.
He did not get tired or hungry. Exerting or resting, he was “feeding.” He did not understand how he did it, any more than a savage would understand the processes by which food entering his mouth became energy and flesh. All he knew was that, munching mouthlessly, he devoured photons and gravitons and chronotrons and radio waves and magnetic lines of force. When in space, he would be eating all these and x-ray energy. His mouth was his shell.
As an engineer, he would have supposed that the surface area of his shell was too small to absorb enough energy to keep him alive. As what he now was, he knew that he could take in more than enough energy.
And then, as he soared up in a catenary curve that left behind a mile-long line of glimmering sapphire porcupine quills, quickly fading, he saw his mother. Going three times as fast, she was an ankh-shaped thing, striped with scarlet and blue and trailing yellow energy particles shaped like stars of David. She did not slow down, she went on up, out into space, headed toward some star. But as she passed, she whispered — or so it seemed to him — that he should follow her. She would love to have him accompany her. If he did not wish to, however, she bade him a fond farewell and hello.
“And what shall we do, brother?” he said in his non-voice.
His brother did not answer. The little yellow thing in him was he; his brother was he, and he was his brother.
He turned and raced around the planet, which was a shifting pattern of triangles and cubes below him. He sped in his orbit as if circularity was a means for arriving at a decision.
And it was.
7.
The doorbell rang.
Mavice Eyre got up from her chair before the TV set and walked through babble and smoke to the front door. She opened it onto the night and Paul Eyre. Two seconds passed, during which he could have covered fifty miles while out of the atmosphere and in the other form. Then Mavice fainted.
There was confusion and consternation. Paul Eyre acted calmly and did what had to be done. With order restored, the TV set off, and Mavice and his children, Roger and Glenda, in their chairs, he began to tell them a little of what had happened. Of his metamorphosis, he said nothing.
When he had finished, Mavice said, “Why didn’t they tell us that they were letting you go? Why didn’t you phone us? I almost died when I saw you!”
“They would like to keep this a secret,” he said. “Your oaths of silence still hold. I’m well now, though I’m not what I was. Not by a long shot. And I didn’t notify you I was coming because they asked me not to. Why, I don’t know. Security reasons, I suppose.”
He could not tell them the truth, of course.
There was a silence. His wife and his son were still afraid of him. Glenda did not fear him, but she did not trust him all the way. Of the three, she suspected that he was far more changed than he had admitted.
“Dad, where’d you get those clothes?” Roger said. “They look as if they came off a skid-row bum. And they sure smell like it!”
“I’ll get rid of them,” he said. And he thought, they did come from a wino. I took his clothes and in return I cured his diseased liver and his incipient tuberculosis and I may have altered the chemical imbalance that has made him an alcoholic. Maybe. I don’t know what was sick about him. But if he had a cirrhosed liver and that cough was from TB and his lust for drink comes from chemistry and not from the pysche, then he’s healed.
“Are you going back to work at Trackless Diesel, Dad?” Glenda said.
“Never. The idea makes me sick.”
“But what will you do!” Mavice said shrilly. “You’re fifty-five, and in only ten years you’ll be able to retire! If you quit, you’ll lose your retirement pension and the group medical insurance and…”
“I have better things to do,” he said.
“Such as what?” Mavice said.
“Such as finding out what a human being is and why he is,” Eyre said. “Before I go on.”
“Go on where?” Glenda said.
“Wherever my destiny takes me.” “And what is that?”
“Whatever seems to be best. Or whatever is good.”
“Look, Dad,” Glenda said. She stood up. “Look at me. I was a cripple and a hunchback, and you healed me just by looking at me! Think of what you can do for others!”
Glenda was radiant with joy, but Roger and Mavice had a better foundation for their emotion than Glenda did for hers. Not that they should be so afraid of him. They should dread what others would try to do to him and to them. Perhaps he should not have come back here. He had put them in jeopardy, whereas, if he had gone to some distant place, they would be safe.
But that wasn’t true either. As long as he stayed on Earth, no human was safe. Change was dangerous, and he was here to see that all were changed. It didn’t matter if he went to Timbuktu (and he might), change would spread out from him in an all-engulfing wave. It would lap over the Earth.
He stood up. “Let’s go to bed. Tomorrow…”
Mavice said, “Yes… ?”
“I begin looking.”
Mavice assumed that he meant he would search for another job. It was his duty to support his family.
And so it was. But a far stronger duty was to find a mate. And then the seeding would begin.
Poul Anderson
A Fair Exchange
NOWHERE on Rustum was autumn like that season anywhere on Earth. But on the plateau of High America it did recall, a little, the falls and Indian summers of the land whence this one had its name — if only because many plants from another mother planet now grew there. Or so the oldest colonists said. They had become very few. Daniel Coffin knew Earth from books and pictures and a dim star near Boötes, which his stepfather had pointed out as Sol.
Red leaves of maple, yellow leaves of birch, gold-streaked scarlet leaves of gim tree, scrittled on the wind, while overhead tossed the blue featheriness of plume oak that does not shed for winter. The founders of Anchor were forethoughtful men and women, who laid out broad streets lined with saplings when they were huddling in tents or sod huts. The timber grew with the town. In summer it gave shade, today it gave radiance to pavement, to walls of brick and tinted concrete and what frame buildings remained from earlier times, to groundcars and trucks — and an occasional horse-drawn wagon, likewise a souvenir of the pioneers — that bustled along the ways.
Children bound for school dodged in and out among elder pedestrians. Their shouts rang. Coffin remembered the toil and poverty he had lived with, like everyone else, and smiled a bit. Yes, there is such a thing as progress, he thought.
Air flowed and murmured, cool on his face, crisp in his nostrils. The sky arched altogether clear, pale blue, full of southbound wings. Eastward, the early morning sun stood ruddy-orange at the end of street and town, above the snowpeaks of the distant Hercules range. Though Anchor’s hinterland was an entire planet, it was itself not large: about ten thousand permanent residents, more than half of them children. To be sure, this was a fourth of the world’s humanity.
Glancing the opposite way, Coffin saw a tattered drift of smoke above the mostly low roofs. A flaw of wind brought a rotten-egg stench. He scowled. Progress can get overdone. Though he had never seen it in person, writings, films, and the tales of witnesses had driven into his bones what too much population and industry had done to Earth.
And as for children — the cheerfulness of the weather departed. Here was the hospital. His heart knocked and he mounted the steps more slowly than was his wont.
“Good morning, Mr. Coffin.” The nurse on desk duty was quite young. She addressed him with an awe which hitherto he had found wryly amusing. Him, plain Dan Coffin, lowland farmer?
Well, of course he’d made a name for himself as a young man, one of the few who could explore the immensities down yonder and gain the knowledge of Rustum that all men must have. And, yes, he’d had experiences that made sensational stories. But he’d always winced at those, recollecting the ancient saying that adventure happens only to the incompetent — then excusing himself with the fact that in so much unknownness, it was impossible to foresee every working of Murphy’s Law.
And anyhow, that was long behind him. He’d been settled down at Lake Moondance for — was it thirty-five years? (Which’d be about twenty Terrestrial, said an echo from his childhood, when people were still trying to keep up traditions like Christmas.) Oh yes, he did have by far the biggest plantation in those parts, or anywhere in the lowlands. He could be reckoned as well-off. His neighbors for three or four hundred kilometers around considered him a sort of leader, and had informally commissioned him to speak for them in High America. Nevertheless!
“Good morning, Miss Herskowitz,” he said, bowing as was expected in Anchor, where they went in more for mannerly gestures than folk did on the frontier. “Uh, I wonder, I know, it’s early but I have an appointment soon and —”
The sudden compassion on her face struck him with terror. “Yes, by all means, Mr. Coffin. Your wife’s awake. Go right on in.”
That gaze followed him as he strode: a stocky, muscular man, roughly clad for his field trip later today, his features broad and weathered, his black hair streaked with gray. He felt it on his back, in his heart.
The door was open to Eva’s room. He closed it behind him. For a moment he stood mute. Against propped-up pillows, sunlight through a window gave her mane back the redness it had had when first they knew each other. She was nursing their baby. On a table stood a vase of roses. He hadn’t brought them, hadn’t even known the town now boasted a conservatory. The hospital staff must have given them. That meant —
She raised her eyes to him. Their green was faded by weariness and (he could tell) recent crying. For the same reason, the freckles stood forth sharply on her snub-nosed countenance. And yet she was making a recovery from childbirth that would have been fast and good in a much younger woman.
“Dan —” He had long had a little trouble hearing, in the High American air that was scarcely thicker than Earth’s. Now he must almost read her lips. “We can’t keep him.”
He clamped his fists. “Oh, no.”
She spoke a bit louder, word by word. “It’s final. They’ve made every clinical test and there is no doubt. If we bring Charlie to the lowlands, he’ll die.”
He slumped on a chair at the bedside and groped for her hand. She didn’t give it to him. Holding the infant close in both arms, she stared at the wall before her and said, flat-voiced: “That was twelve or thirteen hours ago. They tried to get hold of you, but you weren’t to be found.”
“No, I — I had business, urgent business.”
“You’ve had a lot of that, the whole while I was here.”
“Oh, God, darling, don’t I know it!” He barely, lightly grasped her shoulder. His hand shook. “Don’t you know it, too?” he begged. “I’ve explained —”
“Yes. Of course.” She turned to him with the resolution he knew. She even tried to smile, though that failed. “I’ve just… been lonely. I’ve missed you…” Then she could hold out no longer, and she bent her head and wept.
He rose, stooped over her, gathered clumsily to his bosom her and the last child the doctors said she could ever have. “I know half a dozen fine homes that’d be happy to foster him,” he said. “That’s one thing that kept me busy, looking into this matter, in case. We can come see him whenever we want. It’s not like him being dead, is it? And, sure, we’ll adopt an exogene as soon as possible. Sweetheart, we both knew our luck couldn’t hold out forever. Three children of our own that we could keep may actually have bucked the odds. We’ve a lot to be glad of. Really we do.”
“Y-yes. It, it’s only that… little Charlie, here at my breast, m-m-milking me this minute — Could we move here, Dan?”
He stiffened before answering slowly: “No. Wouldn’t work. You’ve got to realize that. We’d lose everything we and — the the rest of our kids — ever hoped and worked for. We’d be too homesick —”
— for soaring mountains, rivers gleaming and belling down their cliffs; for boundless forests, turquoise, russet, and gold, spilling out to boundless prairies darkened by herds of beautiful beasts; for seas made wild by sun and outer moon, challenging men to sail around the curve of the world; for skies argent with cloud deck, or bright and changeable when that broke apart, or ablaze with lightning till the mighty rains came cataracting; for air so dense and rich with odors of soil and water and life, that the life in humans who could breathe it burned doubly bright, ran doubly strong; for the house that had grown under their hands from cabin to graciousness, the gardens and arbors and enormous fields that were theirs, the lake like a sea before them and wild-woods elsewhere around it; for friends with whom roots had intertwined over the years until they were more than friends and a daughter of theirs became the first love of a boy called Joshua Coffin —
“You’re right,” Eva said. “It wouldn’t work. I, I, I’ll be okay… later on… But hold me for a while, Dan, darling. Stay near me.”
He let her go and stood up. “I can’t, Eva. Not yet.”
She stared as if in horror.
“The whole community depends on, well, on me,” he said wretchedly. “The negotiations. We’ve discussed them often enough, you and I.”
“But —” She shifted the gurgling baby, in order to hold out one arm in beseeching. “Can’t that wait for a while? It’s waited plenty long already.”
“That’s part of the point. Everything I’ve been working for is coming to a head. I dare not hesitate. The time’s as good as it’ll ever be. I feel that. I can’t let… my man… cool off; he’ll back away from the commitment he’s close to making. I’ve gotten to know him, believe me. In politics, you either grab the chance when it comes, or —”
“Politics!”
He consoled her for the short span he was able. At least, she accepted his farewell kiss and his promise to come back soon, bearing his triumph and their people’s for a gift. He did not tell her that the triumph was not guaranteed. Doubtless she understood that. Her brain and will had been half of his throughout the years. In this hour she was worn down, she needed him, and he had never done anything harder than to leave her alone, crying, while he went to do his damned duty.
Or try to. Nothing is certain, on a world never meant for man.
Consider that world, its manifold strangenesses, and the fact that no help could possibly come from an Earth which a handful of freedom-lovers had left behind them. Consider, especially, a gravity one-fourth again as great as that under which our species, and its ancestors back to the first half-alive mote, evolved.
Hardy folk adapted to the weight. Children who grew up under it became still better fitted. But the bearing of those children had not been easy. It would never be easy for most women, until natural selection had created an entire new race.
Worse, that gravity held down immensely more atmosphere than did Earth’s. Because this was more compressed, men could breathe comfortably near the tops of the loftiest mountains. As they descended, however, the gas concentration rose sharply, until it became too much for most of them. Carbon dioxide acidosis, nitrogen narcosis, the slower but equally deadly effects of excess oxygen: these made the average adult sick, and killed him if he was exposed overly long. Babies died sooner.
