The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 2: To the Dark Star: 1962-69

by Robert Silverberg

  Alcibiades screamed.

  In the same instant one of the tendrils wrapped about Holbrook’s body lost its grip. He dropped about twenty feet in a single dizzying plunge before the remaining tendril steadied itself, leaving him dangling a few yards above the floor of the grove. When he could breathe again, Holbrook looked down and saw what had happened. Naomi had picked up the needler that he had dropped when he had been seized by the tree, and had burned away one tendril. She was taking aim again. There was another scream from Alcibiades; Holbrook was aware of a great commotion in the branches above him; he tumbled the rest of the way to the ground and landed hard in a pile of leaves. After a moment he rolled over and sat up. Nothing broken, Naomi stood above him, arms dangling, the needler still in her hand.

  “Are you all right?” she asked soberly.

  “Shaken up a little, is all.” He started to get up. “I owe you a lot,” he said. “Another minute and I’d have been in Alcibiades’ mouth.”

  “I almost let him eat you, Zen. He was just defending himself. But I couldn’t. So I shot off the tendrils.”

  “Yes. Yes. I owe you a lot.” He stood up and took a couple of faltering steps toward her. “Here,” he said. “You better give me that needler before you burn a hole in your foot.” He stretched out his hand.

  “Wait a second,” she said, glacially calm. She stepped back as he neared her.

  “What?”

  “A deal, Zen. I rescued you, right? I didn’t have to. Now you leave those trees alone. At least check up on whether there’s a spray, okay? A deal.”

  “But—”

  “You owe me a lot, you said. So pay me. What I want from you is a promise, Zen. If I hadn’t cut you down, you’d be dead now. Let the trees live too.”

  He wondered if she would use the needler on him.

  He was silent a long moment, weighing his options. Then he said, “All right, Naomi. You saved me, and I can’t refuse you what you want. I won’t touch the trees. I’ll find out if something can be sprayed on them to kill the rust.”

  “You mean that, Zen?”

  “I promise. By all that’s holy. Will you give me that needler, now?”

  “Here,” she cried, tears running down her reddened face. “Here! Take it! Oh God, Zen, how awful all this is!”

  He took the weapon from her and holstered it. She seemed to go limp, all resolve spent, once she surrendered it. She stumbled into his arms, and he held her tight, feeling her tremble against him. He trembled too, pulling her close to him, aware of the ripe cones of her young breasts jutting into his chest. A powerful wave of what he recognized bluntly as desire surged through him. Filthy, he thought. He winced as this morning’s images danced in his brain, Naomi nude and radiant from her swim, apple-round breasts, firm thighs. My niece. Fifteen. God help me. Comforting her, he ran his hands across her shoulders, down to the small of her back. Her clothes were light; her body was all too present within them.

  He threw her roughly to the ground.

  She landed in a heap, rolled over, put her hand to her mouth as he fell upon her. Her screams rose, shrill and piercing, as his body pressed down on her. Her terrified eyes plainly told that she feared he would rape her, but he had other perfidies in mind. Quickly he flung her on her face, catching her right hand and jerking her arm up behind her back. Then he lifted her to a sitting position.

  “Stand up,” he said. He gave her arm a twist by way of persuasion. She stood up.

  “Now walk. Out of the grove, back to the truck. I’ll break your arm if I have to.”

  “What are you doing?” she asked in a barely audible whisper.

  “Back to the truck,” he said. He levered her arm up another notch. She hissed in pain. But she walked.

  At the truck he maintained his grip on her and reached in to call Leitfried at his info center.

  “What was that all about, Zen? We tracked most of it, and—”

  “It’s too complicated to explain. The girl’s very attached to the trees, is all. Send some robots out here to get her right away, okay?”

  “You promised,” Naomi said.

  The robots arrived quickly. Steely-fingered, efficient, they kept Naomi pinioned as they hustled her into a bug and took her to the plantation house. When she was gone, Holbrook sat down for a moment beside the spray truck, to rest and clear his mind. Then he climbed into the truck cab again.

  He aimed the fusion gun first at Alcibiades.

  It took a little over three hours. When he was finished, Sector C was a field of ashes, and a broad belt of emptiness stretched from the outer limit of the devastation to the nearest grove of healthy trees. He wouldn’t know for a while whether he had succeeded in saving the plantation. But he had done his best.

  As he rode back to the plantation house, his mind was less on the work of execution he had just done than on the feel of Naomi’s body against his own, and on the things he had thought in that moment when he hurled her to the ground. A woman’s body, yes. But a child. A child still, in love with her pets. Unable yet to see how in the real world one weighs the need against the bond, and does one’s best. What had she learned in Sector C today? That the universe often offers only brutal choices? Or merely that the uncle she worshipped was capable of treachery and murder?

  They had given her sedation, but she was awake in her room, and when he came in she drew the covers up. Her eyes were cold.

  “You promised,” she said bitterly. “And then you tricked me.”

  “I had to save the other trees. You’ll understand, Naomi.”

  “I understand that you lied to me, Zen.”

  “I’m sorry. Forgive me?”

  “You can go to hell,” she said, and those adult words coming from her not yet adult face were chilling. He could not stay longer with her. He went out, upstairs, to Fred Leitfried in the info center. “It’s all over,” he said softly.

  “You did it like a man, Zen.”

  “Yeah. Yeah.”

  In the screen he scanned the sector of ashes. He felt the warmth of Naomi against him. He saw her sullen eyes. Night would come, the moons would do their dance across the sky, the constellations to which he had never grown accustomed would blaze forth. He would talk to her again, maybe. Try to make her understand. And then he would send her away, until she was finished becoming a woman.

  “Starting to rain,” Leitfried said. “That’ll help the ripening along, eh?”

  “Most likely.”

  “You feel like a killer, Zen?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I know. I know.”

  Holbrook began to shut off the scanners. He had done all he meant to do today. He said quietly, “Fred, they were trees. Only trees. Trees, Fred, trees.”

  ISHMAEL IN LOVE

  The “novel I was doing” that I mention in the March 25, 1968 letter to Ed Ferman quoted in the introduction to “The Fangs of the Trees” was Nightwings, which I wrote in three novella-sized sections for Fred Pohl in the early and middle months of 1968. I finished the first of them, the novella that was also called “Nightwings,” by mid-March, and went on immediately to do a second story for Ed Ferman.

  Dolphins were getting to be big news, then, and I built the story around the latest dolphin data and an article I had read in Science on experimental desalinization plants. Apparently I had begun to emerge a little, six weeks after the fire that had wrecked my house, from the numbness and exhaustion of the early post-fire days: at least, the audacity of opening a story with the words, “Call me Ishmael,” leads me to think I was starting to recover a little of my emotional balance. Even though I hadn’t sent Ferman a synopsis in advance, as seems to have been required, he accepted the story and ran it in the July, 1970 Fantasy and Science Fiction. Don Wollheim and Terry Carr chose it for the 1971 volume of their annual year’s-best-science-fiction volume, my third year in a row in that distinguished collection.

  ——————

  Call me Ishmael. All human beings who know me
do. My own kind does not make use of the unit-structural designation [“name”] to distinguish individuals, but this is the name the humans gave me, and it will do. I was named by Miss Lisabeth Calkins, for whom I feel protective-chivalrous-sexual emotions [“love”]. Throughout my narrative it is understood that the designation “Ishmael” refers only to myself.

  I am a member of an intelligent aquatic mammalian nonprimate nonhuman species, Tursiops truncatus, a bottle-nosed dolphin. I am eleven years old, which is to say that I am fully mature in all respects. My weight is 175 kilograms, and my total length is 2.9 meters. I am employed at Gerard-Worzel Seawater Recovery Station, St. Croix, Virgin Islands, in a maintenance capacity, having commenced there on your date of August 14 1994. To my own species I am sexually desirable and also highly regarded for my mental development. I have a large vocabulary. I communicate well with members of H. sapiens. I have considerable mechanical ability, as you can see by my success in switching on the electronic-acoustic device through which I am dictating this memoir.

  I am a lonely mammalian organism who has committed acts of heroism on behalf of your species and wishes only the reward of a more intimate relationship [“love”] with Miss Lisabeth Calkins. I beseech compassionate members of H. sapiens to speak favorably of me to her. I am loyal, trustworthy, reliable, devoted, and extremely intelligent. I would endeavor to give her stimulating companionship and emotional fulfillment [“happiness”] in all respects within my power.

  Permit me to explain the pertinent circumstances.

  Category 1: My Employment

  Gerard-Worzel Seawater Recovery Station occupies a prominent position on the north shore of the island of St. Croix in the West Indies. It operates on the atmospheric-condensation principle. All this I know from Miss Calkins [“Lisabeth”], who has described its workings to me in great detail. The purpose of our installation is to recover some of the fresh water, estimated at two hundred million gallons per day, carried as vapor in the lower hundred meters of air sweeping over each kilometer of the windward side of the island.

  A pipe .9 meters in diameter takes in cold seawater at depths of up to 900 meters and carries it approximately 2 kilometers to our station. The pipe delivers some 30 million gallons of water a day at a temperature of 5°C. This is pumped toward our condenser, which intercepts approximately 1 billion cubic meters of warm tropical air each day. This air has a temperature of 25°C and a relative humidity of 70 to 80 percent. Upon exposure to the cold seawater in the condenser, the air cools to 10°C and reaches a humidity of 100 percent, permitting us to extract approximately 16 gallons of water per cubic meter of air. This salt-free [“fresh”] water is delivered to the main water system of the island, for St. Croix is deficient in a natural supply of water suitable for consumption by human beings. It is frequently said by government officials who visit our installation on various ceremonial occasions that without our plant the great industrial expansion of St. Croix would have been wholly impossible.

  For reasons of economy we operate in conjunction with an aquicultural enterprise [“the fish farm”] that puts our wastes to work. Once our seawater has been pumped through the condenser it must be discarded; however, because it originates in a low-level ocean area, its content of dissolved phosphates and nitrates is 1500 percent greater than at the surface. This nutrient-rich water is pumped from our condenser into an adjoining circular lagoon of natural origin [“the coral corral”], which is stocked with fish. In such an enhanced environment the fish are highly productive, and the yield of food is great enough to offset the costs of operating our pumps.

  [Misguided human beings sometimes question the morality of using dolphins to help maintain fish farms. They believe it is degrading to compel us to produce fellow aquatic creatures to be eaten by man. May I simply point out, first, that none of us work here under compulsion, and second, that my species sees nothing immoral about feeding on aquatic creatures. We eat fish ourselves.]

  My role in the functioning of the Gerard-Worzel Seawater Recovery Station is an important one. I [“Ishmael”] serve as Foreman of the Intake Maintenance Squad. I lead nine members of my species. Our assignment is to monitor the intake valves of the main seawater pipe. These valves frequently become fouled through the presence on them of low-phylum organisms, such as starfish or algae, hampering the efficiency of the installation. Our task is to descend at periodic intervals and clear the obstruction. Normally this can be achieved without the need for manipulative organs [“fingers”] with which we are unfortunately not equipped.

  [Certain individuals among you have objected that it is improper to make use of dolphins in the labor force when members of H. sapiens are out of work. The intelligent reply to this is that, first, we are designed by evolution to function superbly underwater without special breathing equipment, and second, that only a highly skilled human being could perform our function, and such human beings are themselves in short supply in the labor force.]

  I have held my post for two years and four months. In that time there has been no significant interruption in intake capacity of the valves I maintain.

  As compensation for my work [“salary”] I receive an ample supply of food. One could hire a mere shark for such pay, of course, but above and beyond my daily pails of fish I also receive such intangibles as the companionship of human beings and the opportunity to develop my latent intelligence through access to reference spools, vocabulary expanders, and various training devices. As you can see, I have made the most of my opportunities.

  Category 2: Miss Lisabeth Calkins

  Her dossier is on file here. I have had access to it through the spool-reader mounted at the edge of the dolphin exercise tank. By spoken instruction I can bring into view anything in the station files, although I doubt that it was anticipated by anyone that a dolphin should want to read the personnel dossiers.

  She is twenty-seven years old. Thus she is of the same generation as my genetic predecessors [“parents”]. However, I do not share the prevailing cultural taboo of many H. sapiens against emotional relationships with older women. Besides, after compensating for differences in species, it will be seen that Miss Lisabeth and I are of the same age. She reached sexual maturity approximately half her lifetime ago. So did I.

  [I must admit that she is considered slightly past the optimum age at which human females take a permanent mate. I assume she does not engage in the practice of temporary mating, since her dossier shows no indication that she has reproduced. It is possible that humans do not necessarily produce offspring at each yearly mating, or even that matings take place at random unpredictable times not related to the reproductive process at all. This seems strange and somehow perverse to me, yet I infer from some data I have seen that it may be the case. There is little information on human mating habits in the material accessible to me. I must learn more.]

  Lisabeth, as I allow myself privately to call her, stands 1.8 meters tall [humans do not measure themselves by “length”] and weighs 52 kilograms. Her hair is golden [“blonde”] and is worn long. Her skin, though darkened by exposure to the sun, is quite fair. The irises of her eyes are blue. From my conversations with humans I have learned that she is considered quite beautiful. From words I have overheard while at surface level I realize that most males at the station feel intense sexual desires toward her. I regard her as beautiful also, inasmuch as I am capable of responding to human beauty. [I think I am.] I am not sure if I feel actual sexual desire for Lisabeth; more likely what troubles me is a generalized longing for her presence and her closeness, which I translate into sexual terms simply as a means of making it comprehensible to me.

  Beyond doubt she does not have the traits I normally seek in a mate [prominent beak, sleek fins]. Any attempt at our making love in the anatomical sense would certainly result in pain or injury to her. That is not my wish. The physical traits that make her so desirable to the males of her species [highly developed milk glands, shining hair, delicate features, long hind limbs or “legs”,
and so forth] have no particular importance to me, and in some instances actually have a negative value. As in the case of the two milk glands in her pectoral region, which jut forward from her body in such a fashion that they must surely slow her when she swims. This is poor design, and I am incapable of finding poor design beautiful in any way. Evidently Lisabeth regrets the size and placement of those glands herself, since she is careful to conceal them at all times by a narrow covering. The others at the station, who are all males and therefore have only rudimentary milk glands that in no way destroy the flow lines of their bodies, leave them bare.

  What, then, is the cause of my attraction for Lisabeth?

  It arises out of the need I feel for her companionship. I believe that she understands me as no member of my own species does. Hence I will be happier in her company than away from her. This impression dates from our earliest meeting. Lisabeth, who is a specialist in human-cetacean relations, came to St. Croix four months ago, and I was requested to bring my maintenance group to the surface to be introduced to her. I leaped high for a good view and saw instantly that she was of a finer sort than the humans I already knew; her body was more delicate, looking at once fragile and powerful, and her gracefulness was a welcome change from the thick awkwardness of the human males I knew. Nor was she covered with the coarse body hair that my kind finds so distressing. [I did not at first know that Lisabeth’s difference from the others at the station was the result of’ her being female. I had never seen a human female before. But I quickly learned.]

  I came forward, made contact with the acoustic transmitter, and said, “I am the Foreman of the Intake Maintenance Squad. I have the unit-structural designation TT-66.”