The Edgar Pangborn Megapack

by Edgar Pangborn

  “Oh, Dorothy! Well, we—”

  “Yes, I saw the lifeboat go down on the channel. It didn’t sink.” She shut her eyes. “It was a misty evening, lover, more ways than one. Remember, Dunin?”

  “I’ll always remember.”

  “Paul, I know that when the open-sea current below the island took the lifeboat it must have been smashed against the cliffs—oh, of course—and for nine years the sea spiders will have used the pieces of it for their little castles and hideaways. All the same—Ed and Ann could have managed to swim ashore. Cross the range somehow or go around it.”

  “Nothing to eat. Barren rock straight up from the beaches, where there are any beaches, for ninety miles south of the only place where they could have landed and for twenty miles north of it.”

  “But no kaksmas in the coast range either; no omasha, this side. There are beaches here and there. They might have found—shellfish—blue seaweed.”

  “Nine years—”

  “It is smoke. Our people wouldn’t be up there.…”

  “You’ve never wanted to talk much about that day.”

  “No, I—haven’t. I didn’t behave too well myself. Yes, there are things I’ve never told.… Paul, Ed Spearman was like somebody I didn’t know. He did say in so many words that he planned to go to Vestoia, not to—to throw himself on the mercy of Lantis, but to ‘give her civilization’—he said. We tried, Ann and I, tried to reason with him against that. I think he had some alternative plan—maybe flying south of Vestoia as far as the fuel would take him and starting a community of his own—with Ann and me, you know, and himself the old man of the tribe.”

  “And without us,” said Dunin mildly.

  “Yes, dear, I recall that. He put that in words.…”

  In a way, Paul did not want her to go on, living it over again, but she had a need to speak of it. “I suppose his plans made a kind of sense if you accepted the premise. As I couldn’t, of course. When he said you were all lost, I believed (I had to believe) that he was—not lying perhaps, but telling something he hadn’t truly seen. I know that was where I let go—I raged and screamed, and when he grabbed my arm (probably just wanting to quiet me down)—well, if he’s living he’ll have two or three white scars down his cheek. Uh-huh: the Dope comes clean. I ever think I was trying to get hold of my pistol when Arek took it away, and took his away too. After that she forced him to give a precise account of everything that had happened, every detail. She made him tell it five or six times, watching for contradictions. She was—justice embodied. I was afraid of her myself even while I loved her for it. I knew what he told us then was the truth: the fuel was low, he’d come direct to the island with no real knowledge of what had happened to you. He was saner after the telling. He lost a—a certain look of exalted listening, as if somebody behind Arek’s shoulder were telling him what to do. Arek never gave back his pistol. We were on the beach. The giants had been bringing wood all day for a beacon fire. I remember the exact shape of a big shell at my feet, the look of a bit of driftwood tossed in by the channel breakers.…”

  “And Ann—”

  “Oh, Ann! Tom two or three ways as usual. She was very much in love with him, you know, from our first days on Lucifer. But her mind was a battleground with no armistice. I think Ed always knew that. When he pleaded with her—reasonably too—she couldn’t think, she could only cry and say: ‘I won’t go with you—I won’t go.’ He stopped trying—suddenly, as if he’d knowingly turned off a light inside himself—unsteady light and the only one he had, I reckon. He said, ‘So much for the human race: but I’ll see what one man can do here before I’m dead without issue.’ And he walked off to the lifeboat, while Arek let his pistol dangle from her finger—and, Paul, I shall always think he knew Ann would run after him. I saw her tugging, trying to pull him out of the boat—but she was pulled in and it was gone.”

  “And I remember,” said Dunin, “what you did after we lost sight of it.”

  “What I did…? What was that, Dunin? I’m blank there.”

  “You went to the beacon fire and put on more wood.”

  “Well,” she said vaguely, “of course. We all did.… That is smoke, Paul. Lantis’ pygmies or the wild giants couldn’t be there on the cliffs.”

  Dunin said, “Oh, there are no giants in that country, Dorothy. Those low hills I remember west of the first camp—those kaksma hills were an impassable boundary in the old days. The country west of them—nobody went there, ever. And south of them—Vestoia. My wild kindred are all very far north of here.…”

  Argo IV eased up to the wharf, where Elis and Arek handled her like a toy, making her fast with ropes of a fabric as good as linen. Wright was there with them, and Tejron, and Pakriaa and Nisana, who were inseparable. “Too far,” said Wright, and handed Paul the field glasses. “Just smoke.”

  Elis grumbled, “What’s up there to burn? No vegetation. Rock.”

  The smoke seemed to be thinning. “How long since our last trip over?”

  “Eight days, Paul,” Tejron recalled. “My impatient eldest wanted to see if he could handle Betsy’s oars, remember?”

  “He could, too.” Paul remembered. “Sears-Danik pulled his weight, my lady. Yes, that was the last time. And we saw nothing unusual.”

  Only Nisana thought to ask, “Good voyage today, Paul?”

  “Fine, darling. You should have come.”

  Wright was carefully calm. “I’ll go over, with Paul, Elis—and—”

  “And me,” said Dorothy, not smiling.

  “Well… Okay, Dope.”

  Pakriaa’s thin wrinkled face turned to him. “Nisana and I? Miniaan—she would remember the Vestoian dialect—but she is at the city. It would need an hour to send for her, and then it would be getting dark.”

  “Yes, come with us.…”

  The site of Jensen City was not where Wright and Paul had originally dreamed of it but two miles south, where the radiance of Sears Lake hung in the hills. A gap in the west admitted ocean winds; the outlet of the lake ran for a mile to the edge of a red stone cliff and tumbled over in a waterfall five hundred feet high. There would one day be houses along that mile of river. Already, near the waterfall, there was a temple of red and black stone devoted to quiet without ritual, thought of sometimes as a memorial to Sears and to the other dead, more often simply as a place to go for the satisfactions of silence. It had no name; Paul hoped it would never have one.

  Miniaan of Vestoia was an eager citizen. The old wound had left one side of her head cruelly scarred; from the other side she was beautiful, by Charin as well as pygmy standards. Younger than Pakriaa, she was the mother of four, by Kajana—the archer whom Mijok had once carried on his shield, who would never walk again nor live a day without pain, and who was more cheerful as a permanent habit of mind than any of the other pygmy survivors of that war. The fifty-four pygmy children of Jensen City were all fathered by Abara and Kajana—a fact which caused old Abara to draw dead-pan comparisons between himself and Mister Johnson and to grow darkly desperate when Kajana wistfully asked him to explain why it was a joke.…

  Elis shipped the oars; Paul let down the anchor, a heavy block of stone, in two fathoms of blackening water; Elis lifted the dugout over the side and held it for them. He himself swam the short distance to the beach and eased the canoe through the shallows. Even now at low tide there was barely a quarter mile of gray sand between water and cliffs. Chipping away of building stone had created a fair path a hundred feet up; beyond, natural irregularities made it possible to climb another two hundred to the first setback of the great sea wall—a ledge which ran only as far as the next patch of beach, five miles south. Sunset had been ending when Argo IV came home; here there was a depth of evening quiet, no sign of smoke or life, no sound but the long hiss and moaning of small waves. “We might make a fire here,” Wright said. “But
there’s enough light. They—they?—must have seen Argo.”

  “There,” Dorothy said, and ran up the sand.

  The others watched in frozen helplessness as the woman came down the crude cliff path, gaunt, seeming tall only because of the gauntness—flaring ribs, thighs fallen in, every arm bone visible. Her hair was black disorder to her waist, her body a battleground of bruises, dirt, scars old and new, and she winced away from Dorothy with protesting hands. “You mustn’t touch me because I’m very dirty, but I know who you are. Besides, I had to burn the last of my clothes. My baby died. I know who you are. You see, my milk stopped. You’re Dorothy Leeds. I left him on the cliff. Matron would not approve. You see—”

  “Ann—Ann—”

  “I have two other sons, but this one died. On the cliff. I used to know a man who called me Miss Sarasate, but that was just his way of talking—I don’t happen to be in practice.” Still trying to fend off Dorothy’s arms, Ann fell on her face.…

  Pakriaa was speaking softly, in the room where Ann was sleeping—Wright’s room. “She will be healed,” Pakriaa said. “I can remember—and you remember it too, Paul—how my own mind refused to be my servant for a while.” Since Ann had been brought to Jensen City, Pakriaa and Nisana had never left her: the little women, both now far from youth, took on the duties of nursing with a fierce protectiveness, so that there was little for even Dorothy to do. Ann had slept heavily all night and morning. At noon the stone-walled house remained cool; mild air entered at the screenless window openings, stirring the wall map of Adelphi and the three of Paul’s paintings which were the only decorations Wright allowed in this ascetic shelter. There was glass-making now, but in such a climate, with no serious insect pests, it seemed a waste of effort to make windows; a long overhang of the eaves was sufficient against the rains. The house was large, U-shaped around a garden courtyard open toward Sears Lake; the walls were of black stone, the roof of a material indistinguishable from slate, carried by hardwood timbers. Wright shared this house with Mijok and Arek, Pakriaa, Nisana, Miniaan, and their children and Arek’s. There were five other such communal houses overlooking the lake; a seventh was building. The children were everywhere: it was, and would be for many years, a city of the young. Rak had died in the Year Four, a matter of falling asleep without waking, but Kamon lived, sharing a house with Tejron, Paul and Dorothy, Brodaa and Kajana. Lately Sears’ daughter had taken over the task of caring for Kajana in his helplessness, lifting him to and from a wheel chair that Paul and Mijok had contrived or carrying him to a hammock slung near the waterfall, where he could watch the ocean and its changes. In middle age, Kajana had taught himself to write, and kept a journal of the colony with a sober passion for detail.

  Ann had not waked when Dorothy and Nisana washed her and clipped the dreadful tangle of her hair. “She will be healed,” Pakriaa insisted. “Maybe in the next waking.” And when Ann’s gray eyes came open an hour later, they did show a measuring sanity, recognizing Dorothy and Paul, but wincing away when Nisana smiled and touched her.

  “Do not be afraid of us,” Pakriaa whispered. “We are still proud. But our pride now is that no one is afraid of us.… You came to my house in the old old days, remember? My blue house, and I thinking I would be Queen of the World? I laugh at that now. Do not look at what I was, Ann.”

  “Pakriaa … Paul, you haven’t changed much.”

  “One of our other friends is about to bring a man-sized meal—”

  “Why, Paul, you must be—”

  “Fifty, Earth calendar—”

  Dorothy said, “We measure it in Lucifer years, pretty please.”

  “Nicer,” Paul admitted. “That way I’m around thirty-seven. Ann, you—let’s see: one Earth year, one point three eight—damn mental arithmetic—let’s call you half past twenty-seven.”

  “Imagine that.” Ann achieved a smile. “And—Pakriaa?”

  “Twenty-nine. See—already I am an old woman and ugly.”

  “Don’t be absurd, Pak,” Dorothy said. “And this lady—”

  “You would not remember me,” said Nisana.

  “Oh, but I do, I do. You—voted for Paul—”

  Pakriaa chuckled with unforced gaiety. “Politics,” Nisana chirped. “P.S., I got the job.” Paul pinched her tiny ear lobe and stepped out to the kitchen, where he found Wright with Arek. The children were at school, with Brodaa, Mijok, and Miniaan: ordinarily Wright would have been there too. When the youngest of this house were through with lessons they would go wandering in the hills with Mijok and Muson, so that Ann might have quiet, with only distant sounds of the laughter and playing in sunlight. “She’s awake,” Paul said, and Wright hurried to the bedroom, but Arek lingered, filling a tray.

  Arek had grown almost to Mijok’s height, filling out, a red mother goddess still bemused by inner discoveries. Her fine soft-furred fingers fussed at the earthen dishes on the wooden tray. “No ambition, no achievement—nothing, I think, could be worth the price of what’s happened to her. Whether she recovers completely or not. There’s human right and wrong. I think sometimes, Paul, it’s not necessary to do much wondering. You can look straight at a thing and say: ‘This ought not to be.’”

  “Granted,” Paul said, watching the garden through the broad kitchen window. His eldest, Helen, must have elected to do a little work after school instead of strolling away with the others. She was weeding, her brown head sheltered from the sun by an improvised hat of leaves; but for that she was prettily naked as the day she was born, and though she was humming to herself, she restrained the sound so that Paul could hardly hear it. She saw him in the window and grinned and waved. She had most of Dorothy’s warm coloring, with Paul’s long-legged slimness.

  Arek saw her too and smiled. “What Ann should have had too.… Paul, I told you once, we love you. All the good new things we have—your work. All the same there’s a devil in—some of you. As in us too, of course. Need of the laws is obvious. If Spearman is responsible—the Vestoians too, maybe?—then I think we live in too much seclusion here.” She took up the tray. “Too easy to live all the time in Paradise and—leave things undone.”

  “Yes. Vestoia is big, Arek—or was, when it almost destroyed us.”

  “True. But you tell me that over there on the beach she said, ‘I have two other sons.’ Living, did she mean? We must find them, and Spearman too.”

  “I believe she can tell us about it soon.”

  “Understood that I go with you when you find them.”

  “Yes. Yes, Arek.…”

  In the bedroom Arek’s manner was altogether changed. “Observe: this is asonis rôti à la mode Versailles, whatever that means. All I did was roast it. These are (Paul says) lima beans Munchausen, and here we have could-be asparagus. And by the way, the cheese tastes better’n it smells.”

  “Cheese—”

  “Asonis milk,” said Wright. “They moo, too.”

  “Oh, you’ve tamed them.” Pain fought with interest in the haggard face. “Yes, Ed wanted to do that, but we—somehow we never—”

  “If you’re good,” Arek said, “and eat all that, there’s cake.”

  “You found something for sugar?”

  “Can’t tell it from terrestrial,” Dorothy chattered, “only it’s pink. From a tree fruit sort of like a plum. We have a plantation of ’em across the lake. You boil it down to nothing and the sugar crystallizes out. We make another kind from sap, not as good as maple. Flour—that’s from the same old wheat that came from Earth. Miniaan—oh, you don’t know her yet—Miniaan and Paul have experimented around with the local grass grains—nothing yet that measures up to wheat.” Ann picked at the food, crying weakly at the first mouthful. “Ah, don’t do that,” said Dorothy, looking away. “You came home, that’s all.”

  Later she ate ravenously. “I want to tell you—”


  It took a long time in telling. Once she fell asleep but woke an hour later, obsessed with a need to continue.…

  The lifeboat drifted south, its last remnant of fuel gone in a mad effort to leap the coastal range. Water sneaked in at the seal of the floor window, damaged in an earlier landing, and Ed Spearman talked to himself. “Fugitives from a Sunday school—we’ll live.” Like a hurt boy he said, “We’ll show ’em.…”

  When the current beyond the island swept them toward the cliffs, he opened the door and pulled Ann into the water, dragging her, forgetting that she was herself a strong swimmer. Later, on the beach, he was tender, trying to comfort and reassure her with a vision of the future abundantly real to him. They had no food, no way to light a fire of driftwood. They would go to Vestoia, he said, convince Lantis that they were friends, with something to offer her empire; they would “bring her civilization.”

  From this beach there seemed to be no passage north. They could have found one by climbing high into the range—Ann did so, nine years later. But Spearman found a ledge of sorts running south: it might take them the eighty-odd miles to the lower end of the range or give out at any point, trapping them. It did give out twice; both times, rather than clamber higher on the cliffs, Spearman hurled his famished body through the breakers and swam south, aided by the current until it was possible to continue along the rocks. Ann followed, not quite wishing for the death the ocean could have given easily. They kept alive with shellfish and seaweed washed ashore and small crustaceans that hid in the tide lines and in crannies of wet rock; there were pools of rain water and violent small streams plunging down the range. It took them fifty days to cover the eighty miles. (“I think I spent a hundred coming back,” Ann said. “Couldn’t swim, with the baby. It would have been against the current anyway. Climbed—sometimes went back miles from a dead end to try again.”) In the afternoons the sun pressed on them with total fury; then they could only crawl into what shadow the rocks gave and wait for the torture to cease.