by Jeffrey Ford
Along with the criminal were stowed a microwave rifle with rechargeable pack, a knife, a handheld fire starter, a single set of clothing, and a heavy coat. There was also a small, six-by-six cube sealed in a bag that when released would draw in the ambient water vapor and grow to become a modest boxlike shelter with a door and a window. The prisoner was allowed to request a personal belonging and Sikes requested his favorite labyrinth board and set of kernels. All of this was done with the understanding that, surely, the outcast had little chance for survival on an alien world. Still, it eased the consciences of the people of Aldebaran and was in keeping with their humane philosophy.
Sikes was stuffed, screaming for the mercy of death, into the cocoon cylinder of his temporary space tomb. In minutes he was deep in the liquid sleep, his physical being sloshing back and forth within as the small vessel was wheeled to the launch pad in the underground of the city. The controls had been set so that the probe would wander through the universe until its sensors, acute spectrographs that used a technique called light dissection, picked up signs of a habitable planet. Then the navigational devices would take over; the single rocket would fire and send him to his new home.
Criminal probe #87659 was shot into the absolute zero of space in the wake of the turning city, a gleaming chrome kernel cast into a game without boundaries. One would think that Sikes’s mind might be a complete blank, but no. There was, even in that suspended state, a dim sort of consciousness; a psychedelic inner realm of intermittent ghost life and insect memory, like pieces of a shattered mirror taking wing.
Then Time was a maniac scattering dust, and miles had no meaning until, suddenly, for what seemed like an eternity, those shards of the shattered mirror flew together like pieces of a puzzle, assembling themselves, and Sikes awoke, reformed from the chemical soup that was himself. The panel of the cocoon slid open, the door of the probe drew back and he beheld his prison. He gasped frantically, trying to recall the process of respiration, and once he did, he screamed from the pain of the sunlight in his eyes. For the first hour on his new world, he lay where he was, dizzy and nauseous. These ill affects soon passed, and though he was weak, he managed to crawl out of the probe and onto the burning sands.
Sikes found the clothes where, four centuries earlier, they had told him they would be. Dressing quickly with shaking hands, he finally got his feet into the heavy boots that protected them somewhat from the searing heat of the red desert. He looked into the sky and saw that the sun was at midday. What he was unsure of was how long a day would be. Scanning the flat terrain, he saw no signs of life, not even the merest scrap of vegetation. His mind was still cloudy from the liquid sleep, but he managed to make a plan. He would retrieve the rifle and knife and shelter cube from the probe, pack the smaller items in the sack they had sent with him, and strike out in one direction. As long as his strength held out he would search, but if he did not find a more inviting landscape in his travels before he became too weak to continue, he would turn the rifle on himself and end his misery.
“Habitable planet, indeed,” he said aloud as he struck out due west from the probe. He went only a few yards before remembering the Maize board and pieces, and because of the comfort they provided, being a link to his previous life, returned to fetch them.
Walking on a planet with a yellow sky above him and not the reassuring scoop of the dome was frightening at first. He felt very much as if he had died and gone, a spirit, to another realm as in the religious Earth myths of old. Then he remembered more clearly his reason for being there, and he thought back through the thousands and thousands of miles and hours to Aldebaran and the image of Methina. Now with so much distance from her murder, he wondered what he had been thinking to have done something so unspeakable. The why of things was totally lost to his memory, but try as he might he could not forget the feel of her body and the long, bright wave of her hair.
Sikes journeyed far. His mouth was parched and perspiration rolled off him and evaporated before hitting the sand. He halted, wondering if it was time to use the rifle, and that is when he saw in the heat-rippled distance the definite outline of what he believed to be trees, a wide swath of them sprouting from the unforgiving sand. He made his way toward them, and at first they seemed to be receding as he approached. Eventually, he closed his eyes against the brightness of the day and doggedly continued to put one foot in front of the other. When he stopped to rest some time later, he opened his eyes and beheld before him an enchanted scene like something from a child’s picture book of long ago.
He found himself standing on the edge of a forest whose trees were straight, blue-trunked giants topped with silver leaves. A little way in beyond them, he saw a meadow of long violet grass blowing in a wind that seemed only to exist within the boundary of the trees. Rushing forward, he ran in under the canopy of silver leaves and the second he was beneath their shade, he felt the heat in the soles of his boots subside and a breeze against his face. He had not yet thought about what his reason was to survive, but for the first time he had an inkling that it might be possible.
As it was, Sikes did survive, for within the borders of the roughly three-hundred-acre oasis he had stumbled upon there were three good-sized lakes, fruit-bearing trees, and wildlife in all its various and intricate forms. Surrounding his living prison was a vast sea of impassable red desert. This place was just large enough for him to feel comfortable in. Aldebaran had been no more than an island in a forbidding void, and so he was used to a life within definite boundaries. He thought of the oasis as a large Maize board, and as he went through his quiet days there he dreamed of strategies that would allow him to outsmart his crafty opponents, Boredom and Death.
He set up his camp next to one of the lakes. The water-vapor-absorbing structure they had sent with him only partially inflated since the climate of that area was so very dry. Still there was enough room for him to lie down inside and to store his belongings. The water in the lake was not only clean and satisfied his thirst, but it was composed of some other element than hydrogen and oxygen that gave it a sweet flavor.
The first thing that Sikes became aware of was the length of the days and nights. They were not too different from the artificial ones that had been imposed on Aldebaran. The night always seemed a little longer than the day, if that was possible, and there was, with regularity, the hulking presence of a large ringed planet in the southern sky. The star that was the sun of this world burned much whiter and hotter than his childhood learning implant had said Earth’s sun had, but it also appeared somewhat farther away.
Sikes surmised that the entire desert must have at one time been a forest, but because of some climate change or erosion the sands had overtaken the flora and dried up rivers and streams. Only in rare places like the oasis, where the water most likely came up from deep in the ground, were there pockets of life, miniatures of how things had once been on a grand scale. He also knew that somewhere on the planet, not farther away than birds would want to migrate, there must have been a different terrain since flocks of different types of small winged creatures infested the trees for a week or two and then were gone.
In addition to the strange life forms of armored insects, large stupid fish with piglike faces he caught with his hands, and chittering little things that were a cross between lizards and chipmunks, there was a species of larger animal with which he shared the residence of the oasis. He was surprised at their number, given the surrounding hostile environment and the long time they must have existed within the boundary of the three hundred acres. They were disconcertingly bipedal, going almost upright with the same basic body form of two arms, two legs, a torso, and head, as humans. They were covered with long hair of various different shades, yet they were not human at all, not even primate.
The flesh of these creatures was soft, almost like plant meat, and they were so lacking in intelligence it seemed to Sikes that even the fish of the lakes were more cognizant. Hairy, walking asparagus was how he thought of them. At night, he
heard their calls—the sound of a sickly old woman wheezing. They were, luckily, not aggressive. In fact, Sikes could walk right up to them and blow their brains out with the rifle. He found them an excellent source of sustenance, but found he could not cook them without first removing the head. Once they were dead, their eyes gave the illusion that all had finally become clear to them. Sikes killed them indiscriminately, sometimes for food and sometimes for sport to counteract boredom.
So this then became Sikes’s life, the existence of the castaway. He had conceived of all manner of diversions in order to try to retain his sanity. At night he studied the stars, trying to determine in what quadrant of space his planet resided. During the day he hunted, practicing with the rifle so often that his aim was perfection itself. He replaced the kernels of corn from his Maize box with pebbles and played against himself every afternoon before the sun set. With nothing but time on his hands, what amazing strategies he came up with. The least of them made the Winner’s Conceit look like the tactic of a dimwitted child. The kernels of corn he planted, in four neat rows and watered consistently every day. On the morning that he first saw the small green sprouts poking through the soil, he felt a sense of accomplishment like none he had experienced in his entire life.
Once he had established his presence in the oasis, he went on half-day journeys of exploration. The landscape of the entire expanse was fairly uniform in its composition. There were groves of the silver-leafed trees, small clearings and meadows of violet grass, and then the three lakes. Only in one spot at the northernmost extent of the oasis were there outcroppings of rock that jutted up from the soil in small hills. There were caves carved by erosion into the faces of these stony eruptions, and it was here where the two-legged creatures—the Geets, as he had come to call them, after the inventor of Maize—lived. On a particularly tedious afternoon, he sat a little way off from their colony and took target practice, drilling young and old alike with blasts from the rifle.
Though the seasons changed, they were but minor ripples in the natural routine of the land. They came every few weeks it seemed, and he could note them by transformations in the leaves of the blue-trunked trees. In one season the silver leaves shone at night, in another they dropped off, in the next the ones that had dropped off disintegrated into a kind of fuzz that blew on the breeze all over the oasis. Then the leaves sprouted and grew again and this cycle continued without fail.
The only other marker of the change in season was that with each permutation of the leaves, the Geets would give birth to a new brood of young. He could not tell if there were male and female Geets, for they all had two womanly breasts, or how they mated, but it was a certainty that, although they were short-lived, they were incredibly prolific. I may very well utterly deplete the capacity of this rifle before all is said and done, thought Sikes after putting a neat hole through the head of one a hundred yards away. Soon after this, he noticed that they had begun to flee when they knew he was nearby.
The corn had apparently retained its distant genetic memory of Earth, because it ignored the seasons of the new planet and grew at its own slow speed. Sikes lavished attention on the stalks as if they were his children, and eventually silky-topped ears began to sprout. He looked forward to a meal of orange-eyed pink bird stuffed with corn. Every morning he checked the progress of the precious fruit, and then one day he discovered that some of the ears were missing. He knew immediately, from the footprints in the soil, that the Geets had come at night and stolen from him.
That night he did not go to sleep but kept himself awake by designing in his mind a new Maize board he would carve out with his knife on a section of blue bark. This kept him well awake and so entranced he did not hear the first stirrings in the corn stalks outside his shelter. When the noise finally became clear to him, he grabbed the rifle and crept outside. Up in the sky, the ringed planet lightened the night with its reflected glow. He moved cautiously around the corner of the rows and saw before him a good-sized Geet reaching for a second ear of corn. He brought the rifle up to aim and pressed the wave generator button at the side. The creature heard the subtle click and, startled, turned to look. By then, Sikes had his finger on the trigger, but he did not fire. The Geet clumsily plucked the second ear of corn and lumbered away into the night with it.
Back in the shelter, Sikes lay on the floor, the same scene repeatedly playing in his mind’s eye. He saw the Geet turn to look at him, and when it did, its long blonde hair whipped in a wave over its left shoulder just as Methina’s had back on Aldebaran a lifetime before. Since he had begun his struggle to survive, he had not allowed himself to think of her once, but now the memory of their night together came flooding back to him. In his mind he again touched the soft skin of her legs and stomach, and his loneliness became a momentary pain in his chest that nearly killed him. It was also in that moment that his most incredible and diabolical strategy of all was born. He would later come to call it the Lover’s Conceit.
In the next ten days, Sikes mercilessly murdered all of the Geets he could find whose hair was not the same color as the beams of the growth lights positioned in the fields of Aldebaran. The extent of the killing sickened him, but he would not stop. By the time his rampage was over, there were very few of the Geets left living in the caves at the north of the oasis. To these chosen blonde creatures, he brought all but an armful of the corn he had grown. Although they fled when he arrived with it, he watched from a blind as they later snuck out of the forest and feasted on his offering. When the silver leaves fell from the trees, there were now many more young with hair the color of Methina’s. Even the babies with lighter hair, but not the exact shade, he murdered.
The microwave rifle was rarely given a chance to cool down in the seasons that followed. Sikes no longer thought of it as an instrument of death but now as a tool of creation. After the blonde color was achieved, he began to select for a lack of body hair. This process took the equivalent of two full Earth years and many Geet generations, but Sikes was patient and focused. The days passed more quickly now and he was never bored. He had a purpose that, for him, bordered on the religious.
In the years that followed, he selected for nakedness, skin tone, the shape of the eye, weight and height. The Geet populations dwindled as they grew more and more to resemble Methina. He knew he could never hope, in the span of his life, to achieve her intelligence and personality in them, but something had changed in their ability to think for they had become increasingly difficult to hunt. They seemed to know when he was coming, and they abandoned the caves altogether a year or two after he had created a brood whose soft flesh was the color of weak tea. Although he had nearly forgotten Aldebaran, the image of Methina remained crystal clear in his mind, and like a depraved sculptor whose medium was an innocent species, he carefully carved his way toward his concept of perfection.
The silver leaves fell, turned to ghosts and were resurrected so many times that the new blue-barked Maize board, chipped and cracked in half, had twice been replaced. I need not describe at length the horrors Sikes’s experiment had visited upon those poor creatures throughout this long age of slaughter, but one day when he was out in the woods searching for their new hiding place, he saw, at a distance, one of the adults of the species. She must have heard him approaching and froze in a crouch. He looked through the telescopic sight of the rifle and nearly lost his breath. There, two hundred yards away stood, for all intents and purposes, Methina. Sikes was an old man now, wrinkled, stoop-shouldered, bald, and bad in the knees, but the sight of her made his passion stir. The only work left to be done was to produce eyes the color green of the fabled wandering star, Karjeet.
He continued to grow corn, and had increased his yearly output by ten times what the first crop had yielded. Besides having been a main staple of his diet, the Geets loved the taste of it more fervently with each altered generation, and he would use it as a lure to draw them into the open. This is what he was doing one day, hiding in a blind behind a fallen tree fifty yar
ds from a pile of corn, when he heard something behind him. He turned quickly only to catch the sight of Methina charging at him. She opened her mouth to display a row of sharp teeth, an item of anatomy he had not before seen in the Geets. Lunging for his rifle, he inadvertently knocked it out of his reach. She lunged for him, pinned him to the ground and sunk her fangs into his shoulder. Even with the pain, having her lying on top of him confused his thinking, mixing desire in equal parts with fear. At the last moment, before she could disengage and go for his neck, he reached for his knife and cut her throat.
As he knelt over the beautiful body he had created, he shook his head, wondering how he had managed to overlook the Geets’ increasing aggression. He remembered how, not but a few days earlier, he had witnessed a pack of his special Methinas attack and eat an imperfect one with throwback hair on its face that he had wounded in the arm with a bad shot. So immured had he become to the death of the lesser Geets that at the time it had not struck him as anything worth noting. But now he saw that as they approached perfection, they were becoming more dangerous. He then heard others in the woods around him and fled back to his camp by the southern lake.
The color of Karjeet eluded him, but he continued to try to render it. More incidents of the Methinas’ aggression had taken place, but now he kept the rifle perpetually with him and powered on. He hated to have to shoot some perfectly good specimens, whose eye color was now tending toward that of a ripe lime, not perfect but moving in the right direction. As he went about his gruesome work, he began to have more and more memories from his days on Aldebaran.
One night, after playing what he considered to be perhaps the most perfect game of Maize against himself, he fell asleep in the structure and dreamed of flying above the spires of the bottled city with Methina. They stood atop Shiva Tower, and when it was his turn to leap up to touch the inner dome, he did not ascend but halfway. With each subsequent jump he made, he flapped his arms harder and felt within as though he were approaching some kind of total climax. She stood on the observation deck beneath him and yelled louder and louder with each successive thrust that took him closer to his goal. Just as the tip of his finger was about to touch the center of the inner dome, he awoke.