by Tanith Lee
Over by the cabinet, the black survival suit for tomorrow’s drill rattled dully, as if sex vibrated the cabin.
When he opened his eyes the next time, it was with a sense of missing hours. He felt dizzy and the cab-com was bawling. The girl had gone.
“Canna!” For some reason no picture had come over to fit Spake’s shouting.
“Yes. I’m sorry. I’m late for my very important date with the Bridge, right?”
“No, Canna. Canna, listen to me. The radiation count in your cabin is point forty-two, and rising.”
Canna straightened himself, his eyes and brain focusing slowly. “Canna, are you there, for Christ’s sake?”
“I’m here, Spake.”
“We have a firework display over the panel here for the whole of lower side, centralized on your level, and through to the B entry-out to the Solarina.”
Canna saw the suit, black as coal against the wall.
“I’ve got a demo suit with me, Spake.”
“Good, Canna. Get it on in two seconds flat.”
“Don’t make any bets.”
“Canna, it’s forty-two point zero nine. Forty-three, Canna.”
“Why no alarms?” Canna inquired as he shambled over to the survival suit, cracked it open, and began to load its myriad pounds onto himself.
“The alarms are out, drained. This com. is working on emergency. Get suited-up, then get as many of the passengers suited as you can. You’ve got about ten minutes to do it before it goes above fifty in there. Oh, and, Canna, with the power shrinkage, half the auto-gears are jammed, including those of the Bridge exit and the seven lifts through from topside. That’s why you’re on your own. That’s why we can’t unpark this truck. Something’s just eating up the Solarine, and we’re glued over the bloody sun.”
Now he was a black beetle. The casque clacked shut, and he hit the suit shields and they came on all around him. Did he fantasize the sudden coolness. His skin felt tender, blistered, but he forgot it.
Beyond his cabin everything was quiet. Innocently, the lower side of Pilgrim slumbered or fornicated, unaware that death lay thick as powder on every eye and nostril, every limb and joint and pore. Yet the lights were flickering again, and presently somewhere a dim far-off yelling arose, more anger than fear, the ship’s insomniacs, God help them. He wasn’t going to be in time. And then he ran at the door and it wouldn’t shift.
“Spake,” he said, “I’m suited-up, but I can’t get the door open.”
But the com. was beginning to crackle. Through the crackle, Spake said to him excitedly: “There’s something happening in the Solarina — (yes, I have it on screen, sir) —”
“Spake, will you listen, the door —”
“My God,” Spake said, in a hushed, low, reverent voice, “it’s a woman, and she’s on fire.”
Canna stood in his cabin in the black coffin of the survival suit. He visualized Apollonia, her fingers in the pocket of his uniform casuals, the authorization tab, the entry-out of the sun deck softly opening.
He saw her, as the bridge was seeing her, lifting her amber arms, her golden body into the glare of the topaz sun. And the sun was shining through her, and like the bush on the holy mountain she was burning and yet not consumed.
A shock of sound passed through the ship. From the suit it seemed miles of cold space away. And then he felt the wild savage trembling like the spasm of an anguished heart, and the tapes and papers on his desk were smoking. The whole cabin was filling with steel-blue smoke he couldn’t smell, like the heat he couldn’t feel.
The screaming seemed to come all on one high frozen note, two thousand voices melted into one, as the ship bubbled like toffee in a pan. And then the screaming became in turn one with a long roar of light, a blinding rush of noise, and silence, and the dark.
The third time he opened his eyes, he was in a black box with white stars stitched over it. A few bits of unidentifiable wreckage went by, lazy as butterflies. Vast distances below, Pilgrim’s charred embers fell into the pinpoint of a sun.
Automatically, Canna stabbed on the stabilizers in the suit that had saved his life, anchoring himself firmly to a point of nothing in space. The suit could withstand almost anything, and had just proved as much. It had liquid food and water sufficient for several day-periods, air for longer; it could probably even sing him songs. He had only to wait and keep sane. Every time a ship died, a red signal lit up on every scan board from Earth to Andromeda. Someone would come. He only had to wait.
If he could have got to any of his flock, he’d have had company. They had suits on the Bridge, of course, but they’d had the jammed doors too. And Bridge was right over the meton reactor. Even a suit couldn’t take that on.
He drifted about the anchor point using up any foul words he could think of, like candles. He started to hurt. As all survivors did, he stared at the stars and wondered about God. He thought about the pretty girl in the salon who had asked if there was any danger, and he cried. He thought about Apollonia Hartley, and then the pain came, and he started to scream.
When the search ship found him two day-periods later, his voice was a hoarse wire splinter from screaming, and he spat blood from his torn throat.
(Tape running.)
–Thank you, Officer Canna. I think we are all in the picture. I should now like to analyze this vision. Or would you prefer a short recess?
–No, sir. I’d like to get this finished.
–Very well. Whatever you wish. Officer Canna, I hope you’ll forgive me when I say, once again, that this story is preposterous. Having heard your account firsthand, I fear I must go further. You’ve somehow managed to turn a naval tragedy into an exercise in masculine ego. This tale of yours, the man who tells the woman she’s beautiful, at which she magically makes herself beautiful for him. Can it really be that you credit — and expect us to credit — the notion that the sexual awareness you brought to this pathetic, rather unbalanced girl, triggered in her an unconscious response so enormous that she attempted to make herself beautiful by absorbing and eventually fusing with a solar body, becoming a fireball that consumed the S.S.G. Pilgrim?
–I don’t know, sir. I only know what I saw and what I heard.
–But what did you see and hear, Officer Canna? You saw an ugly girl, who for some perverse reason attracted you, who then prettied herself for you, tanning quickly, as do all travelers on the Solarine Galleons, dyeing her hair, using a slimming machine. A girl who eventually offered herself to you. Coincidentally, there was a shield failure, which the computer of Pilgrim failed to localize. The computer may already have been affected by the loss of power from the Solarine system, hence its inability to identify the source of the trouble. A vicious circle ensues. The shield break degenerates the Solarine bank, the bank is unable to supply sufficient power to stem the break. On the other hand, assuming your bizarre hypothesis to be true, the computer should surely have traced the source. Do you agree, Officer Canna?
–A computer can’t think on its own. You have to feed the right questions. Bridge was asking the computer to check for a specific leakage, in or out.
–Very well. I don’t think we’ll split any more hairs on that, Officer Canna. My comments on this phenomenon are amply recorded. The other phenomena you describe are due to the experience itself, but seen in the retrospect of your guilt.
–Excuse me, I don’t like what happened, but I don’t feel guilty. There was no way I could guess. When I did, there was nothing I could do.
–Perhaps not, but you were wasting precious hours with a female passenger when you might have been able to help your ship.
–I didn’t know that at the time.
–Lastly, the woman on fire in the Solarina, by which garbled fragment you seem to set great store. With the radiation level where it was, and so near the outer surface of the ship as the sun deck, spontaneous combustion of tissue was not only possible but predictable. Er — Mr. Liles? Yes, please speak.
–As the witness’s cou
nsel, Mr. Hofman, I would respectfully draw your attention to the note appended to Leon Canna’s written statement.
–This one? To do with the radiation burns Officer Canna received? But I would have thought such burns inevitable. After all, the exposure —
–The rad level in the cabin before Leon Canna suited-up was insufficient to cause burns of this magnitude.
–Well, I see. But what —
–Excuse me, Mr. Hofman. Leon, are you sure you want to go through with this?’
–I’m sure.
–Mr. Hofman, I’m setting up here a view screen, and on the screen I’m going to present to this investigation two shots of Officer Canna, taken before he underwent treatment and tissue regeneration. Lights, please. Thank you. Shot one.
(A faint growl of men unaccustomed to seeing raw human flesh.)
–Mr. Liles, is this strictly —
–Yes, Mr. Hofman, sir. And I’d ask you to look carefully, here and here.
–Yes, Mr. Liles, thank you.
–This is the frontal shot of Leon Canna’s body. The second shot is of the hind torso and limbs.
(Silence. Loud exclamations. Silence.)
–I think you will take my point, gentlemen, that what might be a curious abstract in the first shot becomes a rather terrifying certainty when compounded by the second.
(Silence.)
–Mr. Liles — Officer Canna — gentlemen. I think — we must have a recess after all. Someone please stop that blasted tape.
(Tape stopped.)
Appendix: Two photographs.
1st Shot: A naked man about thirty-six years of age and of athletic, well-proportioned build, badly burned by a class-B radiation strike across the lower face, chest, arms, palms of the hands, pelvis, genitals, and upper legs.
2nd Shot: The same man, also nude; hind view. Burns of similar type, but small in area and fragmentally scattered across the shoulders and buttocks. Across the middle to upper region of the back, definitely marked as if with branding irons, the exact outline of two female arms and hands, tightly and compulsively pressed into the skin.
Part III
Falling Angels
With a Flaming Sword
The Being had searched for a long while, through the star-shoals of space, before he found the planet. It was a young world, one of several clustered round the blazing youth of a new sun. Long before the instruments aboard his ship told him, he knew that this was the place.
For the Being had a Mission in the universe, a Mission that was both a happiness and a heartbreak to him. It had begun a very great time ago, in the galaxy of his own race, a race powerful and wonderful, but beginning then to die. There was no reason for this death. It had happened as if at the dictate of some irrefutable law, a relentless, dreadful dying. Nevertheless, there had been one remote last chance of propagation. Therefore, into the Being, and into several others chosen like himself, had been poured all the final spirit and might of their race. They had been given near immortality and the reserves of health and beauty that went with it. They had been given silver moons of ships to sail the vastnesses of space, searching. And they had been given the power to make again the life of their own galaxy on other planets resembling the worlds they had left behind.
And now, here, for the first time, lay an answer to the searching and the waiting, and the silent no-sound of space.
The ship slid downwards into the embrace of an alien gravity, not alien at all, and cruised high up, shining. The Being looked, and saw a world still in its infancy, not yet like a world of his lost galaxy, but reaching out toward that likeness. Above all else, it was a beautiful world, though still savage with its childhood. He saw the smoking greenness of jungle forest, blue mirages of hills like clouds resting on the land. He saw vast sweeps of sea, twitching sunlight, rock-lands baking, mountains that snarled fire at the sky from the unhealed wounds of volcanic craters. The Being looked for a long while, resting on his gladness. And then the ship sank lower, and the second search began. And this time there was no reward. For he must find beings like himself through which his race could breed again. And he found none.
There were animals in abundance, animals that seemed familiar, the products of his own galaxy at their earliest evolution. Things moved on land, in sea, through air. But of his kind, the Being was alone amongst them. He left the ship and walked through the moist, throbbing forests, trod the smoldering mountain-flanks. He felt the angry weight of despair.
And then a morning came when he saw them.
Moving crazily and ungracefully, and much smaller, yet they seemed to him to be of his own species. They were trailing across an open tract of grassland, and he followed them in the ship, and came low enough to see their similarities — and all their differences, which were many. He came low enough for them in turn to see the silver thing hanging in the air, point and grunt and screech, and run away. He drew the ship back upwards into the sky, and thought about them. There was a war within him. He was uncertain and unconvinced. He did not know if he could make life out of these creatures, but then, there were no other creatures here so possible.
In the evening he found them again, and rushed low over them, scattering them. He picked out a female separated from the rest, and herded her toward the mountains. She was distressed and called at the others, presumably for help, but they were too afraid to come near the ship. When the rest of the tribe was far behind, he released a soporific gas, let down the nets, and gently lifted her into the ship with him.
He examined her minutely, shrinking a little from her alien stink and texture, but finding in her now many of the attributes he needed. Her organs were similar, both internally and externally, her features and structure also very like. She had neither the physical beauty nor the physical brain of the females of his own race, but he decided he must make her do, must see, must try, must hope. Perhaps this was the nearest chance he would ever have. And so he implanted in her the life-seed, stored for aeons in the womb-tube of the ship, seed that would make a male and a female from her body, providing her body could harbor it.
He took her to a valley he had found, high up, lovely. It was shielded by mountains that had ceased to spit fire; water-courses ran through it, and it was full of animals he had taken there earlier, experimenting gently with them to speed their evolution, hoping to see in them the animals of his own galaxy, before he went away. He set his captive free and watched her roaming the forests and grassland, solitary, blinking her small eyes. She plucked down fruit and ate it, but kept away from the other animals. She slept in tree-hollows at night. Soon he began to see that the life-seed lived in her womb, and he waited helpless, wondering if the magic would work, or if two monsters would break out of her, or if she would die and kill them at birth.
One day she hid herself. He searched in an agony; finally he found her with her two living infants. She had rolled away from them, and, as quickly as she was able, abandoned the place where they were. She felt no maternity for them because they were so alien to her. It did not matter. Her role was finished. Soon he took her out of the valley and left her where he had found her first, hoping she would make her way back to the tribe.
He lifted the infants into the ship and examined them. The miracle had happened. He found in them all the potential, both physical and mental, that had moved in his own lost race. They were shaped like the Being and his people, both beautiful, with the brain ready to grow in its case, with features delicate and strong, with limbs and eyes prepared to grasp skills, and see beyond seeing. He knew, of course, with sadness that the greatness of his own Galaxy would not come to them until their own race had advanced far into an unguessable future. He did not know what dangers and setbacks might slow their progress. He realized that he might never see their final fulfillment and the fruit of his task. But he believed that it would come, and that was enough.
When they had grown sufficiently, he put them out in the valley, and they bounded and played in the greenness as the lower animals did
. They were still covered all over by the coarse, long hair their mother had had, a protection and a camouflage. The animals, gentle because of their environment, and the things the Being had adaptively done to them, came to the pair and would play and run about with them. Later, when the Being began their instruction, he tried to show his charges that they were superior to these other animals and must not identify with them totally. But as the process went on, and they grew from young to distinctive male and female, he knew he had little communion with them. They went in awe of him, speaking to each other, the animals, even the metallic robot tube he used to feed them from, rather than to him. Yet he loved to hear them speak, even though it was necessary for him to eavesdrop, for they spoke the old galactic tongue, clear and rounded. Despite their hairy bodies, nothing else of their mother remained in them. Even their occasional cries of anger or pain were sharp and formed; they seldom grunted as the tribe had done.
Eventually they spoke most often to the feeding tube. The Being imagined that in a way they identified it with him, as it brought them the special food he had prepared for them, so necessary for their development. The tube, long and shining, roamed around the valley freely. The Being realized that the male and female thought it was sentiently alive as they were and loved it because it could speak to them, as none of the animals could. It had a thin, metallic voice, which was mainly used in calling them to their meals.
As the time went by, and the Being had told them and taught them all they could grasp at this stage of their evolution, he began to be troubled by the growth of hair still clinging to their bodies. He had thought it might disappear naturally, or that the drugs he mixed with their food might disperse it. His own race had been entirely hairless, and the growth was anathema to him. He began to develop a new drug to use against it, gathering for energy, as he had always done, the power of the bright new sun that flamed overhead. The valley was full of the Being’s experimental vats, where things metamorphosed under their sun-domes. Much of the food he had provided for the male and female had come from these. At first they had stood up, strange and sudden in the soft landscape, and the animals had kept away from them. But by now the vats had blended with the scenery of the valley, for the growth of the young world was so intense they had been covered by flowers and leaves and creepers, becoming at last almost indistinguishable from the large trees of the forest. Partly because of this, the Being put a force wall around the new vat to keep the animals out, and warned the male and female not to go near it either. It was very important to him. One day a deer brushed by the wall, and the current in the force field killed it. The male and female seemed afraid because of this. He had explained death to them, but as yet they could not understand it.