Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS)

by James Tiptree Jr.

  Suddenly Evan saw that the clouds were parting over The Clivorn’s upper crags. As only once before, the turrets above the glacier’s mark were coming clear. The last veils blew by.

  Evan peered frantically. Nothing . . . No, wait! And there it was, a faintly flickering dead-level line around the whole top. Say two-hundred meters below the crest. What could it be?

  The clouds closed back. Had he really seen anything?

  Yes!

  He leaned his forehead against the port. Pontreve had said, there comes a time in every Scientist’s life . . . in a million barren planets he might never have another such chance. The knowledge of what he was about to do grew in his guts, and he was scared to death.

  Before he could lose courage he flung himself back and slammed his sleep-inducer to full theta.

  Next morning he dressed formally, spent a few minutes with his Terms of Grant codex, and marched into Pontreve’s office. The appointment ritual went smoothly.

  “Doctor Deputy-Administrator,” Evan’s throat was dry. “As accredited anthrosyke of this Mission I hereby exercise my prerogative of ordering an all-band full sensor probe of the terrain above five hundred meters indicated by these coordinates.”

  Pontreve’s pursed lips sagged. “An all-band probe? But the cost—”

  “I certify that my autonomous funds are adequate,” Evan told him. “Since this is our last on-planet day, I would like to have it done soonest, sir, if you would.”

  In the full daylight bustle of the Labs, before the ranked Technicians, Apprentices, and Mechs, Pontreve could say no more. Evan was within his rights. The older man’s face grayed, and he was silent before ordering his aide to produce the authorization forms. When they were placed before Evan he stabbed his finger on the line where Evan must certify that the scan was relevant to his Requirements of Specialization.

  Evan set his thumbprint down hard, feeling the eyes of the Tech-staff on him. This would take the last of his fund. But he had seen the Anomaly!

  “Sir, you’ll be interested to know I’ve had more evidence since—since our meeting.”

  Pontreve said nothing. Evan marched back to his lab, conscious of the whispers traveling through the wing. The probe would not take long once the sensor configuration was keyed in. He told his assistant to be ready to receive it and settled to wait.

  Endless heartbeats later, his man came back holding the heavily sealed official canister before him in both hands. Evan realized he had never touched an original before; all-band scans were in practice ordered only by the Chief, and then rarely.

  He took a deep breath and broke the seals. It would be a long decoding job.

  At shiftover he was still sitting, stone-faced at his console. Noonbreak had sounded, the Labs had emptied and filled. A silence grew in the staff wing, broken finally by Pontreve’s footsteps down the hall. Evan stood up slowly. Pontreve did not speak.

  “Nothing, sir,” Evan said into the Deputy’s eyes. “I’m . . . sorry.”

  The eyes narrowed and a pulse twitched Pontreve’s lip. He nodded in a preoccupied manner and went away. Evan continued to stand, mechanically reviewing his scan. According to every sensor and probe The Clivorn was an utterly ordinary mountain. It rose up in rounded folds to the glaciation limit and then topped off in strikingly weathered crags. The top was quite bare. There were no caves, no tunnels, no unusual minerals, no emissions, no artifacts nor traces of any sort. At the height where Evan had seen the strange line there was perhaps a faint regularity or tiny shelf, a chance coincidence of wind-eroded layers. The reflection of moonlight on this shelf must have been what he’d seen as a flickering line. Now he was finished as a Scientist.

  For an anthrosyke to waste his whole fund on scanning a bare mountain was clear grounds for personality reassessment. At least. Surely he could also be indicted for misuse of ship’s resources. And he had defied a Deputy-Administrator.

  Evan felt quite calm, but his mind strayed oddly. What would have happened, he wondered, if he had found a genuine Anomaly? A big alien artifact, say; evidence of prior contact by an advanced race. Would it have been believed? Would anyone have looked? He had always believed that Data were Data. But what if the wrong person found them in the wrong, Unscientific way?

  Well, he at any rate was no longer a Scientist.

  He began to wonder if he was even alive, locked into this sealed ship. He seemed to have left his cubby; he was moving down the corridors leading to the lock.

  Something was undoubtedly going to happen to him very soon. Perhaps they would begin by confining him to quarters. His was an unheard-of malfeasance, they might well be looking up precedents.

  Meanwhile he was still free to move. To order the Tech-crew to open the personnel lock, to sign him out a bubble-sled.

  Almost without willing it, he was out in the air of the planet.

  Delphis Gamma Five, the charts called it. To the natives it was simply the World, Ardhvenne. He opened the bubble. The air of Ardhvenne was fresh. The planet was in fact not far from the set of abscissae Evan knew only as terranormal.

  Beneath his sled the sea arm was running in long salty swells lit here and there by racing fingers of sunlight. Where the sun struck the rocks the spray was dazzling white. A flying creature plummeted past him from the low clouds into the swells below, followed by a tree of spray.

  He drove on across the bay to the far shore by the village and grounded in a sandy clutter of fishnets. The sled’s voder came alive.

  “Dr. Dilwyn.” It was Pontreve’s voice. “You will return immediately.”

  “Acknowledged,” said Evan absently. He got out of the sled and set the autopilot. The sled rose, wheeled over him, and fled away over the water to the gleaming ship.

  Evan turned and started up the path toward the village, where he had come on his field trip the week before. He doubted that they would send after him. It would be too costly in time and decontamination.

  It felt good to walk on natural earth with the free wind at his back. He hunched his shoulders, straining the formal labcoat. He had always been ashamed of his stocky, powerful body. Not bred to the Scientist life. He drew a lungful of air, turned the corner of a rock outcrop, and came face to face with a native.

  The creature was his own height with a wrinkled olive head sticking out of a wool poncho. Its knobby shanks were bare, and one hand held a dub set with a soft-iron spike. Evan knew it for an elderly pseudofemale. She had just climbed out of a trench in which she had been hacking peat for fuel.

  “Good day, Aunt,” he greeted her.

  “Good three-spans-past-high-sun,” she corrected him tartly. Temporal exactitude was important here. She clacked her lips and turned to stack her peat sods. Evan went on toward the village. The natives of Ardhvenne were one of the usual hominid variants, distinguished by rather unstable sex morphology on a marsupial base.

  Peat smoke wrinkled his nose as he came into the village street. It was lined by a double file of dry-rock huts, thatched with straw and set closer together for warmth. Under the summer sun it was bleak enough. In winter it must be desolate.

  Signs of last night’s ceremonials were visible in the form of burnt-out resin brooms and native males torpid against the sunnier walls. A number of empty gourds lay in the puddles. On the shady side were mounds of dirty wool which raised small baldheads to stare at him. The local sheep-creatures, chewing cud. The native wives, Evan remembered, would now be in the houses feeding the young. There was a desultory clucking of fowl in the eaves. A young voice rose in song and fell silent.

  Evan moved down the street. The males’ eyes followed him in silence. They were a taciturn race, like many who lived by rocks and sea.

  It came to him that he had no idea at all what he was doing. He must be in profound shock or fugue. Why had he come here? In a moment he must turn back and submit himself to whatever was in store. He thought about that. A trial, undoubtedly. A long Reassessment mess. Then what? Prison? No, they would not waste his training.
It would be CNPTS, Compulsory Non-Preferred Technicians Service. He thought about the discipline, the rituals. The brawling Tech Commons. The dorms. End of hope. And his uncle heartbroken.

  He shivered. He could not grasp the reality.

  What would happen if he didn’t go back? What if the ship had to leave tomorrow as programmed? It couldn’t be worth sterilizing this whole area just for him. He would be recorded as escaped, lost perhaps after a mental breakdown.

  He looked around the miserable village. The huts were dark and reeked inside. Could he live here? Could he teach these people anything?

  Before him was the headman’s house.

  “Good, uh, four-spans-past-high-sun, Uncle.”

  The headman clicked noncommittally. He was a huge-limbed creature, sprawled upon his lounging bench. Beside him was the young male Parag from whom Evan had obtained most of his local information.

  Evan found a dry stone and sat down. Above the huts streamed the unceasing mist-veils. The Clivorn was a shadow in the sky; revealed, hidden, revealed again. A naked infant wandered out, its mouth sticky with gruel. It came and stared at Evan, one foot scratching the other leg. No one spoke. These people were capable of convulsive activity, he knew. But when there was nothing urgent to be done they simply sat, as they had sat for centuries. Incurious.

  With a start, Evan realized that he was comparing these scraggy hominids to the Scientists at ease in their ship. He must be mad. The ship—the very symbol of man’s insatiable search for knowledge! How could he be so insane, just because they had rejected his data—or rather, his nondata? He shook his head to clear the heresy.

  “Friend Parag,” he said thickly.

  Parag’s eyes came ‘round.

  “Next sun-day is the time of going of the sky ship. It is possible that I-alone-without-co-family will remain here.”

  The chief’s eyes came open and swiveled toward him too.

  Parag clicked I-hear.

  Evan looked up at the misty shoulders of The Clivorn. There was sunlight on one of the nearly vertical meadows cradled in its crags. It was just past Ardhvenne’s summer solstice, the days were very long now. In his pocket was the emergency ration from the sled.

  Suddenly he knew why he was here. He stood up staring at The Clivorn. An’druinn, The Mountain of Leaving.

  “An easy homeward path, Uncle.” He had inadvertently used the formal farewell. He began to walk out of the village on the main Path. Other trails ran straight up the mountain flank behind the huts; the females used these to herd their flocks. But the main Path ran in long straight graded zigzags. On his previous trips he had gone along it as far as the cairn.

  The cairn was nothing but a crumbled double-walled fire hearth, strewn with the remains of gourds and dyed fleeces. The natives did not treat it as a sacred place. It was simply the lower end of the Path of Leaving and a good place to boil dyes.

  Beyond the cairn the Path narrowed to eroded gravel, a straight scratch winding over The Clivorn’s shoulders to the clouds. The dead and dying were carried up this way, Evan knew, and abandoned when they died or when the bearers had had enough. Sometimes relatives returned to pile stones beside the corpse, and doubtless to retrieve the deceased’s clothing. He had already passed a few small heaps of weathered rocks and bones.

  Up this Path also were driven those criminals or witches of whom the tribe wished to be rid. None ever returned, Parag told him. Perhaps they made it to another village. More likely, they died in the mountains. The nearest settlement was ninety kilometers along the rugged coast.

  He topped the first long grade over the lowest ridge, walking easily with the wind at his back. The gravel was almost dry at this season, though The Clivorn was alive with springs. Alongside ran a soppy sponge of peat moss and heather in which Evan could make out bones every few paces now.

  When the Path turned back into the wind he found that the thin mists had already hidden the village below. A birdlike creature soared over him, keening and showing its hooked beak. One of the tenders of The Clivorn’s dead. He watched it ride off on the gale, wondering if he were a puzzle to its small brain.

  When he looked down, there were three olive figures ahead of him on the Path. The native Parag with two other males. They must have climbed the sheep-trails to meet him here. Now they waited stolidly as he plodded up.

  Evan groped through the friends-met-on-a-journey greeting.

  Parag responded. The other two merely clicked and stood waiting, blocking the Path. What did they want? Perhaps they had come after a strayed animal.

  “An easy home-going,” Evan offered in farewell. When they did not stir he started uphill around them. Parag confronted him.

  “You go on the Path.”

  “I go on the Path,” Evan confirmed. “I will return at sunend.”

  “No,” said Parag. “You go on the Path of Leaving.”

  “I will return,” insisted Evan. “At sun-end we will have friendly speech.”

  “No.” Parag’s hand shot out and gripped Evan’s jacket. He yanked.

  Evan jumped back. The others surged forward. One of them was pointing at Evan’s shoes. “Not needful.”

  Evan understood now. Those who went on this Path took nothing. They assumed he was going to his death, and they had come for his clothing.

  “No!” he protested. “I will return! I go not to Leaving!” Scowls of olive anger closed in. Evan realized how very poor they were. He was stealing valuable garments, a hostile act. “I go to village now! I will return with you!”

  But it was too late. They were pawing at him, jerking the strange fastenings with scarred olive claws. Dirty hair-smell in his nose. Evan pushed at them, and half his jacket ripped loose. He began running straight up the hillside. They started after him. To his surprise he saw that his civilized body was stronger and more agile than theirs. He was leaving them behind as he lunged up from sheep-track to track.

  At the ridge he risked a look back and shouted. “Friends! I will return!” One of them was brandishing a sheep-goad.

  He whirled and pounded on up the ridge. Next moment he felt a hard blow in his side and went reeling. The sheep-goad clattered by his legs. His side—they had speared him! He gulped air on a skewer of pain and made himself run on. Up. No track here but a smooth marsh tipped, skyward. He ran stumbling on the tussocks, on and up. Mist-wraiths flew by.

  At a rock cornice he looked back. Below him three misty figures were turning away. Not following, up The Clivorn.

  His breathing steadied. The pain in his side was localized now. He wedged his torn sleeve between arm and ribs and began to climb again. He was on the great sinew that was The Clivorn’s lowest shoulder. As he climbed he found he was not quite alone in the streaming wraith-world; now and then a sheep bounded up with an absurd kek-kek-kek and froze to stare at him down its pointed nose.

  He was, he realized, a dead man as far as the village was concerned. A dead man to the ship, a dead man here. Could he make the next village, wounded as he was? Without compass, without tools? And the pocket with his ration had been torn away. His best hope was to catch one of the sheep-creatures. That was not easily done by a single man. He would have to devise some sort of trap.

  Curiously uncaring of his own despair, he climbed on. The first palisades were behind him now. Before him was a steep meadow moist with springs of clear peat water, sprigged with small flowers. Great boulders stood, or rather hung here, tumbled by the vanished batteries of ice. In the milky dazzle their cold black shadows were more solid than they. The sun was coming with the wind, lighting the underside of the cloud-wrack above him.

  He clambered leaning sideways against the wind, his free hand clutching at wet rocks, tufts of fern. His heart was going too fast. Even when he rested, it did not slow but hammered in his chest. The wound must be deeper than he’d thought. It was burning now, and it hurt increasingly to lift his feet. Presently he found that he had made no progress at all but marched in place drunkenly for a dozen steps.
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  He ground his teeth, gasping through them. The task was to focus on a certain rock ahead—not too far—and push himself up into the sky. One rock at a time. Rest. Pick another, push on. Rest. Push on. Finally he had to stop between rocks. Breath was a searing ache. He wiped at the slaver on his jaw.

  Make ten steps, then. Stop. Ten steps. Stop. Ten steps . . .

  A vague track came underfoot. Not a sheep-track, he was above the sheep. Only the huge creatures of the clouds ranged here. The track helped, but he fell often to his knees. On ten steps. Fall. Struggle up. Ten steps. On your knees in the stones, someone had said. There was no more sunlight.

  He did not at first understand why he was facing rocky walls. He looked up, stupid with pain, and saw he was against the high, the dreadful, cliffs. Somewhere above him was The Clivorn’s head. It was nearly dark.

  He sobbed, leaning on the stone flanks. When his body quieted, he heard water and staggered to it among the rocks. A spouting streamlet, very cold, acid-clear. The Water of Leaving. His teeth rattled.

  While he was drinking, a drumming sound started up in the cliff beside him and a big round body caromed out, smelling of fat and fur. A giant rock-coney. He drank again, shivering violently, and pulled himself to the crevice out of which the creature had come. Inside was a dry heathery nest. With enormous effort he got himself inside and into the coney’s form. It was safe here, surely. Safe as death. Almost at once he was unconscious.

  Pain woke him in the night. Above the pain he watched the stars racing the mists. The moons rose, and cloud-shadows walked on the silver wrinkled sea below him. The Clivorn hung over him, held him fast. He was of The Clivorn now, living its life, seeing through its eyes.

  Over the ridgeline, a hazy transcience. Moon-glints on a forest of antlers. The beasts of Clivorn were drifting in the night. Clouds streamed in, and they were gone. The wind moaned unceasing, wreathing the flying scud.