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

by James Tiptree Jr.

  “Her courage and her accomplishment will be an inspiration.”

  Aaron nods again, warily.

  “I wanted to be sure you understand I have full confidence in your sister’s report.”

  She snowed him, Aaron thinks dismally. Oh, Lory. Then he catches the tension in the pause and looks up. Is this leading somewhere?

  “There is too much at stake here, Aaron.”

  “That’s right, sir,” says Aaron with infinite relief. “That’s what I feel, too.”

  “Without in any way subtracting from your sister’s achievement, it is simply too much to risk on anyone’s unsupported word. Anyone’s. We have no objective data on the fate of the Gamma crew. Therefore, I shall continue to send code yellow, not code green, until we arrive at the planet and confirm.”

  “Thank god,” says Aaron the atheist.

  Yellaston looks at him curiously. It’s the moment for Aaron to speak about the Tighe-sightings, the dreams, to confess his fears of Lory and alien telepathic vegetables. But there’s no need now, Yellaston wasn’t snowed, it was just his weird courtesy.

  “I mean, I do agree. . . . Does this mean we’re going to the planet, that is, you’ve decided before we check out that specimen?”

  “Yes. Regardless of what we find, there is no alternative. Which brings up this point.” Yellaston pauses. “My decision with respect to the signal may not be entirely popular. Although two years is a very short time.”

  “Two years is an eternity, sir.” Aaron thinks of the flushed faces, the voices; he thinks of Bustamente.

  “I realize it may seem so to some. I wish it could be shortened. Centaur does not have the acceleration of the scouters. More pertinently, Aaron, some crew members may also feel that we owe it to the home world to let them know as soon as possible. The situation there must be increasingly acute.”

  They are both silent for a moment, in deference to the acuteness of Earth’s “situation.”

  “If Centaur were to have an accident before we verify the planet, this could deprive Earth of knowledge of the planet’s existence, perhaps forever. The fear of such a catastrophe will weigh heavily with some. On the other hand, we have had no major malfunctions and no reason to think we shall. We are proceeding as planned. The most abysmal error we could make would be to send the green code now and then discover, after the ships have been irreversibly launched, that the planet is uninhabitable. Those ships cannot turn back.”

  Aaron perceives that Yellaston is using him to try out pieces of his formal announcement; a bootlegger has many uses. But why not his logical advisers, his execs, Don and Tim? Oh, oh. Aaron begins to suspect who “some” people may include.

  “We would doom all the people in the pipeline. Worse, we would end forever any hope of a new emigration effort. Our hastiness would be criminal. Earth has trusted us. We must not risk betraying her.”

  “Amen.”

  Yellaston broods a moment, suddenly gets up and goes over to his cabinet wall. Aaron hears a gurgle. The old man must have saved his last one until relief arrived.

  “Goddamn it.” Yellaston suddenly sets a flask down hard. “We never should have had women on this mission.”

  Aaron grins involuntarily, thinking, there speaks the dead dick. Thinking also of Soli, of Åhlstrom, of all the female competences on Centaur, of the debates on female command that had yielded finally to the policy of minimal innovation on a mission where so much else would be new. But he knows exactly what Yellaston means.

  Yellaston turns around, letting Aaron see his glass; an unusual intimacy. “Going to be a bitch, Doctor. These two will be the toughest we’ve had to face. Two years. The fact that we’re going to the planet ourselves will suffice for most, I think.” He massages his knuckles again. “It might not be a bad idea for you to keep your eyes and ears rather carefully open, Aaron, during the time ahead.”

  Implications, implications. Doctors, like bootleggers, have their uses, too.

  “I believe I see what you mean, sir.”

  Yellaston nods. “On a continuing basis,” he says authoritatively. He and Aaron exchange regards in which is implicit their mutual view of the relevance of Francis Xavier Foy.

  “I’ll do my best,” Aaron promises; he has recalled his general checkup plan, maybe he can use that projective-recall session to spot trouble.

  “Good. Now, tomorrow we examine that specimen. I’d like to hear your plans.” Yellaston comes back, glassless, to his console, and Aaron gives him a rundown on his arrangements with the Xenobiology chief.

  “All the initial work will take place in situ, right?” Aaron concludes, conscious that the alien’s situ is now directly to his left. “Nothing goes into the ship?”

  “Right.”

  “I’d like to have authority to enforce that. And guards on the corridor entrances, too.”

  “The authority is yours, Doctor. You’ll have the guards.”

  “That’s fine.” Aaron rubs his neck. “There’ve been a couple of, oh, call them psychological reactions to the alien I’m looking into. Nothing serious, I think. For instance, have you experienced an impression of localization, about the alien, I mean? A sense of where the thing is, physically?”

  Yellaston chuckles. “Why yes, as a matter of fact I do. Right north, over there.” He points high toward Aaron’s right. “Is that significant, Doctor?”

  Aaron grins in relief. “Yeah, it is to me. It signifies that my personal orientation still isn’t any good after ten years.” He picks up his kit, moves over to Yellaston’s cabinets. “I thought the thing was down under your bunk.” Unobtrusively he substitutes the full flasks, noting that that drink had been indeed the old man’s last.

  “Give your sister my personal regards, Aaron. And don’t forget.”

  “I’ll remember, Captain.”

  Obscurely moved, Aaron goes out. He knows he must do some serious thinking; if Don or Tim decide to kick up, what the hell can Dr. Aaron Kaye do about it? But he is euphoric. The old man isn’t buying Lory’s story blind, he isn’t going to rush it. Daddy will save us from the giant cauliflowers. I better get some exercise, he thinks, and trots down-ramp to one of the long outer corridors on the hull. There are six of these bow-stern blisters; they form the berths that hold the three big scout ships. Gravity is strong down here, slightly above Earth-normal, and people use the long tubes for games and exercise—another good program-element, Aaron thinks approvingly. He comes out into Corridor Beta, named for Don Purcell’s scouter. Beta has long been known as the Beast, as in Beast-of-Fascist-Imperialism, a joke of Centaur’s early years when Tim’s Alpha was likewise christened the Atheist Bastard. Kuh’s Gamma became only China Flower—the flower which is now hanging on her stem with her cryptic freight.

  This corridor is identical to Gamma where the alien will be examined tomorrow. Aaron strides along effortfully savoring the gee-loading, counting access portals which will need guards. There are fourteen, more than he had thought. Ramps lead down here from all over the ship—the scouters were designed as lifeboats, too. The corridor is so long the far end is hazy. He fancies he can feel a chill on his soles. Imagine, he is in a starship! A fly walking the wall of a rotating can in cosmic space: There are suns beneath my feet.

  He remembers the scenes of ceremony that had taken place in these corridors three years back, when the scout ships were launched to reconnoiter the suns of Centaurus. And the sad returns four months ago when first Don and then Tim had come back bearing news of nothing but methane and rock. Will the Beast and the Bastard soon be ferrying us down to Lory’s planet?—I mean in two years, and it’s Kuh’s planet, Aaron corrects himself, so preoccupied that he bumps blindly into the rear of Don Purcell, backing out of Beta’s command lock.

  “Getting ready to land us, Don?”

  Don only grins, the all-purpose calm grin that Aaron believes he would wear if he were going down in flames. Tough to get behind a grin like that if Don really was, well, disaffected. He doesn’t look mutinous, Aa
ron thinks. Hard to imagine him leading an assault on Ray’s gyros. He looks like an order man, a good jock. Like Tim. Kuh was the same breed, too, transistorized. The genotype that got us here, the heavy-duty transport of the race.

  Aaron ducks into the ramp that leads to Lory’s quarters, imagining Don and the scout ships and them all superimposed on that planet, that mellow flowery world. Pouring out to make a new Earth. Will they find Kuh’s colony, or silent bones? But the freedom, the building . . . and then, then will come the fleet from Earth. Fifteen years, that’s what we’ll have, Aaron thinks, assuming we send the green signal when we land. Fifteen years. And then the emigration ships will start coming in, the—what was it Yellaston called it—the pipeline. Typical anal imagery. The pipeline spewing Earth’s crap across the light-years. Technicians first, of course, basic machinery, agriculture. Pioneer-type colonists. And then pretty soon people-type people, administrators, families, politicians—whole industries and nations all whirling down that pipeline onto the virgin world. Covering it, spreading out. What of Bustamente, then? What of himself and Lory?

  He is by Lory’s door now, the lounge is empty at last.

  When she opens it Aaron is pleased to see she’s doing nothing more enigmatic than brushing her hair; the same old hygienic black bristles pulling through the coppery curls which are now just frosted gray, nice effect, really. She beckons him in, brushing steadily; counting, he guesses.

  “Captain sends you his personal regards.” As he sits it occurs to him that Foy may have bugged her room. No visuals, though. Not Foy.

  “Thank you, Arn . . . seventy . . . Your personal regards, too?”

  “Mine too. You must be tired, I notice you had company. Tried to look in earlier.”

  “Seventy-five . . . Everybody wants to hear about it, it means so much to them.”

  “Yeah. By the way, I admired your tactfulness about our battling Chinese. I didn’t know you had it in you, Sis.”

  She brushes harder. “I didn’t want to spoil it. They—they stopped all that, anyway. There.” She lays the brush down, smiles. “It’s such a peaceful place, Arn. I think we could really live a new way there. Without violence and hatred and greed. Oh, I know how you—but that’s the feeling it gave me, anyway.”

  The light tone doesn’t fool him. Lory, lost child of paradise striving ever to return. That look in her eye, you could cast her as the young Jeanne, reminding the Dauphin of the Holy Cause. Aaron has always had a guilty sympathy for the Dauphin.

  “There’ll always be some bad stuff as long as you have people, Lor. People aren’t all that rotten. Look at us here.”

  “Here? You look, Arn. Sixty handpicked indoctrinated specimens. Are we really good? Are we even gentle with each other? I can feel the—the savagery underneath, just waiting to break loose. Why, there was a fight yesterday. Here.”

  How does she hear these things?

  “It’s a hell of a strain, Lor. We’re human beings.”

  “Human beings must change.”

  “Goddamn it, we don’t have to change. Basically, I mean,” he adds guiltily. Why does she do this to him? She makes me defend what I hate, too. She’s right, really, but, but—“You might try caring a little for people as they are—it’s been recommended,” he says angrily and hates the unctuousness in his voice.

  She sighs, straightens the few oddments on her stand. Her room looks like a cell. “Why do we use the word human for the animal part of us, Arn? Aggression—that’s human. Cruelty, hatred, greed—that’s human. That’s just what isn’t human, Arn. It’s so sad. To be truly human we must leave all that behind. Why can’t we try?”

  “We do, Lor. We do.”

  “You’d make this new world into another hell like Earth.”

  He can only sigh, acknowledging her words, remembering too the horrible time after their parents died, when Lory was sixteen. . . . Their father had been Lieutenant-General Kaye, they had grown up sheltered, achievement-oriented in the Army enclaves’ excellent schools. Lory had been into her biology program when the accident orphaned them. Suddenly she had looked up and seen the world outside—and the next thing Aaron knew he was hauling her out of a Cleveland detention center in the middle of the night. The ghetto command post had recognized her Army ID plate.

  “Oh, Arn,” she had wept to him in the copter going home. “It isn’t right! it isn’t right.” Her face was blotched and raw where the gas had caught her, he couldn’t bear to look.

  “Lor, this is too big for you. I know it isn’t right. But this is not like setting up a dog shelter on Ogilvy Island. Don’t you understand you can get your brains cut?”

  “That’s what I mean, they’re doing obscene things to people. It isn’t right.”

  “You can’t fix it,” he’d snapped at her in pain. “Politics is the art of the possible. This isn’t possible, you’ll only get killed.”

  “How do we know what’s possible unless we try?”

  Oh, god, that next year. Their father’s name had helped some, luck had helped more. In the end what probably saved her was her own implacable innocence. He had finally tracked her down in the back shed of a mortuary in the old barrio section of Dallas; emaciated, trembling, barely able to speak.

  “Arn, oh—they—” she whimpered while he wiped vomit off her chin, “Dave refused to help Vicky, he—he wants him to get caught. . . . So he can be leader. . . . He won’t let us help him.”

  “I think that happens, Lor.” He held her thin shoulders, trying to stop the shaking. “That does happen, people are human.”

  “No!” She jerked away fiercely. “It’s terrible. It’s terrible. They—we were fighting among ourselves, Arn. Fighting over power. Dave even wants his woman, I think—they hit each other. She, she was just property.”

  She heaved up the rest of the soup he’d brought her.

  “When I said that they threw me out.”

  Aaron held her helplessly, thinking, her new friends can’t live up to her any more than I can. Thank god.

  “Arn,” she whispered. “Vicky . . . he took some money. I know. . . .”

  “Lor, come on home now. I fixed it, you can still take your exams if you come back now.”

  “. . . All right.”

  Aaron shakes his head, sitting in Centaur twenty trillion miles from Dallas, looking at that same fierce vision on the face of his little sister now going gray. His little sister whom chance has made their sole link with that planet, that thing out there.

  “All right, Lor.” He gets up, turns her around to face him. “I know you. What the hell happened on that planet? What are you covering?”

  “Why, nothing, Arn. Except what I told you. What’s the matter with you?”

  Is it too innocent? He distrusts everything, cannot tell.

  “Please let go of me.”

  Conscious of Foy’s problematical ears he lets go, steps back. This would sound crazy.

  “Do you realize this isn’t games, Lor? Our lives are depending on it. Real people’s lives, much as you hate humanity. You better not be playing.”

  “I don’t hate humanity, I just hate some of the things people do. I wouldn’t hurt people, Arn.”

  “You’d liquidate ninety percent of the race to achieve your utopia.”

  “What a terrible thing to say!”

  Her face is all soul, he aches for her. But Torquemada was trying to help people, too.

  “Lor, give me your word that Kuh and his people are absolutely okay. Your faithful word.”

  “They are, Arn. I give you my word. They’re beautiful.”

  “The hell with beauty. Are they physically okay?”

  “Of course they are.”

  Her eyes still have that look, but he can’t think of anything else to try. Praise be for Yellaston’s caution.

  She reaches out for him, thin electric hand burning his. “You’ll see, Arn. Isn’t it wonderful, we’ll be together? That’s what kept me going, all the way back. I’ll be there tomorrow when we look at
it.”

  “Oh, no!”

  “Jan Ing wants me. You said I’m medically fit. I’m his chief botanist, remember?” She smiles mischievously.

  “I don’t think you should, Lor. Your ulcers.”

  “Waiting around would be much worse for them.” She sobers, grips his arm. “Captain Yellaston—he’s going to send the green, isn’t he?”

  “Ask him yourself. I’m only the doctor.”

  “How sad. Oh, well, he’ll see. You’ll all see.” She pats his arm, turns away.

  “What’ll we see?”

  “How harmless it is, of course. . . . Listen, Arn. This is from some ancient work, the martyr Robert Kennedy quoted it before he was killed. ‘To tame the savage heart of man, to make gentle the life of this world’ . . . Isn’t that fine?”

  “Yeah, that’s fine, Lor.”

  He goes away less than comforted, thinking, the life of this world is not gentle, Lory. It wasn’t gentleness that got you out here. It was the drives of ungentle, desperate, glory-hunting human apes. The fallible humanity you somehow can’t see. . . .

  He finds he has taken a path through the main Commons. Under the displays the nightly bridge and poker games are in session as usual, but neither Don nor Tim is visible. As he goes out of earshot he hears the Israeli physicist ante what sounds like an island. An island? He climbs up toward the clinic, hoping he heard wrong.

  Solange is waiting for him with the medical log. He recites Ray and Bachi’s data with his head leaning against her warm front, remembering he has another problem. Forget it, he tells himself, I have two years to worry about Bustamente.