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

by James Tiptree Jr.

  The burrow is dark. Pelicosaurus squats over her half-grown pups, her dim node of awareness holding only the sensation of their muzzles sucking the glandular skin of her belly among her not-quite hair. From outside comes a thunderous eructation, splashing. The burrow quakes. Pelicosaurus crouches, rigid; the huddled pups freeze. All but one—a large female pup has squirmed free, is nosing nervously toward the recesses of the burrow. She moves in a half-crawl, her body slung from the weak reptilian shoulder girdle.

  More crashes outside. Earth showers down within the damp nest. The mother only crouches tighter, locked in reflexive stasis. The forgotten pup is now crawling away up a tunnel.

  As she vanishes, the giant hadrosaur in the stream outside decides to clamber out. Twenty tons of reptile hit the soft bank. Earth, rocks, and roots slam together, crushing Pelicosaurus and her pups and all other bank-dwellers into an earthy gel, a trough of destruction behind the departing one. Leather wings clap; pterosaurs are gathering to stab in the wreckage.

  Farther up the bank beside a gymnosperm root, the lone pup wriggles free. She cowers, hearing the hoarse grunts of the scavengers. Then an obscure tropism rises in her, an undefined urge toward space, toward up. Awkwardly she grips the bole of the gymnosperm with her forelimbs. A grub moves on the bark. Automatically she seizes and eats it, her eyes blinking as she strives to focus beyond. Presently she begins to clamber higher, carrying, in the intricacy of her genes, the tiny anomaly which has saved her. In the egg from which she grew, a molecule has imperceptibly shifted structure. From its aberrant program has unfolded a minute relaxation of the species-wide command to freeze, a small tendency to action under stress. The pup that is no longer wholly Pelicosaur feels her ill-adapted hind limb slip upon the branch, scrabbles for purchase, falls, and crawls weakly from the graveyard of her kind.

  . . . So the wave of Life mounts under the lash of Death, grows, gathers force in unbounded diversity. Ever-perishing, ever-resurgent, it foams to higher, more complex victories upon the avalanche of its corpses. As a wave swells, it surges, swarming, striving ever more strongly, achieving ever more intricate strategies of evasion, flinging itself in wilder trajectories to escape its pain. But it bears its Enemy within it, for Death is the power of its uprush. Dying in every member, yet every moment renewed, the multiple-hearted wave of Life crests into strangeness. . ..

  Yelling, the hairless creature runs swiftly, knuckles to earth, and screams again as a rock strikes him. He swerves and scuttles, limping now; he is unable to avoid the hail of missiles flung by those stronger, more freely jointed arms. His head is struck. He goes down. The bipeds close around him. Shouting in still wordless joy, they fall upon their brother with thin jaws and sharpened stones.

  . . . The living, dying tumult mounts, fountains into culminant light. Its billion tormented fragments take on intenser being; it leaps as a great beast above the ravenings of its Adversary. But it cannot shake free, for the force of its life is Death, and its strength is as the strength of the deaths that consume it, its every particle is propelled by the potency of the dark Assailant. In the measure of its dying, Life towers, triumphs, and rolls resistless across the planet that bore it. . ..

  Two horsemen move slowly across the plain under the cold autumn rain. The first is a young boy on a spotted pony; he is leading a black-eared roan on which his father is riding slumped, breathing open-mouthed above the rifle-ball in his chest. The man’s hand holds a bow, but there are no arrows. The Kiowas’ stores and supplies were lost at Palo Duro Canyon, and the last arrows were fired in the slaughter at the Staked Plains three days back, where his wife and oldest son were killed.

  As they pass a copse of willows the rain eases for a moment. Now they can see the white man’s buildings ahead: Fort Sill with its gray stone corral. Into that corral their friends and relatives have vanished, family by family, surrendering to their merciless enemy. The boy halts his pony. He can see a column of soldiers riding out of the fort. Beside him his father makes a sound, tries to raise his bow. The boy licks his lips; he has not eaten for three days. Slowly he urges his pony forward again.

  As they ride on, faint sounds of firing come to them on the wet wind, from a field west of the fort. The white men are shooting the Kiowas’ horses, destroying the life of their life. For the Kiowas, this is the end. They were among the finest horsemen the world has ever known, and war was their sacred occupation. Three centuries before, they had come down out of the dark mountains, had acquired horses and a god and burst out in glory to rule a thousand miles of range. But they never understood the grim, unrelenting advance of the U.S. Cavalry. Now they are finished.

  The Kiowas have been toughened by natural hardship, by millennia of death in the wilderness. But their death-strength is not enough. The pale soldiers before them are the survivors of more deadly centuries in the caldrons of Europe; they drive upon the Indians with the might derived from uncountable generations of close-quarter murder in battle, deaths under merciless tyrannies, by famines and plagues. As has happened before and before and before, the gray-faced children of the greater death roll forward, conquer and spread out across the land.

  . . . So the great Beast storms among the flames that devour it, the myriad lives of its being a crucible of always fiercer deaths and more ascendant life. And now its agonized onrush changes. What had been flight becomes battle. The Beast turns on the enemy that savages it and strives to cast Death from its heart. Desperately it struggles; streaming from the wounds that are its life, it fights to save some fragment while Death slays whole members. For Death is the twin of its essence, growing as Life grows, and the fury of its attack mounts with the power that attacks it. Locked into intimate battle, the Beast and its Enemy are now nearing a consummating phase of pain. The struggle rages, breaches the norms of matter. Time accelerates. . ..

  As night comes over the Mediterranean the battered freighter limps warily past the enemy ears on Cyprus. Rain and darkness hide it; it creeps with all lights extinguished, every human sound quenched. Only the throbbing of its engines and the thrashing of its rusty screw remain to betray it to the blockaders. In its body is the precious cargo, the huddled silent sparks of life. The children. The living ones, the handfuls saved from the six million corpses of the death camps, saved from the twenty million killed by the Reich. In darkness and desperation it crawls on, leaking, the crew not daring to work the creaking pumps. Hidden by the night it steams mile by daring mile through the gauntlet of the blockade, carrying the children to Palestine.

  While on the other side of the world, in the morning of that same night, a single bomber leaves its escort and bores steadily westward through the high cold air. The Enola Gay is on course to Hiroshima.

  . . . Pain-driven, death-sinewed, the convulsed Beast strives against its Enemy. In ever-new torment it grows, rears itself to new brilliancy, achieves ever-greater victories over Death, and is in turn more fearfully attacked. The struggle flames unseen across the planet, intensifying until it breaks from the bounds of Earth and flings portions of itself to space. But the Beast cannot escape, for it carries Death with it and fuels Death with its fire. The battle heightens, fills earth, sea, and air. In supreme agony it fountains into a crest of living fire that is a darkness upon the world. . ..

  “Doctor, that was beautiful.” The senior surgical nurse’s whisper barely carries beyond her mask.

  The surgeon’s eyes are on the mirror where the hands of the suturist can be seen delicately manipulating the clamped-back layers. Lub-dub, lub-dub; the surgeon’s eyes go briefly to the biofeedback display, check the plasma exchange levels, note the intent faces of the anesthesiology team under their headsets, go back vigilantly to the mirror. Vigilant—but it is over, really. A success, a massive success. The child’s organs will function perfectly now, the dying one will live. Another impossibility achieved.

  The senior nurse sighs again appreciatively, brushing away a thought that comes. The thought of the millions of children elsewhere now dying of f
amine and disease. Healthy children too, not birth-doomed like this one but perfectly functional; inexorably dying in their millions from lack of food and care. Don’t think of it. Here we save lives. We do our utmost.

  The operating room is sealed against the sounds of the city outside, which yet comes through as a faint, all-pervading drone. Absently, the nurse notices a new sound in the drone: an odd high warbling. Then she hears the interns behind her stirring. Someone whispers urgently. The surgeon’s eyes do not waver, but his face above the mask turns rigid. She must protect him from distraction. Careful that her clothing does not rustle, she wheels on the offenders. There is a far burst of voices from the corridor.

  “Be quiet!” She hisses with voiceless intensity, raking the interns with her gray gaze. As she does so, she recalls what that continuous warbling tone is. Air-attack warning. The twenty minute alert, meaning that missiles are supposed to be on their way around the world from the alien land. But this cannot be serious. It must be some drill—very laudable, no doubt, but not to be allowed to disturb the operating room. The drill can be held another time; it will take more than twenty minutes to finish here.

  “Quiet,” she breathes again sternly. The interns are still. Satisfied, she turns back, holding herself proudly, ignoring fatigue, ignoring the shrill faint whining, ignoring at the end even the terrible flash that penetrates the seams of the ceiling far above.

  . . . And the riven Beast crashes, bursts together with its Enemy into a billion boiling, dwindling fragments that form and reform under the fires of a billion radiant deaths. Yet it is still one, still joined in torment and unending vitality. With its inmost plasm laid bare to the lethal energies Life struggles more intensely still, more fiercely attacks the Death that quenches its reborn momentary lives. The battle grows to total fury, until it invades the very substrata of being. Culminant paroxysm is reached; in ultimate agony the ultimate response is found. The Beast penetrates at last into its Adversary’s essence and takes it to itself. In final transcendence. Life swallows Death, and forges the heart of its ancient Enemy to its own. . ..

  The infant between the dead thighs of its mother is very pale. Dismayed, the Healer frees it from the birth slime, holds it up. It is a female, and perfectly formed, he sees, despite the whiteness of its skin. It takes breath with a tiny choke, does not cry. He hands it to the midwife, who is covering the mother’s corpse. Perhaps the pallor is natural, he thinks; all his tribe of Whites have heavy pale skins, though none so white as this.

  “A beautiful baby girl,” the midwife says, swabbing it. “Open your eyes, baby.”

  The baby squirms gently, but its eyes remain closed. The Healer turns back one delicate eyelid. Beneath is a large fully-formed eye. But the iris is snow-white around the black pupil. He passes his hand over it; the eye does not respond to light. Feeling an odd disquiet, he examines the other. It is the same.

  “Blind.”

  “Oh, no. Such a sweet baby.”

  The Healer broods. The Whites are a civilized tribe, for all that they have lived near two great craters before they came here to the sea. He knows that his people’s albinism is all too frequently coupled with optical defect. But the child seems healthy.

  “I’ll take her,” says Marn, the midwife. “I still have milk, look.”

  They watch as the baby girl nuzzles Marn’s breast and happily, normally, finds her food.

  Weeks pass into months. The baby grows, smiles early, though her eyes remain closed. She is a peaceful baby; she babbles, chortles, produces a sound that is surely “Marn, Marn.” Marn loves her fiercely and guiltily; her own children are all boys. She calls the pale baby “Snow.”

  When Snow begins to creep Marn watches anxiously, but the blind child moves with quiet skill, seeming to sense where things are. A happy child, she sings small songs to herself and soon pulls herself upright by Marn’s leather trousers. She begins to totter alone, and Marn’s heart fears again. But Snow is cautious and adroit, she strikes few obstacles. It is hard to believe that she is blind. She laughs often, acquires only a few small bumps and abrasions, which heal with amazing speed.

  Though small and slight, she is a very healthy baby, welcoming new experience, new smells, sounds, tastes, touches, new words. She speaks in an unchildishly gentle voice. Her dark world does not seem to trouble her. Nor does she show the stigmata of blindness; her face is mobile, and when she smiles, the long white lashes tremble on her cheeks as if she is holding them closed in fun.

  The Healer examines her yearly, finding himself ever more reluctant to confront that blank silver gaze. He knows he will have to decide if she should be allowed to breed, and he is dismayed to find her otherwise so thriving. It will be difficult. But in her third year the decision is taken from him. He feels very unwell at the time of her examination and shortly realizes that he has contracted the new wasting sickness which has been beyond his power to cure.

  The daily life of the Whites goes on. They are a well-fed Ingles-speaking littoral people. Their year revolves around the massive catches of fish coming up from the sea-arm to spawn. Most of the fish are still recognizable as forms of trout and salmon. But each year the Whites check the first runs with their precious artifact, an ancient Geiger counter which is carefully recharged from their water-driven generator.

  When the warm days come, Snow goes with Marn and her sons to the beach where the first-caught will be ritually tested. The nets are downstream from the village, set in the canyon’s mouth. The beaches open out to the sea-arm, surrounded by tall ice-capped crags. Fires burn merrily on the sands, there is music, and children are playing while the adults watch the fishermen haul in the leaping, glittering nets. Snow runs and laughs, paddling in the icy stream edge.

  “Fliers up there,” the Netmaster says to Marn. She looks up at the cliffs where he points, searching for a flitting red shape. The Fliers have been getting bolder, perhaps from hunger. During the last winter they have sneaked into an outlying hut and stolen a child. No one knows exactly what they are. Some say they are big monkeys, some believe they are degenerated men. They are man-shaped, small but strong, with loose angry-looking folds of skin between their limbs on which they can make short glides. They utter cries which are not speech, and they are always hungry. At fish-drying times the Whites keep guards patrolling the fires day and night.

  Suddenly there is shouting from the canyon.

  “Fliers! They’re heading to the town!”

  Fishermen paddle swiftly back to shore, and a party of men go pounding upstream toward the village. But no sooner have they gone than a ring of reddish heads pops into sight on the near cliffs, and more Fliers are suddenly diving on the shore.

  Marn snatches up a brand from a fire and runs to the attack, shouting at the children to stay back. Under the women’s onslaught the Fliers scramble away. But they are desperate, returning again and again until many are killed. As the last attackers scramble away up the rocks Marn realizes that the blind baby is not among the other children by the fires.

  “Snow! Snow, where are you?”

  Have the Fliers snatched her? Marn runs frantically along the beach, searching behind boulders, crying Snow’s name. Beyond a rocky outcrop she sees a Flier’s crumpled legs and runs to look.

  Two Fliers lie there unmoving. And just beyond them is what she feared to find—a silver-pale small body in a spread of blood.

  “Snow, my baby, oh, no—”

  She runs, bends over Snow. One of the little girl’s arms is hideously mangled, bitten nearly off. A Flier must have started to eat her before another attacked him. Marn crouches above the body, refusing to know that the child must be dead. She makes herself look at the horrible wound, suddenly stares closer. She is seeing something that makes her distraught eyes widen more wildly. A new scream begins to rise in her throat. Her gaze turns from the wound to the white, still face.

  Her last sight is of the baby’s long pale lashes lifting, opening to reveal the shining silver eyes.

 
Marn’s oldest son finds them so; the two dead Fliers, the dead woman, and the miraculously living, scarless child. It is generally agreed that Marn has perished saving Snow. The child cannot explain.

  From that time, little Snow the twice-orphaned is cared for among the children of the Netmaster.

  She grows, though very slowly, into a graceful, beloved little girl. Despite her blindness she makes herself skilled and useful at many tasks; she is clever and patient with the endless work of mending nets and fish-drying and pressing oil. She can even pick berries, her small quick hands running through the thickets almost as expert as eyes. She patrols Marn’s old gathering paths, bringing back roots, mushrooms, birds’ eggs, and the choicest camass bulbs.

  The new Healer watches her troubledly, knowing he will have to make the decision his predecessor dreaded. How serious is her defect? The old Healer had thought that she must be interdicted, not allowed to breed lest the blindness spread. But he is troubled, looking at the bright, healthy child. There has been so much sickness in the tribe, this wasting which he cannot combat. Babies do not thrive. How can he interdict this little potential breeder, who is so active and vigorous? And yet—and yet the blindness must be heritable. And the child is not growing normally; year by year she does not mature. He becomes almost reassured, seeing that Snow is still a child while the Netmaker’s baby son is attaining manhood and his own canoe. Perhaps she will never develop at all, he thinks. Perhaps there will be no need to decide.