In his rearview mirror he saw Danny hug himself and sit back with his misery. The child’s dark tight-fitting clothes marked him out to the eye as much as his status, the first exogene to enter school, did to the mind. The others were also dressed coarsely, by the standards Svoboda recalled on Earth, but some effort had been madelo create a little gaiety of color and cut. Old Josh Coffin must think that was nearly as big a sin as happiness. Svoboda sometimes wondered whether the Coffins had not been the first to ask for their compulsory exogene because Teresa had failed to bear her own child, or because Joshua wanted still another duty to assume. Of course, after the adoption Teresa had proceeded to get pregnant anyway, a common occurrence. And this, instead of giving Danny some playmates at home, had presented him with a clutch of sibling rivals.
Poor kid. But it was nobody else’s affair. As long as he wasn’t obviously abused, his foster parents had a right to raise him as they saw fit, free from busybodies official and private. However – I might consult Saburo. I just might.
Svoboda turned his consciousness back to piloting. The route was changed each day – three five-hour classroom sessions, spaced around the clock – to divide the transit time as fairly as possible. He must guide himself by a complex pattern of landmarks, and be ready for air turbulence as well. At this pressure, even a light gust struck hard.
Not for the first time, the unoccupied part of him considered the interrelatedness of things. Old Torvald Anker, with his saying that ‘Nothing is irrelevant,’ would have been delighted by the examples Rustum presented. For instance, the connection between ecology and school buses. Because little native life on the plateau was edible, the colonists must raise Terrestrial crops. But because the ecology which supported those crops was not yet firmly established (consider, as one minor example, that local virus which attacked the nitrogen-fixing bacteria symbiotic with Earthly legumes), harvests were poor and it took many hectares to support a human. Therefore most of the colonists must be farmers, and live isolated in the middle of immense holdings. And thus they were dependent on aircraft – still so scarce and expensive as to be publicly owned – for their transportation, beyond a horse’s range. Especially the transportation of their children to and from classes. The effect of this, in turn, was to make school-bus piloting a duty for which those like Svoboda, who were not farmers, were drafted. Which tended to sharpen the conflict between professional classes.
Now and then Svoboda wondered if the freedom they said they had come here for might not already have soured.
Whatever route the bus took, Danny was always the last one off. The Coffins lived farthest out of anybody, near the edge of the Cleft. When Svoboda, today, set the bus down on their strip, Danny went past him without a word.
Teresa Coffin had stepped onto the porch as they landed. She had a baby in her anns. Another, lately begun to walk, hung onto her skirt. The level sunlight touched her hair with charitable bronze. She managed to wave. ‘Hello,’ she called. ‘Want to stop in for a cup of tea?’
‘No, thanks,’ Svoboda answered, leaning out the window. ‘Judith expects me home soon.’
Across the yard, bare trampled earth save where a plume oak spread its leafage, she smiled. ‘Wedding preparations?’
He nodded. ‘She’s up to her ears in baking and sewing and Omniscience knows what else. I promised to help shift furniture before supper.’
‘Well, tell her I’ll bring those cookies I promised tonight, on the next Stein-Lake Royal bus. I wish I could do more, but—’ Her gesture was wry. The Coffins had five youngsters now, including Danny, with a sixth on the way.
‘Thanks. Everybody’s being very helpful. I could wish it were in a better cause, though.’
‘Why, Mr. Svoboda! Your own daughter’swedding!’
‘Sure, sure. Of course I’m glad Jocelyn’s hooked onto a decent lad like Colin Lochaber, and I want things to be done right, and so forth. But trying on this planet to imitate a Midlevel Earthly wedding reception – in harvest season at that—’ Svoboda shrugged. ‘It seems out of proportion.’
Teresa came down off the stairs, closer to him. Her face, lined and almost as weatherbeaten as his own, turned grave. ‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ she said. ‘For us, these days, hardly anything is more important than a wedding.’
He thought of Jocelyn, David, Rustum-born Anton, the exogene infant Gail; his mind veered away from one small grave behind his orchard. At that, he and Judith were lucky. Most families had lost more. And they would continue to lose. There would be another Year of Sickness, another Peace Day blizzard, another who knew what. No doubt this was natural selection and would in time produce a race more healthy and gifted than Earth had known for centuries. But there were gray streaks in Judith’s hair, and in his own. He had most of his strength yet, but hills had grown subtly steeper.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you’re doubtless right. And I don’t deny it’s nice to have a celebration occasionally. I didn’t mean to sound like—’ He stopped himself from saying ‘your husband’ and trusted she hadn’t noticed. ‘Anyhow,’ he finished quickly, ‘I’ve got to be on my way. So long.’
She smiled again. Till tonight. About 3900 o’clock.’
She must be looking forward to a visit with us, Svobodathought. An escape, for an hour or two. He started feelingso sorry for her that he forgot about Danny.
2
Like most settlers’ homes, this one was built of roughly dressed logs, bound together with steel and concrete against the great winds, with a storm cellar beneath. Long and low, cool despite the nearby sun, warm in winter, the house was not primitive. Besides electricity from the nuclear plant at Anchor, it had a solar collector which stored energy in an underground tank of superheated water. Light was fluorescent and heating radiant. But while power was plentiful, power tools were not. So much of the house must go to work space that the three boys bunked together in one room. Such conditions would be lavish for a Lowleveler on Earth, their father pointed out.
‘But we aren’t any old Lowlevelers,’ Danny had said, in his first resentment when Ethan was moved in with him and Ahab.
For which you can thank a just and merciful God,? Joshua Coffin had answered. ‘You can even be thankful you weren’t alive the first few years on Rustum, when we lived in tents and dugouts, and the rains came. I saw dying men, yes, women and children, lie in muddy water, with rain such as Earth never knew beating their faces.’
‘Aw, that was so long ago,’ Danny said.
His foster father’s lips grew tight. ‘If you think grown men have time to build an extra room whenever a new brat is born, you shall have to learn different,’ he snapped. ‘You can milk all the cows next choretime.’
‘Joshua!’ Mother cried. ‘He’s only a baby.’
‘He’s five Terrestrial years old,’ Father answered. There was no more argument. Danny had learned better.
He liked the cows – they were warm and, kind and smelled like summer – but there were a lot of them. Father spanked him when he didn’t finish the job, before seeing that his fingers had gone too stiff to move. Then Father mumbled something like, ‘All right, maybe it was too much,’ and left the barn in a hurry. Afterward, unable to sleep for the pain in his hands, Danny had gotten up for a glass of water. From the dark hallway he saw Mother and Father in the living room. Father looked sad and Mother was stroking his hair. Since then Danny had never been sure if Mother really meant it when she stuck up for him.
And now he had to go to school. He’d rather have milked all the cows. He asked to, the first time he came home, after the other kids at recess had shouted, ‘Stinky, Stinky, grown inna tank like a fat little piggy.’ Not that he told his parents this. It was too monstrous. But he cried. Father told him to stop that nonsense and behave like a man.
Mother must have asked the teacher what was wrong. Mrs. Anthropopoulos knew the kids were riding Danny and told them to stop, but that only made them worse. (‘You wait till I get you tomorrow,’ Frank de Smet had whispered
. There was a shed back of the playfield —) One day when Danny came home crying, Mother had packed a picnic lunch and they went off, the two of them, to the top of Boulder Hill. They sat on the big stones he often pretended had been rolled there by giants, and looked down on the house and bams, out across the blue-green pasture where the sheep seemed to be woolly bugs, the cornland where Father’s tractor raised a plume of dust, and so on to the Cleft, which was the edge of the world. The wind ruffled a loose lock of Mother’s hair and made the trees sigh around her voice. She talked low and carefully, as he had sometimes heard her talk when Father had gone off on one of his long walks by himself.
‘Yes, Danny, you are different. It’s not a bad difference. When you’re older, you’ll be proud of it. You, the first exogene on Rustum! There’ll be others just like you, many others, and we’re so glad to have you. Because we need you, Danny.’
But when he asked how come, she looked away. ‘You’re too young,’ she said. Her fingers clenched together. ‘When you’ve learned about heredity, then you’ll know. That’s one of the things you go to school for. To learn about, oh, everything. What we must know to live here on Rustum. And why we came. And what we must never forget, Earth andthe people of Earth …. Danny, they pick on you becausethey don’t understand either. They’re scared, a teensy bit, of what they don’t understand. You don’t help them much, either. You should try to be more friendly. Not ask so many questions of the teacher. Join in their games, instead of going off by yourself and— Oh, I don’t know. We came to Rustum to keep the right to be different. I suppose I shouldn’t start the old cycle over again by telling you to conform simply because it’s more comfortable.’
And this sounded so much like some of the things Father said, that Danny stopped liking the picnic and they soon went back to the house.
Later on, he learned more about the exogene tanks. There hadn’t been room on the spaceships for livestock. So the seeds, the father seeds and mother seeds, were brought along instead. They were so tiny that you could carry enough seed to make millions of animals, cows, pigs, sheep, dogs, horses, poultry and everything. The seeds were kept alive, those long years in space, and later on in High America, by the same sort of deepsleep that kept the people alive. After everybody was settled on Rustum and ready for animals, the biotechs put the father seeds and mother seeds together and threw them in tanks till they had real baby animals.
Science class had lately gone down the street in Anchor to visit Biolab and see those tanks. The man in charge explained, though, that they weren’t used this way any more, because the live animals had grown up and were now making little ones by themselves. He said many kinds had never been made at all, but the seeds were being kept in case those kinds were ever needed. He showed them pictures of some of those animals, snakes, elephants, mongooses, toads, ladybugs, and such.
So Danny understood exogenesis all right. He understood too that children grew in their mothers just like calves in the cows, after their fathers had put in the father seed. Only … not all children. Some were grown in tanks – the same tanks as the animals. Danny was the first. Why? When he asked, he was told that many different kinds of people were needed, but that didn’t quite make sense. And why did every man and wife have to adopt at least one baby from a tank?
Once he overheard young Mr. Lasalle grumble to Father about that law, when they were on the same threshing crew. And Father had gotten mad and said, ‘Have you no concept of civic duty?’ So Father and Mother must have taken Danny because the law said they had to. They made his brothers and sisters themselves, so they must have wanted Ahab, Ethan, Elizabeth, Hope, and now this new one they had started, that would be born in a few more weeks. Danny was different. He was a civic duty.
Some people were nice to him. Mr. Svoboda, for instance. The kids didn’t always hate Danny either. Most of the time they left him alone and he left them alone. But once in a while some of the boys beat up on him, like today. The bus had been a few minutes late, and there hadn’t been anything else to do after class while they waited, so Frank started picking on Danny and Danny talked back and then a lot of them started teasing him.
He wiped his nose on his wrist, hoping Mother wouldn’t see. She was talking to Mr. Svoboda and hadn’t said hello to Danny. Maybe she didn’t notice him. Maybe she didn’t care. Danny slipped past her, into the house. He had to take his school clothes off and put on his farm clothes. It wasn’t time for chores yet, but clothes were hard to make and hard to clean.
Ahab was on his bunk in the boys’ room. He was not quite a year younger than Danny. (That was an Earth year, 139 days. They used the Rustum calendar mostly, but the old year lingered in such things as reckoning people’s ages or when to have Christmas. Danny had often wondered about the powerful and mysterious Earth year, that marched around the seasons.) Ahab was brown-haired and slender, like all the real Coffin kids. ‘Hi,’ said Danny hopefully.
‘Are you ever gonna get it when Father comes home,’ said Ahab.
Danny’s heart jumped. ‘I haven’t done nothing!’
‘You haven’t done nothing,’ Ahab echoed. ‘Sure. You didn’t close the gate on the north six hundred. Mom says the gate was open.’
‘I did! I did too! I always close the gate when I herd the sheep out there. Jus’ before I left for school.’
‘Mom says the gate was open. A catling could’a got in. Maybe a catling did get in; Maybe it’s hiding in the woods and it’s gonna kill the sheep till Father shoots it. You dumb ole sheep yourself!’ Malice flickered on the round face. Ever since Ahab and Ethan had learned their big brother was an exogene (whatever that meant to them at their age), they had used it against him, because he was bigger and stronger and Mother was always more kind to him.
They didn’t think how much more kind Father was to them.
‘No!’ Danny shouted. He ran from the room. Mother had come back inside and was changing little Hope.
‘Mother, I didn’t, I didn’t. I know I closed the gate. I just know it.’
She glanced around. ‘Do you?’ she asked.
‘I know!’
‘Danny, dear,’ she said gently, ‘always remember how important objectivity is. That’s a long word, but one reason why we came here is that people on Earth were forgetting it and this made them poor and miserable and unfree.’ She left the baby on the couch, sat on her heels and took Danny by the shoulders and looked into his eyes. ‘Objectivity means always trying to be truthful,’ she said. ‘Especially being truthful with yourself. That’s the hardest and the most necessary.’
‘I did close the gate. I always do. I know there’s bad animals in the wild woods. I didn’t forget.’
‘Darling, the gate didn’t leave itself open. You were there last before me. I understand what happened. You don’t like school, and you were thinking so hard about that that you forgot to close the gate. You didn’t mean to leave it open, I know. But don’t hide from the truth.’
He choked back the tears. Father said he was too old to be a crybaby like … Ethan. ‘M-m-maybe I did. I’m sorry.’
That’s a good boy.’ She rumpled his hair. ‘I’m not angry with you. I only wanted you to admit you’d made a mistake. We want people on Rustum never to get into the habit of lying to themselves. I’m very glad you didn’t.’
‘W-will Father know?’
She bit her lip. ‘I don’t see how to keep the others from blabbing,’ she said, more to herself than him. Briskly: ‘Never mind. I’ll explain to him. It really wasn’t your fault.’
‘You always —’ He couldn’t finish, but pulled free of her and walked back to his room. She always said things hadn’t been his fault, and Father never believed her.
‘Boy, are you gonna get it,’ said Ahab.
Danny ignored him. This was worse for Ahab than a blow. ‘Nyaah, nyaah, nyaah, are you ever gonna get it, you old essogene,’ he chanted. Danny changed clothes and walked back down the hall to the living room. Ahab didn’t follow.
‘M
other, can I go for a walk?’
Her eyes clouded. ‘Again? I wish you didn’t go walk so much alone. I thought—’ She smiled very brightly. ‘I thought perhaps after supper, when I take the bus to Svoboda’s, I could let you off at the Gonzales’. You could play with Pedro.’
‘Aww, no. Pedro just likes kid games. I can go by myself okay, Mother, honest. See, I’m wearing my bracelet.’ Danny lifted his arm. The studded metal circlet gleamed on his wrist. Father had explained to him that this was a transistorized radio transmitter, and if he seemed to be lost or in trouble, any adult with a directional unit could go straight to where he was.
Those were pretty big words too. Danny was content to understand that if he wore the bracelet he could be found. He’d gotten lost a couple of times already, in fact, and soon been found. Afterward Father had made hot cocoa for him and told him stories about King Arthur.
Today, mostly, he wanted to get away.
‘Well …. all right,’ said Mother. ‘Remember, though, we have to feed and milk in about an hour. And afterward I’ll be baking cookies for Miss Svoboda’s wedding. Wouldn’t you like to help?’
‘Awww.’ Danny didn’t want to hurt her feelings, but that sort of thing was for girls. ‘No, thanks, I guess. So long.’
He wandered out past the barn, over the rail fence of the clover meadow, among the scattered copses and tall grass of the undeveloped land – eastward, to his special favorite spot on the rim of the Cleft, which was the edge of the world.
3
As yet, High America had no formal government. Televisual discussion could settle what questions of policy arose. These were few, when most traditional functions of the state could be forgotten – military defense, for example – or else left to voluntary associations. Eventually there must be a more elaborate social structure; but this could evolve in an organic manner within the framework of Constitutionalist philosophy.
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