Rescued From Paradise

by Robert L. Forward

  "Mom?" said Eve, who had been working quietly a few meters from her mother, trapping the tiny creatures in a cup made from the hollowed-out joint of a peethoo sapling. "Why don't you rest? Freeman and I will be able to finish filling the bucket."

  Eve and Freeman did work well together, Cinnamon admitted to herself. Just like her father and I, thought Cinnamon. When she and Nels had worked together on the hydroponics deck of Prometheus, they hardly needed to speak; each one's work naturally complemented the other. Cinnamon smiled, waded out of the marsh, and sat down tiredly on a hummocky dune.

  It was a beautiful day, but then it was so often beautiful on Eden. Cinnamon watched Eve and Freeman washing the sand and mud from the little crabs before putting them in the "bucket"—a plastic box originally designed to hold frozen food on the now submerged lander. The box's snaptop lid had been lost over time, and now it had a makeshift handle of tough keekoo tentacle roots threaded through holes poked through the corners just under the Up.

  Eve had inherited her mother's straight black hair and it fell in a long curtain to her waist. Cinnamon looked wryly out of the corner of her eye at a strand of her own hair. It had once looked like that, but now it was gray and frazzled and hardly reached below her shoulders. Eve was willowy and thin, her slender arms and legs softly curved with muscle. The simple white sarong flattered the golden brown of her skin. Freeman looked at her with adoration in his eyes, adoration that Eve returned with gentle trust.

  He will be a good match for her, thought Cinnamon, not for the first time. Freeman had finally stopped growing and was losing his adolescent clumsiness as he got used to the size of his own body. Freeman might not be as tall as the other boys, but like all the Eden children, good health gave him grace and beauty. Cinnamon sighed again and rubbed her legs.

  These are old woman's legs, she thought to herself. She looked at her old hands. Rubbed with old woman's hands. When did I get old? she wondered. She looked again at the two young people, both so intent on their work and yet so aware of each other. Do they really appreciate the beauty of each other? she wondered. Do they appreciate their own youth and grace? She thought about it for a while. Youth is wasted on the young, she finally decided.

  "Mommy!" sang Ruth as she ran up the beach. "Come see!" The little girl grabbed her mother's hand and dragged her down to the main beach where they were clear of the trees. "Look! I can see Daddy!"

  Cinnamon shaded her eyes. On the horizon she could just make out the profile of the tiny flotilla. Jinjur, Nels, John, and David had taken the big raft and the dugout canoe, and were fishing just beyond the shelter of Crater Lagoon. They had originally planned on just Nels and Jinjur going out to catch the saltwater filter-fish, but at the last moment John had suggested that he and David join them in the dugout.

  John had felt that David needed to get out of the house and spend a day with his friends; he needed to take a break from his self-imposed vigil of sitting beside Arielle in her sickbed. Arielle spent most of her time sleeping these days and would not even know he had left. The disease that was taking her life had first stolen her strength and beauty. Gaunt and haggard, the free-spirited pilot had been trapped on her sleeping pad for more than a month now.

  "Can they see us, do you think?" asked Ruth. "Daddy!" she called, waving enthusiastically. "Daddy! Here I am!"

  Cinnamon waved, too. Who knows? she thought. Maybe he can see us ... She was reaching to take her communicator out from the pocket in her sarong, to let Ruth talk to her daddy, when the ground moved under her and she was thrown off her feet. Instinctively she rolled across the quivering sand and caught Ruth into her arms. Covering her daughter's body with her own, she remained on all fours as the beach shook and trembled beneath her.

  "Mommy?" Ruth whimpered.

  "It's okay, sugar, it's just an earthquake. It will be over soon." As suddenly as it started, the shaking ended.

  Eve! thought Cinnamon. I've got to make sure she's all right. She got to her feet and took Ruth by the hand.

  "Mother! Are you all right?" Eve called as she came running toward them, Freeman running along behind her.

  How long has she been taking care of me? Cinnamon wondered as she brushed the sand off her legs.

  "I'm just fine," she answered calmly. "It was a big quake, but it's all over now. Let's just get back ..." Cinnamon's voice faltered as she caught sight of the ocean.

  The tiny waves were no longer lapping innocently onto the sand. Slowly, ominously, the ocean was retreating. Rocks and plants that had never been exposed before were lying in shallow puddles, the sunlight sparkling on their wet surfaces.

  Run! screamed a voice in Cinnamon's mind, while another voice said, Think!

  I mustn't scare the children. They might freeze if they are frightened, thought Cinnamon, struggling to control her own panic. "Come on," she said, walking rapidly up the shore toward the nearby knoll with the clump of tall boobaa trees. "I want you all to go up the boobaa to the clubhouse."

  The girls didn't know what the problem was, but they obeyed Cinnamon without question. When Freeman tried to hang back and help her, she shot him a look of pure fury. Startled, Freeman climbed rapidly up the trunk. Pushing the youngsters ahead of her, Cinnamon forced her tired old bones up the slender rungs of the child-sized ladder. By the time Cinnamon had pulled herself, panting, onto the small platform, the youngsters had found time to look back toward the ocean. Their eyes were now wide with apprehension.

  The horizon had changed. The small boats that had been out on the ocean had disappeared. Most of the lagoon had also disappeared. The bar of sand at the entrance to the lagoon was rapidly eroding away, as the water in the lagoon poured out and down the still-emptying shore. In the ocean beyond, a gigantic wall of water was moving inexorably toward the shore, growing larger as it came.

  "Quick!" shouted Cinnamon, trying to break the thrall of horror the looming danger had cast on the children. "Take off your sarongs!" Cinnamon had removed the long white cloth that she used to cover her own withered flesh and was pulling off Ruth's. Her communicator fell from her sarong pocket onto the platform and clattered off down to the ground below.

  "Why?" asked Eve, even as she moved to emulate her mother.

  Cinnamon didn't waste time trying to explain as she started to tie Ruth's sarong to hers. Eve quickly understood and added her sarong to the other end, Freeman lending his strong muscles to tighten the knot, then adding his loincloth to the end. Cinnamon pushed Ruth's bare body up against the trunk of the tree, then placed her meager body so it would protect the small body of her youngest child, as Eve and Freeman positioned themselves around the smooth trunk on either side of her. Cinnamon wrapped the knotted length of clothing around them all, so that it fastened them to the tree, and held it taut against their bodies while Freeman, facing out, tied the loose ends together—Cinnamon watching the knot critically. Freeman then twisted around until his back was to the oncoming wave and his face was looking at Eve's. He reached out and took Eve's hand. They waited ...

  A deep rumble from the burdened ground vibrated the trunk beneath their bellies as the base of the massive tsunami climbed up onto the shore. At the same time, through the air, came the sound of the aerated water in the rapidly rising crest, hissing like a menacing cobra that was about to strike. It grew dark as the top of the cresting wave blocked the afternoon sun ...

  In that last moment, before the whole world came crashing down, there was a moment of calm. Cinnamon could see Eve and Freeman looking at each other, their eyes filled with love and trust.

  All that matters to them is that they are together, thought Cinnamon—just as all thought was knocked out of her head.

  Cinnamon could feel the strain as the tree bent beneath the wave's assault and she was shoved violently against the tree and her daughter beneath her. She was surrounded by a chaos of green and white and water and foam; the breath was knocked out of her lungs and there was nothing to breathe except water. She lost all feeling in her body, all se
nse of direction, all awareness of the child so close to her. She was trapped in an endless swirling of water as it surged against her, pulling at the bonds, sucking at her limbs, trying to rip her free so that she could be tossed about along with the sand and debris that the wave had picked up and was now beating against her back.

  Then all was still. The water surrounding them lifted strands of Cinnamon's long white hair so that they floated before her face like exotic seaweed. Cinnamon felt her lungs scream with the need to breathe, and she opened her mouth to let the seawater rush in and out, a child's trick to beat the craving to draw the water in more deeply.

  We weren't high enough, she thought calmly. I have tied them to a tree just so they could drown. I wanted to protect them, and all I have done is make them attractive corpses.

  Then, the surface broke over her head. With her first breath, Cinnamon ducked her head back under the water and exhaled the air into the startled but eager mouth of Ruth. It took two such breaths until the water fell far enough for the little girl to breathe for herself. Out of the corner of her eye, Cinnamon saw Freeman sharing breaths with Eve. At least their lips were pressed together and Cinnamon figured that whatever they were doing, they were alive.

  It took almost fifteen minutes for the water to drain back down from the dense jungle of trees and allow the beach to reappear, so that they could climb down from the tree and cross the scoured dunes from the knoll to the safety of higher ground. They spent the waiting time in silence. Cinnamon tried to keep her thoughts empty of speculation, empty of the fear for the safety of all the others. Without the communicator, there was no way to know what had happened to them.

  All along their three-hour walk back to the settlement, they could see where the landscape had been changed by the wave's passage. Trees had snapped, rocks had been shifted, destruction was everywhere. When they finally reached the entrance to their usually sheltered valley, they almost didn't recognize it. New stream channels now made shortcuts across some of the meander bends of the old stream, some of the new channels cutting right through what used to be fields of grain. Huts were shifted from their foundations, and the Meeting Hall was full of mud and rubble. Only Carmen's hut, high on the ridge, was untouched, although several rock slides marred the normally smooth sides of the ravine. When they called up to her, Carmen answered.

  "Gracias a Dios!" she called down to them. "Thank God you are safe! All the children are here and all are well. After the quake I had Maria bring them all here, so they could call their parents through the comm-links. Just as they had all come up the mountain ... the water filled the valley."

  "And Arielle?" called Cinnamon.

  "She is okay. The water level didn't reach her bower."

  "What about Richard and Reiki?"

  "They're in the Jolly village. Things there are a real mess, with most of the Jollys washed off their feet and some of the seedlings uprooted, but they are okay, too. They are staying to help the stronglimbs get things back in order. Are the others with you? I thought if their boats were far enough away from the shoreline the wave would hardly have bothered them."

  "I haven't seen them," said Cinnamon evenly. She knew that the boats were much too close to the shore to have escaped the tsunami, but bad news could wait.

  "Well, the Jollys have their eyes out searching for any sign of them," Carmen finished. "We'll learn soon enough."

  "I'm going to see if I can help the Jollys," said Cinnamon, moving off. And to see if they have any word of Nels, she thought to herself.

  "We're coming, too!" called Adam, Dirk, Everett, and Shannon as they piled down the stairs from Carmen's.

  "What about us?" called the younger kids.

  "Yeah! We're not babies!"

  "Anyone over thirteen can go as long as you stay within sight of a grownup. And that's within their sight, not them within yours," compromised Carmen.

  Ernest, Sarah, and Christopher groaned as they went back into the shelter while their siblings ran joyfully down the hill.

  The whole island had been affected by the giant wave. The Jollys' buildings had never been designed to withstand such an assault, and the entire village had been razed. Richard attempted to save the youngest seedlings with some quick replanting work with a spade they had made from a piece of scrap metal from the lander. But as the Jollys predicted, the effort was in vain. The seedlings would wilt from root shock before the end of the day.

  Cinnamon had just reached the village with her pack of young reinforcements, when one of the Jolly's free-flying eyes brought word of one of the humans. She was able to follow the owl-like eye through the forest and found Nels, battered and unconscious where he had washed up in a nearby valley. He was bleeding heavily from a wound in the leg. If they had not found him when they did, he would probably have died. Of the others on that ill-fated fishing trip, John, Jinjur, and David, there was never any sign.

  With John gone, Cinnamon was now their doctor. As Cinnamon tended Nels, she started teaching Eve about medical care by using her as an apprentice—for one day she too might be gone and they would need someone trained as a doctor to take her place.

  Over the next several days, they all struggled to come to grips with the loss of their loved ones—and the devastation that had happened so quickly and with so little warning. The grain crops that had been so close to harvesting were gone, and many of the younger fruit trees would not survive to bear fruit. Game was easy to catch, as it too had been made homeless with the loss of so much underbrush, but that meant lean times later. Rubble cluttered the beaches and daily they searched in vain for signs of their lost ones.

  As Arielle watched the rest of them try to get on with their lives, she reached a decision of her own. She waited until she was sure that all of them were busy. Then she took a large drink of the bottle of painkiller medicine that John had prepared for her. After leaving a note on her recorder she pulled herself out of bed and left the settlement.

  Arielle moved slowly, searching the unfamiliar flood-reworked landscape for signs of the trail she had taken so many times in the past. Finally she came to the deep chasm spanned with tight cables. She looked down. The surface of the lava was now back at its normal red-gray, heated from within by the slow but constant flow of liquid rock down the gigantic tube of hardened lava rock that filled the canyon floor from wall to wall. She had seen the pictures Shannon had made of the gourd bombs the boys had dropped here. She remembered how they had exploded from the extreme heat before they even reached the glowing surface of the molten rock.

  Arielle knew in her heart that David was dead, but she didn't grieve for him. Grief comes from knowing that you have to live without someone, she thought. I don't have to live without David, and now I can be happy that he never had to live without me.

  The children would be cared for. The rescue ship was only a few years away, and the children would be safely taken back to Earth. She had done all that she could do in this life. Now, she only wanted to be free, free of the pain, free of this body that disease had turned into a prison. She opened the medicine bottle and drank down the last of the painkiller. It was a big dose. Shortly afterward, she could feel her body growing numb. Before the numbness went too far, she unfastened the small wheeled swing and adjusted it on the end of the taut cable. The grace that had been a part of her all her life did not fail her now as she launched herself over the chasm. As the swing reached the middle of the ravine, Arielle let go, spreading her wings in her final flight.

  TABLET

  A FEW weeks later, while hunting game with Adam along the shore on the other side of the river from the Jolly village, Dirk came upon a long, thin, rectangular slab of stone which had been washed far up the beach. It was the beginning of the rainy season, and the heavy rains had washed the sand from the stone slab and had left it glittering in the grass. The stone had strange markings on it. Dirk picked it up and took it to Adam.

  "Look what I found," Dirk said, handing it over. They both stood looking at it, rainwater
dripping from their noses. "What do you make of it?"

  Adam looked at the markings on the stone carefully, having to tilt it slightly in order to see them in the dim red light of Barnard filtering through the drizzling gray overcast sky. One side of the stone slab was rough, like the surface of an ordinary lava mound. The side with the markings was highly polished.

  "Looks like a drawing of something. On a pictotablet like the Jollys use. But this tablet is made of stone instead of clay. Hmm ... All the lines are so straight they must have been made with a ruler. These two house-shaped things at the ends must be end views, while the rectangle with one sloping side must be a side view. With the sloping roofs, it looks like a drawing of some sort of a shelter to me."

  "What are the crosses and bars next to the lines?" asked Dirk.

  The Stone Tablet

  "Must be the measurements of the thing ... you know ... a number telling how many meters or centimeters long that part is."

  "They don't look like numbers to me," said Dirk.

  "Of course, they wouldn't, jookeejook brain," said Adam. "These must be Jolly numbers, and this must a drawing of a Jolly hut. I bet it got washed away from the village by the tsunami. I'll take it to Chief Seetoo and see if its important. I doubt it, though. Probably an ordinary pictotablet." He added the tablet to his hunting net and then forgot about it as the two continued their hunt.