She closed the lid on the box and skidded her way down the ladder. Papa always said that she’d get splinters in her butt doing that. This time he was right. It stung something fierce, so she walked kind of sideways into the kitchen where Oldpappy was. Sure enough, he stopped his cooking long enough to pry the splinters out.
“My eyes ain’t sharp enough for this, Maggie,” he complained.
“You got the eyes of an eagle. Papa says so.”
Oldpappy chuckled. “Does he now.”
“What’s for dinner?”
“Oh, you’ll like this dinner, Maggie.”
Little Peggy wrinkled up her nose. “Smells like chicken.”
“That’s right.”
“I don’t like chicken soup.”
“Not just soup, Maggie. This one’s a-roasting, except the neck and wings.”
“I hate roast chicken, too.”
“Does your Oldpappy ever lie to you?”
“Nope.”
“Then you best believe me when I tell you this is one chicken dinner that’ll make you glad. Can’t you think of any way that a partickler chicken dinner could make you glad?”
Little Peggy thought and thought, and then she smiled. “Bloody Mary?”
Oldpappy winked. “I always said that was a hen born to make gravy.”
Little Peggy hugged him so tight that he made choking sounds, and then they laughed and laughed.
Later that night, long after little Peggy was in bed, they brought Vigor’s body home, and Papa and Makepeace set to making a box for him. Alvin Miller hardly looked alive, even when Eleanor showed him the baby. Until she said, “That torch girl. She says that this baby is the seventh son of a seventh son.”
Alvin looked around for someone to tell him if it was true.
“Oh, you can trust her,” said Mama.
Tears came fresh to Alvin’s eyes. “That boy hung on,” he said. “There in the water, he hung on long enough.”
“He knowed what store you set by that,” said Eleanor.
Then Alvin reached for the baby, held him tight, looked down into his eyes. “Nobody named him yet, did they?” he asked.
“Course not,” said Eleanor. “Mama named all the other boys, but you always said the seventh son’d have—”
“My own name. Alvin. Seventh son of a seventh son, with the same name as his father. Alvin Junior.” He looked around him, then turned to face toward the river, way off in the nighttime forest. “Hear that, you Hatrack River? His name is Alvin, and you didn’t kill him after all.”
Soon they brought in the box, and laid out Vigor’s body with candles, to stand for the fire of life that had left him. Alvin held up the baby, over the coffin. “Look on your brother,” he whispered to the infant.
“That baby can’t see nothing yet, Papa,” said David.
“That ain’t so, David,” said Alvin. “He don’t know what he’s seeing, but his eyes can see. And when he gets old enough to hear the story of his birth, I’m going to tell him that his own eyes saw his brother Vigor, who gave his life for this baby’s sake.”
It was two weeks before Faith was well enough to travel. But Alvin saw to it that he and his boys worked hard for their keep. They cleared a good spot of land, chopped the winter’s firewood, set some charcoal heaps for Makepeace Smith, and widened the road. They also felled four big trees and made a strong bridge across the Hatrack River, a covered bridge so that even in a rainstorm people could cross that river without a drop of water touching them.
Vigor’s grave was the third one there, beside little Peggy’s two dead sisters. The family paid respects and prayed there on the morning that they left. Then they got in their wagon and rode off westward. “But we leave a part of ourselves here always,” said Faith, and Alvin nodded.
Little Peggy watched them go, then ran up into the attic, opened the box, and held little Alvin’s caul in her hand. No danger, for now at least. Safe for now. She put the caul away and closed the lid. You better be something, baby Alvin, she said, or else you caused a powerful lot of trouble for nothing.
DAMON KNIGHT
Strangers on Paradise
A multitalented professional whose career as writer, editor, critic, and anthologist spans almost fifty years, Damon Knight has long been a major shaping force in the development of modern science fiction. He wrote the first important book of SF criticism, In Search of Wonder, and won a Hugo Award for it. He was the founder of the Science Fiction Writers of America, cofounder of the prestigious Milford Writer’s Conference, and, with his wife, writer Kate Wilhelm, is still deeply involved in the operation of the Clarion workshop for new young writers. He was the editor of Orbit, the longest-running original anthology series in the history of science fiction, and has also produced important works of genre history such as The Futurians. His other books include the novels A for Anything, The Other Foot, and Hell’s Pavement, and the collections Rule Golden and Other Stories and The Best of Damon Knight, as well as dozens of anthologies. His most recent books are the novels The Man in the Tree and CV. Upcoming is another novel, The Mirror, from Tor. Knight lives with his family in Eugene, Oregon.
As a writer, Knight established a reputation as one of the very finest short-story writers ever to work in the genre, and although he has produced relatively few stories in recent years, he has not lost any of his skill—as the incisive story that follows aptly demonstrates.
STRANGERS ON PARADISE
Damon Knight
Paradise was the name of the planet. Once it had been called something else, but nobody knew what.
From this distance, it was a warm blue cloud-speckled globe turning in darkness. Selby viewed it in a holotube, not directly, because there was no porthole in the isolation room, but he thought he knew how the first settlers had felt ninety years ago, seeing it for the first time after their long voyage. He felt much the same way himself; he had been in medical isolation on the entryport satellite for three months, waiting to get to the place he had dreamed of with hopeless longing all his life: a place without disease, without violence, a world that had never known the sin of Cain.
Selby (Howard W., Ph.D.) was a slender, balding man in his forties, an Irishman, a reformed drunkard, an unsuccessful poet, a professor of English literature at the University of Toronto. One of his particular interests was the work of Eleanor Petryk, the expatriate lyric poet who had lived on Paradise for thirty years, the last ten of them silent. After Petryk’s death in 2106, he had applied for a grant from the International Endowment to write a definitive critical biography of Petryk, and in two years of negotiation he had succeeded in gaining entry to Paradise. It was, he knew, going to be the peak experience of his life.
The Paradisans had pumped out his blood and replaced it with something that, they assured him, was just as efficient at carrying oxygen but was not an appetizing medium for microbes. They had taken samples of his body fluids and snippets of his flesh from here and there. He had been scanned by a dozen machines, and they had given him injections for twenty diseases and parasites they said he was carrying. Their faces, in the holotubes, had smiled pityingly when he told them he had had a clean bill of health when he was checked out in Houston.
It was like being in a hospital, except that only machines touched him, and he saw human faces only in the holotube. He had spent the time reading and watching canned information films of happy, healthy people working and playing in the golden sunlight. Their faces were smooth, their eyes bright. The burden of the films was always the same: how happy the Paradisans were, how fulfilling their lives, how proud of the world they were building.
The books were a little more informative. The planet had two large continents, one inhabited, the other desert (although from space it looked much like the other), plus a few rocky, uninhabitable island chains. The axial tilt was seven degrees. The seasons were mild. The planet was geologically inactive; there were no volcanoes, and earthquakes were unknown. The low, rounded hills offered no impediment to the
global circulation of air. The soil was rich. And there was no disease.
This morning, after his hospital breakfast of orange juice, oatmeal, and toast, they had told him he would be released at noon. And that was like a hospital, too; it was almost two o’clock now, and he was still here.
“Mr. Selby.”
He turned, saw the woman’s smiling face in the holotube. “Yes?”
“We are ready for you now. Will you walk into the anteroom?”
“With the greatest of pleasure.”
The door swung open. Selby entered; the door closed behind him. The clothes he had been wearing when he arrived were on a rack; they were newly cleaned and, doubtless, disinfected. Watched by an eye on the wall, he took off his pajamas and dressed. He felt like an invalid after a long illness; the shoes and belt were unfamiliar objects.
The outer door opened. Beyond stood the nurse in her green cap and bright smile; behind her was a man in a yellow jumpsuit.
“Mr. Selby, I’m John Ledbitter. I’ll be taking you groundside as soon as you’re thumbed out.”
There were three forms to thumbprint, with multiple copies. “Thank you, Mr. Selby,” said the nurse. “It’s been a pleasure to have you with us. We hope you will enjoy your stay on Paradise.”
“Thank you.”
“Please.” That was what they said instead of “You’re welcome”; it was short for “Please don’t mention it,” but it was hard to get used to.
“This way.” He followed Ledbitter down a long corridor in which they met no one. They got into an elevator. “Hang on, please.” Selby put his arms through the straps. The elevator fell away; when it stopped, they were floating, weightless.
Ledbitter took his arm to help him out of the elevator. Alarm bells were ringing somewhere. “This way.” They pulled themselves along a cord to the jump box, a cubicle as big as Selby’s hospital room. “Please lie down here.”
They lay side by side on narrow cots. Ledbitter put up the padded rails. “Legs and arms apart, please, head straight. Make sure you are comfortable. Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
Ledbitter opened the control box by his side, watching the instruments in the ceiling. “On my three,” he said. “One … two…”
Selby felt a sudden increase in weight as the satellite accelerated to match the speed of the planetary surface. After a long time the control lights blinked; the cot sprang up against him. They were on Paradise.
* * *
The jump boxes, more properly Henderson-Rosenberg devices, had made interplanetary and interstellar travel amost instantaneous—not quite, because vectors at sending and receiving stations had to be matched, but near enough. The hitch was that you couldn’t get anywhere by jump box unless someone had been there before and brought a receiving station. That meant that interstellar exploration had to proceed by conventional means: the Taylor Drive at first, then impulse engines; round trips, even to nearby stars, took twenty years or more. Paradise, colonized ninety years ago by a Geneite sect from the United States, had been the first Earthlike planet to be discovered; it was still the only one, and it was off-limits to Earthlings except on special occasions. There was not much the governments of Earth could do about that.
* * *
A uniformed woman, who said she had been assigned as his guide, took him in tow. Her name was Helga Sonnstein. She was magnificently built, clear-skinned and rosy, like all the other Paradisans he had seen so far.
They walked to the hotel on clean streets, under monorails that swooped gracefully overhead. The passersby were beautifully dressed; some of them glanced curiously at Selby. The air was so pure and fresh that simply breathing was a pleasure. The sky over the white buildings was a robin’s-egg blue. The disorientation Selby felt was somehow less than he had expected.
In his room, he looked up Karen McMorrow’s code. Her face in the holotube was pleasant, but she did not smile. “Welcome to Paradise, Mr. Selby. Are you enjoying your visit?”
“Very much, so far.”
“Can you tell me when you would like to come to the Cottage?”
“Whenever it’s convenient for you, Miss McMorrow.”
“Unfortunately, there is some family business I must take care of. In two or three days?”
“That will be perfectly fine. I have some other people to interview, and I’d like to see something of the city while I’m here.”
“Until later, then. I’m sorry for this delay.”
“Please,” said Selby.
That afternoon Miss Sonnstein took him around the city. And it was all true. The Paradisans were happy, healthy, energetic, and cheerful. He had never seen so many unlined faces, so many clear eyes and bright smiles. Even the patients in the hospital looked healthy. They were accident victims for the most part—broken legs, cuts. He was just beginning to understand what it was like to live on a world where there was no infectious disease and never had been.
He liked the Paradisans—they were immensely friendly, warm, outgoing people. It was impossible not to like them. And at the same time he envied and resented them. He understood why, but he couldn’t stop.
On his second day he talked to Petryk’s editor at the state publishing house, an amiable man named Truro, who took him to lunch and gave him a handsomely bound copy of Petryk’s Collected Poems.
During lunch—lake trout, apparently as much a delicacy here as it was in North America—Truro drew him out about his academic background, his publications, his plans for the future. “We would certainly like to publish your book about Eleanor,” he said. “In fact, if it were possible, we would be even happier to publish it here first.”
Selby explained his arrangements with Macmillan Schuster. Truro said, “But there’s no contract yet?”
Selby, intrigued by the direction the conversation was taking, admitted that there was none.
“Well, let’s see how things turn out,” said Truro. Back in the office, he showed Selby photos of Petryk taken after the famous one, the only one that had appeared on Earth. She was a thin-faced woman, fragile-looking. Her hair was a little grayer, the face more lined—sadder, perhaps.
“Is there any unpublished work?” Selby asked.
“None that she wanted to preserve. She was very selective, and of course her poems sold quite well here—not as much as on Earth, but she made a comfortable living.”
“What about the silence—the last ten years?”
“It was her choice. She no longer wanted to write poems. She turned to sculpture instead—wood carvings, mostly. You’ll see when you go out to the Cottage.”
Afterward Truro arranged for him to see Potter Hargrove, Petryk’s divorced husband. Hargrove was in his seventies, white-haired and red-faced. He was the official in charge of what they called the New Lands Program: satellite cities were being built by teams of young volunteers—the ground cleared and sterilized, terrestrial plantings made. Hargrove had a great deal to say about this.
With some difficulty, Selby turned the conversation to Eleanor Petryk.
“How did she happen to get permission to live on Paradise, Mr. Hargrove? I’ve always been curious.”
“It’s been our policy to admit occasional immigrants, when we think they have something we lack. Very occasional. We don’t publicize it. I’m sure you understand.”
“Yes, of course.” Selby collected his thoughts. “What was she like, those last ten years?”
“I don’t know. We were divorced five years before that. I remarried. Afterward, Eleanor became rather isolated.”
When Selby stood up to leave, Hargrove said, “Have you an hour or so? I’d like to show you something.”
They got into a comfortable four-seat runabout and drove north, through the commercial district, then suburban streets. Hargrove parked the runabout, and they walked down a dirt road past a cluster of farm buildings. The sky was an innocent blue; the sun was warm. An insect buzzed past Selby’s ear; he turned and saw that it was a honeybee. Ahead was a fi
eld of corn.
The waves of green rolled away from them to the horizon, rippling in the wind. Every stalk, every leaf, was perfect.
“No weeds,” said Selby. Hargrove smiled with satisfaction. “That’s the beautiful part,” he said. “No weeds, because any Earth plant poisons the soil for them. Not only that, but no pests, rusts, blights. The native organisms are incompatible. We can’t eat them, and they can’t eat us.”
“It seems very antiseptic,” Selby said.
“Well, that may seem strange to you, but the word comes from the Greek sepsis, which means ‘putrid’. I don’t think we have to apologize for being against putrefaction. We came here without bringing any Earth diseases or parasites with us, and that means there is nothing that can attack us. It will take hundreds of thousands of years for the local organisms to adapt to us, if they ever do.”
“And then?”
Hargrove shrugged. “Maybe we’ll find another planet.”
“What if there aren’t any other suitable planets within reach? Wasn’t it just luck that you found this one?”
“Not luck. It was God’s will, Mr. Selby.”
* * *
Hargrove had given him the names of four old friend of Petryk’s who were still alive. After some parleying on the holo, Selby arranged to meet them together in the home of Mark Andrevon, a novelist well known on Paradise in the sixties. (The present year, by Paradisan reckoning, was A.L. 91.) The others were Theodore Bonwait, a painter; Alice Orr, a poet and ceramicist; and Ruth-Joan Wellman, another poet.
At the beginning of the evening, Andrevon was pugnacious about what he termed his neglect in the English-Speaking Union; he told Selby in considerable detail about his literary honors and the editions of his works. This was familiar talk to Selby; he gathered that Andrevon was now little read even here. He managed to soothe the disgruntled author and turn the conversation to Petryk’s early years on Paradise.
“Poets don’t actually like each other much, I’m sure you know that, Mr. Selby,” said Ruth-Joan Wellman. “We got along fairly well, though—we were all young and unheard of then, and we used to get together and cook spaghetti, that sort of thing. Then Ellie got married, and…”
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection Page 16