So he was executed. His last words to Mara were: “Now my burden of duty falls upon you. See that your mother never goes hungry—I charge you.”
But mother was always hungry. It was her natural state. Mara earned and gave her twice as much food as anyone else in the Fami received, but she always wanted more. Mara began to suspect that her father had allowed himself to be caught on purpose.
So when in the evening the neighbors ceremoniously placed the naked (cloth was short in Fami) body of her mother on the edge of the glacier, and equally ceremoniously gave it a push, she was not sad when she saw it slide down and become a fast-moving speck which the mist swallowed. She went home and worked on the big, cloth-stuffed mattress she was fashioning from her spoils. (She was one of the reasons for cloth being scarce.) She finished it late at night, then dragged it through the sleeping village to the glacier. She balanced it on the hallowed spot, lay on it, pushed hard. She worked the ponderous thing away from the edge…
Then suddenly she was riding it at gathering speed down through the complete darkness.
She was following Leep’s advice—and her mother—literally. She was a simple girl, and something of a fatalist. What no other inhabitant of Fami had dared do even in daylight, she was doing casually at night—for no other reason than that this happened to be the time when her carrier was completed. She lay spread-eagled on the lumpy thing at an acute angle, the air rushing over her like an upward gale. She had no idea of what might lie only an arm’s length ahead of her.
This swift glissading went on for a long time. She’d adjusted herself to it and was even beginning to doze, when the mattress began to slow with a series of jerks.
It stopped. She knelt, and groped around with an exploratory hand. Her fingers dabbled in cold water in most directions. She knifed the mattress up the middle and snuggled down inside it. Soon she was warmly asleep. The main object was accomplished: she’d escaped from Fami. She was content to await the morning to discover where she’d escaped to.
She awakened some time after dawn and found her bed poised on a narrowing spit of hard snow. Several longer tongues of the glacier reached out into the shallows of the wide lake formed by its melting. She found four shrunken but fairly well preserved bodies lying along the margin of the lake and recognized them as people of Fami who’d died in the last few years. Her mother was not among them, and she surmised that the greater weight of that gross body had carried it far into the lake. The bones of her ancestors and many old friends must lie around here, beneath the ice-snow or the water.
Beyond the leaden level of the lake were hills. She skirted the lake to reach them, passing through valleys which wound ever downwards until she emerged, toward evening, on a wide plain where the air was warm, even oppressive. She slept there in a hollow. Next morning she ate the last of her loogo stalks, and set out across the plain.
She heard spasmodic rumblings and bangings in the far distance, and once the heavy drone of unseen aircraft passed overhead. But these were sounds one often heard from Fami. They’d never hurt anyone during her lifetime, and so she wasn’t afraid of them.
She still wasn’t afraid when she saw two strange birds fight briefly high in the sky and one fall dead to the ground. But she was curious when she saw a man floating down from the heavens swinging beneath what looked like a big white sheet. The man might have some food with him—and that sheet looked like a nice piece of cloth. So she started making for the spot where she judged he’d come to earth.
Presently, she came upon the abandoned parachute, and was rapturous about the thin, smooth, incredibly clean silk. She gathered it, tied it in a bundle with its own cords. She could see the man in the distance walking toward the broken body of the fallen bird. She balanced the bundle on her head and walked after him.
George delved in the wreckage of the helicopter. He found the box of provisions and helped himself to a food bar. He bit off a sizeable chunk, laid the remainder on the splintered fuselage while he investiated the state of the Teleos. They seemed okay. He reached for the residue of food bar. It was gone. He looked on the ground. It hadn’t fallen there. But nearby was his parachute, bundled up like a cushion. Sitting on it, watching him and eating the last of the bar, was a young girl with a solemn but beautiful pale face. She was wearing only a very tattered frock. Her arms and legs were bare, her hair jet black, her eyes brown and expressionless.
“Well, hello there,” he said, very surprised and very interested. She continued to sit and chew and watch him.
“Hungry?” He tossed her another food bar. She caught it neatly and eyed the provision box speculatively.
In his turn, he inspected the first live Venusian any Earthling had seen. If they’re all like this one, he thought, it’s going to be all right. She not only had a head, but a nice head; and all of her other members were not only in the right places, but most pleasingly arranged there.
He got out a couple of the Teleos, and went into an elaborate miming routine to convey what they were for and to assure her that the apparatus wouldn’t harm her. She sat there finishing the second bar calmly, her gaze wandering away from him and back to the provision box. Indifferent, she let him adjust the cap over her raven hair.
With practice, this thought projection became as automatic as speech, and could be described as speech.
“What’s your name?” asked George.
“Mara,” she said, exhibiting no surprise to find a voice other than her own speaking in her mind.
“Where are you from, Mara?”
She waved sticky fingers in the direction of the misty mountains, then stuck the same fingers in her mouth and sucked them.
“I see. I’m George. I come from another planet, Earth.”
She was incurious about him. The words “another planet” were meaningless, creating no mental image. She was much more interested in the texture of the parachute, which she fingered again.
“You may have that,” said George, kindly.
“Naturally. It’s mine.”
“Finders keepers, huh? Mara, what’s this war all about? What side are you on—white circles or green triangles?”
She remained expressionless. Not a thought came across to him: it was as though her Teleo were switched off. When she didn’t understand, or was uninterested, her mind seemed to become a complete blank.
“You don’t get it? Circles. Triangles. See here.”
He seized a sharp splinter from the wreckage and carved specimen circles and triangles in the turf. When he looked up, she was raiding the provision box, grabbing handfuls of food bars.
“Hey, what’s the game, Mara?”
She paused. “Game?” She pulled a piece of cloth from her pocket and tossed it to him. The strange marks on it conveyed only that it was something in another language. He gave it back, telling her to read it.
She read the whole verse beginning: “It’s all a pointless game…”
When she’d finished, he switched off his transmitter for a while, did some private thinking, took the food bars away from her, and said: “Mara, these are strictly rationed. However, I’ll give you another one if you tell me what this doggerel means.”
She said she didn’t know what the verse meant any more than he did, but Leep was a man of strange perception and… She told him about Leep, and her mother, and Fami and its history, and the glacier and her escape. He gave her the promised bar, and said: “It’s a pity my helicopter’s completely smashed. Otherwise, we could have flown up to Fami and interviewed your friend, Leep. He seems to know a lot of things.”
“Oh, yes, he does. He has made many cloth books of verses of this kind. They foretold many things which have come to pass.”
“The village Nostradamus, huh? A useful guy to have around.” He pondered, then said abruptly: “Well, it’s the only lead I can see. We’ll call on him, anyhow, using our flat feet.”
“But the glacier is too slippery to climb.”
George fished around in the fuselage an
d extricated a pick-ax from the bundle of implements he’d brought along. He tapped it, and said: “We’ll cut steps. Come on, now. My time is limited.”
He couldn’t persuade her to leave the parachute behind: It was too precious a find. He carried the provision box, the pick, spare Teleos, and his telescope. She followed sedately, carrying the bundled ’chute on her head. They both continued to wear their Teleos.
The glacier was a bigger affair than he’d imagined: wider, higher, steeper. This he decided on the fifth day of painful step-cutting, inching up a slope that seemed to mount forever. Every night they’d hacked out a niche in which to sleep, enfolded in the silken layers of the parachute. Even so he, in his thick air-suit, slept poorly because of the cold.
He marveled at the hardihood of Mara. Clad only in her thin frock, placing her bare feet unhesitatingly in the ice holes he’d chipped out, she climbed behind him without complaint or obvious fatigue. Nor did she question why she should have to retrace so tediously the route of her escape from Fami. There were no infantile regrets or crying for the moon in her make-up. She dealt only with facts.
Her simple line of reasoning, George suspected, was: This man has food. He is a fool, and gives it away. Therefore, if I stay with him, I shall have food. That night, as they lay in their small, artificial cave, he accused her directly:
“Mara, you’re not interested in the war, are you? You don’t care whether we find the white circle G.H.Q or not?”
“No.”
“And you don’t want to return to Fami?”
“No.”
“You only come with me because I feed you and there is no food on the plain?”
“It is nice to be fed. I always had to feed others.”
He sighed, and felt oddly regretful. He would have preferred that she kept him company just because she liked him. He’d certainly grown to like having her around in this cold, dreary desolation. She was, for instance, less unsettling company than Captain Freiburg, for she was uncomplicated, self-controlled, unfearful of the present or the future. And, underneath, deep down, he’d found a queer little streak of quiet humor. Not the purely surface kind of facetious humor, the cover-up for uncertainty, but the genuine vein, seeing things for what they were and smiling at them, unafraid.
Suddenly, she said: “Of course, if I wished, I could take the food any time I wanted to.”
“No, Mara, not now. The box is locked and the key is in my pocket.”
She made no answer, but presently fidgeted about as though she were trying to get in a comfortable position for sleep. George lay there dozing lightly and wondering formlessly about the men back at the space-ship. Had there been any further attacks? How was the work on the fins going? He’d been away almost a week now, and almost anything might have happened back there. Again, how was he going to get back to the ship? If he contacted the white circle Venusians soon, and they happened to be in a cooperative mood, they might provide transport. If not, if he never found them, then it wasn’t going to be easy.
The automatic direction-recorder in the helicopter had been pulverised in the crash. So he’d small notion of where the ship lay from here. He only knew that out on the plain were mountain ranges other than this one, and the ship was somewhere over the other side of them. Even if he attained the general locality, the ship, laying flat as it was, wouldn’t be easy to spot in this poor visibility, even through the telescope.
He might wander past it and get utterly lost.
Again, at this rate, it could be weeks before he got back there. By which time, if they’d got the ship operative, and Freiburg with his will-to-quit complex, they might well have given him up for dead and taken off for Earth, licking their wounds.
He started out of his gloomy reverie when he heard something—or rather, some things—fall onto his rough pillow. He identified them by touch; half a dozen food bars.
He sat up and stared into the freezing dark. He reached out and touched Mara’s quiescent form. With the other hand he fumbled in his pocket: the key was still there.
“Yes?” she said, without moving.
“Did I leave the box unlocked?”
“No. I don’t need keys. I have my own methods.”
“Oh.” He lay back. There was something wrong with this analysis of Mara’s reasoning. She could have helped herself to the food at any time, of course, and disappeared into the night. That should have been her natural course, thieving being her profession. They’d argued over the ethics of honest labor as opposed to honest thieving. He had explained the social code of Earth, but she had not been impressed. They’d agreed to differ about that.
“Mara,” he said, “you could have stolen all the food and left me. Why didn’t you?”
“Then I should have to carry it, and that box is heavy.”
He was disappointed. “So that’s all. It’s not because you like me?”
“I like you.”
“Why?”
“Because you don’t want me to steal for you. Everyone I knew, except my father, thought that the only point of my existence was to be their artist. You make no such demands on me. So I like you.”
“Um.” It still wasn’t quite satisfactory. He said: “I like you, too, Mara. Good-night.” And turned over to go to sleep. But he couldn’t sleep for a long while. He kept thinking about how he liked Mara.
In the morning they reached a point on the glacier from which they could see Fami. Rather, could have seen it had it been there to see. George, through his telescope, searched the region indicated by Mara, and could discern no trace of the ledge. The outflanking arm of the glacier had swept over it and now hung, like a huge, torn, white lace drape, for a kilo or more down the sheer precipice.
“Leep said that would happen soon,” said Mara, unperturbed.
“Then more of a fool he is for staying there,” said George, feeling vindictive through frustration. “He and his ragbooks will have to stay there for ever now. One small pick isn’t enough to shift that weight of ice. I guess the war will just have to remain a mystery.”
He was furious at the waste of time and effort, dismayed by the prospect of a long, cold, slow climb down the glacier so soon—to go where? Where was the white circle G.H.Q.? How could he get a line on it now?
While he wasted still more time, in a clouded fury, kicking childishly at the side of an ice-step and swearing aloud, Mara accepted and handled the situation in her calm, mature way. She made a wide, flat cushion of the parachute. Then she seized the heavy provision box and shoved it off down the glacier. George grabbed at it and missed. It gathered momentum down that fearsome slope, and soon vanished with the speed of a bullet.
He switched his anger to her.
“Why in hell did you do that?”
She sat deliberately on the silken cushion, clinging to the step with one hand and patting the space beside her with the other, motioning him to join her. Then, smiling faintly, she pointed the way the box had gone. He got it, together with a tremor of apprehension. It hadn’t crossed her mind to waste time in climbing down the glacier. She’d go the way she went before and she expected him to ride with her. For a moment he contemplated talking her out of it. Then his fear was killed by the greater fear of her surprise and contempt. Carefully, he crawled to her side.
“Sure, let’s go. I always had a yen to shoot Niagara.”
They slid together, flat on their backs on the cushion, for a short way. Then it felt as though they were no longer sliding, but falling. He glimpsed high ramparts on either side sawing rapidly, actively, at the clouds. His stomach seemed to be climbing up into his chest. The airflow chilled his cheeks. He realized there was no way of applying the brakes, and felt rather sick. He found himself clinging more tightly to Mara than to the cushion material. He shut his eyes and waited for it to end.
After a kind of lifetime, it ended—abruptly.
A wall of freezing cold water came rumbling down over his feet and buried him. He choked and spluttered and thrashed around. He
’d lost all sense of direction, and the water seemed to be poking icicles into his eyes, ears, and nostrils. Then, somehow, he discovered himself standing breast-deep, in the lake gasping like a landed fish.
Mara, neck-deep, was near-by, pushing her wet hair back. The cap of her Teleo had been washed off. Her solemn face split suddenly into a grin when she saw him. He tried to speak but could only continue to gasp—the water was paralyzingly cold. He beckoned her to follow, and floundered to the shore. When he looked back, she was still out there, walking slowly around, seeming to feel about with her feet.
Then suddenly she did a little duck-dive and disappeared. He waited over half a minute and she didn’t reappear. Half frightened, half angry, he started sloshing out towards the spot. Then she bobbed up, metres nearer the shore, bending, and dragging something out of the shallows. It was the provision box. He went to help her.
“You c-cold-blooded little f-fish.” His teeth were chattering. She didn’t understand. When they were ashore, he fixed her a new cap from the waterproof satchel. But before she dried off, she wanted to go back in the water and recover the parachute.
“Leave it there, darn you,” he said. “The friction will have worn it full of holes. Anyhow, it’s saturated—it’ll weigh a ton now. I’ll give you a brand-new one when we reach the ship.”
The promise made her so happy that her face became radiant. The wet frock clung to the curves of her form. A sudden hunger came upon him. He caught hold of her, pressed her to him, kissed her roughly, almost brutally. She responded fiercely.
Between kisses he babbled more promises, mostly foolish. “You shall have the best Paris can offer… Dresses of silk and coats of fur… Jewels and such things as you have never dreamed of…”
She giggled like a child and caressed him like a woman. The shells of her ancestors lay all around them, long past love, or memory, or the promises of life.
Battle on Venus Page 5