Daughters of Earth and Other Stories

by Judith Merril

  These bugs were smart, but there were plenty of things they didn't know at all ...

  She was pretty sure they wouldn't understand anything about the safety door, for instance. Unless...

  Maybe they could find out about it in her mind. But even if they did, they wouldn't understand ...

  And they couldn't even find out anything, if she just didn't think about it any more....

  That was the best way. I'll just forget all about it, she decided.

  She felt very brave. The Space Girl Troup Leader on Starhope would be proud of her now, she thought, as she reached out and turned the light all the way off before she fell asleep.

  Petey was crying again. `Shut up,' Dee said crossly; 'why don't you shut up a minute?'

  Her eyes felt glued together. She didn't want to wake up. She was warm and comfortable and still very sleepy; and now that it was all over, why didn't Mommy come, and... ?

  She opened one eye slowly, and couldn't see anything. It was pitch dark in the room; no lights or windows...

  She reached out for the oxy torch, her hand scraping across the smooth clay floor, and it wasn't there. The bugs had taken it away. They had come in while she was sleeping and taken it ...

  Her hand found the torch, fumbled for the switch, and she had to close her eyes against the sudden bright flare of light. Petey, startled, stopped crying for a minute, then started in again just twice as loud.

  The knapsack was in the corner, back of the light, and there was a bottle all ready for him inside it, but Dee still didn't want to get up. If she got up, it would be admitting once and for all that this was real, and the other part had been a dream—the part where she'd been waking up in a real bed, with Mommy in the next room ready to come and take care of them and give them breakfast.

  It still felt that way a little bit, as long as she lay still with her eyes closed. Mother in the next room ... Dee didn't want the feeling to stop, but she couldn't help it if the food was in this room. Mother can't feed me ... That was a silly thing to think. She was a big girl; nobody had to feed her...

  Dee got up and got the bottle for Petey, and some fruit and crackers for herself. She was wide awake now and she knew she wasn't dreaming; but when she was all done eating, she didn't know what to do. There was still some food left, but she wasn't really hungry. She knew she might need it later on, so she just sat around listening to Petey making sucking noises on his bottle, and wondering what was going to happen next.

  XV

  THE MORNING PATTERN of the Household was a familiar and punctilious ritual: a litany of order and affirmation. Each member of each Family knew his role and played it with conditioned ease; the sum of the parts, produced a choreography of timing and motion, such as had delighted the Mother on that day when she watched her mason sons construct the new arch in her double chamber.

  Daydanda's great body rested now, as then, on the couch of mats from which she had once thought she would never rise again; but her perceptions spread out of the boundaries of her Household, and her commands and reprimands were heard wherever her children prepared for the day's labour.

  Some of the pattern was set and unvarying: the nurses to care for the babes, and the babes to the gardens to feed; the growing sons and daughters to their classrooms, workrooms, and the training gardens; those whose wings are sprouting to instruction in the mysteries of flight and reproduction.

  The winged ones whose nuptial flight time has not come as yet wait in their quarters for assignments to scouting positions for the day; the builders breakfast largely to prepare cement, and gather up clay and chips for work in some new structure of the House; the growers, gardeners, and harvesters spread out across the forest, clearing the fallen leaves and branches, sporing the fungi, damming or redirecting a flow of water to some more useful purpose, bringing back new stores of leaf and wood and brush to fill the storage vaults beneath the House.

  It was never precisely the same. There was always some minor variation in the combination of elements: a boundary dispute today on this border, instead of the other; a new room to add to the nursery quarters, or an arch to repair in the vaults; a garden to replant into more fertile soil. And on this particular morning, two matters of special import claimed the Lady's attention.

  The most urgent of these was the reconditioning of the disturbed Bigheads. Two of the eldest winged daughters—both almost ready for nuptial departures from the Household—had been assigned to work with the nurses who ordinarily tended to the needs of the corral. Under different circumstances, Daydanda would have considered the process worthy of her own direct supervision. Now, however, she contented herself with listening in semi-continuously on the work being done. The programme was proceeding slowly—too slowly—but as long as some progress was being made, she refrained from interfering, and concentrated her own efforts on a matter of far greater personal interest: the Strangers in the House.

  Or, rather, the Strange daughter. The babe was no great puzzle; his wants were familiar, and easy to understand. Food and love he needed. The latter was easy; the former they would simply have to find some way to provide ...

  She pushed aside the train of thought that led to making these new arrivals permanent members of the Household. No telling how much longer their supply of their own foods would last; nor whether it would be desirable to keep them in the House. For the time being, Daydanda could indulge her curiosity, and concentrate on the unique components of the Strange daughter's personality.

  The child was a conglomeration of contradictions such as the Mother would not previously have believed possible in a sane individual—in one who was capable of performing even the most routine of conditioned tasks, let alone initiating such original and independent actions as those of the Stranger.

  And yet, the confusions that existed in the child's thought patterns were so many, and so vital, it was a wonder she could even operate her own body without having to debate each breath or motion in her neurones first.

  Fear! The child was full of fear. And something else for which there was no proper name at all: I should-I shouldn't.

  Impossible confusion, resulting even more impossibly in better-than-adequate responses!

  Hunger ... Mother ... hunger ... Mother?...

  The drifting thoughts merged with the Lady's reflections, and for a moment she was not certain of the source. Too clearly-formed in pattern to be the babe ... and then she realized it was the older one, just waking from sleep, and still stripped of defences.

  'I cannot feed you, child,' she answered the Strange daughter's unthinking plea. 'Not yet. You brought food with you from your ... ship. Eat now, and feed the babe; then we will make plans for tomorrow.'

  But in her own mind, Daydanda knew, there was no question of what plans to make. If there were any way to do so, she meant to have the Strangers stay within her House. She meant to have the secrets of the Strange Wings-House explored and uncovered and to learn the Strange customs and knowledge. It remained only to determine whether it was possible to feed them and care for them adequately within the Household ... and to convince the strange daughter to stay.

  The Mother opened her mind once more to her sons and daughters, at their tasks, and found that all was well throughout the Families. Then she waited patiently till the Strangers were done feeding.

  Petey was sleeping. All he ever did was drink milk and go to sleep and yell and act silly. Dee got up and walked around the room, but there was nothing to see and nothing to do.

  She didn't even remember which way they had come to get to this room last night, and she didn't know whether they'd let her go out if she wanted to. There was no door closing the room off from the corridor—just another open archway. But outside there was only dimness and darkness.

  Abruptly, she picked up the torch and walked to the doorway, flared brilliance out into the hall, and peered up and down. After that she felt better, at least they weren't being guarded. She had seen half a dozen other open arches along the corridor,
but not even a single bug anywhere.

  When Petey woke up, she decided they'd just start walking around until they found some way to get out. She'd have to wait for him to get up, though, because she couldn't carry the lighted torch and the baby both; and even if she didn't need it to see with, she had to have the torch turned up real bright, because that's what they were afraid of. They wouldn't bother her ...

  They're not all scared of the light, she thought. Just the white-coloured ones are. She wondered how she knew that, and then forgot about it, because she was thinking: If we did get out of here, I don't know how we could get back to the rocket.

  It was a long way, and she'd have to carry Petey most of the time; and she didn't know which way it was, and...

  I'm going to go find the Mother-bug! she decided. For just an instant after that she hesitated, wondering about leaving Petey, but somehow she felt it was all right. He was asleep, and she figured if he woke up and started yelling, she could hear him; any place in here she'd be able to hear him because there weren't any doors to close in between.

  She picked up the torch again, and turned it down low, so there was just enough light to see her way. Don't scare them, she thought. They're friends. But it was comforting to know, anyhow, that she could scare them just by turning it up. The white ones were the only ones who couldn't stand it, but none of them were used to bright light.

  She wondered again how she knew that, and tried to remember something from last night that would have let her know it, but that time she was too busy trying to figure out which corridors and archways would take her to the Mother-bug's room.

  XVI

  A TREMENDOUS EXCITEMENT was building up inside Daydanda's vast and feeble bulk, while she guided the Strange child through the labyrinth of the House from the visitor's chamber near the outer walls to her own central domain.

  Yesterday, for the first time in many years of Motherhood, she had experienced once more—with increasing ease and pleasure through the day—the thousand subtly different sensations and perceptions of direct vision. Through all the years between, she had known the look of things outside her chamber—and of beings outside her own Families—only through the distortions and dilutions of the minds of her sons and daughters, travelling abroad on missions of her choosing, and reporting as faithfully as they could, all that they saw and touched and felt for her appraisal.

  But no image filtered through another's brain emerges quite the same as when it entered ... and no two beings, not even those as close as Mother and daughter, can ever see quite the same image of an object. Certainly, Daydanda had perceived both more and less of the winged object in the clearing when she viewed it with her own eye, than when she had watched it through the mind of her own scouting son.

  And now she was to have the Strange child here before her eyes again, to watch and study! The thought was so far removed from precedent and past experience, it would not have occurred to her at all to have the girl come to her chamber. But when she tried to make the child aware of her desire to converse, to exchange information, the prompt and positive response had come clearly: I want to see the Mother. I want to try and talk to her.

  And behind the response was a pattern Daydanda dimly perceived, in which two-way communication was commonly associated with visual sensation. The girl seemed to assume that an exchange of information would occur only where an exchange of visimages was also possible!

  DAYDANDA

  And now the child was standing in the entrance to the new chamber, and the background patter of her mind was a complaint about the difficulty of seeing clearly.

  `You may have more light, child, if you wish to see me more clearly,' the Mother assured her. 'I told you before, it is only the ones unpigmented who are harmed by the bright- ness, and only the wingless who fear it at all.'

  An instant later, she realized she had been boasting. The flaring-up of the light caused her no agony, such as she had experienced the day before; but it was quite sufficient to cause her to turn her face abruptly towards the stranger, so as to shield her eye.

  And then there was a far worse pain than anything her eye could feel. The Mother's vanity was almost as carefully fed, and quite as much enlarged, as her great abdomen; certainly it was far more vulnerable to attack.

  Nobody had ever thought her anything but beautiful before. The Stranger child, at the first clear look, thought she was...

  Ugly and awful and frightening and fat!

  It was the clearest, sharpest message she had had at any time from the Strange daughter ... that she was hideous!

  Shame and disappointment both receded before a sudden access of fury.

  Reflexively, Daydanda shot out a spanking thought; and in the very next instant, regretted it.

  'I am sorry, child. I should not have punished you for what you could not help thinking, but ... I am not used to such thoughts.'

  `You did that?' the child demanded, and angrily : `You meant to do it?'

  `I did not plan to do it; but it was done with volition, yes.'

  The Stranger, Daydanda felt, had no clear concept in her mind to understand that distinction. A thing was done she'd either—on purpose was the child's symbol, or else involuntarily. Nothing in between.

  Well, it was a common enough childish confusion, but not one the Mother would have expected in this uncommon child.

  'It was a punishment,' she tried to explain, `which I had no right to administer. You are my guest, and not my daughter. I offer apology.'

  `I am laughing,' came a mandible message; but the background was a quick shiver of fear. Daydanda tried to soothe the fright away, and the laughing stopped, to be replaced by a sturdy mandibled denial of the fear that was, truthfully, already considerably lessened. And then an apology! `I am sorry,' the child said. `It was most improper of me to laugh.'

  And the background message was no different, but only more specific: `It was very rude of me to be frightened at the idea of being your daughter.'

  This time Daydanda repressed her reflexive irritation. `Laugh when you like, child,' she said; `perhaps it is a good way to release your fear.'

  Promptly, she was rewarded by a clear, unmandibled, but strong reply: 'You're good; I like you. I don't care what you look like.'

  The woman's vanity quivered, but her curiosity triumphed. The child, at long last, was receptive to communication. Daydanda withdrew from contact entirely, to calm her wounded feelings, and to formulate carefully the question now uppermost in her mind: how to gain more knowledge of the Wings-House in which the Strangers had arrived.

  DEBORAH

  Deborah stood in the open archway between the two big rooms, and peered intently at the great bulk of the Mother—bug on the couch of mats against the far wall. Then she decided it was all right now to turn the torch up high, so she could see something more than her own feet ahead of her.

  The shadows jumped back, and the gently heaving mass on the cot sprang suddenly into full view. Deborah stood still, and gawped at ugliness beyond belief.

  The big bug's enormous belly was a mound of grey-white creases and folds and bulges under the sharp light, reflecting pin-points of brightness from oily drops of moisture that stood out all over the dead-looking mass.

  And up above the incredible belly, a cone-shaped bulbous lump of the same whitish grey that must have been a face despite its eyeless lack of any expression, tapered into six full thick lips just like the ones of the baby bugs in the fungus garden.

  It was a good thing, Dee thought, that she hadn't seen the Mother-bug this close the day before. She never could have made herself believe that anything that looked ... that looked like that ... could possibly be friendly.

  She tried now to believe it was true, tried to remember that good-feeling laughter that she was certain had come from the big bug; but the inside of her head had begun to prickle, just as if somebody was sandpapering in back of her eyes. She shook her head, rubbed at her stinging eyes, sniffled, and the feeling went away as sudd
enly as it had come.

  Then she got mad. `You did that on purpose!' she gasped. And then a moment later, she had a crazy thought come through her head that the Mother-bug wanted her to feel better, like sometimes Mom ... the way a mother, maybe, would feel bad after spanked a child. The idea of being a big fat bug's little girl was too silly, and she couldn't help laughing. Then she felt the same kind of panting inbside her head that she remembered from last night, and she knew what Mother-bug thought.

  I am not scared,' she said emphatically. `What do you think I do? Laugh when I get scared?' Then she thought it over and decided it wasn't very nice of her to laugh at an idea like that—about being the Mother-bug's child—if the big bug really could read her mind, so she apologized.

  'I'm sorry,' she said. 'I guess it wasn't very nice of me to laugh at you.' And she had a feeling as if the Mother-bug knew she had apologized, and was telling her it was all right.

  The big old bug was ugly, all right, Dee thought, but so were a lot of people she'd seen ... and the bug was really pretty nice. Good, sort of, the way a mother ought to be ...

  Just the same, Dee realized, she didn't want to stay here.

  She didn't want to stay in the rocket either, though. I don't know which is worse, she thought mournfully; then she decided this was worse—even though in a lot of ways it was better—just because she didn't know whether she could get out if she wanted to.

  She had to find that out first.

  She had to get back to the rocket. Once she was safe inside again, with Petey, she could make up her mind.

  XVII

  'I HAVE TO go back to the rocket,' Dee said out loud. 'I have to go and get us some clothes, anyhow, if we're going to stay here.'