“Surprising as it may seem, my friend, no.”
Celeste explained, at length, from her substantial knowledge of microscopic life and its effects on humans, as Tor increasingly frowned. The Protector sat impassive. Finally, she raised her hand and said, “But you did not want me to come up here to tell me this, did you.”
“You don’t believe me.”
“It is all new to me. I fear you are right, but it is very different to think of myself as a sort of rabbit warren for such crowds of hostile things; however, I doubt that you could have made all that up. Again, though, since these tiny creatures have been feeding off me all these years, I will let them continue for the present. We must get on to other concerns. You say there are others in the dome, as Stel suspected, and Tor?”
“Yes.”
“How many?”
“I must know that you will not harm them.”
“Celeste, we seldom harm anyone. Look at us. We are as meek as mice. As I see it, there are four things that must immediately concern us. First, the dome is in danger of collapse. Next, there are people in it to be saved. Next, those people must be integrated into some society when they leave the dome—somewhat less precipitously than you did, I hope. And last, which is extremely important, not only to us but to all the Heart River peoples, and those beyond, to all the people of Urstadge—the dome people have all kinds of knowledge that has been lost ever since the time of fire. We need to reintroduce that knowledge to humankind. This is desperately important.”
Celeste lay silent for a time. “Yes, they do have a great many things to teach you, but you have some to teach them, too. And I am not sure that they will want to learn them. They will want to manage everything. They will want to take over this city and do things their way. They are my people. But they aren’t the way you are to each other. They have been in there too long. I am that way, too. I can see it. I feel a great emptiness.”
“It is only your illness, my friend.”
“No. It is more. It is a numbness. We hardly feel. My real friends are the machines and computation systems. Look. You and Tor are really strangers to each other, but I sense feelings flowing between you. I have been lying here a long time thinking about this. It is true.”
“Fifteen years ago, if Tor had seen me outside the city, he would have killed me.”
“That long? He was only a boy.”
“What matter?”
“Yes, he told me of that. But he would have felt a certain way about you. He would not have calculated it all out.”
“No. He would not have bothered,” said the Protector, chuckling.
“We seldom touch each other, you know.”
“What do you see in that?”
“I see that everyone here touches. Tristal comes, and Tor puts his arm around him. Tor kisses me, and I feel something like a shock flow from him. Tristal would touch me, but I won’t let him. They sleep in a heap with Raran, the big dog. Stel and Ahroe come here. They touch. Garet touches them. He reaches for me.”
“That is a habit. It can be learned.”
“Can it? I see it, but I don’t understand it. Still, I remember Tor carrying me, all muddy, to the fire. I was swept up in something. It had great power. I turned myself over to him.”
“Yes, Celeste. Are you afraid, then, that your friends in the dome will not touch? That they will not feel our togetherness, that reaches from Shumai to Pelbar, and even beyond to the animals? Are you afraid that with all their knowledge, they will therefore act in ways not in our interest?”
“Yes.”
“But you do love them. You can’t let us leave them there to die when the dome collapses.”
“Love them? I am not sure I know what you mean. I don’t think so. Perhaps Thornton, but he is an old man. He is kind, though, often. I am now afraid of them.”
“You love Tor. I can see that. No, don’t cover your face. We all see it and accept it as normal. He obviously loves you, behind that fierce beard of his. See? He doesn’t deny it. If you learned so quickly, then—”
“But you don’t understand. You haven’t met Eolyn, or Zeller, or Dexter. You haven’t seen the comps. You haven’t seen Butto trying to make babies and failing.”
“Make babies?”
“Yes. In the lab. It is to control the genetics—that is, the way the child will turn out. Yes, we can do that. No, we can’t. We once did, but we have forgotten how. Do you know that all our food, everything we use—oh, I am so ashamed by all this.”
“But you did what you had to do. And you are changing. They will adjust.”
“Will they? I am not sure. I am not sure. I don’t even think I can, really.”
“Then, dear child, you are worried about us more than about them. What happened in there that so drove you out that you have traded away a whole world, all you knew, for strangers?”
“They were strangers. They were. More strangers than you. I know. You have to get them out. But I am so afraid. They have great power. You are safer with less.”
All three were silent in the dim room. Finally, the Protector said, “Well, Celeste, I thank you for your friendship and your openness. I will call a council to discuss this. Tor, please ask the guardsmen to come in. Now if you will rest, my friend, I am sure you will get well. After all, there are only so many diseases, and you are running through this list quite rapidly. I will not kiss you as Tor does, because I suddenly see myself as a teeming city of tiny beetles—what were they? Microorganisms. I would like to see one someday. Now good night.” She patted the bedclothes and leaned on the guardsmen, slowly leaving the room.
As Tristal and the Protector slowly descended the stairs to the level of her apartments, she on the arm of a guardsman, far off at the dome the sun had set. The old structure lost the sunlight that had bathed it, and now gave up its residual outer heat to the air and the insects, alone, out in the edge of the empty place.
In her chamber, once again Eolyn looked at the pictures of beautiful women from ancient times. It was true. As Susan had said, she herself was as beautiful as they. She took one thin blond woman on a beach in the sun, holding a peculiar bottle with a long tap. She dilated the face and neck on the screen, punched a code, bringing her own face into superimposition. Yes. The bone structure was the same. Look, the slightly slanted eyes of the model made a flaw. She herself stood perfect in contrast.
She moved to the hand and spread her own to match. Again it was nearly identical, except for the ridiculously long fingernails on the model.
Perhaps then she was in the master plan of the founders, somehow. If they were to leave the dome in her lifetime, she would be the new Eve, the one perfect source, the mother of all living. No. She would not want to be that, swelling with babies. She would flow through time unchanged, a goddess of beauty. Somehow she would have to research aging and find a way to stop it. Surely that too was in the genes. Surely she could remake herself. They would have to recover and perpetuate out-of-mother systems for the life outside. They had worked well in the past.
But she knew this to be madness, to be vanity. No. She could not alter every cell in her body. She too would age, and the perfect flower of humanity would either drop its petals or pass them on to some other perfect flower. What a tragedy. How would she stand seeing her own child, grown and beautiful, move through the earth as she faded? Well, that was the method of things, or at least the human coordinates in which she must work. There was a logic, but it was evolutionary, not designed to satisfy individuals. A flaw in the system, Eolyn thought.
But when they left the dome, if they did, who would be the father for her, if she must be a mother? Could she take some of the ancient store of fluid so she would need no father? No. She shuddered. Some man would have to be involved. Still, that might not be so bad. She had been infected by the magazines. The life of the ancients, as depicted by The New Yorker, by Vogue—how satisfying it must have been to give all those gifts to oneself, the riches of the earth, knowing it was pure vanity, and c
hildish, but having no other motive, no humanitarian ideal, and so pursuing hedonism. It was a way of becoming what one was not, to enjoy the pleasure of the fantasy, all brought about by surrounding oneself, one’s pitiful body, with objects—approved objects difficult to obtain and denied others. It was like stroking oneself to hear oneself murmur with satisfaction.
What of Dexter? Yes, he was the only possible consort. He too was an excellent specimen—a bit cold, perhaps, but symmetrical, and detached enough to keep from getting sloppy. They could produce a new generation, now that Butto’s failures were so evident. Dexter. Susan had shown how the men moved close to her. Not Dexter, of course—yet. But she was a magnet, despite the depressants. She smiled to herself.
At that moment, Dexter and Ruthan, in his chamber, had put in the code to prevent entry. She looked weary and spent, puzzled and frightened.
“I don’t know, Dex. It is wrong somehow, isn’t it? You have no bond of loyalty to me.”
“I do, Ruthy. And our love will be our further bond. What bond could there be? In ancient times that was the only one that really worked. The ancient ceremony of marriage? We are all that is left on a barren and ravaged planet, and its only hope of regeneration. That itself is marriage, is it not?”
“Oh, Dex. I am not sure. It is so secret. Royal would disapprove.”
“Royal? I suppose he would. Come, Ruthy. I know you love me.” He took her in his arms and kissed her whole face, systematically, missing no spot. She slowly relaxed, and he deftly turned her and laid her back on his sleep pad, moving to her. The light field dimmed, and the pattern board of lights describing conditions in the rodentry stood steady, then moved and repositioned, unwatched. In the left quadrant, it recorded a birth—five new rat lives dropped gently into the corner, their tiny hearts ticking, their tiny mouths opening and closing like the pulsings of hydra. The blip of the mother turned, indifferent. The record of one small heart stopped. The others continued to monitor, certain and even, in that section of the screen.
After a time, Ruthan, her arms still around Dexter, sighed and squeezed her eyes shut, tears in their corners. Dexter grinned down at her. Reaching over, he touched a button. A panel in his wall slid back. Three white rats sat bewildered in a row of three cages. A tiny signal light went on, and all three sat up and clapped their pink hands silently several times, then sank back down again. Dexter slyly touched the signal again. Again they obediently sat up and clapped. Then the panel shut. Dexter stifled his laughter.
Leaning down, he murmured in Ruthan’s ear, “Well, my love, who had no mother, you and I, who also had no mother, may really become a mother and a father. Isn’t it all strange?” Ruthan put her face into his shoulder and held it there.
When the Protector reentered her chambers, she motioned to Tristal to resume his seat at the eating table, while she sat across from him in her own large chair.
The Protector seemed distracted and restless, and Tristal sat quietly, looking around the rather stark room. On the wall a pellute hung on a cord made of woven sweet grasses. It had been the Jestana’s late husband’s, he a quiet man, compliant in the Pelbar manner, who lived his dreams in music and in a fierce loyalty to his only son, Jestak, who had changed the history of the Heart River fourteen years ago by uniting its peoples.
“Tristal,” she began, “I have two things to say to you—perhaps three. All are different, yet all are related.
“This matter of procedure. When you are out on the prairies, and you approach a Shumai camp, what do you do?”
“Blow the horn of greeting, or else yell, if we don’t have one.”
“What will happen if you don’t?”
“Perhaps nothing. Perhaps, too, a fight, if the others think we are enemies.”
“So you always do send a signal?”
“Yes. It is such a habit that we don’t notice not to.”
“Exactly, Tristal. Now we have such procedures as well. One is the means of approaching the Protector. I am, after all, the most important personage in Pelbarigan—or at least one holding this office is. Don’t worry. I don’t feel it as a source of pride, but rather as a weight. I would rather be with my son at Northwall. Now I would like you to make me a promise, and I hope you will.”
“A promise?”
“Yes. I would like you to follow all Pelbar procedures while you are with us. That includes addressing me as Protector when you are with others. Will you do that?”
“Why?”
The Protector shifted in her chair. She moved her finger on the table between them. “Because that will be the only possible way I can see much of you and do much for you.”
“Why would you do that?”
“What happened to your family?”
A look of pain flitted through Tristal’s eyes. “They died in a fire on the prairie.”
“Were you with them?”
Tristal swallowed hard and looked down, then nodded.
“You don’t need to tell me. I am glad you have Tor. But he is—well, a man in motion, is he not? Pelbarigan doesn’t move.”
Tristal looked up. “I have Stel and Ahroe here. And Hagen.”
“Yes. Well, then that is all I wanted. You may go.”
“I thought there were three things.”
“It does not matter. You may go now.”
Tristal sat utterly still, and the Protector grew irritated at his disobedience. He dropped his head. “I meant no discourtesy,” he said. “I see it was, though. You must think of it as the behavior of the mice on the great rock.”
“What is that?”
“It is not a great rock to them. They treat it like any other place because they don’t know better. I suppose I don’t understand, either. But I am willing to try to be of use to you if you would like that. I mean it. You must understand. I know I am an ignorant boy, and my one good point is that my uncle cares for me. I will do something because of that someday.”
“Your uncle? Would you be an axeman, then? That, you must realize, is a fading way of life. Even now the Shumai are gathering at Northwall as farmers and herdsmen. I hear they are establishing farms along the Isso River.”
“But, Protector, a good axeman is something you don’t understand. And Tor is the best. The Shumai—we don’t organize into cities like you. We are free. But Tor can organize them. They are wild and restless, but he disciplines them. He has a way of knowing, and they feel it.”
“Knowing what?”
“It is hard to say. He seems to know where the cattle are, where danger is, how to find water in summer in the western plains. He knows when one of his men is angry, or when I am so lonely he must put his arm around me; and when he does, the loneliness vanishes. I don’t know how he knows. He just knows.”
“I see. Are you good at that?”
“No. Not at all. I am not much good at anything.” Tristal said that with an openness that made it a statement of fact without any regret or lament in it. The Protector touched her fingertips together.
“You could do something for me now that no one else is in a position to do.”
“I will do it, but I am not at all sure I will do it right.”
“Do you know where Northwall is?”
“Of course. Up the Heart.”
“Could you take a message for me to Jestak? No one must know. I don’t want to use normal channels. It will take you some time.”
“Of course. I will start now if you would like.”
“Before morning will be fine. But you must not tell anyone even where you are going. You must start off in another direction. There is too much opposition to Celeste and the dome here.”
“Tor will know.”
“Tor will . . . Yes, of course. I will tell him.”
Tristal got up. Then he said, “Oh, yes. There was another thing.”
“Yes. Sit down. I am worried about you. You look at Celeste the way boys look at girls, but also almost as one would at Aven—or Sertine—if you could see Her. Are you aware that she is
a potential danger to you, to us?”
“Of course. She has, behind her words, the knowledge that will change everything. We don’t know how she will change it, though.”
The Jestana jerked her head upright and squinted at him a little. “You see that clearly then? You are an intelligent young man. Then why are you so completely in love with her? You are also only a boy, you know.”
Tristal looked at her with puzzled despair, then shook his head. “I know and I don’t know. Is that the kind of thing you can explain? It has just happened. I think it is because I can feel what she is feeling. Her whole world has been simply snuffed out, the way you would blow out a lamp. Her loneliness is worse than mine was. We were running, my parents and I, out on the long-grass prairie. The grass was taller than our heads. The fire came on a high wind, and it came faster than we could run, sending sparks out in front of us. There was no break in the grass and no water. Finally it was clear it was on us. My parents threw me on the ground, tore up the clods, and lay on me, covering me. I could feel them writhe as the fire took them, but they never cried out, and when it passed they were dead, and I wasn’t even burnt, though my chest was so full of smoke that I have had trouble with it ever since.”
The Protector stared at the table. When she finally looked up, she saw Tristal’s eyes shining full. “One other thing,” he said. “She was running from something in the dome. I know it. The dome is all she knows, but she fears it. That makes me fear it, too. Even more, because I don’t know it. Protector, I didn’t really know my parents loved me like that. They weren’t that good to me. I have been beaten for very little, and that is rare among the Shumai. I have been cursed and neglected. But when it came to our deaths, they gave me my life as freely and willingly as the noblest Shumai. It cost them the most terrible agony. I know they didn’t cry out because they didn’t want the echoes of those cries to ring in my head forever. But you know what?”
“You hear the cries anyhow. The cries that were never uttered.”
“Yes,” he whispered.
“Don’t worry about that. Every parent cries those cries somehow. You will yourself when you have children. It is a part of being human. You mustn’t suffer anguish because at last they achieved a greatness, you know. What? What is it? There is more?”
The Dome in the Forest Page 8