They were different because they had meaning …
The moment was so poignantly sweet that Danby never wanted it to end. The very thought of its passing racked him with unbearable agony and instinctively he did the only physical thing he could do to sustain it.
He put his arm around Miss Jones' shoulder.
She did not move. She sat there quietly, her breast rising and falling at even intervals, her long lashes drifting down now and again like dark, gentle birds winging over blue limpid waters—
"The play we watched last night," Danby said. "Romeo and Juliet—why didn't you like it?"
"It was rather horrible, sir. It was a burlesque, really—tawdry, cheap, the beauty of the lines corrupted and obscured."
"Do you know the lines?"
"Some of them."
"Say them. Please."
"Yes, sir. At the close of the balcony scene, when the two lovers are parting, Juliet says, 'Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say good night till it be morrow.' And Romeo answers: 'Sleep dwell upon thine eyes, peace in thy breast! Would I were sleep and peace, so sweet to rest!' Why did they leave that out, sir? Why?"
"Because we're living in a cheap world," Danby said, surprised at his sudden insight, "and in a cheap world, precious things are worthless. Shay—say the lines again, please, Miss Jones."
"'Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say good night till it be morrow—'"
"Let me finish." Danby concentrated. "'Sleep dwell upon thine eyes, peace—'"
"'—in thy breast—'"
"'Would I were sleep and peace, so—'"
"'—sweet—'"
"'—so sweet to rest!'"
Abruptly, Miss Jones stood up. "Good evening, madam," she said.
Danby didn't bother to get up. It wouldn't have done any good. He could see Laura well enough, anyway, from where he was sitting. Laura standing in the living-room doorway in her new Cadillette pajamas and her bare feet that had made no sound in their surreptitious descent of the stairs. The two-dimensional cars that comprised the pajama pattern stood out in vermilion vividness and it was as though she was lying down and letting them run rampant over her body, letting them defile her breasts and her belly and her legs …
He saw her narrow face and her cold pitiless eyes, and he knew it would be useless to try to explain, that she wouldn't—couldn't—understand. And he realized with sudden shocking clarity that in the world in which he lived September had been dead for decades, and he saw himself in the morning, loading the case into the Baby B. and driving down the glittering city streets to the little secondhand store and asking the proprietor for his money back, and he saw himself afterwards, but he had to look away, and when he looked away he saw Miss Jones standing incongruously in the gaudy living room and heard her saying, over and over like a broken, bewildered record, "Is something wrong, madam? Is something wrong?"
It was several weeks before Danby felt whole enough to go down to Friendly Fred's for a beer. Laura had begun speaking to him by then, and the world, while not quite the same as it had once been, had at least taken on some of the aspects of its former self. He backed the Baby B. out of the drivette and drove down the street and into the multicolored boulevard traffic. It was a clear June night and the stars were crystal pinpoints high above the fluorescent fire of the city. The hot dog stand on the corner was finished now, and open for business. Several customers were standing at the gleaming chrome counter and a waitress was turning sizzling wieners over a chrome charcoal brazier. There was something familiar about her gay rainfall of a dress, about the way she moved; about the way the gentle sunrise of her hair framed her gentle face— Her new owner was leaning on the counter some distance away, chatting with a customer.
There was a tightness in Danby's chest as he parked the Baby B. and got out and walked across the concrete apron to the counter—a tightness in his chest and a steady throbbing in his temples. There were some things you couldn't permit to happen without at least trying to stop them, no matter what the price for trying to stop them involved.
He had reached the section of the counter where the owner was standing, and he was about to lean across the polished chrome and slap the smug fat face, when he saw the little cardboard sign propped against the chrome mustard jar, the sign that said, MAN WANTED …
A hot-dog stand was a long way from being a September classroom, and a schoolteacher dispensing hot-dogs could never quite compare to a schoolteacher dispensing dreams; but if you wanted something badly enough, you took whatever you could get of it, and were thankful for even that …
"I could only work nights," Danby said to the owner. "Say from six to twelve—"
"Why, that would be fine," the owner said. "I'm afraid I won't be able to pay you much at first, though. You see, I'm just starting out and—"
"Never mind that," Danby said. "When do I start?"
"Why, the sooner the better."
Danby walked around to where a section of the counter raised up on hidden hinges and he stepped into the stand proper and took off his coat. If Laura didn't like the idea, she could go to hell, but he knew it would be all right because the additional money he'd be making would make her dream—the Cadillette one—come true.
He donned the apron the owner handed him and joined Miss Jones in front of the charcoal brazier. "Good evening, Miss Jones," he said. She turned her head and the blue eyes seemed to light up and her hair was like the sun coming up on a hazy September morning. "Good evening, sir," she said, and a September wind sprang up in the June night and blew through the stand and it was like going back to school again after an endless empty summer.
The End
© 1957 by Mercury Press, originally appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1957.
The View from Endless Scarp
Marta Randall
The last ship nosed up through the thin clouds. It was still in sight when Markowitz sprinted from the boulders and leaped about the landing field, throwing her arms in the air, screaming, weeping, begging the ship to return. By the time it disappeared she lay exhausted on the hot black setdown, fingers scrabbling, muttering to herself. The departure hadn't gone as she'd planned but the results were the same, and Markowitz, wretched in the dirt, remained perhaps the only human being on planet.
A Peri scuttled down the hill. It stopped at the edge of the field, hesitated, and flung a rock at her. She cursed but didn't move. The Peri lifted its narrow snout and produced the irritating whine that was the Peri giggle; the others tumbled past her down the hill and poured through the abandoned settlement, grabbing and screaming and fighting over what remained of the colony. Within an hour the town had disappeared, save for the shattered foundations of the houses. These, too, would find their way to the Peri villages. Markowitz didn't care. After a while the Peri left, dragging the last of their loot behind them.
The sun moved overhead. She turned her face from it and remembered Thompson. That absurd hysteria on the landing field: she was no better than the rest of them. She turned her head again, both ashamed and relieved, and stood amid a burned landscape in which nothing moved except her shadow across the cracked earth. She foraged a meal of unripe berries and bitter roots; the Peri hadn't dismantled the well pump, so she sat beside it, sipping gritty water and gnawing at the roots. She filled her wooden canteen. In mid-afternoon she left the ruins and walked to the brink of Endless Scarp, where she sat under a dead tree, her feet dangling over the immense drop, and waited for night to fall.
The view from Endless Scarp had once, briefly, been a view of paradise. The Terrans had engineered rain in a place of drought, had made rivers and lakes, had caused the earth to flower and bear fruit. Within a Peri generation they changed the face of the world, and the Peri had changed with it. No need to move with the migrating game, now that game stayed year-long on the plateau, held by the abundance of food. No need to store grains or beans, which flourished in the broa
d valley. No need to sow even the minimal crops the Peri had planted during their migrations, seeding the slapdash fields one season and returning to harvest crops the next.
Fat clouds slipped eastward from the sea, up the high slopes of the continent, to drop rain on the angles of the Scarp and into the wide plain. Rivers widened and deepened, the desert turned green. The small, slender Peri added weight under their silvery coats. Terrans went to the new Peri villages and cured the sick, set up schools, listened to Peri music and made music of their own. The Peri laughed and capered and accepted Terran teachings, and the Terrans smiled, knowing that in two generations, or perhaps four, the Peri would become small, alien versions of their benefactors. The Terrans had been given a desert world to colonize and succeeded in making a piece of it green. They were fruitful and multiplied. They benefited the natives. They prospered. They were very proud of themselves.
The sky deepened from blue to rose, and the shadow of the Scarp cast long, red fingers across the scorched plain. Not even meka trees grew there now; they had died of prosperity and had not returned with the return of drought. Markowitz stared into the increasing darkness, hoping as always for a distant glimmer of light. Day fell into night and no fires glowed; if Thompson built a signal fire, he built it beyond the curve of the horizon. She felt a sudden, powerful longing, not for the safety of the departed ships, but for the circle of Thompson's arms. She shook her head and looked across the desert. The rose tints of the plain darkened to purple. The air chilled.
She put on her jacket and her reed hat and walked from cave to cave, prying up boulders and extracting the things she had hidden. Some of the Peri followed at a distance, curious, but didn't approach her. She ignored them. They would not steal her belongings as long as she carried them.
She built a fire in front of the last cave, for warmth and as a signal across the dark, for Thompson. In its flickering light she loaded her supplies into the carrying pack, strapped the knives to her belt, and ate a handful of berries. She wet her lips from the canteen, and, after stringing vines and gourds across the cave's entrance as an alarm, she lay with her head on the pack and stared at the patch of night behind the rocks. Eventually she slept.
Twenty years of prosperity; then the engines of change broke down. An arctic storm jammed the unjammable metering station at the pole: Hohbach, their chief of science, thought that a defective casing on the self-repair devices cracked and the equipment froze. The wrong circuit activated the wrong relay in the delicate sensing and transmitting mechanism in the monitors' cores. The wrong signal beamed up to the great engines that had nudged the moon into a new course, and the engines exploded. The moon, its path so cautiously modified to modify the tides of air and water, twisted in the sky and stabilized into a new orbit; the earth heaved and groaned; the winds shrieked. Hundreds of Terrans and thousands of Peri died. The ocean currents changed, and the rains fell far out to sea. Within a season the broad, ripe plain withered; the rivers and lakes shrank to mud and baked away in the fierce sunlight.
The northern and western oceans were unnavigable, and the southern desert extended as far as scouts could walk and canteens last. The Peri spoke of a verdant land they said lay to the east, but few of them left. In the second year, the springs failed. For a short time the colony depended on the distilling stations along the boulder-strewn ocean shore, as they had done during the initial terraforming years. They carted water across the coastal hills to the village on the Scarp and the fertile land around it, but the stations broke down, or were vandalized by the Peri, or taken in storms, and the supply of brackish water stopped. Their generators cracked and stopped. They expended the last of their dwindling power to drill the well deeper, rationed water at a cup a day, and in the fifth year they sent out calls for help.
Help came four years after that. The colony had dwindled from five thousand to less than four hundred. They died of lack of water, lack of food, lack of hope. The Peri, too, died, in numbers so great the parched Terrans could not reckon them. The Peri sowed neither the new seeds of rains nor the old seeds of drought; they lived in their villages until the houses rotted around them, then moved on to others less decayed. Rituals fell away from them: of marriage, of death, of the seasons, of life. Instead, they laughed, sitting starving in the harsh daylight; laughed and shuffled in terrible parody of their dances and watched each other and the Terrans die with high good humor, cackling and rocking and plucking vermin from their dull, unhealthy coats. Their children disappeared. The colonists noticed, and looked at one another uneasily, and turned away.
"We did better than the Peri," Markowitz said in her dream. The words woke her. The Peri had lost everything: their food, their water, their culture, even their desire to help each other, their sense of themselves as fellows of the same creation. They stole food and water from the dying; they played practical jokes of fatal consequence. They gathered at the outskirts of the Terran settlement and giggled as their erstwhile benefactors struggled to survive, apportioning food and water, aiding the ill, whispering words of encouragement in the dense sunlight or the cold night. Markowitz's mother moved from house to house, bringing rations of food and water, talking of the rescue ships that would arrive at any hour now, any day. She pleaded, humored, and bullied people to live, and when she died, most of them died with her. She died because, alone one blazing afternoon, she fell and broke her leg and could not crawl to safety. The Peri thought her death quite funny. By the time Markowitz found her, it was too late.
Markowitz hissed in the blackness of the cave and flung a rock. It clattered and banged against the gourds. Outside, Peri voices laughed and shouted. Markowitz cursed and turned toward sleep again.
She woke to the pale dawn. The Peri were still laughing. She shouldered her pack and climbed down the face of Endless Scarp. About a dozen Peri walked with her. Most of them dropped away during the morning, but one, hardier than the others, continued tailing her. When she reached the plain and stopped to rest out the hottest part of the day, he dropped to a squat beside her in the shelter of an outcrop.
"Give me food," he said without much hope. When she refused, he remained beside her, staring across the baking plain. After a time he stood and ambled away, returning as she began to walk again.
"Where are you going?" he said as he fell into step beside her.
"East."
"There is nothing to the east," he said. She lengthened her step. He scurried to keep up; although he was soon panting, he did not fall behind. She slowed through fatigue, not sympathy. Their shadows stretched across the hardpan before them, gaunt and sharp-edged in the late sunlight. Beyond the bobbing rim of her broad hat, the plain's horizon disappeared into suspended dust. A few dying trees and stumps broke the flatness. The silence was absolute.
After a long time, "My name is Kre'e," the Peri said.
"Kre'e," she replied with automatic politeness. He grinned. "Kre'e, go home. I don't want your company."
"I'm only walking in the same direction, " he said, insulted.
"Walk on a different path."
"There's only one path going east."
She looked over the unbroken plain, on which any route would serve. He followed her glance and giggled again, and dropped a pace behind but did not leave. They walked in silence into the night.
She made camp that evening on the bank of a dead river, and while she dug through the mud in search of water, Kre'e found some shriveled roots. He ate them all and came to her where she built her signal fire. The air chilled rapidly.
"Give me water."
"Get your own," she said.
"You have extra water in your pouch; you have enough for both of us."
"I have just enough for me. I'll need it tomorrow. Get your own water."
"Why are you saving it? Let's drink it now; there will be more water tomorrow."
"Where?"
"Oh, there is always water."
"But you don't know," she said. "You would rather be lazy today and thirst tomo
rrow."
"Today's work is tomorrow's bounty," he said, parroting the lessons taught at Peri schools in paradise. She stared at him. "We must share in all things," he said.
"Find your own."
He shrugged, snickered, and ambled down the bed of the river. She watched him in the light of the fire. He was just entering his prime, perhaps eleven or twelve years old. Old enough to have attended and remembered the colony's native schools, to have lived through the months of terror and change. To know what it was like to be civilized. She looked away from him, wrapped her arms around her knees, and stared into the fire.
Kre'e returned and hunched so close to the fire that she demanded he move back. He sat just beyond the scorching point and tucked his small, dark hands between his thighs.
"You didn't go with the others, " he said. "Why not? They were going to a land of fat rains." When she was silent, he said, "Perhaps you were not allowed to go. Perhaps you did a thing for which they banished you."
She wondered what the lying, thieving, merciless Peri would consider a banishable crime. The fire burned lower.
"There's a man with a ship," she said after a time, almost talking to herself. "Somewhere to the east, there's a man with a ship who's still waiting for us. He shouldn't be left there; he shouldn't have to wait alone."
"To the east there is nothing, and then there is the valley," Kre'e said. "Perhaps. But the valley is nothing, is foolish, as foolish as giving up rain for a man in a broken ship."
"You know about him!"
"Of course. You just told me."
Sci Fiction Classics Volume 3 Page 17