CAPTAIN: Yes, Mr. Balls, I do. But you know, if it wasn’t, something else would be. A meteor, an interstellar plague spore, the irresistible gravity well around an invisible neutron star, an extra-galactic enemy destroyer, a collision with another Ship of the Fleet... One way or another, Mr. Balls, we are going to have had it. Sometime, somewhere in the time-space continuum, there is a point-instant with our name on it. So what can we do but go on?
FIRST MATE: But we don’t have to drag this thing along with us—
CAPTAIN: If we don’t give it a fair start, then who’s to. carry our breadfruit trees on to the Unknown End when we run out of fuel?
CHIEF ENGINEER: I’ve thocht, Captain, that perhaps that cruiser might lend us a hand wi’ the beastie, if it I knew we had one. "
CAPTAIN: It certainly would be a help in the towing. But ,the problem is getting “Sparks” to send a message to the cruiser. If only we had a normal Communications Officer!
COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: Please be quiet, everybody. I’m receiving.
INSANE SECOND MATE: From the dead upside-down queen out there?
COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: No; she isn’t saying anything. This is from the alien, I think.
INSANE SECOND MATE: Already? Ha! I always said that a ship could communicate with its alien, if it just listened carefully. What is it saying?
COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: It still doesn’t speak English.
INSANE SECOND MATE: What’s the message, then?
COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: Hiccups.
CAPTAIN: Hiccups?
COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: It has the hiccups. It must have been the tomato rice soup. Here, I’ll put it on the intracom. Listen.
ALIEN: Hic Hic
CHIEF ENGINEER: Captain, there’s a rattling in the forward pipes, and a high pressure area building up amidships. Should I try baking soda?
CAPTAIN: No, no, you never use soda when there’s an alien aboard, haven’t you read the Handbook? Try Maalox.
CHIEF ENGINEER: Aye aye, Captain.
ALIEN: Hic
CHIEF ENGINEER: There, there, puir wee sleekit cowerin’ beastie.
FIRST MATE: Oh, my God, if only I could have shipped aboard a cruiser, where I belong! I’m going mad here! You’re all mad. I’m mad.
INSANE SECOND MATE: Mr. Balls. Listen. Would it make you feel any better if there was another male on board?
FIRST MATE: Another male? Of course it would. Strength! Sanity! Logic! Cleanliness! Godliness! Virility! Yes! Yes!
INSANE SECOND MATE: Even if it was an alien?
FIRST MATE: An alien?
INSANE SECOND MATE: This might, you know, be a male alien.
CAPTAIN: Yes, there’s better than a fifty percent chance of that.
FIRST MATE: My God. It might. You’re right. It might.
CAPTAIN: That was a good thought, “Bats.”
INSANE SECOND MATE: Well, it’s not my own preference, but I thought it might stabilise Mr. Balls.
FIRST MATE: A male alien. A male. By golly. It just might be. Hey. Alien. Are you there?
ALIEN: Hie
FIRST MATE: What are you, alien? Hmm? Are you a little boy alien? Hmm?
CAPTAIN: Please, Mr. Balls, don’t, as it were, go overboard. Keep your duties in mind, and the obscure dignity of your position. We need you. You’d better do some mathematics right now. As for me, I’ll be starting dinner soon. Second Mate, how are things on the Bridge?
INSANE SECOND MATE: Splendid, Captain. Fiery bears and scorpions break like luminous foam and stream backward in glory from our prow. Beneath us, above us, on all sides of us is the abyss, unsounded, full of unimaginable horrors, unpredictable disasters, undeserved beauties, and unexpected death. Like a flying yarrow stalk we shoot forward, if it is forward, through the gulfs of probability.
CAPTAIN: Very good. “Bolts”?
CHIEF ENGINEER: Dandy, Captain. We’re on Warp Five, and the Maalox is working fine.
CAPTAIN : Very good. I shall make dinner now. Something light but nourishing, I think. Chinese Egg Flower Soup, perhaps.
COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: Please. Will you all be quiet a minute. I’m receiving from Cosmic Sources.
INSANE SECOND MATE: Oh, I hear them sometimes without even a radio. What are they saying?
ALIEN: Hie
COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: Shh. Well, here’s a message just came in from a sister ship of the fleet. It says: Tsk Tsk.
CAPTAIN: Never mind that. What do the Cosmic Sources say?
COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: I can’t quite make it out. There’s a lot of star hiss, and the code keeps changing. It might be Congratulations. Or again it might not be that at all. Be quiet, please. I’m listening.
The Eye Altering
Miriam stood at the big window of the infirmary ward and looked out at the view and thought, For twenty-five years I have been standing at this window and looking out at this view. And never once have I seen what I wanted to see.
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem—
The pain was forgotten, yes. The hatred and the fear, forgotten. In exile you don’t remember the grey days and the black years. You remember the sunlight, the orchards, the white cities. Even when you try to forget it you remember that Jerusalem was golden.
The sky outside the ward window was dulled with haze. Over the low ridge called Ararat the sun was setting; setting slowly, for New Zion had a slower spin than Old Earth, and a twenty-eight-hour day; settling, rather than setting, dully down onto the dull horizon. There were no clouds to gather the colors of sunset. There were seldom any clouds. When the haze thickened there might be a misty, smothering rain; when the haze was thin, as now, it hung high and vague, formless. It never quite cleared. You never saw the color of the sky. You never saw the stars. And through the haze the sun, no, not the sun, but NSC 641 (Class G) burned swollen and vaporous, warty as an orange—remember oranges? the sweet juice on the tongue? the orchards of Haifa?—NSC 641 stared, like a bleary eye. You could stare back at it. No glory of gold to blind you. Two imbeciles staring at each other.
Shadows stretched across the valley towards the buildings of the Settlement. In shadows the fields and woods were black; in the light they were brown, purplish, and dark red. Dirty colors, the colors you got when you scrubbed your watercolors too much and the teacher came by and said, You’d better use some fresh water, Mimi, it’s getting muddy. Because the teacher had been too kind to say to a ten-year-old, That picture’s a total loss, Mimi, throw it away and start fresh.
She had thought of that before—she had thought all her thoughts before, standing at this window—but this time it reminded her of Genya, because of the painting, and she turned to see how he was doing. The shock symptoms were almost gone, his face was no longer so pale and his pulse had steadied. While she held his wrist he sighed a bit and opened his eyes. Lovely eyes he had, grey in the thin face. He had never been much but eyes, poor Genya. Her oldest patient. Twenty-four years he had been her patient, right from the moment of his birth, five pounds, purplish-blue like a fetal rat, a month premature and half dead of cyanosis: the fifth child born on New Zion, the first in Ararat Settlement. A native. A feeble and unpromising native. He hadn’t even had the strength, or the sense, to cry at his first breath of this alien air. Sofia’s other children had been full-term and healthy, two girls, both married and mothers now, and fat Leon who could hoist a seventy-kilo sack of grain when he was fifteen. Good young colonists, strong stock. But Miriam had always loved Genya, and all the more after her own years of miscarriages and stillbirths, and the last birth, the girl who had lived two hours, whose eyes had been clear grey like Genya’s. Babies never have grey eyes, the eyes of the newborn are blue, that was all sentimental rubbish. But how could you ever make sure of what color things were under this damned warty-orange sun? Nothing ever looked right. “So there you are, Gennady Borisovich,” she said, “back home, eh?” It had been their joke when he was a child; he had spent so much time in the infirmary that whenever he came in with one of his f
evers or fainting spells or gasping asthma he would say, “Here I am, back home, Auntie Doctor ”
“What happened?” he asked.
“You collapsed. Hoeing down in the South Field. Aaron and Tina brought you up here on the tractor. Touch of sunstroke, maybe? You’ve been doing all right, haven’t you?”
He shrugged and nodded.
“Dizzy? Short of breath?”
“On and off.”
“Why didn’t you come to the clinic?”
“It’s no good, Miriam.”
Since he was grown he had called her Miriam. She missed “Auntie Doctor.” He had grown away from her, these last few years, withdrawn from her into his painting. He had always sketched and painted, but now, all his free time and whatever energy he had left when his Settlement duties were done, he spent in the loft of the generator building where he’d made a kind of studio, grinding colors from rocks and mixing dyes from native plants, making brushes by begging pigtail ends off little girls, and painting—painting on scraps from the lumber mill, on bits of rag, on precious scraps of paper, on smooth slabs of slate from the quarry on Ararat if nothing better was at hand. Painting portraits, scenes of Settlement life, buildings, machinery, still-lifes, plants, landscapes, inner visions. Painting anything, everything. His portraits had been much in demand—people were always kind to Genya and the other sicklies—but lately he had not done any portraits; he had gone in for queer muddy jumbles of forms and lines all in a dark haze, like worlds half created. Nobody liked those paintings, but nobody ever told Genya he was wasting his time. He was a sickly; he was an artist; O.K. Healthy people had no time to be artists. There was too much work to do. But it was good to have an artist. It was human. It was like Earth. Wasn’t it?
They were kind to Toby, too, whose stomach troubles were so bad that at sixteen he weighed eighty-four pounds; kind to little Shura, who was just learning to talk at six, and whose eyes wept and wept all day long, even when she was smiling; kind to all their sicklies, the ones whose bodies could not adjust to this alien world, whose stomachs could not digest the native proteins even with the help of the metabolising pills which every colonist must take twice a day every day of his life on New Zion. Hard as life was in the Twenty Settlements, much as they needed every hand to work, they were gentle with their useless ones, their afflicted. In affliction the hand of God is visible. They remembered the words civilisation, humanity. They remembered Jerusalem.
“Genya, my dear, what do you mean, it’s no good?” His quiet voice had frightened her. “It’s no good,” he had said, smiling. And the grey eyes not clear but veiled, hazy.
“Medicine,” he said, “Pills. Cures.”
“Of course you know more about medicine than I do,” Miriam said. “You’re a much better doctor than I am. Or are you giving up? Is that it, Genya? Giving up?” Anger had come upon her so suddenly, from so deep within, from anxiety so long and deeply hidden, that it shook her body and cracked her voice.
“I’m giving up one thing. The metas.”
“Metas? Giving them up? What are you talking about?”
“I haven’t taken any for two weeks.”
The despairing rage swelled in her. She felt her face go hot, so that it felt twice its normal size. “Two weeks! And so, and so, and so you’re here! Where did you think you’d end up, you terrible fool? Lucky you’re not dead!”
“I haven’t been any worse since I stopped taking them, Miriam. Better, this whole last week. Until today. It can’t be that. It must have been heatstroke. I forgot to wear a hat...” He too flushed faintly, in the eagerness of his pleading, or with shame. It was stupid to work in the fields bareheaded; for all its dull look NSC 641 could hit the unsheltered human head quite as hard as fiery Sol, and Genya was apologetic for his carelessness. “You see,I was feeling fine this morning, really good, I kept right up with the others hoeing. Then I felt a bit dizzy, but I didn’t want to stop, it was so good to be able to work right with the others, I never thought about heatstroke.”
Miriam found that there were tears in her eyes, and this made her so ultimately and absolutely angry that she couldn’t speak at all. She got up off Genya’s bed and strode down the ward between the rows of beds, four on one side, four on the other. She strode back and stood staring out the window at the mud-colored shapeless ugly world.
Genya was saying something—“Miriam, honestly, couldn’t it be that the metas are worse for me than the native proteins are?”—but she did not listen; the grief and wrath and fear swelled in her and swelled in her, and broke, and she cried out, “Oh, Genya, Genya, how could you? Not you, to give up now, after fighting so long—I can’t bear it! I can’t bear it!” But she did not cry it out aloud. Not one word of it. Never. She cried out in her mind, and some tears came out and ran down her cheeks, but her back was turned to the patient. She looked through distorting tears at the flat valley and the dull sun and said to them, silent, “I hate you.” Then after a while she could turn around and say aloud, “Lie down,”—for he had sat up, distressed by her long silence—“lie down, be quiet. You’ll take two metas before dinner. If you need anything, Geza’s in the nurse’s station.” And she walked out.
As she left the infirmary she saw Tina climbing up the back path from the fields, coming to see how Genya was, no doubt. For all his wheezes and fevers Genya had never wanted for girl friends. Tina, and Shoshanna, and Bella, and Rachel, he could have had his pick. But last year when he and Rachel were living together, they had got contraceptives from the clinic regularly, and then they had separated; they hadn’t married, though by his age, twenty-four, Settlement kids were married and parents. He hadn’t married Rachel, and Miriam knew why. Moral genetics. Bad genes. Shouldn’t pass them on to the next generation. Weed out the sicklies. No procreation for him, and therefore no marriage; he couldn’t ask Rachel to live barren for the love of him. What the Settlements needed was children, plenty of healthy young natives who, with the help of the meta pills, could survive on this planet.
Rachel hadn’t taken up with anybody else. But she was only eighteen. She’d get over it. Marry a boy from another Settlement, most likely, and move away, away from Genya’s big grey eyes. It would be best for her. And for him.
No wonder Genya was suicidal! Miriam thought, and put the thought away from her fiercely, wearily. She was very weary. She had meant to go to her room and wash, change her clothes, change her mood, before dinner; but the room was so lonesome with Leonid away at Salem Settlement and not due back for at least another month, she couldn’t stand it. She went straight across the dusty central square of the Settlement to the refectory building, and into the Living Room. To get away, clear away, from the windless haze and the grey sky and the ugly sun.
Nobody was in the Living Room but Commander Marca, fast asleep on one of the padded wooden couches, and Reine, reading. The two oldest members of the Settlement. Commander Marca was in fact the oldest person in the world. He had been forty-four when he piloted the Exile Fleet from Old Earth to New Zion; he was seventy now, and very frail. People didn’t wear well here. They aged early, died at fifty, sixty. Reine, the biochemist, was forty-five now but looked twenty years older. It’s a damned geriatric club, Miriam thought sourly; and it was true that the young, the Zionborn, seldom used the Living Room. They came there to read, as it held the Settlement’s library of books and tapes and microfilm, but not many of them read much, or had much time to read. And maybe the April light and the pictures made them a little uneasy. They were such moral, severe, serious young people; there was no leisure in their lives, no beauty in their world; how could they approve of this luxury their elders needed, this one haven, this one place like home...The Living Room had no windows. Avram, a wizard with anything electrical, had done the indirect lighting, deliberately reproducing the color and quality of sunlight—not NSC 641 light, but sunlight—so that to enter the Living Room was to enter a room in a house on Earth on a warm sunny day of April or early May, to see all things in that clear,
clean, lovely light. Avram and several others had worked on the pictures, enlarging colored photos to a meter or so square: scenes of Earth, photographs and paintings brought by the colonists—Venice, the Negev, the domes of the Kremlin, a farm in Portugal, the Dead Sea, Hampstead Heath, a beach in Oregon, a meadow in Poland, cities, forests, mountains, Van Gogh’s cypresses, Bierstadt’s Rocky Mountains, Monet’s water-lilies, Leonardo’s blue mysterious caves. Every wall of the room was covered with pictures, dozens of pictures, all the beauty of the Earth. So that the Earthborn could see and remember, so that the Zionborn could see and know.
There had been some discussion about the pictures, twenty years ago when Avram had started putting them up: Was it really wise? Should we look back? And so on. But then Commander Marca had come by on a visit, seen the Living Room of Ararat Settlement, and said, “This is where I’ll stay.” With every Settlement vying to have him, he had chosen Ararat. Because of the pictures of Earth, because of the light of Earth in that room, shining on the green fields, the snowy peaks, the golden forests of autumn, the flight of gulls above the sea, the white and red and rose of waterlilies on blue pools—clear colors, true, pure, the colors of the Earth.
He slept there now, a handsome old man. Outside, in the hard, dull, orange daylight, he would look sick and old, his cheeks veined and muddy. Here you could see what he looked like.
Miriam sat down near him, facing her favorite picture, a quiet landscape by Corot, trees over a silvery stream. She was so tired that for once she was willing to just sit, in a mild stupor. Through the stupor, faintly, idly, words came floating. Couldn’t it be... honestly, couldn’t it be that the metas are worse... Miriam, honestly, couldn’t it be...
The Compass Rose Page 15