The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Judith Merril

  “Sacrificing quality for quantity,” he growled. “Bring the top market price? Sure. I was counting on twice that.”

  Nan Maxill realized how much she herself had changed, or been changed, since the fellow came.

  Her father seemed to her now like a petulant child, going into a tantrum because something he wanted—something she saw wasn’t good for him—was denied. The boys she used to go out with were gluttonous infants, gurgling and slobbering their fatuous desires. The people of Henryton, of Evarts County, of—no, she corrected herself—people; people were juvenile, adolescent. News on the radio was of wars in China and Spain, massacre and bestialities in Germany, cruelties and self-defeat all over the world.

  Had she unconsciously acquired Ash’s viewpoint? He had no viewpoint, passed no judgments. He accepted what was all around him as he accepted what she told him: reflectively, curiously, puzzledly, but without revulsion. She had taken the attitude she thought ought to be his, unable to reach his detachment as he was unable to reach that of those who had exiled him here, as one who cannot distinguish between apes would put a gorilla and chimpanzee in the same zoo cage.

  As primitive characteristics were sloughed off, a price was paid for their loss. Ash’s people had exchanged his ability to make things grow for a compensatory ability to create by photosynthesis and other processes. If Ash had lost the savage ability to despise and hate, had he also lost the mitigating ability to love?

  Because she wanted Ash to love her.

  * * * *

  They were married in January, which some thought odd, but the season suited Nan who wanted a “regular” wedding and at the same time a quiet one. She had expected her father’s assent at least; Ash had made him prosperous in two short years; their marriage would be insurance that he would continue to do so. But Maxill’s bank account, his big car, the new respect Henryton—including his son-in-law— gave him, had inflated his ideas. “Who is the fellow anyway?” he demanded. “Where’d he come from originally? What’s his background?”

  “Does all that matter? He’s good and gentle and. kind, where he came from or who his parents were doesn’t change that.”

  “Oh, doesn’t it? Maybe there’s bad blood in him. Bound to come out. And he’s a cripple and not right in the head besides. Why, he couldn’t even talk like anybody else at first. Sure it matters: you want kids who turn out idiots with the wrong number of fingers? Maybe criminals too?”

  Nan neither smiled at his passion for respectability nor reminded him that her children would have a moonshiner and bootlegger for a grandfather. “Ash is no criminal.”

  Ash was no criminal, but what of other dangers? Not just children with the wrong number of fingers or differences she knew nothing of (she’d never dare let Ash be examined by a doctor for fear of what anatomical or functional differences might be revealed), but perhaps no children at all. Beings so different might well have sterile union. Or no carnal union at all. Perhaps no bond deeper than that of a man for a cat or horse. Nan didn’t pretend for a second it wouldn’t matter. It mattered terribly, every last perilous possibility. She was still determined to marry him.

  Maxill shook his head. “There’s another thing—he hasn’t even got a name.”

  “We’ll give him ours,” said Nan. “We’ll say he’s a second cousin or something.”

  “Hell we will!” her father exploded. “A freak like that—”

  “All right. We’ll elope then, and get a place of our own. It won’t be hard when anyone sees what Ash can do. And we won’t have to have good land.” She left it at that, giving him plenty of time to think over all the implications. He gave in. Grudgingly, angrily. But he gave in.

  Ash had never gone into Henryton or showed himself except the few times he’d helped Maxill pay back a debt of work. Still everyone knew there was some sort of hired man on the farm. Gladys and Muriel knew him to nod to and that was about all; they were skeptically astonished to learn he was a remote relative “from back East” and still more amazed to hear he was marrying Nan. They thought she could do better. Then they remembered her reputation; maybe they should be glad the fellow was doing right. They counted the months and were shocked when a year and a half went by before Ash Maxill junior was born.

  Nan had counted the months too. Some of her fears had been quickly dispelled, others persisted. She feared to look closely at her son, and the fear was not mitigated by Ash’s expression of aloof interest nor the doctor’s and nurses’ over-bright cheeriness. Her insides settled back into place as she delicately touched the tiny nose, unbelievably perfect ears, rounded head. Then she reached to lift the wrapping blanket—

  “Uh... uhh... Mrs. Maxill, uh...”

  She knew of course even before she saw them, and a great wave of defiance flowed through her. The little dimpled hands, the little rectangular feet—eight fingers, eight toes.

  She wanted to shout, It’s not an impediment, you idiots! Why do you need five fingers when four will do the same things more easily and skillfully, and do things no five-fingered hand will do? It wasn’t physical weakness which kept her quiet—she was a strong, healthy girl and the birth had not been complicated—but the knowledge that she must hide the child’s superiority as she hid Ash’s lest the ordinary ones turn on them both. She hid her face. Let them think it was anguish.

  She felt a curious sympathy for her father. Malcolm Maxill was triumphant; his dire prophecies had been fulfilled; he could not restrain his gratification. At the same time it was his grandson—his flesh and blood—who was deformed. Short of betraying Ash’s secret she had no way of reassuring him and even this might not console him. More than likely he would take Ash’s banishment as further proof of undesirability; he did not try to hide his increasing animosity.

  “You’d think,” said Nan, “you’d injured him instead of doing all you have.”

  Ash smiled and ran his hand lightly over her shoulder. It still surprised her slightly that someone without anger, envy or hate should be capable of humor and tenderness.

  “Do you expect him to be grateful?” he asked. “Have you forgotten all you told me about how people act? Anyway, I didn’t do it for your father but for the sake of doing it.”

  “Just the same, now the baby is here, we ought to have a regular agreement. Either a share in the farm or else wages—good wages.”

  She knew his look of grave and honest interest so well. “Why? We have all we can eat. Your clothes wear out but your father gives you money for new ones, and the baby’s too. Why—”

  “Why don’t your clothes wear out or get dirty?” she interrupted irrelevantly.

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. I told you I didn’t understand these things. Until I came here I never heard of fabrics which weren’t everwearing and self-cleaning.”

  “Anyway it doesn’t matter. We ought to be independent.”

  He shook his head. “Why?”

  * * * *

  Malcolm Maxill used some of the money from the bountiful crop of 1940 to buy the adjoining farm. He was indisputably a big man in Evarts County now. Three laborers worked the two farms; the house had been remodeled; a truck, two cars and a station wagon stood in the new garage beside all the shining machinery. The banker in Henryton listened deferentially when he spoke; Muriel’s husband asked his advice.

  Nan saw how it chafed him to be tied to farming, beholden to Ash. When he left on the long trip to Los Angeles she knew he was trying to end his dependence, searching for a deal to put him in a business where his shrewdness, money, energy, not Ash’s gifts, would make the profit. Maxill wasn’t mean; if he sold the land she was sure he’d settle with Ash for enough so they could get a place of their own.

  A freeway accident intervened: Malcolm Maxill was killed instantly. There was no will. The estate was divided amicably enough, Gladys and Muriel waiving practically all their share in return for Nan’s taking full responsibility for the three younger girls. Ash was quite content to leave arrangements—which he regar
ded with the detached interest an Anglican bishop might take in a voodoo mask—to her. He clearly didn’t grasp the importance of possessions and power.

  He had to register for the draft but as a father in an essential occupation there was little danger of being called up; anyway he would never pass a medical examination with eight fingers. The war sent farm prices up and up; Gladys went to Washington to work for the government; Josey married a sailor home on leave.

  Harvests continued bountiful, Nan noted with pleasure how other fanners came to Ash for advice and help. Since he couldn’t convey his knowledge to her despite partial communication in his own tongue there was no use trying with others. He never refused his aid; he simply limited it to visiting the poor growth, sick animal or doubtful field, talking platitudes’ from agricultural bulletins while his hands were busy. Afterward, so naturally that they were only amazed at the wisdom of the trite advice, the beasts recovered, the crop flourished, the sterile ground bore.

  Her faint fear of little Ash’s hands becoming a handicap after all was dissipated. He could grasp, clutch, hold, manipulate, throw better than any other child of his age. (Some years later he became the best pitcher Evarts County had ever known; he had a facing curve no opposing batter ever caught onto.) Without precocity he talked early; he learned his father’s speech so well he eventually outdistanced Nan; she listened with maternal and wifely complacency as they hummed subtleties beyond her understanding.

  Jessie, who took a commercial course, got a job as her brother-in-law’s secretary; Janet went East to study archaeology. After V-J Day, price-controls went off; the Maxills made more and more money. Ash stopped planting corn on the old farm. Part of the acreage he put into a new orchard, on the rest he sowed a hybrid grass of his own breeding which yielded a grain higher in protein than wheat. Young Ash was a joy; yet after seven years he remained an only child. “Why?” she asked.

  “You want more children?”

  “Naturally I do. Don’t you?”

  “It’s still hard for me to understand your people’s obsession with security. Security of position, ancestry or posterity. How is it possible to differentiate so jealously between one child and another because of a biological relation or the lack of it?”

  For the first time Nan felt him alien. “I want my children.”

  But she had no more. The lack saddened without embittering her; she remembered how she had been bent on marrying Ash even with the chance of no children at all. And she had been right: without Ash the farm would have been worthless; her father a whining, querulous, churlish failure; she would have married the first boy who asked her after she tired of necking in cars, and would have had a husband as incapable of helping her grow and bloom as her father had been incapable with his barren acres. Even if she had known there would be no young Ash, she would still have chosen the same way.

  It troubled her that Ash was unable to teach his son his farming skill. It destroyed a dream of Nan’s: Ash’s secret made him vulnerable; young Ash, with no secret to be extracted, could have worked his miracles for humanity without fear.

  “Why can’t he learn? He understands you better than I ever will.”

  “He may understand too much. He may have advanced beyond me. Remember, I’m a throwback, with faculties no longer needed by my people. Sports rarely breed true; he may be closer to them in some ways than I.”

  “Then... then he should be able to do some of the marvelous things they can do.”

  “I don’t think it works that way. There’s some kind of equation—not a mechanical leveling off, but compensatory gains and losses. I can’t teach him even the simple sort of telekinesis I can do. But he can heal flesh better than I.”

  So a new dream supplanted the old: young Ash as a doctor, curing the diseases mankind suffered. But the boy, happy enough to exorcise warts from a playmate’s hands or mend a broken bone by running his fingers over the flesh outside, wanted no such future. The overriding interest of his life was machinery. At six he had rehabilitated an old bicycle each Maxill girl had used in turn until it was worn beyond repair. Beyond any repair except young Ash’s, that is. At eight he restored decrepit alarm clocks to service, at ten he could fix the tractor as well or better than the Henryton garage. Nan supposed she ought to be happy about a son who might be a great engineer or inventor; unfortunately she thought the world of freeways and nuclear weapons less desirable than the one she had known as a girl—Prohibition and Depression or not.

  Could she be aging? She was just over forty; the fine lines on her face, the slight raising of the veins on her hands were far less noticeable than the same signs on girls—women— five or six years younger. Yet when she looked at Ash’s smooth cheeks, unchanged since the day Josey brought him in from the south pasture, she had a qualm of apprehension.

  “How old are you?” she asked him. “How old are you really?”

  “As old and as young as you are.”

  “No,” she persisted. “That’s a figure of speech or a way of thinking. I want to know.”

  “How can I put it in terms of earth years—of revolutions around this sun by this planet? It wouldn’t make sense even if I knew the mathematics involved and could translate one measurement into another. Look at it this way: wheat is old at six months, an oak is young at fifty years.”

  “Are you immortal?”

  “No more than you. I’ll die just as you will.”

  “But you don’t grow any older.”

  “I don’t get sick either. My body isn’t subject to weakness and decay the way my remote ancestors’ were. But I was born, therefore I must die.”

  “You’ll still look young when I’m an old woman. Ash...”

  Ah, she thought, it’s well enough for you to talk. What people say doesn’t bother you; you aren’t concerned with ridicule or malice. I’d call you inhuman if I didn’t love you. Every superhuman carries the suggestion of inhumanity with it. Yes, yes—we’re all selfish, mean, petty, grasping, cruel, nasty. Are we condemned for not seeing over our heads, for not being able to view ourselves with the judicial attachment of a million generations hence? I suppose we are. But it must be a self-condemnation, not am admonition, not even the example of a superior being.

  She could not regret marrying Ash; she would not have changed anything. Except the one pitiful little resentment against aging while he didn’t. No acquired wisdom, no thoughtful contemplation could reconcile her to the idea, could prevent her shuddering at the imagined looks, questions, snickers at a woman of fifty, sixty, seventy, married to a boy apparently in his twenties. Suppose young Ash had inherited his father’s impervious constitution, as he seemed to have? She saw, despite the painful ludicrousness of it, her aged self peering from one to the other, unable to tell instantly which was the husband and which the son.

  In her distress, and her soreness that she should be distressed, she drew off from the others, spoke little, spent hours away from the house, wandering in a not unpleasant abdication of thought and feeling. So, in the hot, sunny stillness of an August afternoon, she heard the music.

  She knew immediately. There was no mistaking its relation to Ash’s humming and its even closer kinship to the polyphony he drew from the radio. For a vanishing instant she thought, heart-beatingly, that young Ash—but this was far far beyond fumbling experiment. It could only come from someone—-something—as far ahead of Ash as he was of her.

  She listened, shocked, anguished, exhaled. There was nothing to see except the distant mountains, the cloudless sky, ripe fields, straight road, groups of slender trees, scrabbly knots of wild berries, untrammeled weeds. Nothing hovered overhead, no stranger in unearthly clothes strolled from behind the nearest hillock. Yet she had no doubt. She hurried back to the house and found Ash. “They are looking for you.”

  “I know. I’ve known for days.”

  “Why? What do they want?”

  He did not answer directly. “Nan, do you think I’ve completely failed to fit into thus life?”
<
br />   She was genuinely astonished. “Failed! You’ve brought life, wisdom, health, goodness to everything you’ve touched. How can you talk of failing?”

  “Because, after all... I haven’t become one of you.”

  “Add, Thank God.” You’ve done much more than become one of us. You’ve changed the face and spirit of everything around here. The land and those who live off it are better because of you. You changed me from a silly girl to—to whatever I am. You fathered young Ash. Don’t ask me if a spoonful of sugar sweetens the ocean—let me believe it makes it that much less salt.”

  “But you are unhappy.”

  She shrugged. “Happiness is for those satisfied with what they have and want nothing more.”

  He asked, “And what do you want?”

  “A world where I wouldn’t have to hide you,” she answered fiercely. “A world you and young Ash and his children and grandchildren could better without inviting suspicion and envy. A world outraged—not happy—with bickering, distrust, animosity and terror. I think you’ve brought such a world a little closer to becoming.”