Collected Fiction

by Kris Neville

  We have, during the

  Sam shook it very hard, but the black marks didn’t come off.

  Sam thought, then, that it might be good to eat. But he found out it wasn’t.

  WIND IN HER HAIR

  To Marte and Johnny Nine the space ship was their world. And yet they dreamed of returning home to Earth . . . a planet they had never seen.

  “MARTE!”

  His voice echoed hollowly, dying away to an eerie whisper, fainter and fainter.

  “Marte!”

  It was very silent here on the last level below the giant atomic motors.

  The feeble light showered down from a single overhead bulb; it was their special bulb. Marte always lit it when she came below.

  “Marte!” His voice was almost pleading.

  “Here I am, Johnny. Over here.”

  “Little imp,” he said, not unkindly. “What do you mean, hiding?”

  “Hiding, Johnny? I wasn’t hiding . . . And besides, you looked so funny and lost, standing there, calling me.” He saw her, now, sitting half in shadow, leaning against the far bulkhead.

  His feet ping-pinged on the uncarpeted deck plates as he crossed to her.

  “Hello,” she said brightly. She threw back her head, and her eyes caught the dim light and sparkled it. “I hoped you’d come today.” Smiling, she held out her hand.

  He took it. “I really shouldn’t have,” he said.

  “Oh?” She puckered her lips in mock anger and drew him down beside her. “Didn’t you want to come?”

  “You know I did.”

  “Then why?”

  “They might need me in Control,” he said, half seriously.

  Marte’s eyes opened an involuntary fraction. “Nothing’s wrong, is there?” Her lips had lost their sudden, native smile, and the smile in her eyes half fled.

  “No. Everything’s fine . . . I just meant in case . . .”

  “Oh, Johnny, don’t say it; please.” Her eyes spoke with her voice, emotions bubbled in them. Her face had something of a woman’s seriousness in it, the product more of native understanding than experience, and much of a girl’s naiveté. “Don’t even think about anything like that.” She looked up at him, studied his face intently, and then said, “Tell me that: Say nothing’s going to go wrong.”

  “I was just talking, Marte. Nothing can go wrong; not now.”

  “Say it again!”

  “Nothing is going to go wrong,” he said slowly, giving each word its full meaning.

  “Do you really—really and truly—believe that?” she asked.

  “Of course I do, Marte.”

  The girl smiled. “I do too—only—” The smile faded. Her eyes focused on some distant place, beyond the last level, beyond the Ship itself. “Only sometimes I’m afraid it’s too good to happen . . . That I’m dreaming, and that all at once I’ll wake up, and—” She shook her head. “But that’s silly, isn’t it, Johnny?”

  “Yes,” he said. He settled back and rested against the bulkhead.

  THERE was silence for a while, two young people, hand in hand, sitting in silence.

  Finally, Marte spoke.

  “Here,” she said, “feel.” She pressed his hand against the bulkhead. “See how cool it is?”

  “Of course. It’s the outside plate.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I know. There’s nothing but space out there.” She squeezed his hand. “But just a little while ago, before you came, I was sitting here thinking. And I thought that wind must feel like that. I mean, not how it feels, exactly, but how it makes you feel. Wild and free. Without any bulkheads to keep you from walking and walking.”

  He shook his head. “Little dreamer,” he whispered.

  She frowned prettily. “Don’t you feel it, too?”

  Johnny Nine pressed his hand to the bulkhead again. “Yes, I guess maybe I do. In a way.”

  “Of course you do! You’ve just got to. You can’t help it I Put your cheek close against the bulkhead and you can almost feel the wind blowing on your face. I can. And if I try hard enough, I can almost smell the fields of flowers all in bloom and hear birds singing, like they were singing from far away . . . And I can—”

  “You’ve been reading again,” he interrupted with a smile.

  “Uh-huh,” she said dreamily. “I have . . . And when I finished, I came down here, and I thought about it, and I hoped you’d come so we could talk. It was poetry; it was—beautiful . . .

  “You know, Johnny, I’d like to write poetry. If I had the sky and the birds and the rivers and the mountains all to write about.”

  After a moment, Johnny Nine said, “Go ahead, tell me what the poems were about.”

  “Well . . .” She drew out the word slowly. “It’s not what they were about, exactly. It’s what they said, not out loud, but down deep. It’s like getting a present that means an awful lot to you; it’s not the present, but the way it makes your nose tickle and your stomach feel.” She smiled wistfully.

  “They were all written a long time ago, even before the First Generation, by men back on Earth, but they seemed to be written just for us . . . One was about a bird, and how it made the poet feel to watch it fly and hear it sing; it made him feel all warm inside . . . And one was about a young girl who worked in the fields, reaping grain . . .” That image seemed to reverberate in her mind, for she was quiet a moment, as if to listen for the fading echoes.

  “I think that would be the most wonderful thing. To help things grow, with your own two hands, and to harvest them when they’re ripe and waiting, not ’ponies, like Sam, but really growing out of the Earth.”

  “Someday,” he said softly, “you’re going to write the kind of poetry they wrote.”

  Marte looked down at her hands.

  “I want to do so many things . . . Maybe help things grow, most of all . . . I think there must be a sort of poetry in that, too.

  “Johnny?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you think we could get a farm? It wouldn’t have to be a very big one; just a little farm, where we could raise things?”

  “If you want it, Marte.”

  “Oh, I do. I do!” Her voice carried the lilt of youth in it.

  THE silences that frequently spiced their conversation had no embarrassed elements in them; they said as much as words, and they came mutually.

  “Some of it was sad. The poetry. I mean, the deep kind of sadness, the real sadness, the kind that has—hopelessness, and lostness, and aloneness in it.

  “Here he lies where he

  longed to be.

  Home is the sailor, home

  from the sea,

  And the hunter home

  from the hill.”

  She caught her breath, sharply. “That kind of sadness. The kind that says something about us. How we’ve dreamed and planned of going Home—”

  She let her voice drift.

  “I sometimes think Earth is such a beautiful place that you have to be dead to go there.”

  Johnny Nine said nothing.

  “Think of the wide sky, Johnny. Where we can see the sunrise. I’ve always dreamed about seeing a sun rise.

  “A sun. That’s a funny word to say; it just sounds warm. Sun. A sun that is like those little points of light, way beyond the bulkheads. When we see them from Observation, they look all cold. Imagine how it would be to be so close to one of them that it’s big and warm . . . “Johnny, do you think anything could be as pretty as those pictures, in Compartment Seven, of a blue and gold sunrise?”

  “Even prettier.”

  “Say it again!”

  “Even prettier.”

  “Ell stay up, then, all the first night. I know I will. Just to see the sun come up.”

  She drew in her legs and clasped her arms around them.

  “Tell me again what They said.” Johnny Nine did not answer immediately. He sat motionless, trying to make out the bulkhead that marked the other side of the Ship. But their feeble light could not penetrate so
much darkness. It almost seemed as if there were no other bulkhead and no Ship, only darkness, there, that spread out to the ends of the Universe.

  Finally he spoke. “It was awful hard to hear them; we’re too far away. As near as we could understand, they’re having a celebration for us. Hundreds and hundreds of people will be there. All to see us.”

  “Hundreds . . . and . . . hundreds. Hundreds and hundreds!” She turned her face to his. “It seems hard to believe, doesn’t it? All those people!”

  “Maybe even more than that, Marte.”

  “Johnny?” She ducked her head and pulled her legs in tighter. “Johnny?”

  “Yes?”

  “We can have babies, can’t we?” She asked it in a rush.

  “. . . Yes. We can have babies. As many as we want.”

  She wrinkled her nose . . . It seems funny, to be able to have all the babies you want. Not one every time somebody dies: but all you want!”

  She smiled at some secret communication with herself. “I think we’ll have a dozen . . .

  “Imagine, Johnny. We can have babies that will have a real childhood. Not like ours, in the Ship, but one on Earth. They can play in the wind and in the sunshine.

  “And learn things. All kinds of things. They won’t be born into one particular job. They can do anything they want to—anything in the whole wide world. And they can live in the air,” She blinked her eyes.

  “It makes me so glad I want to cry.”

  THE Big Ship, the balanced terrarium of fifty lives, swung downward in her path, rushing toward her parent sun, the first interstellar voyager coming home.

  Home. After twenty-one generations had peopled her vast bulk, after four hundred long years in space.

  The radio in Control crackled and sputtered; the nearly seven-hour wait was over. The Captain, the Mate, and Johnny Nine, the pilot, listened intently.

  The language had changed, and the voice that came out of the speaker was reedy, and thin with vast distances.

  “Halloo . . . Hallooo . . .” Like a cosmic sigh. Weird. “Yur message . . .” They could make out the words; the vowels were shorter, the consonants more sibilant, but they could make out the words . . . Repeat . . . pilot . . .” The voice rose and fell, rose and fell. Static hacked away inside the speaker, split sentences, scattered words.

  “. . . World waiting eagerly for . . .” Hiss and sputter. “In answer . . . Repeat . . . pilot inside Mar’s orbit . . . Repeat . . . pilot . . .”

  Johnny Nine bent forward. “I guess he means we’ll get a pilot ship inside the orbit of Mars. They’ll probably set us around Earth. We’ve got too much bulk to land.”

  “They’ll probably ferry us down in one of their best ships,” the Mate said; there was a weariness and an undefined, non-directional bitterness in his voice. A germ of thought lay buried beneath the words, a half-formed memory concept: Ferry us down like they ferried our ancestors up—four hundred years ago—to the Leviathan—built in space—too big ever to land.

  The voice from Earth sighed out of the speaker; only the sputter of static remained. Earth was awaiting, now, the reply.

  The Mate snapped off the speaker. The new silence was stark, as if something other than sound had been withdrawn.

  The Captain rubbed the back of his left hand with the palm of his right.

  None of them could quite find words for their thoughts.

  It was the Captain, finally, who spoke.

  “I guess—there isn’t much to tell them, is there?”

  The Captain turned his swivel chair until it faced the broad Observation window; through it he could see out into the inconceivable depths of star-clustered space.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he mused, half to himself. “Thinking a lot, lately.” He rubbed his forehead. “About the Ship . . . I’ve lived here a long time—my whole life. That’s a long time. I was wondering how it would seem not to live here anymore.”

  He put his elbows on his knees and twined his hands before his face. “Not for you, Johnny. For you and Marte, and the rest of the Twenty-first Generation, that’s different. I mean for us old timers. When you’re twenty, there’s a new world ahead; when you’re fifty—it’s not ahead any more. How will it seem to us?”

  The Captain shook his head slowly. “It’ll sure seem funny to give this up. This room here, where I’ve worked all these years. This view—”

  He waved his hand toward the Observation window.

  “This view clear into Infinity.”

  Johnny Nine crossed the room and stood before the window. He gazed into space. Without .turning, he began to talk. There was no excitement in his voice, only calm certainty.

  “Think, Captain: think of other things. Think of trees and running water and blue sky. Think of green grass, real green grass, acres and acres of it, swaying in the wind. Think of that.”

  The Captain smiled. “Ah, youth, Johnny . . . If it had been forty years ago—or thirty—or even ten . . . But now . . .”He shrugged. “We’re old and set in our ways. We think of rest and of the familiar.” Johnny Nine still did not turn. “Imagine sitting on a chair, on a porch, facing out to the woods, across a field of corn. Imagine the neighborhood kids gathering about you, and you telling them how you were on the Interstellar Flight. How you came back from the stars.”

  “Perhaps, Johnny, perhaps . . . Perhaps . . .”

  The Mate jammed full power into the heavy transmitter. “I hope these tubes hold,” he said matter-of-factly. “I couldn’t find the replacements.” The Captain came back from his thoughts. “Did you make a check of the Parts Index?” he asked.

  “Sure. They’re supposed to be in Compartment Four. Couldn’t find them there. Some crazy fool probably made baby rattles out of them a hundred and fifty years ago.”

  “I’ll send someone to see if you overlooked them. You want to go, Johnny?”

  “I’ll look, sure. Compartment Four, Skippy?”

  “Supposed to be.”

  The Mate turned back to the radio. “Hello, Earth . . . Hello, Earth . . . Hello, Earth . . . This is Interstellar Flight One . . . Interstellar Flight One, inside Pluto . . . Hello, Earth, this is—”

  Johnny Nine closed the door behind him and left the cramped room.

  IN Compartment Four Johnny-Nine switched on the lights; the large center bulb flared blue and the filaments fused. That left the compartment in gloom.

  Slowly the Ship was growing old. It no longer functioned as smoothly as before; its spare parts stock was running low. Bulbs were rationed and three whole levels were in continual darkness. The long night was creeping in, as if the jet of space was slowly digesting the interloper.

  “Sit down, Johnny. Old Sam wants to talk to you.”

  Johnny Nine dropped his hand from the switch and turned. “Oh? Oh, Sam . . . Where did you come from?”

  “I seen you coming down, so I followed you. I wanted to talk to you alone. And when I seen you comin’ down here, I said, ‘Now, Sam, here’s your chance to talk to Johnny.’ ”

  “Yes, Sam?”

  “Go ahead, Johnny, sit down.” Johnny Nine crossed to a crate that still contained parts for the atomic motor and sat down. “All right, Sam. Go ahead.”

  Sam shuffled his feet. “I don’t know how to start, hardly. Look, Johnny. Tell me something. True. You will, won’t you?”

  “Yes, Sam, I will. You know that.”

  “Sure, I know you will. Why, don’t I remember when you was just a little tyke, how you used to come down to the gardens and watch old Sam? And I said, then, that if ever there’s a boy that gives you a straight answer, that’s Johnny Nine.

  “I remember you say ‘in’, once, ‘Sam’ you said, ‘you’ve to one blue eye and one brown.’ ” Sam smiled. “Right out you said it. An’ you know, that’s right. I have. Nobody else would have told me so, because they were afraid of hurting my feelings. But why should I mind that I’ve got one blue eye and one brown one? Funny, how other folks think you mind, when really you don’t
. . .

  “Look, Johnny. About the gardens. I’m getting old—uh-uh, don’t say it: I am and you know I am. Lately, folks have been comin’ around helpin’ me out. They let on that they’re just there lookin’, but they help me, and I know it. Is it because I’m gettin’ old, Johnny?”

  “Sam, you’re like the Captain. Good for another twenty years.”

  “Now, Johnny, answer old Sam straight.”

  Johnny Nine hesitated. “Well,” he admitted, “you aren’t as young as some of us, Sam. But that doesn’t mean you’re old. I mean, really old.” Johnny Nine turned his head so Sam could not see his face.

  Sam cleared his throat. “Look, Johnny!” He held out a tiny bottle.

  Johnny Nine glanced around. “Where did you get that?” he demanded angrily when he saw the bottle.

  “That’s all right. Old Sam’s got ways. An’ he’ll be takin’ it any day now. You just say the word, Johnny.”

  “Did somebody give that to you?” Johnny Nine demanded sharply.

  “No. Nobody gave it to me. Old Sam’s had this bottle for years. Just waitin’, Johnny. Just waitin’. For somebody to say the word.”

  “Give it to me!”

  Sam snatched back the bottle. “No!” His weak old eyes showed traces of fire. “No. Old Sam’s—”

  “Sam,” Johnny Nine said gently, “we’re almost Home, Sam, almost Home.”

  Sam laughed bitterly. He shook his head. “No, Johnny. Can’t fool old Sam. ’Course folks say we are. But I know. Old Sam knows. I’ll be drinkin’ this any day now.”

  “Sam, listen. In four—” He bit his tongue before he could say ‘months’. That superstition. “In a little while, we’ll be Home. It’s true, Sam, I wouldn’t lie.”

  Sam’s eyes brightened. “You ain’t foolin’ me?”

  “No, Sam.”

  SAM seemed to relax. “Home,” he said. “You know, Johnny, lately I’ve been dreamin’ of Home. Now you say we’re almost there . . . You know, I remember, when old John Turner—I guess you don’t remember old John—before your time—when old John, well, he told Molly Dawn (she was his partner), he said, ‘Molly, it sure looks like the only way we can get Home is live as long an’ as useful a life as Sam. Because Sam is just too stubborn to grow old like the rest of us.’ Yes, sir, that’s just what he said: ‘Old Sam is too downright stubborn to grow old like the rest of us.”