by John Brunner
This idea had come to him when he was setting up an improvised headstone over a new grave.
Achmed’s, I think, or was it Ruggiero’s…? Does it matter?
Even now the suspicion haunted him that he had chosen the less-than-best means; metal too could be corroded, these slow awkward words could be dissolved much as they had been etched… But he was in great pain, and what little concentration he could summon might better be applied to leaving a blurred message than none at all. He gathered his forces and continued.
… thirty-two graves. No, we didn’t start another baby after the shock and horror of losing first Cathy’s, then Sue’s. One of those graves, complete with a marker, is for me. I’ve been sleeping in it since I recovered enough from my last illness to move about and do things like digging and writing.
I think I’ve gone insane. In fact I’m sure I have. But I’m not surprised. I’ve been alone for a long time now. At the end there were four of us. I mean I wasn’t the one who lasted longest, not really, because I just collapsed one day—the world started to swim around me and Olaf said I had a five-degree fever and found me some place to lie down and brought me some sort of medicine… I’d started to believe that the food converters weren’t working any longer when you switched them to the drug mode. I mean so many people had died even with what was supposed to be the best medicine. And I guess I was wrong because I got better—well, a few days later I could get up and find something to drink, just a puddle of rainwater but I was terribly thirsty, and…
Well, there they were. The others. Dead as mutton. The last and toughest except me: Olaf, and Achmed, and Ruggiero. Funny; we thought the women were going to be the toughest, same as back on Earth. Only, you see, Cathy killed herself, and so did Sue, and Karen got in this lunatic fight with Achmed that time when Achmed was delirious and was so terrified of dying without a son—some kind of Muslim hangup—and she lost such a lot of blood she…
Never mind. I put what I could think of to say about them on the gravestones. Grave markers. Whatever.
And of course the way they died was the thing I was most aware of. Like the babies. I had to do the autopsies on both of them. Weird. Nadine should have done them, same as for Lucas, but somehow she said she couldn’t face it, and I… Well, maybe I was just the person who wanted to know the answer that much more than anybody else did. I cut them up. Like a butcher. Had nightmares for years afterwards. I still do. I think it’s been years. Keep seeing in my dreams the way the internal organs spilled out on the big sterile table. If I get reincarnated next time, I want to be a vegetarian, a Hindu or something, and very orthodox. I want to forget that, except I can’t when I’m asleep.
I got to stop wasting this ink stuff!
Starting over, next day. I was going to explain about the babies. In their lungs we found a kind of puffy fungus thing. We got it all worked out. An aerophytic plant, an equivalent to the orchids you find on Earth. But instead of landing in full view on the trunk of a tree, or a branch or whatever, it starts its life cycle in some dark warm crevice where there’s plenty of moisture. It’s only the size of a yeast spore when it drifts around looking for a place to start growing, and it’s sort of delicate until it gets a proper grip on life. In the lungs of an adult, it simply drowns in the regular phlegmy secretions. All of us must have breathed in spores like that and just coughed them up again. The babies couldn’t. I wish I didn’t keep wondering about poor Igor and the cancer he had in his lungs. I’m sure it could have started from almost any cause even if he didn’t ever smoke cigarettes. I mean back on Earth if he breathed the exhaust from an unfiltered car or something. But he died in such agony and he took so long about it and nobody deserved that much suffering, nobody, not even a mass murderer, and Igor was the kindest and gentlest person in the world! I mean both worlds. I hated watching him die. I guess if I am crazy that was when it started. I know it was his loss that kicked Cathy over the edge, not just the kid’s death but his, too. I think I already put it down some place that he was—oh, on the grave marker. I keep on mentioning grave markers but that’s what I see most of when I look up. I’m sitting facing them so when I forget what I ought to be saying I can look up and remember, oh of course, we had somebody called Valentine Rorschach who was the director, and we had Lucas Wong who was the doctor and chief biologist, and the rest of the people I wish were here to keep me company!
Rereading what I managed to write yesterday, and feeling today a lot better than I’ve felt for ages—not sweating or shaking nearly so much—I realise I’m wasting time and ink. I’m talking about things that could be pieced together from other sources. But I guess I should write down what we found out here, because the other night—I think—I saw an electrical storm up there on the plateau where we left the base, and a lightning strike could play merry hell with the computer memories, hm? Down here at the settlement, where we shouldn’t have moved to because if we’d stayed up in that dry dusty air those babies wouldn’t have inhaled spores and suffocated—but maybe they would, who can say? Forget it. They’re dead.
Yes, anyway. We found out that the Draconians inbred to the point of simple genetic collapse because they used commitment to fertilise each other as the basis for their medium of exchange. In other words, they counted their fortune according to the excellence of the genetic lines that would father their children when they shifted into the female stage. Within a very short time—about a thousand generations—they had so depleted their gene pool that they lost their immunity to some disease, or some recessive gene became endemic, or both or more than that. Never mind. They’re dead, too. And they brought their doom on themselves, I’m certain of that. In fact it was among the first clues I had to their capacity for being stupid even if they were brilliant. Oh, they were so like us in their faults! I can even imagine we might have become friends if our time in the universe had overlapped… Never mind. They had all these biological skills; what would be the first use they made of them? Prolong the active-male stage, obviously. That was when things really got done.
On top of which they wanted to be fertilised, when they turned female, from only the best lines. The longer they could postpone the day of reckoning, the better chance they had of accumulating good commitments: maybe not from the original person making the contract, but from his/her offspring, or siblings, or kinfolk. So it would have been desirable to breed for a short female stage. In the end they overdid it. There were only females with short fertile periods, capable of having one or two offspring, but jealously guarding the right to be fecundated because they’d spent their active lives investing in it. No doubt they had regulations to punish males who fertilised females they were not under contract to. And enforced the regulations brutally. I don’t know. I’m not as well as I thought. I’m not sure if I got that right or whether it refers to Earth.
I wish I hadn’t put down “Earth” in the last line I wrote yesterday. I’ve been struggling not to think about Earth. I keep having this other crazy dream—I think I said something about one of the dreams I get but this one is different—where I wake up in the morning and there’s Stellaris coming down and everybody turns out to greet her and I see Valentine and Cathy and Igor and everybody and we’re all waiting there until the air lock opens and then out comes Colonel Weil all beaming and cheerful and I remember he’s been retired and I look around and it isn’t my friends who are standing with me to welcome the ship.
It’s Draconians. Thousands of them. All as huge as the statues we found at Peat. They loom over me and pay no attention to my existence, just walk into the ship one after another and the lock closes behind them and off they go, to somewhere—I don’t know—and there I am, alone, in the middle of the plateau and there aren’t even any buildings.
When I have that dream, I wake up with my throat so sore I guess I must have been screaming for a long time. Just as well there isn’t anybody to hear me.
I was going to face thinking about Earth, only yesterday I got very sick again. I’ve been p
assing blood. I don’t expect I have much longer to go.
It gets very hard to drag metal plates here to write on and making this acid ink seems to be doing wrong things to the food converters, I mean it was supposed to be okay to reset them to make practically anything just synthesising from the available elements but having stuff that will bite into metal may be doing something to the innards… Oh, I don’t know. Just keep on as long as I can. It distracts me. Speaking of something being done to innards, I brought up my breakfast today. Thought it was kind of odd when I ate it. But I don’t have the skills to make tests and analyse the food and whatever.
I got this bruise on my arm. Taking a terrible time to go away.
Earth. Yes. I vaguely recall the place. And of course the whole reason I’m writing this down is because I’m sure they’re going to send the ship back soon, or another ship in a hundred years’ time maybe, and I want somebody to be able to find out what happened here, obviously not just to the Draconians but to us, too, in case they get all sorts of wrong ideas like it’s not legal to go to another star. Riridu—ridiculous! (Mustn’t make spelling mistakes because of wasint ink.)
Look, it isn’t like that at all! Sure, the Draconians failed because of what they bred out of themselves—must have done. Discounted the importance of things that had enabled them to evolve from the brute because they were so high on the idea of being able to reason they didn’t worry about losing immunities and such so long as they were able to look better and think better and invent more ingenious gadgets. I can hear them arguing in my head sometimes: so what does it matter if they have an underdeveloped glotch in that family? We didn’t hear of a death from glotchitis in umpty-dozen seasons, did we?
Or words to that effect. No, I don’t mean words. I mean. What I mean is, it was what they bred out of themselves that they tripped over. With us, my best guess from nineteen light-years away is that what did for us was what we didn’t breed into ourselves. Like compassion, and generosity, and love.
You know, I’d rather this message never got read than that it was picked up by somebody on the winning side in a war that wiped out half mankind. I just wouldn’t want people that dangerous to go roaming around the galaxy. I’d be ashamed to have my race remembered and recognised as vicious killers. All of a sudden my mind is very lucid. I think that’s a bad sign. I recall how Nadine became very articulate and forceful just a few hours before she died, and so did Igor in spite of being doped to the eyeballs. I feel slightly cold, but very much in control. I ought to be hungry, but I have no appetite. The bruise on my arm is bright purple, as though new red blood is leaking from the capillaries just under the skin.
And that’s not the only place. I just realised I have a sweetish taste in my mouth. My gums are bleeding.
Oh well.
You know, I often wondered about being aware of death. It isn’t too bad. Not compared with what the Draconians went through, knowing they were going to become extinct. For all I can tell, right this minute the Stellaris may be broadcasting frantic signals, trying to make us answer. I don’t particularly want to go and look, though. I’m tired. I’m very old. Being alone makes one feel old. I wish I didn’t have one more thing I want to say that I can’t quite remember, because it’s important and I have to carry on until I do recall it in case I break off and find I can’t start again— Got it.
I was going to say this. We mustn’t MUST NOT let the pattern spread. We mustn’t quit, mustn’t give up, mustn’t act in such a fashion that when one day some species on some other planet goes looking for friends all that can be found is ruins and corpses and fossils. Right here we figured out why the Draconians didn’t make it—don’t say “Ian Macauley figured it out,” say always THEY figured it out, human beings, a whole bunch working together. Make kids excited about that, make them admire it, make them want to do the same sort of thing! But never let them forget that just thinking isn’t enough. You can become arrogant by thinking, you can imagine you know it all and there are always things you don’t know that can wreck your hopes and smash your dreams.
I meant to say something else. I’m so cold, though. I keep yawning and blood trickles out of my mouth when I open it. I want to go and join Cathy. I love her very much and I never had time to tell her so the way I wanted to. So I guess I—
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