by Damon Knight
She had fallen ill and lain for days sick and delirious, and had heard a voice which hardly seemed to be her own, saying that if she died the wind voices would care for Robin . . . and then the shock and irrationality of that had startled her out of delirium, agonized and trembling, and she pulled herself upright and cried out, “No!”
And the shimmer of eyes and voices had faded again into vague echoes, until there was only the stir of sunlight on the leaves, and Robin, chubby and naked, kicking in the sunlight, cooing with his hands outstretched to the rustle of leaves and shadows.
She had known, then, that she had to get well. She had never heard the wind voices again, and her crisp, scientific mind rejected the fanciful theory that if she only believed in the wind voices she would see their forms and hear their words clearly. And she rejected them so thoroughly that when she heard them speak she shut them away from her mind, and after a time heard them no longer, except in restless dreams.
By now she had accepted the isolation and the beauty of their world, and begun to make a happy life for Robin.
For lack of other occupation last summer—though the winter was mild and there was no lack of fruits and roots even then—Helen had patiently snared male and female of small animals like rabbits, and now she had a pen of them. They provided a change of diet, and after a few smelly unsuccessful experiments she had devised a way to supple then-fur pelts. She made no effort at gardening, though when Robin was older she might try that. For the moment, it was enough that they were healthy and safe and protected.
Robin was listening again. Helen bent her ear, sharpened by the silence, but heard only the rustle of wind and leaves; saw only falling brightness along a silvered tree-trunk.
Wind? When there were no branches stirring?
“Ridiculous,” she said sharply, then snatched up the baby boy and squeezed him before hoisting him astride her hip. “Mommy doesn’t mean you, Robin. Let’s look for berries.”
But soon she realized that his head was tipped back and that he was listening, again, to some sound she could not hear.
On what she said was Robin’s fifth birthday, Helen had made a special bed for him in another room of the building.
He missed the warmth of Helen’s body, and the comforting sound of her breathing; for Robin, since birth, had been a wakeful child.
Yet, on the first night alone, Robin felt curiously freed. He did something he had never dared do before, for fear of waking Helen; he slipped from his bed and stood in the doorway, looking into the forest.
The forest was closer to the doorway now; Robin could fuzzily remember when the clearing had been wider. Now, slowly, beyond the garden patch which Helen kept cleared, the underbrush and saplings were growing back, and even what Robin called “the burned place” was covered with new sparse grass.
Robin was accustomed to being alone, during the day— even in his first year, Helen had had to leave him alone, securely fastened in the house, or inside a little tight-fenced yard. But he was not used to being alone at night.
Far off in the forest, he could hear the whispers of the other people. Helen said there were no other people, but Robin knew better, because he could hear their voices on the wind, like fragments of the songs Helen sang at bedtime. And sometimes he could almost see them in the shadowy spots.
Once when Helen had been sick, a long time ago, and Robin had run helplessly from the fenced yard to the inside room and back again, hungry and dirty and furious because Helen only slept on the bed with her eyes closed, rousing up now and then to whimper like he did when he fell down and skinned his knee, the winds and voices had come into the very house; Robin had hazy memories of soothing voices, of hands that touched him more softly than Helen’s hands. But he could not quite remember.
Now that he could hear them so clearly, he would go and find the other people. And then if Helen was sick again, there would be someone else to play with him and look after him. He thought gleefully, Won't Helen be surprised? and darted off across the clearing.
Helen woke, roused not by a sound but by a silence. She no longer heard Robin’s soft breaths from the alcove, and after a moment she realized something else:
The winds were silent.
Perhaps, she thought, a storm was coming. Some change in air pressure could cause this stillness—but Robin? She tiptoed to the alcove; as she had suspected, his bed was empty.
Where could he be? In the clearing? With a storm coming? She slid her feet into handmade sandals and ran outside, her quivering call ringing out through the silent forest:
“Robin—oh, Robin!”
Silence. And far away a little ominous whisper. And for the first time since that first frightening year of loneliness, she felt lost, deserted in an alien world. She ran across the clearing, looking around wildly, trying to decide which way he could have wandered. Into the forest? What if he had strayed toward the riverbank? There was a place where the bank crumbled away, down toward the rapids—her throat closed convulsively, and her call was almost a shriek:
“Oh, Robin! Robin, darling! Robin!”
She ran through the paths worn by their feet, hearing snatches of rustle, winds and leaves suddenly vocal in the cold moonlight around her. It was the first time since the spaceship left them that Helen had ventured out into the night of their world. She called again, her voice cracking in panic.
“Robin!”
A sudden stray gleam revealed a glint of white, and a child stood in the middle of the path. Helen gasped with relief and ran to snatch up her son—then fell back in dismay. It was not Robin who stood there. The child was naked, about a head shorter than Robin, and female.
There was something curious about the bare and gleaming flesh, as if she could see the child only in the full flush of the moonlight. A round, almost expressionless face was surrounded by a mass of colorless streaming hair, the exact color of the moonlight. Helen’s audible gasp startled her to a stop: she shut here eyes convulsively, and when she opened them the path was black and empty and Robin was running down the track toward her.
Helen caught him up, with a strangled cry, and ran, clasping him to her breast, back down the path to their shack. Inside, she barred the door and laid Robin down in her own bed, and threw herself down shivering, too shaken to speak, too shaken to scold him, curiously afraid to question. I had a hallucination, she told herself, a hallucination, another dream, a dream. . . .
A dream, like the other Dream. She dignified it to herself as The Dream, because it was not like any other dream she had ever had. She had dreamed it first before Robin’s birth, and been ashamed to speak of it to Chao Lin, fearing the common-sense skepticism of the older woman.
On their tenth night on the green planet (the Starholm was a dim recollection now), when Merrihew’s scientists had been convinced that the little world was safe, without wild beasts or diseases or savage natives, the crew had requested permission to camp in the valley clearing beside the river. Permission granted, they had gone apart in couples almost as usual, and even those who had no enduring liaison at the moment had found a partner for the night.
It must have been that night. . . .
Colin Reynolds was two years younger than Helen, and their attachment, enduring over a few months of shiptime, was based less on mutual passion than a sort of boyish need in him, a sort of impersonal feminine solicitude in Helen. All her affairs had been like that, companionable, comfortable, but never passionate. Curiously enough, Helen was a woman capable of passion, of great depths of devotion; but no man had ever roused it and now no man ever would. Only Robin’s birth had touched her deeply pent emotions.
But that night, when Colin Reynolds was sleeping, Helen stayed restlessly awake, hearing the unquiet stirring of wind on the leaves. After a time she wandered down to the water’s edge, staying a cautious distance from the shore—for the cliff crumbled dangerously—and stretched herself out to listen to the wind-voices. And after a time she fell asleep, and had The Dream, which was to retu
rn to her again and again.
Helen thought of herself as a scientist, without room for fantasies, and that was why she called it, fiercely, a dream; a dream born of some undiagnosed conflict in her. Even to herself Helen would not recall it in full.
There had been a man, and to her it seemed that he was part of the green and windy world, and he had found her sleeping by the river. Even in her drowsy state, Helen had suspected that perhaps one of the other crew members, like herself sleepless and drawn to the shining water, had happened upon her there; such things were not impossible, manners and mores being what they were among starship crews.
But to her, half dreaming, there had been some strangeness about him, which prevented her from seeing him too clearly even in the brilliant green moonlight. No dream and no man had ever seemed so living to her; and it was her fierce rationalization of the dream which kept her silent, months later, when she discovered (to her horror and secret despair) that she was with child. She had felt that she would lose the haze and secret delight of the dream if she openly acknowledged that Colin had fathered her child.
But at first—in the cool green morning that followed— she had not been at all sure it was a dream. Seeing only sunlight and leaves, she had held back from speaking, not wanting ridicule; could she have asked each man of the Starholm, “Was it you who came to me last night? Because if it was not, there are other men on this world, men who cannot be clearly seen even by moonlight.”
Severely she reminded herself, Merrihew’s men had pronounced the world uninhabited, and uninhabited it must be. Five years later, hugging her sleeping son close, Helen remembered the dream, examined the content of her fantasy, and once again, shivering, repeated, “I had a hallucination. It was only a dream. A dream, because I was alone. . . .”
When Robin was fourteen years .old, Helen told him the story of his birth, and of the ship.
He was a tall, silent boy, strong and hardy but not talkative; he heard the story almost in silence, and looked at Helen for a long time in silence afterward. He finally said in a whisper, “You could have died—you gave up a lot for me, Helen, didn’t you?” He knelt and took her face in his hands. She smiled and drew a little away from him.
“Why are you looking at me like that, Robin?”
The boy could not put instant words to his thoughts: emotions were not in his vocabulary. Helen had taught him everything she knew, but she had always concealed her feelings from her son. He asked at last, “Why didn’t my father stay with you?” „
“I don’t suppose it entered his head,” Helen said. “He was needed on the ship. Losing me was bad enough.”
Robin said passionately, “I’d have stayed!”
The woman found herself laughing. “Well—you did stay, Robin.”
He asked, “Am I like my father?”
Helen looked gravely at her son, trying to see the halfforgotten features of young Reynolds in the boy’s face. No,
Robin did not look like Colin Reynolds, nor like Helen herself. She picked up his hand in hers; despite his robust health, Robin never tanned; his skin was pearly pale, so that in the green sunlight it blended into the forest almost invisibly. His hand lay in Helen’s palm like a shadow. She said at last, “No, nothing like him. But under this sun, that’s to be expected.” Robin said confidently, “I’m like the other people.”
“The ones on the ship? They—”
“No,” Robin interrupted, “you always said when I was older you’d tell me about the other people. I mean the other people here. The ones in the woods. The ones you can’t see.” Helen stared at the boy in blank disbelief. “What do you mean? There are no other people, just us.” Then she recalled that every imaginative child invents playmates. Alone, she thought, Robin’s always alone, no other children, no wonder he’s a little—strange. She said, quietly, “You dreamed it, Robin.”
The boy only stared at her, in bleak, blank alienation. “You mean,” he said, “you can’t hear them, either?” He got up and walked out of the hut. Helen called, but he didn’t turn back. She ran after him, catching at his arm, stopping him almost by force. She whispered, “Robin, Robin, tell me what you mean! There isn’t anyone here. Once or twice I thought I had seen—something, by moonlight, only it was a dream. Please, Robin—please—”
“If it’s only a dream, why are you frightened?” Robin asked, through a curious constriction in his throat. “If they’ve never hurt you ...”
No, they had never hurt her. Even if, in her long-ago dream, one of them had come to her. And the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair—a scrap of memory from a vanished life on another world sang in Helen’s thoughts. She looked up at the pale, impatient face of her son, and swallowed hard.
Her voice was husky when she spoke.
“Did I ever tell you about rationalization—when you want something to be true so much that you can make it sound right to yourself?” -
“Couldn’t that also happen to something you wanted not to be true?” Robin retorted with a mutinous curl of his mouth.
Helen would not let go his arm. She begged, “Robin, no, you’ll only waste your life and break your heart looking for something that doesn’t exist.”
The boy looked down into her shaken face, and suddenly a new emotion welled up in him and he dropped to his knees beside her and buried his face against her breast. He whispered, “Helen, I’ll never leave you, I’ll never do anything you don’t want me to do, I don’t want anyone but you.” And for the first time in many years, Helen broke into wild and uncontrollable crying, without knowing why she wept.
Robin did not speak again of his quest in the forest. For many months he was quiet and subdued, staying near the clearing, hovering near Helen for days at a time, then disappearing into the forest at dusk. He heard the winds numbly, deaf to their promise and their call.
Helen too was quiet and withdrawn, feeling Robin’s alienation through his submissive mood. She found herself speaking to him sharply for being always underfoot; yet, on the rare days when he vanished into the forest and did not return until after sunset, she felt a restless unease that set her wandering the paths herself, not following him, but simply uneasy unless she knew he was within call.
Once, in the shadows just before sunset, she thought she saw a man moving through the trees, and for an instant, as he turned toward her, she saw that he was naked. She had seen him only for a second or two, and after he had slipped between the shadows again common sense told her it was Robin. She was vaguely shocked and annoyed; she firmly intended to speak to him, perhaps to scold him for running about naked and slipping away like that; then, in a sort of remote embarrassment, she forbore to mention it. But after that, she kept out of the forest.
Robin had been vaguely aware of her surveillance and knew when it ceased. But he did not give up his own pointless rambles, although even to himself he no longer spoke of searching, or of any dreamlike inhabitants of the woods. At times it still seemed that some shadow concealed a half-seen form, and the distant murmur grew into a voice that mocked him; a white arm, the shadow of a face, until he lifted his head and stared straight at it.
One evening toward twilight he saw a sudden shimmer in the trees, and he stood, fixedly, as the stray glint resolved itself first into a white face with shadowy eyes, then into a
translucent flicker of bare arms, and then into the form of a woman, arrested for an instant with her hand on the bole of a tree. In the shadowy spot, filled only with the last ray of a cloudy sunset, she was very clear; not cloudy or unreal, but so distinct that he could see even a small smudge or bramble scratch on her shoulder, and a fallen leaf tangled in herv colorless hair. Robin, paralyzed, watched her pause, and turn, and smile, and then she melted into the shadows.
He stood with his heart pounding for a second after she had gone then whirled, bursting with the excitement of his discovery, and ran down the path toward home. Suddenly he stopped short, the world tilting and reeling, and fell on his face in a b
ed of dry leaves. .
He was still ignorant of the nature of the emotion in him. He felt only intolerable misery and the conviction that he must never speak to Helen of what he had seen or felt.
He lay there, his burning face pressed into the leaves, unaware of the rising wind, the little flurry of blown leaves, the growing darkness and distant thunder. At last an icy spatter of rain aroused him, and cold, numbed, he made his way slowly homeward. Over his head the boughs creaked woodenly, and Robin, under the driving whips of the rain, felt their tumult only echoed his own voiceless agony.
He was drenched by the time he pushed the door of the shack open and stumbled blindly toward the fire, only hoping that Helen would be sleeping. But she started up from beside the hearth they had built together last summer.
“Robin?”
Deathly weary, the boy snapped, “Who else would it be?”
Helen didn’t answer. She came to him, a small swift-moving figure in the firelight, and drew him into the warmth. She said, almost humbly, “I was afraid—the storm—Robin, you’re all wet, come to the fire and dry out.”
Robin yielded, his twitching nerves partly soothed by her voice. How tiny Helen is, he thought, and I can remember that she used to carry me around on one arm; now she hardly comes to my shoulder. She brought him food and he ate wolfishly, listening to the steady pouring rain, uncomfortable' under Helen’s watching eyes. Before his own eyes there was the clear memory of the woman in the wood, and so vivid was Robin’s imagination, heightened by loneliness and undiluted by any random impressions, that it seemed to him
Helen must see her too. And when she came to stand beside him, the picture grew so keen in his thoughts that he actually pulled himself free of her.
The next day dawned gray and still, beaten with long needles of rain. They stayed indoors by the smoldering fire; Robin, half sick and feverish from his drenching, sprawled by the hearth too indolent to move, watching Helen’s comings and goings about the room; not realizing why the sight of her slight, quick form against the gray light filled him with such pain and melancholy.