In another year I was well enough to return to the surface. It was hard to say good-bye to John, after seeing him every day. I had my old Liaison job back, so I would see him periodically, but it was going to be the way it had been before. Afraid that each parting would be the last. He was only eighty, Earth-years-minus-cryptobiosis, but he looked and obviously felt a lot older. Besides, as we’d been warned, a person who’s had one serious stroke usually dies of another one.
But it was glorious to step out of the shuttle and into the warm breeze. I’d spent a lot more time in orbit, in hospital, then I had on the planet, but emotionally this was home. It was spring, and the perfume of blossoms was intoxicating, a mixture of transplanted Earth smells and alien ones. The lift door was an open gate now; I could look out past Hilltop and see how Lakeside had grown. Crop and orchard land had more than tripled, but it was laid out carefully with respect to the natural forest line, in accordance with the eveloi’s wishes.
Most of the eveloi had moved to an island on the other side of the planet, asking that we stay away from them for the time being. Two had remained behind with us, though, so I wasn’t surprised to see one of them among the welcoming committee at the loading dock. After my tearful embraces with Sandra and Charlee, and less emotional hellos for Odenwald, Dennison, and Doc Bishop, I saw the creature float forward and extend its pink feeler toward my head. I closed my eyes and cringed, ready for the slight pain.
It stung and there was a brief instant, a memory of the terrible blackness, but then it just left a nonverbal Welcome home and withdrew.
A lot had changed in the years I had been away. Some of the changes were decorative, like the orderly flower beds that lined the roads, but there were more functional alterations, too. The place was large enough to make vehicles convenient now. There were bicycles propped up or lying down everywhere, and a few power carts for the lazy or load-bearing. Sandra picked up a random bike and went back to work. Dan and I kept walking; I was still a little unbalanced for pedaling. Wouldn’t want to undo all that careful surgery by crashing into a tree. Wouldn’t want to redo it!
Dennison’s cobbled-together office had become an Administrative Center, a climate-controlled brick building about a hundred meters by fifty. An identical building across the street served as a hospital. They also stored meat there, which seemed bizarre and appropriate at the same time.
At least there aren’t any shops yet, or banks or insurance buildings. They do have what they call a “market,” though no money changes hands. It’s just a central place for people to bring fruit and vegetables for general distribution. People who eat meat pick it up at the hospital. Makes you feel like becoming a vegetarian. Or at least a careful meat inspector.
People cook their own meals. Seems primitive and inefficient, but I guess it’s worth the work for being able to choose a menu for yourself. Though ’Home’s weekly Chinese meal was unappetizing enough to save me a couple of thousand calories a month. If Dan cooks something awful, I guess I have to eat it.
I’ll probably learn how to cook myself. Some people on Earth thought that was funny, that I could live to the ripe old age of twenty-one and not know how to cook. Here I am almost sixty, and if you handed me an egg, I wouldn’t know which end to break.
What used to be Lakeside was now a “township,” Drake. There were two other lakeside townships, Columbus and Magellan, each one comprising all the homes along three kilometers of shoreline. Each township had its own substation for power, water, and sewage. Drake had the largest population, being closest to Hilltop and also possessing the only swimming pool and handball courts, along with a recreation building with everything from checkers to VR. The other two townships were basically a string of houses on the lake side of the road; Drake had started crawling up the hill to meet the suburbs of Hilltop crawling down.
Some brave pioneers had started a new township inland, Riverside, situated in a fertile valley on the banks of a wide slow river that emptied into the lake in the swamps east of Magellan. A new road snaked down from Hilltop to a dock on the edge of the swamp. A few people had taken up rowing; it was a healthy two-hour pull to Riverside, and then a lazy ride back. So far none of the lake monsters had been seen in the river, but it was considered reckless to go swimming in it.
Our hut looked much the same, though neater, Dan having reverted to his fussy bachelor ways. The kitchen between the two residences had become elaborate, though. It used to be just a double hot plate for coffee and reheating commissary meals. Now there was an oven, refrigerator, sink, and a pegboard with various cooking implements. On the balcony outside was a grill beside a stack of wood, and ten clay pots lined up sprouting small bushes of cooking herbs.
Their fragrance suddenly took me back to a sad time, remembering Sam; I caught at Daniel and he steadied me. I said it was just the long walk and climbing up the stairs. He sat me down on a wicker chair on the balcony, went back into the kitchen, and reappeared with a glass of cold beer.
I sipped it, exotic and homey at the same time, and looked out over the lake at the clouds billowing up on the horizon, preparing for the sunset show. While Dan busied himself in the kitchen, I watched the fantastic shapes and their reflections and tried to put a name to the way I felt—excited but comforted, feeling all this humanity around me growing, the planet in some sense allowing us to anchor here. It was good to be back, good to be part of things again.
My first day back was awkward. During my hospitalization in orbit, I’d become sort of a local legend, I suppose largely because of Sandra’s account of what she had seen. Well, I was there, too. What I had done was reflex, and we’re all lucky it was evidently the right reflex. There was a lot of pain, but I wish people wouldn’t remind me of it. Even without anybody’s help I go spinning back into that burning river ten times a day. Just for an instant; just long enough for my skin to glow cold and prickly, my guts to turn to water. The therapist at ’Home said it would be that way “for a while.” A long while, I suspect.
The first day at work was mainly talking with Constance Surio, who had temporarily taken over my job as ’Home Liaison, and her assistant, Andre Buchot. It had been a harried time for both of them, with almost two thousand tertiaries coming down from orbit, every one of them a special case.
Two months before, one of the shuttles had failed, breaking up in the atmosphere, and there was a moratorium on migration while the other shuttles, one at a time, were taken apart and put back together. There were still regular flights, but not too many people going back and forth, which did make for less liaison work.
Right now it was mostly a matter of constant but more or less civilized argument with our counterparts in orbit, the Epsilon Liaison Committee. They had a starship full of stuff they wanted to keep up there, and we tried to talk them into sending it down here, where it belonged.
Purcell would have loved the situation, the parody of economics. Both ’Home and Hilltop were self-sufficient in terms of life’s necessities, and since we have a common database, there was no information to barter. Both locales had problems, but they weren’t problems that formed a basis for exchange: I’ll trade you two brain-suckers and an aquatic constrictor for two cases of explosive decompression and a botched crypto. So it was mainly a case of us wheedling and them resisting patiently.
We could have indulged in a bit of coercion with a building slow-down, since they did have over a thousand people waiting to come down here, and they were going to need places to stay. With the moratorium, though, we didn’t have any reasonable justification for that. The housing crew was two hundred empty dwellings ahead of the population, and had been temporarily diverted into building an overland road to Riverside, through the hills. (There was already a path along the river, but it was periodically flooded and always plagued with bugs. The overland route would be a third as long.)
The relationship between ’Home and Epsilon had changed, not subtly, and was evolving toward who-knows-where? The psychological distance had widened, a
s anyone could have predicted: we saw the people in orbit as conservative stay-at-homes, and they saw us as runaways. Maybe we envied them the comforts we had all grown up with; maybe they envied our freedom.
We had started out as an extension of the starship, and became for some time an embryonic gravity-bound copy. The umbilical cord didn’t suddenly one day break, but for more than a year it had been obvious that, barring catastrophe, we could survive without them.
That should translate into a kind of economic, quasi-economic, strength, since they did need us at least as a destination for their restless thousand. But we couldn’t see any practical, ethical way to exploit that. We had to plan for a future when the starship was literally a foreign land—the mother country, with all that implies. We didn’t want a revolution, people joked, not while they could drop things on us, and all we could do is duck.
Someday there might be a limited agricultural trade, since we were now growing a few exotic hybrids, but in ’Home they were understandably cautious for the time being. Even people not old enough to remember the ag plague learned about it as a disaster of mythic proportion, started by one wayward organism.
I spent a few hours at the office and then walked around town for a while. I even tried a bicycle, but though the breeze was pleasant I was still a little too wobbly not to be a hazard to myself and others.
Hilltop’s pattern of growth was eccentric. The original experimental farms were still being planted, even though they were surrounded by buildings and there was better acreage in the low land. Perhaps that was conscious planning. In my mind’s eye I could see them becoming parkland in a few decades; islands of green in the bustle of a planet’s capital city.
I still had another half of a life to look forward to. How long would it be before I remembered this primitive scene with nostalgic longing?
I’d been back three days when Dennison asked me to “give a little talk” about the experience with the eveloi. I wasn’t thrilled, but at least it was an opportunity to set the record straight.
The administration building had a whitewashed meeting room big enough to seat five hundred people on benches; half again that number showed up, lining the walls and sitting on the floor. I supposed they were starved for novelty.
The night before, I had written out descriptions of the places the creature had taken me and what it had said, mostly from my diary, adding some things the analysts got through hypnosis. (I didn’t trust those notes as much as simple memory, though what you “reveal” under hypnosis depends a lot on how the question is worded. It’s not the shortcut to truth that some people think it is, or want it to be.) I had to be vague about what the creature said, since it so rarely used actual words.
I gave an unornamented description of the experience and asked if there were any questions. There were plenty of hands raised.
“If it wasn’t a ‘test,’” Kisti Seven asked, “what would you call it? An ordeal?”
“I think it was a series of experiments. The thing was emphatic about it not being a test in the sense of something you pass or fail. But I think it may have been a test in the objective way engineers sometimes apply the word: take a piece of metal and see what happens when you stretch it, heat it, dip it in acid—you’re not judging the metal; you’re just trying to find out things about it. When you’ve learned enough, you stop. They haven’t bothered anybody else, have they?”
There was a general murmur, no, and Dennison added, “They’ve asked us questions about human nature, usually pretty direct. But nothing like what happened to you—no transporting to other worlds or shape-changing, and no pain.”
“Maybe it never actually happened,” I said, “no matter how real it felt. It could have been something like VR, but more advanced. The objective evidence, the frozen clothing and wounds I experienced, could have been caused by some agency less astounding than instantaneous starflight.”
“But you don’t feel that way,” someone said. “It was real to you.”
“Absolutely. But I wonder what would happen if you put a naive primitive into a VR template. He or she wouldn’t keep the slight link back to objective reality that you and I retain. It would be just like going to another world.”
Suddenly an eveloi appeared in front of me. “It is real, real,” the thing rasped. “Come with me.” The pink tendril floated out; I closed my eyes and accepted the sting.
I opened my eyes at the sound of screams, a huge concrete lion. After a moment I recognized it, one of the guardians of the New York Public Library. Hundreds of people were stampeding in fright from this weird apparition that had suddenly appeared, woman and unearthly creature linked. It is real to them.
I said that I was convinced. The city scene faded to a weightless pearly gray. I asked it why it hadn’t transported anybody else.
We will do that soon. One more thing.
I was suddenly back in the total black nullity that had preceded the terrible choice with Sandra. After a moment, the rough rope was in my hands again.
I said that I can’t do this. You can’t make me go through this twice.
It’s not the same. Hold on.
I gripped it and was swinging in the fiery glare, the molten river rushing below again, its heat blistering even from ten meters.
You have twenty seconds.
This time it was John’s crippled body swinging there, thick hawser bound around pipestem wrists. He stared down in wide-eyed terror.
I asked if the same thing would happen if I let go.
Yes. He will live. You may live if you can survive the experience again. If he drops he will certainly die… but then he does not have a long time to live in any case.
I asked how long.
That is not important. What you do in the next five seconds is important.
I read somewhere that the two most common last words are “Mother” and “shit.” I guess I was never that close to Mother.
AGE 100
6 January 2204 [4 Columbus 527]—Today I’m officially one hundred Earth years old, not counting cryptobiosis. Prime notes helpfully that I was born 313 actual Epsilon years ago. Thanks, Prime. Don’t feel a day over 312.
The odd thing about it is that I don’t feel all that old, if I just close my eyes and don’t try to move—or touch or hear or smell anything. Here in the cave of my mind I can still be a gawky twelve or a cocksure twenty.
By twenty-one, I was less sure of how the world worked, after leaving New New and visiting an actual planet. Full of revolutionaries and rapists.
My favorite revolutionary was Benny, the poet “benjaarons.” The first man I loved who died. As of course they all have, though not usually slain in an epiphany of injustice. Being murdered would be interesting, compared to being slowly or swiftly traduced by one’s own body. I don’t suppose at this late date I could get anyone that angry at me.
What fraction of this body is actually mine is open to debate. After the second dip in that fiery river all of my transplants had to be replaced with new transplants. And then more switchouts over the years. I do miss having a heart that beats. Sometimes the cheerful clickety-hum drives me crazy. I love the painless mechanical kidney, though, and these hard plastic teeth. It’s funny to think about your teeth outlasting you. I wonder if they’ll pass them on to someone else. They could probably get a good price. “Used by a little old lady who never got to eat anything interesting.”
I vaguely remember some poet, maybe Shakespeare, bemoaning “the calamity of so long life.” Maybe it is a calamity if you have to hang on to one set of kidneys. I see it more as a cosmic kind of whimsy, a joke not told too well.
It’s sort of like visiting an unfriendly exotic planet, this state of being older than old. Too much gravity, the air so thick it’s hard to see and hear. Your mind is quite clear, but the alien humanoids dashing around you are on a different wavelength. You are in the grip of a sinister mind force that makes you pee when you sneeze.
(The thing about the alien humanoids is a jo
ke, you generations yet unborn. When I grew up we didn’t have actual alien humanoids everywhere.)
But it’s still worth hanging around. There have been times when I was in enough agony of one sort or another to wish myself dead. That has always been only a reaction to an overload of pain, though, rather than a decision of great existential significance. Even when the pain was emotional. I remember Raskolnikov in that Russian novel, who in all his terrible Russian misery, of which there can be no variety worse, said that if he could have only a square meter of earth to stand on, with nothing around him but impenetrable fog, forever, that would be preferable to death. I would have to agree, if only by force of logic. Death is probably restful and boring, but maybe it’s a fiery river. Maybe the old Christians were right, and I’m going to sizzle for every one of those hundred limber teenage dicks, more or less a century ago.
I guess curiosity about religion is a disease of age. I read the Jewish tale of Job the other day, not for the first time. What it seems to boil down to, so to speak, is that God makes you suffer for reasons of his own, which you (not being godlike) could never understand, so suffer and shut up. Be glad he cares enough to take an interest in your life. I should relate the tale to the eveloi the next time I contact one; I think they would find it eminently sensible. A handy guide for dealing with merely mortal creatures.
They’re still aloof about their own affairs, although they’ve been transshifting people ever since my second test-which-was-not-a-test. Last I heard, we’d visited fifty-three planets with their help, not counting Earth and New New. We’ve exchanged envoys, or spies or whatever, with eight of those planets. In each case I’ve had to hobble ceremonially down to the Capitol and say Hello, you don’t smell bad at all, although you look like a mental disorder personified. Actually I say something less honest.