Earthblood (3 page)

"Roan is the dumbbell of the sevens," they began to chant, flapping their wings at him. "Roan is stoo-oo-pid."

"I'm going to do it," he called. "Just watch me." But still he hesitated. He didn't have any wings.

The idea was to take the rope vine, which was just long enough to swing three-fourths of the way across Endless Ravine, and swing out into the dizzy air, and then sail the rest of the way across on your own power. Roan tested the rope vine, swinging softly on it, looking up to where it hung from high, high in the purplefruit tree, and then looking across Endless Ravine, across the impossible distance to where the other seven yearers stood.

Roan's pink face was drenched with perspiration, his tunic pasted to his childish body, his whole being drenched with fear.

He clung to the swaying rope and thought of how it would be if he just let go and ran home. Ma would say, "What did you do today?" and he'd say,

"Nothing," and the day would end, just like any other day.

"Stoopid!" they called. "Roan is a dumbbell." They'd said that before, that way, about other things, and Roan had decided it wasn't going to happen again. No—he'd show them, show them, show them—and some day there's be something he could do that they couldn't do.

Roan made himself relax, muscle by muscle, as Ma had taught him to do when he was angry and couldn't go to sleep. All I think about is getting to the other side, he said to himself, and didn't mention the ravine. He measured the distance with his eyes and gauged the swing of the rope vine with his whole body.

With luck, he'd make it.

Roan ran back with the rope vine, as far as it would go. Then he clung, feeling himself part of the arc of the swinging, willing the swing to be far enough, forcing himself to know when the top of the arc came, to let go at just the right moment.

The air was in his ears and the mouth of the ravine opened to swallow him, but his eye was on the soft pasture grass of the other side, and he let go at the apogee of the swing. Then, not knowing whether he would land or not, he relaxed himself for the landing, feeling the whistle of the air . . . He struck, rolled freely to lessen the impact of the earth on his soft human body, hardly feeling as his foot caught briefly, then rolled free with him. He laughed up at the group of empty faces. Somewhere inside of him something was pumping him in and out, as if he were a pair of bellows.

"Yah, I did it better than any of you," he said, and jumped up to walk off and show it hadn't been anything, to jump over a ditch.

"Yah," he said.

And fell down and went black.

He awakened slowly, into red and green flashes of pain, and he couldn't see anything but glaring sunlight. The other children had gone. They'd figured he was just dead.

If this was what death was, somebody ought to care.

Ma and Dad would care.

Roan started pulling himself along by his hands and his right knee. His left foot pulsed with pain that flared up his leg and into his groin. He had to peer through the brilliant sunshine as though it were a fog, to see which way home was. He would have to crawl to the swinging bridge over Endless Ravine, and across it, and then across more countryside to home. Up the hillock and down, his dead, screaming foot dragging uselessly behind him. Roan wanted to die at home. Or not die, if Dad could fix him. But he wasn't going to lie and die where he was, as the gracyls did. His foot bumped over a sharp stone, caught in a prickle bush. The prickle bush uprooted and clung to the dragging foot like a great insect. Like the Charons that cleaned the flesh off gracyl bodies.

That gracyl at the bottom of Endless Ravine. He'd be thick with them. Roan stopped to retch, and he thought of removing the prickle bush from his foot but it was too much to do anything else except crawl toward home. He came to the swinging bridge and here the crawling was worse, infinitely worse, because his hands slipped on the smooth, worn boards, and it was possible that he'd slip off, between the ropes along the sides, and always the bridge swayed nauseously.

The wood smelled dry and hot and burned his arms and hands and the prickle bush made an arid, insistent rustle, scraping along with the dead foot.

He crawled forever through the hot, bright fog, his whole leg burning like a torch. He reached home and crawled up on the stoop and called, "Ma! Dad!" and went black again, still calling through the infinite dark corridors of his unconsciousness.

Ma was saying, "Drink this," and he drank it.

"Raff!" she called. "He's awake."

Dad was there, his big, broken body looming in the doorway. You knew he was big, but he stood shorter than Ma.

"Stop that sniffling, Bella," he said. "I'll do it good." Roan was gladder of Dad. Ma was so old. Like curled leaves. Like things the winds toss up.

Raff sat down heavily, arranged himself on the chair, his bent legs awkwardly set back and his twisted torso facing to one side so that his face was over Roan's, his good eye bright and blue.

"Don't worry, boy," he said. "It's all right."

"I'm broken, Dad," Roan said, and realized something suddenly. "Like you." And began to cry.

"Oooh!" Ma said, almost whistling it. "Oooh."

"Get out of the room, woman," Dad said, looming over to pat Roan's shoulder. "I'll fix you, boy. Shut up, Bella. My hands are good. I don't have anything else left, but I've got that."

Raff felt softly of Roan's foot. Roan screamed.

"The drink'll help some, boy," Dad said. "But this is going to hurt. There's no help for it. Let it hurt."

Roan was shaking all over and Ma was sobbing and saying, "Stop, Raff, stop, I can't stand it." And Dad was doing something to his foot and Roan shuddered and shuddered and finally thought, I'm going to die. Dad is killing me. Dad is killing me because I'm broken.

The first day that Roan was outside exercising his foot the gracyl sevens came by. Roan was carefully limping. Putting even a little weight on the foot hurt.

"He's alive!" one of them said, and they all stood still and gaped at him, and came close and then edged back a little.

"Go ahead, walk," Dad said to Roan.

Roan limped painfully.

"Put your weight on it. It doesn't matter how much it hurts. Use it. Show

'em."

"He ain't natural," a gracyl child said.

"He was dead," another added.

"His father ain't natural, either. Look at 'em. They're both dead people walking around alive, that's what they are."

The children edged back some more, flapping their skinny arms excitedly, showing the pink membranes of their developing wings.

One of them picked a bright orange chunck-flower pod from the front garden. It missed Roan and made a garish stain on the little house Raff so carefully whitened every spring.

Another child threw a brown one and Roan ducked and a green one hit him over his right eyebrow and hurt and the acrid juice dripped into his eye and stung.

Dad started after the gracyl and the child laughed and spread its wings and flew off in little jumps. Raff swore at his twisted bones and useless muscles and tried to catch the children, and, forgetting himself, fell and lay there futilely trying to twist himself over like a turtle.

"Roan's old man is broken," they chanted. "Roan's a freak, and he's broken, too . . . " They howled with glee and tossed the chunck-flower pods as fast as they could pick them, and when the pods began to run out they used gobs of mud.

Bella came to the front door and screamed.

Roan forgot his foot. He didn't even know it hurt. He ran to the nearest gracyl and wrested the pod from his hand and smeared the juice in his eyes. Then he grabbed the next one and did the same thing.

They were all upon him, but they didn't fight together. They didn't have one hold him while another hit; Roan fought them one at a time. He kicked one gracyl and caught another around the neck with his hands, and bit a third that fell against him.

Finally those who hadn't gotten hurt bounded off, in their half-flights, and the rest lay there to see whether they were going to die or not. That evening before dinner Roan took off his tunic and looked at himself in the mirror, examining himself carefully all over. He felt of his hair and poked at his teeth. He twisted around and examined his back minutely and then moved his arms and poked his wing bones in and out, seeing the sharp edges move beneath the thin skin.

He went down to dinner, but he didn't look at the food on the table; he looked at Ma and Dad. And he asked, "What am I?" He always asked, but he never understood.

"You," said Dad, "are a human being. And don't you forget it." That's what he always said.

Roan looked at the steaming plate Ma put before him and didn't want it.

"Then that's why I'm so stoopid. Why I can't do anything the gracyls can do."

Raff and Bella exchanged glances.

"That's why you can do everything the gracyls can't do," Raff said. "Or that anybody can't do."

"You cost two thousand Galactic credits," Bella said proudly.

"I cost that much!"

"You were special," Bella said. "Very special." Roan thought of the insignificant white body he'd just examined, and how it got so easily hurt and broken and how he didn't have any wings and how he'd had to learn how to burrow and swim instead of just knowing as the gracyls did, and how he couldn't just let himself die when he was broken but had to cause everybody a lot of trouble . . .

"You got gypped, didn't you?" Roan said, and ran to his room to cry alone. But when he'd finished crying he was hungry and he went down and ate and Raff talked to him about what a great thing it was to be a human—and of the original Terry strain. Roan kept trying to believe all the things Raff told him.

Raff was enjoying this talk with his son, and thinking how more and more his son would be a companion to him, and how it had been worth the trouble and the expense of adopting Roan and seeing him through the difficult years of babyhood—and hadn't the boy grown fast!

"You weren't born to be a slave. The Shah could have those a dime a dozen. Or for a common soldier because those were easy come by, too. You were something special . . . "

"But when will my wings grow?" Roan asked, watching Raff's wide, brown face.

Raff shook his heavy head. "You don't need wings, boy. You've got something better: you've got your humanness—"

"Oh, don't try to explain him all that, him only seven years old, even if he is big for his age," Bella said, coming in with another hot dish.

"He's old enough to understand he's a Terry—a real Terry, genuine Terrestrial strain," Raff said. "Not mutated, like me . . . " He nodded proudly at the boy. "And not just humanoid, like your ma." He leaned toward Roan. "Some day you'll know what that means. Real Terry—the breed that settled the whole universe—that built the empire, long ago."

"I thought they were all stuck on Terry," Roan said. "That's what T'hoy hoy says."

Raff looked confused. "Yes, but . . . you were a special case."

"And if I'm a real Terry, why do we have to live in the ghetto with a bunch of old gracyls, and—"

"Here, don't go worrying your mind about all that," Raff cut in. "You're genuine, all right. I can tell. I've seen pictures. Look at you: pale skin, like skim-ice, and hair the color of wineberries, and—"

"But how did I get here, and where are the other real Terries, and—"

"Raff, I told you it wasn't good for the boy to get talking about all those things."

"Some day when you're older," Raff said. "Now just eat your dinner, and take my word for it: you can hold your head up anyplace in the Galaxy and be proud. You're a Terry. Nobody can take that away from you." T'hoy hoy had come in to put Roan to bed. "I didn't mean to upset the boy," he told Raff, "telling him about the Terran blockade and all the old Terran legends."

"Tell him the legends," Raff said. "I want him to know. Tell him your stories, T'hoy hoy."

"Then, Roan, tonight I tell you the song of Silver Shane the warrior, who defeated a Niss dreadnought single-handed by crawling up through the waste ejector and holding a fusion bomb while it exploded." It was winter and the incontinent rains of Tambool swept across the hills and found out a hole in the ceiling of the Cornay's house and Roan heard it drip, drip and it was the last straw, to try to read with that drip, drip happening and the frowsy house smelling of age and poverty, the house they could have because nobody else wanted it.

"It's nasty outside," Bella said.

"It's nastier inside," Roan said, and flung his book across the room. "I'm through."

"You haven't even started," Raff said. "Sit back down." Roan stood at bay before his parents. Bella set her bone-white lips and began picking irritably at the shedding skin on her thin arm, and Raff tried to work up a temper over the boy, but he couldn't. He's beautiful, Raff thought. No other word for it. Beautiful. Standing there tall for his ten years and glowing in his anger and with the dark red curls tumbling over his forehead.

"Everything," Roan shouted. "I have to do everything the hard way. I'm tired of it. They don't study, study, study. They know how to read just looking at the graffiti."

"They're only gracyls," Raff said. "Charons know how to build mud houses without learning. It's the same thing."

"I want to do whatever it is humans know how to do without learning. A two thousand credit Man ought to be able to do something." Raff pounded his right fist into his left hand and wished he could flex words the way he could flex his hands. "I've tried to make you understand. I don't know how to say it so's you'll see. Humans are superior, but that doesn't mean everything's easy for you. But you can do things no gracyl can do—"

"One thing humans don't do is read," Roan interrupted. "I hate reading."

"But you can read good," Bella said. "You read better than me. Better than Raff. And you can read Gracyl and Universal and those Terran books we kept for you."

"I know he can read good," Raff cut in. "I want him to read better. Good isn't enough."

"Humans aren't superior," Roan said. "They're—"

"That's enough, boy," Raff said sharply. He rocked in his chair, watching Roan sliding his foot in a puddle of rainwater on the floor. Bella went to the crockery shelf and took down a bowl to put under the leak in the roof.