George Zebrowski (11 page)

The two younger women seemed to smile from behind their long, brown hair. The mother was without expression. Her chiseled, sun-darkened features seemed bare with her hair put up in a bun on her head. Kurbi noticed the winding gray streaks.

“Please sit down,” she said in a decisive tone of voice, as if she resented his scrutiny.

Kurbi sat down in the one chair on the empty side of the table.

“Are you hungry?” she asked. “We have eaten, but there is a little meat left.”

“No, thank you, I ate on the train,” Kurbi said, patting his rucksack which he held on his lap. “When does the next train come by?”

“About a week,” Fane said, “going east.”

“You don’t like the train, do you?”

“No.”

“It takes from us our reliance on our bodies,” the older woman said.

“But isn’t it useful?” Kurbi asked.

“When?” Fane said.

“Why — when someone is sick and needs a hospital.…”

“We are never sick,” the woman said, “unless it is time to die.”

“What about when food is scarce?”

“To be useful is not always to be right,” Fane said.

The storm was dying outside. Kurbi turned and saw daylight brightening in the window.

“The rain will help,” Kurbi said.

“It is welcome — but it is not enough,” Fane said.

“How old are your daughters?” Kurbi asked.

“They are spoken for,” Fane said.

“Do you have any sons?”

“They have gone.”

“Where?”

“To the port, the rail towns — we don’t know,” Fane said.

Kurbi thought of his co-workers in the port, especially Den, who must have come from a family like this. A severe conflict would one day develop on New Mars, between those who would modernize according to Federation ways and those who would cling to the ideals of the original colonists. The conflict was even present in how Fane spoke to him. Quite clearly, he disapproved of offworlders and their influence, but his curiosity as well as good manners prevented him from showing his feelings overtly.

“How old are you?” the woman asked.

Her husband gave her a quick look of surprise and cut her off with another question. “How long do people live where you come from?”

“I’m from Earth,” Kurbi said, “I’m fifty Earth years old. That’s about thirty-five of your years, which are longer. Federation citizens can live as long as they wish depending on whether there is a rejuvenation facility nearby. Medical care is part of Federation citizenship, a right. Technically, New Mars is part of the Federation, but it’s up to you what you import.”

“Not every world has interstar transport facilities,” Fane said, eager to show that he knew something.

“That’s true,” Kurbi said. He estimated that Fane was about fifty Earth years old, but he looked older.

“But I have no wish to live beyond my time,” Fane added quickly. Then he looked directly at Kurbi and asked, “Don’t you wish to die?”

“Sometimes — many of my people take their own lives when it comes to that.”

“It was meant to be,” the woman said, “the merciful God made the world to test us for another life, not for us to be happy in. If we are happy we will not learn what will be required of us later.”

“How long will you live?” Fane asked.

“I don’t know — past a century at least, I suppose. My wife died in a flying accident recently.”

“Flying?” Fane asked.

“Gliding — for sport.”

“I don’t understand,” Fane said.

The woman shook her head but did not speak.

“That is why you are traveling?” Fane asked.

Kurbi nodded. “May I stay here for a day or two? I’ve been doing chores for my food and a place to sleep. Can you use the help?”

“Yes, I can,” Fane said. Kurbi sensed that the mention of Grazia’s death had affected Fane, perhaps reminding him of the certainty of his wife’s death, as well as of his own.

“You may stay until the next train, young man,” Fane’s wife said. “You may call me Slifa while you are with us.”

“And your daughters’ names?”

Slifa looked to her husband. Fane shrugged.

“They are Azura and Apona,” she said.

“Twins?”

“Yes — they were made by God so that they might better see their faults in each other.”

The two girls nodded solemnly at Kurbi, but he was still unable to see their full faces. He wondered if they were shy, or if they were supposed to wear their hair like a veil.

“I’m glad to know you, Azura and Apona.”

“You must not speak of knowing them,” Fane said.

“I see.”

“You must not look at them long,” Slifa added. “They must not become accustomed to the gaze of any other except the ones who have spoken for them.”

“Very well.”

Fane got up and went to the fireplace, where he added two chunks of peat to the flames. “You will sleep by the fire,” he said without turning around.

Silently, the women got up. Azura and Apona went to a door at the end of the room, opened it and disappeared into a dark room, closing the wooden door firmly behind them. Slifa went to the door at the opposite end of the room at Kurbi’s right, opened it and went inside, leaving it slightly ajar.

Fane prodded the fire a few times with a stick.

“Why are you really here, offworlder?” he asked as he sat down again.

“You’re certainly curious about how people live elsewhere. I’m here for the same reason.”

Fane shrugged and his dark eyebrows went up. “What is there to know — we know, and we know our way is right.” There seemed to be a suppressed anger in the man’s manner, as if the existence of other worlds were an insult to him. “I do not believe there are as many worlds as some say — certainly there are not as many as grains of sand.”

Kurbi did not answer, but searched for something else to say. “I’d like to watch your sunset before I sleep,” he said finally.

Fane looked at him and smiled, obviously relieved that Kurbi had not contradicted him about something he was unsure about. “Yes — but the wind gets cold,” he said as he stood up. “I will leave you now.”

“Sleep well,” Kurbi said as the man went into his bedroom and closed the door. Kurbi heard him putting something against the door inside.

There was a muffled giggle from the bedroom at his left as he stood up to go outside. He opened the door and stepped out.

The storm was completely gone. At his right the sky was clear and blue, darkening into jet black. The twin suns were balls of molten metal, joined with a white-hot streamer of plasma. The wind from the east was cold, but there was less dust on its breath after the rain.

The suns touched the horizon and sank into the flat earth, until only an upward wash of red light was left. Abandoned, the planet seemed to shudder as the wind quickened and became cooler. Kurbi turned and went back inside, closing the wooden door quickly behind him.

He unrolled his sleeping bag by the fire, put his package of provisions aside and lay down by the warming flames. For a time he wandered in the suburbs of sleep, circling the center of rest while images of his travels came to him like actors paying curtain calls.

“If you don’t return in some months,” Nicolai had said, “I’ll take the flyer we have and come out along the rail line looking for you — so don’t wander too far from the tracks.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“I will come anyway.”

“Suit yourself, Nico — you just want an excuse to travel. Or is it because you’ll miss our talks?”

“Both.”

“I’ll get back, don’t worry. If you feel so constricted, why don’t you leave New Mars, start a new life elsewhere?”

“My family is here — I haven’t faced the idea of leaving my parents permanently to go worlds away.”

“You don’t have a wife or children.”

“No — there is a brother I haven’t seen for years. It’s not the same for me, Raf, as it is for you.”

“I think I understand. It would be as if the Earth were not there anymore, as if something had destroyed it.” He had thought of the Herculean at that moment, of Julian and his offer, and it all seemed to mean more.

A bit of moist peat crackled in the fire, jarring him into wakefulness. He felt that eyes were watching him. The floorboards creaked under him as if someone were walking across the room toward him. The planet trembled under his back slightly and he sat up, wide-awake.

The house shook a little, and the window facing east brightened. Kurbi stood up just as Fane came out of his bedroom. “Do you have quakes?” Kurbi asked.

Fane shook his head and went out the door. Kurbi followed him outside. Together they watched the eastern sky glow brighter, burning with a blue-white light that rose higher and higher, as if the planet had disgorged a bolt of light to strike the sky. The horizon flashed once, twice; the ground shook again.

“What can it be?” Kurbi asked.

“I have never seen anything like this,” Fane said.

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“I balanced all, brought all to mind,

The years to come seemed waste of breath,

A waste of breath the years behind

In balance with this life, this death.”

— W. B. Yeats

THE ROCK became a point and disappeared into the atmosphere of New Mars. A glow appeared against the blue ocean as the asteroid hurtled in at nearly one hundred kilometers per second, a forty-billion-ton missile that would strike the ocean just off New Marsport in less than a minute. The air glowed blue from the passage a few moments before impact.

Gorgias realized that he would not be able to see the full magnitude of the ocean strike from this distance.

“Describe what is happening,” he told the ship.

A violet flare appeared in the ocean below; it flashed once, twice.

SUB-NUCLEAR REACTION FROM HEAT OF IMPACT.

The screen telescoped the distance until the area of ocean took up the whole screen.

OCEAN VAPORIZED AT IMPACT POINT. CRUST PENETRATION THROUGH MANTLE. MAGMA EXPOSED.

Steam clouds covered the impact area, but the infrared glow of the wound in the ocean floor showed up clearly on the screen. The ocean was rushing in to cool that glow, creating the steam cloud that would soon veil the whole planet.

EFFECTS:

QUAKES,

OSCILLATION OF ALL PLANETARY WATER

RESULTING

IN TIDAL WAVES,

HIGH WINDS,

RAINSTORMS.

DURATION INDEFINITE.

On the edge of the continent, the city of New Marsport glowed in the infrared sensors. It disappeared as the tidal wave covered it. The sensors continued to pick up the city’s fading heat as the waves cooled it. And so it would be with every coastal settlement on the planet, as the angered ocean broke upon the shores, rolling in to reclaim its ancient places.

CLIMATIC FORECAST:

INDEFINITE WINTER RESULTING FROM CLOUD COVER.

RAIN AND WINDSTORMS INCREASING IN SEVERITY.

RECURRING TIDAL WAVES, TYPHOONS,

TORNADOES, WATERSPOUTS.

All this, he thought, from the energy released by the ocean’s quenching of the strike heat. A ringed waterfall as high as a mountain range was rushing in to fill the hellhole of the impact, water and steam distributing the heat energy necessary to threaten the biosphere of a world. An economical weapon, he thought, wondering if he would use it again. If he announced his responsibility for the strike, it would be difficult to repeat this form of attack; yet he wanted them to know that he had done it, rather than some mindless natural process.

“Send a message,” he said to the ship, “tell them we were here.”

In a few moments the communication would reach the exit beacon’s warp transmitter-repeater; within minutes the Federation would know. He got up from his station and went aft to find his father.

All through the next day wind and rain swept across the plain. Kurbi and the Weblen family huddled in the small cellar of the house. The roof of the house had been ripped off. Kurbi feared that the cellar would flood, forcing them out into the open.

The twin girls and their mother huddled together in one comer of the wood-lined basement. Kurbi and Fane each sat in a different comer, facing the women.

“What is happening, offworlder?” Fane asked in the gloom, sounding as if he thought that Kurbi might be responsible for the disaster.

“I don’t know — a volcanic eruption somewhere on the planet, maybe a large meteor strike. There’s no way I can find out.” He wondered if Nicolai was safe.

“My spring crop is dying,” Fane said. “Nothing will grow. We are being judged.”

“Death is near,” Slifa said. “We must compose ourselves.” Apona and Azura whimpered at her words.

“I — I can’t accept this to be the will of God,” Fane said.

“Do not blaspheme,” Slifa said.

Thunder cracked as she spoke the words. She wailed and her daughters joined in.

“Be still,” Fane shouted over the wind and thunder, “be still!”

“They can’t help it,” Kurbi said, “I’m fearful also.”

“You — afraid?”

“Yes.”

“Then we are lost.”

Suddenly more water began to flow into the cellar. In a minute they were in water up to their thighs.

“Up into the house,” Kurbi shouted over the rushing sound.

One by one they climbed the ladder into the roofless house. Here the fireplace was a mass of wet stones; chairs, pots and pans were scattered over the floor. Overhead, the sky drove with an unbroken obscurity of rain and dirt scooped up from the land.

“Over there,” Kurbi said, “There’s still some cover left in that corner. Help me with the overturned table — the women can get under it if we put it against the wall.”

They shoved the table into the corner and the three women crawled under it. Kurbi and Fane crouched on either side. “If the walls blow away,” Fane shouted to him across the tabletop, “we’ll be done.”

“As long as there’s a bit of wall,” Kurbi answered, “there’s hope.”

“What if the rain doesn’t stop?”

“It will,” Kurbi said, “it will.” It must, he thought, or the plain will flood and sweep us away. The land could only absorb so much.

“What time do you think it is?” Fane shouted.

There was no way to tell. The cloud cover had wiped out all distinction between day and night, morning and afternoon. Kurbi peered around the dark, debris-strewn floor, looking for his bedroll and rucksack.