Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS) (58 page)

The prognosis is death.

This is of great scientific interest, friend. But you won’t believe it, of course. You’re on your way there, aren’t you? Nothing will stop you, you have reasons. All kinds of reasons—saving the race, building a new world, national honor, personal glory, scientific truth, dreams, hopes, plans—does every little sperm have its reasons, thrashing up the pipe?

It calls, you see. The roe calls us across the light-years, don’t ask me how. It’s even calling Dr. Aaron Kaye, the sperm who said no—Oh, Christ, I can feel it, the sweet pull.
Why did I let it go?
. . . Excuse me. Dr. Aaron Kaye is having another drink now. Quite a few, actually. Yellaston was right, it helps. . . . The infinite variety of us, all for nothing. Where was I? . . . We make our rounds, I check them all. They don’t move much anymore. I look at the new things, too. . . . Lory comes with me, she helps me carry things. Like she used to, little sister—we’re particularly not going to talk about Lory. The things, the zygotes—three more of them went away today, Kawabata’s and the two Danes. Don’s is still in Commons, I think it’s going soon. Do they leave when the, the
person
dies? I think that’s just coincidence. We’re totally . . .
irrelevant
, afterward. The zygote remains near the site of impregnation for a variable period before moving on to implant. Where do they implant, in space, maybe? Where do they get born?—Oh, god, what are they like, the creatures that generated us, that we die to form? Can a gamete look at a king? Are they brutes or angels? Ah, Christ, is isn’t fair,
it isn’t fair!

. . . Sorry, friend. I’m all right now. Don Purcell collapsed today, I left him in Commons. I visit my patients daily. Most of them are still sitting. Sitting at their stations, in their graves. We do what we can, Lory and I.
Making gentle the life of this world
. . . It may be of great scientific interest that they all saw it different the egg-things I mean. Don said it was god, Coby saw ova. Åhlstrom was whispering about the tree Yggdrasill. Bruce Jang saw Mei-Lin there. Yellaston saw death. Tighe saw Mother, I think. All Dr. Aaron Kaye saw was colored lights. Why didn’t I go, too? Who knows. Statistical phenomenon. Defective tail. My foot got caught. . . . Lory saw utopia, heaven on earth, I guess. We will not talk about Lory. . . . She goes ‘round with me, looking at the dying sperms, our friends. All the things in their rooms, the personal life, all this ship we were so proud of.
Mono no aware
, that’s the pathos of things, Kawabata told me. The wristwatch after the wearer has died, the eyeglasses . . . the pathos of all our things now.

. . . Yes, Dr. Aaron Kaye is getting fairly well pissed, friend. Dr. Aaron Kaye, you see, is avoiding contemplating what he’ll do, afterward . . . after they are all gone. Coby broke his leg today. I found him, I think he was pleased when I put him to bed. He didn’t seem to be in much pain. His, the thing he made, it went away quite a while ago, I guess I haven’t been recording too well. A lot of them have gone. Not Yellaston’s last time I looked. He’s up in Astrogation, I mean Yellaston himself. Gazing out the dome. I know he wants to end there. Ah, Christ, the poor old tiger, the poor ape, everything Lory hated—all gone now. Who cares about a sperm’s personality? Answer: another sperm . . . Dr. Kaye grows maudlin. Dr. Kaye weeps, in fact. Remember that, friend. It has scientific interest. What will Dr. Kaye do, afterward? It will be quiet around here on the good ship
Centaur
, which will probably last forever, unless it falls into a star. . . . Will Dr. Kaye live out the rest of his life here, twenty-six trillion miles from his home testis? Reading, listening to music, tending his garden, writing notes of great scientific interest? Fifty-five frozen bodies and one skeleton. Keep your eye on the skeleton, friend . . . or check on that last scout ship,
Alpha
. Will Dr. Kaye one day take off in little old
Alpha
, trying to head for somewhere? Where? You guess . . . Tail-end Charlie, last man in the oviduct. Over the viaduct, via the oviduct. Excuse me.

. . . Not the last. Not at all, let’s not forget all those fleets of ships, they’ll start from Earth when the green signal gets there. And they’ll keep on coming for a while, anyway. . . . The green got sent, didn’t it, no matter how we tried? The goal of man’s desiring. No way to stop it. No hope at all, really.

But of course it’s only a handful, the ones that will ever make it to the planet, compared to the total population of Earth. About the proportion of one ejaculandum to total sperm production, wouldn’t you say? Should compute sometime, great scientific interest there. So most of the egg-creatures will die unfertilized, too. Nature’s notorious wastefulness. Fifty million eggs, a billion sperm—one salmon . . .

. . . What happens to the people who don’t go, the ones who stay on Earth, all the rest of the race? Let us speculate, Dr. Kaye. What happens to unused sperm? Stuck in testes, die of overheating. Reabsorbed. Remind you of anything? Calcutta, say. Rio de Janeiro, Los Angeles . . . Previews. Born too soon or too late—too bad. Rot away unused. Function fulfilled, organs atrophy. . . . End of it all, just rot away.
Not even knowing
—thinking they were people, thinking they had a chance. . . .

Dr. Kaye is getting rather conclusively intoxicated, friend. Dr. Kaye is also getting tired of talking to you. What good will it do you on your way up the pipe? Can you stop, man? Can you? Ha ha. As—someone used to say. . . . Goddamn it, why can’t you try? Can’t you stop, can’t you stay human even if we’re—Oh, lord, can a half of something, can a gamete build a culture? I don’t think so. . . . You poor doomed bastard with a load in your head, you’ll get there or die trying—

Excuse me. Lory stumbled a lot today. . . . Little sister, you were a good sperm, you swam hard. You made the connection. She wasn’t crazy, you know. Ever, really. She knew something was wrong with us. . . . Healed, made whole? All those months . . . a wall away from heaven, the golden breasts of god. The end of pain, the queen couzy . . . fighting it all the way . . . Oh, Lory, stay with me, don’t die—
Christ, the pull, the terrible sweet pull—

. . . This is Dr. Aaron Kaye signing off. Maybe my condition is of deep scientific interest . . . I don’t dream anymore.

WE WHO STOLE THE
DREAM

T
HE CHILDREN
could survive only twelve minims in the sealed containers.

Jilshat pushed the heavy cargo loader as fast as she dared through the darkness, praying that she would not attract the attention of the Terran guard under the floodlights ahead. The last time she passed he had roused and looked at her with his frightening pale alien eyes. Then, her truck had carried only fermenting-containers full of
amlat
fruit.

Now, curled in one of the containers, lay hidden her only-born, her son Jemnal. Four minims at least had already been used up in the loading and weighing sheds. It would take four more, maybe five, to push the load out to the ship, where her people would send it up on the cargo conveyor. And more time yet for her people in the ship to find Jemnal and rescue him. Jilshat pushed faster, her weak gray humanoid legs trembling.

As she came into the lighted gate the Terran turned his head and saw her.

Jilshat cringed away, trying to make herself even smaller, trying not to run. Oh, why had she not taken Jemnal out in an earlier load? The other mothers had taken theirs. But she had been afraid. At the last minute her faith had failed. It had not seemed possible that what had been planned so long and prepared for so painfully could actually be coming true, that her people, her poor feeble dwarf Joilani, could really overpower and subdue the mighty Terrans in that cargo ship. Yet there the big ship stood in its cone of lights, all apparently quiet. The impossible must have been done, or there would have been disturbance. The other young must be safe. Yes—now she could make out empty cargo trucks hidden in the shadows; their pushers must have already mounted into the ship. It was really and truly happening, their great escape to freedom—or to death. . . . And now she was almost past the guard, almost safe.

“Oy!”

She tried not to hear the harsh Terran bark, hurried faster. But in three giant strides he loomed up before her, so that she had to halt.

“You deaf?” he asked in the Terran of his time and place. Jilshat could barely understand; she had been a worker in the far
amlat
fields. All she could think of was the time draining inexorably away, while he tapped the containers with the butt of his weapon, never taking his eyes off her. Her huge dark-lashed Joilani gaze implored him mutely; in her terror, she forgot the warnings, and her small dove-gray face contorted in that rictus of anguish the Terrans called a “smile.” Weirdly, he smiled back, as if in pain too.

“I wo’king, seh,” she managed to bring out. A minim gone now, almost two. If he did not let her go at once her child was surely doomed. Almost she could hear a faint mew, as if the drugged baby was already struggling for breath.

“I go, seh! Men in ship ang’ee!” Her smile broadened, dimpled in agony to what she could not know was a mask of allure.

“Let ‘em wait. You know, you’re not bad-looking for a Juloo
moolie?
” He made a strange
hahnha
sound in his throat. “It’s my duty to check the natives for arms. Take that off.” He poked up her dingy
jelmah
with the snout of his weapon.

Three minims. She tore the
jelmah
off, exposing her widehipped, short-legged little gray form, with its double dugs and bulging pouch. A few heartbeats more and it would be too late, Jemnal would die. She could still save him—she could force the clamps and rip that smothering lid away. Her baby was still alive in there. But if she did so, all would be discovered; she would betray them all.
Jailasanatha
, she prayed. Let me have love’s courage. O my Joilani, give me strength to let him die. I pay for my unbelief.

“Turn around.”

Grinning in grief and horror, she obeyed.

“That’s better, you look almost human. Ah, Lord, I’ve been out too long. C’mere.” She felt his hand on her buttocks. “You think that’s fun, hey? What’s your name,
moolie?
”

The last possible minim had run out. Numb with despair, Jilshat murmured a phrase that meant
Mother of the Dead
.

“Joobly-woobly—” His voice changed. “Well, well! And where did
you
come from?”

Too late, too late: Lal, the damaged female, minced swiftly to them. Her face was shaved and painted pink and red; she swirled open a bright
jelmah
to reveal a body grotesquely tinted and bound to imitate the pictures the Terrans worshiped. Her face was wreathed in a studied smile.

“Me Lal.” She flirted her fingers to release the flower essence the Terrans seemed to love. “You want I make fik-fik foh you?”

The instant Jilshat felt the guard’s attention leave her, she flung her whole strength against the heavy truck and rushed naked with it out across the endless field, staggering beyond the limit of breath and heart, knowing it was too late, unable not to hope. Around her in the shadows the last burdened Joilani filtered toward the ship. Behind them the guard was being drawn by Lal into the shelter of the gatehouse.

At the last moment he glanced back and scowled.

“Hey, those Juloos shouldn’t be going into the ship that way.”

“Men say come. Say move cans.” Lal reached up and caressed his throat, slid skillful Joilani fingers into his turgid alien crotch. “Fik-fik,” she crooned, smiling irresistibly. The guard shrugged, and turned back to her with a chuckle.

The ship stood unwatched. It was an aging
amlat
freighter, a flying factory, carefully chosen because its huge cargo hold was heated and pressurized to make the fruit ferment en route, so that some enzyme the Terrans valued would be ready when it made port. That hold could be lived in, and the
amlat
fruit would multiply a thousandfold in the food-converter cycle. Also, the ship was the commonest type to visit here; over the decades the Joilani ship cleaners had been able to piece together, detail by painful detail, an almost complete image of the operating controls.

This one was old and shabby. Its Terran Star of Empire and identifying symbols were badly in need of paint. Of its name the first word had been eroded away, leaving only the alien letters: . . . N’S DREAM. Some Terran’s dream once; it was now the Joilani’s.

But it was not Lal’s Dream. Ahead of Lal lay only pain and death. She was useless as a breeder; her short twin birth channels had been ruptured by huge hard Terran members, and the delicate spongy tissue that was the Joilani womb had been damaged beyond recovery. So Lal had chosen the greater love, to serve her people with one last torment. In her hair flower was the poison that would let her die when the
Dream
was safely away.

It was not safe yet. Over the guard’s great bulk upon her Lal could glimpse the lights of the other ship on the field, the station’s patrol cruiser. By the worst of luck, it was just readying for its periodic off-planet reconnaissance.

To our misfortune, when the
Dream
was loaded, the Terran warship stood ready to lift off, so that it could intercept us before we could escape by entering what the Terrans called tau-space. Here we failed.

Old Jalun hobbled as smartly as he could out across the Patrol’s section of the spaceport, to the cruiser. He was wearing the white jacket and female
jelmah
in which the Terrans dressed their mess servants, and he carried a small napkin-wrapped object. Overhead three fast-moving moonlets were converging, sending triple shadows around his frail form. They faded as he came into the lights of the cruiser’s lock.

A big Terran was doing something to the cruiser’s lock tumblers. As Jalun struggled up the giant steps, he saw that the spacer wore a side arm. Good. Then he recognized the spacer, and an un-Joilani flood of hatred made his twin hearts pound. This was the Terran who had raped Jalun’s granddaughter, and broken her brother’s spine with a kick when the boy came to her rescue. Jalun fought down his feelings, grimacing in pain.
Jailasanatha; let me not offend Oneness.