Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS) (68 page)

There was silence. Over the water the eerie whistling suddenly rose, faded again. Or did it fade?

“You do not . . . ripen?” The
noion
’s “words” probed stealthily in his mind, pricked a sealed-off layer.

“No!” He jerked around, glaring at it. “Never ask me that again! Never.” He panted, clenching his mind against the memory. The thing the
noion
had shown him, the terrible thing. No. No.

“The only help I want from you is to protect them.” He built intensity, flung it at the
noion
. “One last time.”

“Mysha!”

He turned. A leathery little woman toiled up the rocks toward him, followed by a naked goddess. His wife and youngest daughter, bringing food.

“Mysha, are you all right up here?”

Bethel’s sad bird-eyes boring into his. Not looking at the
noion
. He took the gourd, the leaf-wrapped fish.

“What I’m doing you can do anywhere,” he grumbled, and repenting touched her sparrow wrists. The glorious girl watched, standing on one leg to scratch the other. How had these supernatural children come out of Bethel’s little body?

It was time to say some kind of good-bye.

“Piet is coming to take you inland,” Bethel was saying. “As soon as they get the laser mounted. Here’s your medicine, you forgot it.”

“No. I’m staying here. I’m going to try something.”

He watched her freeze, her eyes at last flicking to the silent brown thing hanging from its branch, back again to him.

“Don’t you remember? When we came here, this grove was the only untouched place. It saved itself, Bethel. I can make it help us again this time.”

Her face was hard.

“Beth, Beth, listen.” He shook her wrist. “Don’t pretend now. You know you believe me, that’s why you’re afraid.”

The girl was moving away.

“If you don’t believe me, why wouldn’t you let me love you here?” he whispered fiercely. “Melie!” he called. “Come here. You must hear this.”

“We must go back, there isn’t time.” Bethel’s wrist jerked. He held it.

“There’s time. They’re still whistling. Melie, this thing here, you’ve heard me call it the
noion
, it’s alive. It isn’t native to this planet. I don’t know what it is—a spore from space, a bionic computer even, maybe—who knows. It was here when we came. What you must know, you must believe is that it saved us. Twice. The first time was before any of you were born, the year when the wells went dry and we almost died.”

The girl Melie nodded, looking composedly from him to the
noion
.

“That was when you discovered the blackwater root,” she smiled.

“I didn’t discover it, Melie. No matter what they tell you. The
noion
did it. I came up here—”

He glanced away for an instant, seeing again the stinking mudflats where the lagoon was now, the dry wells, the jungle dying under the furnace that poured white fire on them week after parching week. That had been the year they decided it was safe to breed. Bethel’s first child had been lost then along with all the others, desiccated in the womb.

“I came up here and it felt my need. It put an image in my mind, of the blackwater roots.”

“It was your subconscious, Mysha! It was some memory!” Bethel said harshly. “Don’t corrupt the girl.”

He shook his head tiredly. “No. No. Lies corrupt, not the truth. The second time, Melie. You know about the still-death. Why we don’t use the soap after the wheat has sprouted. When Piet was a baby. . . .”

The still-death . . . his memory shivered. It had hit the babies first. Stopped them breathing, with no sign of distress. Martine’s baby started it, she’d seen the bubbles stop moving on its lips while it smiled at her. She got it breathing again, and again, and again, and then in the night Hugh’s baby died.

After that they watched constantly, exhausted because it was harvest time and a smut had damaged the wheat, every grain had to be saved. And then the adults started to drop.

Everybody had to stay together then, in pairs, one always watching the other, and still it got worse. The victims didn’t struggle, those who were brought back reported only a vague euphoria. There was no virus; the cultures were blank. They tried eliminating every food. They were living only on water and honey when Diera and her husband died together in the lab. After that they huddled in one room, still dying, and he had broken away and come up here—

“You were in a highly abnormal state,” Bethel protested.

“Yes. I was in a highly abnormal state.” On his knees here, cursing, his need raging at the
noion.
What is killing us? What can I do?
Tell me!
The broken gestalt of his ignorance clawing at the
noion.

“It was the need, you see. The urgency. It—somehow, it let me
complete
myself through it. I can’t describe it. But the fact remains I learned what to do.”

Adrenaline, it had been, and febrifacients, and making them breathe their own carbon dioxide until they choked and choked again. He had come down from the hill and thrust his baby son’s head in a plastic bag with Bethel fighting him.

“It was the enzyme in the soap,” said Melie calmly. She cocked her head, reciting. “The-soap-traces-potentiate-the-ergotin-the-wheat-smut-resulting-in-a-stable—uh—choline-like-molecule-which-passes-the-blood-brain-barrier-and-is-accepted-by-the-homeostats-of-the-midbrain.” She grinned. “I really don’t understand that. But, I mean, I guess it’s like jamming the regulator on our boiler. They didn’t know when they had to breathe.”

“Right.” He held Bethel more gently, put his other arm around her thin rigidity. “Now, how could that have possibly come out of my mind?” The girl looked at him; he realized with despair that to her there were no limits on what he might know. Her father Mysha, the colony’s great man.

“You must believe me, Melie. I didn’t know it. I couldn’t. The
noion
gave it to me. Your mother won’t admit it, for reasons of her own. But it did, and you should know the truth.”

The girl transferred her gaze to the
noion.

“Does it speak to you, Father?”

Bethel made a sound.

“Yes. In a way. It took a long while. You have to want it to, to be very open. Your mother claims I’m talking to myself.”

Bethel’s mouth was trembling. He had made her come here and try once, leaving her alone. Afterward the
noion
had asked him, “Did anyone speak?”

“It’s a projection,” Bethel said stonily. “It’s a part of your mind. You won’t accept your own insights.”

Suddenly the whole thing seemed unbearably trivial.

“Maybe, maybe,” he sighed. “‘Bethink ye, my lords, that ye may be mistaken. . . .’ But know this. I intend to try to get its help once more, if the beasts break through. I believe it has the strength to do it just once more. It’s dying, you see.”

“The third wish.” The girl said lightly. “Three wishes, it’s like the stories.”

“You see?” Bethel burst out. “You see? It’s starting again. Magic! Oh, Mysha, after all we’ve been through—” Her voice broke with bitterness.

“Your mother is afraid you’ll make a religion out of it. A fetish in a carved box.” His lips quirked. “But you wouldn’t believe a god in a box, would you, Melie?”

“Don’t joke, Mysha, don’t joke.”

He held her, feeling nothing. “All right. Back to work. But don’t bother trying to move me, tell Piet to use the time for another load. You have the lab packed, haven’t you? If they get through there won’t be any time.”

She nodded dumbly. He tightened his arms, trying to summon feeling.

“Dying makes one cantankerous.” It was not much of a good-bye.

He watched them going down the hill, the girl’s peach-bloom buttocks gliding against each other. The ghost of lust stirred in him. How solemn they had been, the elaborate decisions about incest. . . . That would all go too, if the sea-wall failed.

Figures were swarming over the water tower now, mounting the old wrecking laser from the ship. That was Gregor’s idea; he’d carried all the young men with him, even Piet. True, the laser was powerful enough to strike beyond the wall—but what would they aim at? Who knew where the things’ vital centers were? Worst of all, it meant leaving the generator, all the precious energy-system in place.

“If we lose, we lose it all,” he muttered. He sat down heavily on the tapes. The pain in his groin was much worse now. Bethel, he thought, I’ve left them a god in a box after all, if the generator’s smashed that’s all these tapes will be.

The box held the poetry, the music, that had once been his life, back in another world. The life he had closed out; his own private meanings. Abandoned it gladly for the work of fathering his race. But after his accident he had asked Piet to lug these up here, telling the
noion
, “Now you will hear the music of men.” It had listened with him, often the whole night through, and sometimes there seemed to be a sharing. . . .

He smiled, thinking of alien communion in the echoes of music from a brain centuries dead and light-years away. Below him in the bay he saw the last rocks were being offloaded into the apex cribs. All the young ones were out there now, lashing a huge hawser in the outer piles.

Suddenly the sea-wall looked better to him. It was really very strong. The braces had gone in now, heavy trunks wedged slanting into the rock. Yes, it was a real fortress. Perhaps it would hold, perhaps everything would be all right.

I am projecting my own doom, he thought wryly. His eyes cleared, he let himself savor the beauty of the scene. Good, it was good; the strong young people, his children with unshadowed eyes. . . . He had made it, he had led them here out of tyranny and terror, he had planted them and built the complex living thing, the colony. They had come through. If there was one more danger, he had one last trick left to help them. Yes; even with his death he could help them one more time, make it all right. What more could a man ask, he wondered, smiling, all calm strength to the bottom of his being, now, all one. . . .

—And the sky fell in, the bottom of his being betrayed him with the memory that he would not remember.
What more could a man want?
He groaned, clenched his eyes.

. . . In the spring, it had begun. In the idle days after the planting was in. He and his eldest son, the young giant whose head he had once thrust into a bag, had made an exploration voyage.

A query had been in the back of his mind since Day One, the day the ship landed. In the last tumultuous minutes there had been a glimpse of another clearing, a white scar on the far south coast. A good site, perhaps, for a future settlement? And so he and Piet had taken the catamaran south to look.

They had found it. In use.

For a day and a night they had hidden, watching the appalling animals surge upon the devastated shore. And then they had cautiously threaded their way out through the fouled shoal waters toward the outer barrier reefs.

The shoals and keys extended far out of sight of land, and a south wind blew forever here. They shipped the sail and paddied outward under a bare mast, blinded by warm flying scud, the roar of the world-ocean ever louder. A huge hollow whistling began, like a gale in a pipe organ. They rounded the last rocky key and saw through the spume the towers and chimneys of the outmost reef.

“My god, it’s alive!”

One of the towers was not gray but crimson. It swayed, reared higher. Another loomed up beside it, fell upon it. There was a visceral wail. Under the two struggling pillars mountains thrashed, dwarfing the giant combers breaking over them.

The catamaran retreated, tried another channel. And another, and another, until there was only moonlight.

“They’re all up and down the whole damned reef.”

“The bulls, perhaps . . . hauled up, waiting for the cows.”

“They look more like enormous arthropods.”

“Does it matter?” he had asked bitterly. “What matters is that they’re preparing to come ashore here too. To our clearing. They’ll destroy it as they did the other. Get the sail up, Piet. There’s enough light. We’ve got to warn them.”

But there was not quite enough light to safely run before that wind. Piet had brought him home senseless and broken, lashed to half an outrigger.

When he awoke he demanded, “Have they started building the sea-wall yet?”

“The sea-wall?” Dr. Liu tossed a dressing into the waste can. “Oh, you mean your sea monsters. It’s early harvest time, you know.”

“
Harvest?
Liu, hasn’t Piet told you? Don’t they realize? Get Gregor in here right now. And Hugh and Tomas. Piet too. Bring them, Liu.”

It was sometime after they came that he began to realize he was a ghost. He’d started calmly, aware that they might think his judgment was warped by his condition.

“The area was totally devastated,” he told them. “Approximately a kilometer square. There was a decapitated body, still living, near us. It was at least twenty meters long and three or four meters thick. That was by no means the largest. They come ashore periodically, it seems, to the same locations to lay eggs. That’s what created our clearing, not a tornado.”

“But why should they come here, Mysha?” Gregor protested. “After thirty years?”

“This is one of their nest sites. The time doesn’t matter, they apparently have a long cycle. Some Terran animals—turtles, eels, locusts—have long cycles. These things are gathering out there all along the reef. An early group came ashore in the south clearing; another will come here soon. We’ve got to build defenses.”

“But maybe they’ve changed their habits. They may have been going to the south site every year, for all we know.”

“No. The newly smashed trees were at least two decades old. They’re coming, I tell you. Here!” He heard his voice go up, saw their closed faces. “I tell you we dare not wait for the harvest, Gregor! If you had seen—
Tell
them, Piet! Tell them, tell them—”

When his head cleared again, there was only Dr. Liu.

And shortly after that he discovered that he was a dead man indeed.

“It’s in the lymph system, Mysha. I found it in the groin when I went in to ease the inguinal ligament.” Liu sighed. “You’d have heard from it pretty soon.”