Screaming Science Fiction (14 page)

“I shook my head. ‘No, I didn’t say that. You said that. On Earth… they’re probably gone for good, yes. We fooled around with them genetically and weakened them. We may even have introduced that virus into the soil, albeit accidentally. The breeds—all the exotics—they were the first to suffer. But we have seeds, shoots, cuttings, all carefully preserved or in hibernation, just biding their time, waiting to be planted in a little rich, living soil under some generous G-type sunlight.’

“She sighed her relief and said, ‘Which means that when the first settlers get here—’

“‘Which is only a few short years away, once we get back to Earth and I deliver my feasibility report.’

“‘—that at least for a little while, and probably quite a while, they’ll have to be vegetarians? Can I at least have that much to look forward to?’

“‘Ah—not so.’ Trying not to take too much pleasure in it, I shook my head. ‘See, it’s the general rule that if something eats something we eat, we can usually eat the first something. There are exceptions, of course, but….’

“Laurilu frowned and said, ‘Come again?’

“And by way of explaining, I said: ‘Those little, er, armadillo guys?’

“Her jaw fell open. ‘Those little…but they’re
animals
!’

“‘That’s right—and very nutritious, too. And what do you think cows, rabbits, goats, sheep and pigs are, Laurilu? And as for chickens…well, we’ll have them all here, eventually.’

“Clenching her fists, she almost stood up. ‘What do I think they are?” she said. ‘I think they’re
sentient
! Oh they may not think too good, but they
do
respond to stimuli…they do have brains, feelings—’

“‘—And souls?’ I got it in quick. ‘Are you religious?’

“‘What?’ she said, caught a little off guard. ‘Religious? I think so. My god may not be your god, but I don’t believe everything is just accidental.’

“‘Well me neither,’ I said. ‘And the Good Book tells us Man shall have dominion over all…We’re
that
far above the other animals, that’s all. We’re almost as far above the home world’s fauna as it is above the flora! So of course we eat it. Fish or fowl or four-legged beast, if it isn’t poisonous we eat it! But we have to find that out first…which is what me and my team have been doing here on Ophiuchus VIII.’

“‘But—’

“‘But there’s no but about it, Laurilu! Put it this way: do we just let humanity go to hell in a bucket along with the home world? No, of course not. It’s us or the lesser species, kid.

“Again she shook her head, sighed, and said, ‘Another world to ruin.’

“And I admit I nodded, sighed with her and said, ‘Yes, only now we can do it a whole lot faster….’ But I knew at once that I had made a mistake.

“Laurilu narrowed her eyes and said, ‘We’ll do what? How do you mean?’

“I shrugged, but not negligently, and answered, ‘We managed to finish off the Earth in about—oh, I don’t know—say four or five thousand years? But that was from our tribal beginnings to where we are now; from a time when the only fires were campfires to a time when we’ve sucked all of the black juice out of the ground and burned it in our cars, in heating our cities and powering our machines; from clean air and oceans to radioactive ruins and skies that leak dilute acid rains…. Are you with me so far?’

“‘Go on,” she said, but very quietly now.

“‘Ten years from now,’ I said, just as quietly, ‘they’ll be sinking oil wells here. Twenty, there’ll be towns, small cities. Twenty-five: airplanes and ocean-going liners, roads and tracks joining up the towns, motor cars on the roads and trains on the tracks. Another thousand years…well, by then we should have found Earth III, or IV, or even V. It’s evolution, Laurilu. Mankind is evolving, expanding throughout the universe.’

“‘And leaving precious little room for anything else,’ she said.

“‘But
is
there anything else?’ I asked her then. ‘We’re it, as far as I can see. Where sentience is concerned, we’re definitely it, Ma Nature’s clever kids, Laurilu. The universe is our playpen, our schoolyard, our many worlds—all the places we’re going to grow up in.’

“‘You’re saying that nature is so utterly uncaring, insensitive of the rest of her creations, that she’s given us a whole universe to sack? All those stars and planets out here—or out there—and they’re all for us? Only for us?’

“‘That’s how it appears,’ I replied. Then I asked her: ‘Did you ever hear of SETI?’

“‘SETI?’

“‘The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence,’ I told her. ‘SETI operated for over two hundred years sending radio signals out to the stars. Now we can get there faster than the signals! But you know what? There wasn’t a single reply, not one. By now those signals have reached out over four hundred light-years in all directions, and no one out there gives a damn because there is no one out there. It’ll take us two thousand years to get to all the places those signals have already left behind, where as far as we know there’s nothing like us to compete with. So yes, it looks like it’s all ours, Laurilu. If there is a god, we are his—or her—main men.’

“‘Men
and
women.’ She corrected me, shivering a little.

“So I put my arm around her, and she drew close. ‘We’re all there is,’ I said. ‘So we must make the best of what we’ve been given. Even of each other.’

“She pulled away just a little. ‘But we haven’t, we aren’t, making the best of it. We’re making a mess of it at the expense of everything we touch! And yet something you said has given me hope.’

“I smiled and pulled her in again. ‘Now don’t you start going soft on me, Laurilu!’

“She drew away again, quite suddenly, which caused the zipper on her uniform blouse to unzip two or three inches. But she didn’t seem to notice.
I
noticed; after all this time away from Earth, well I was bound to. But just then it didn’t occur to me that she’d been the same time away. And: ‘No,’ she said, ‘don’t distract me!’ (Though I didn’t know I had.) ‘It’s what you were saying about the tree ferns: how the settlers can use every bit of them. See, it’s all the waste that I hate the most.’

“‘The waste?’

“She was up on her feet in a moment; one pace of those long legs took her to her bookshelf…there’s not too much room in a grav-ship’s bunks. And: ‘See,’ she said again, ‘when I got to know I was assigned to the
Starspike Explorer
’—she got down a book, one of her several antique volumes, and came and sat down again—‘I decided to take at least an interest in every aspect of the expedition, which included ecology: planet Earth’s ecology; or, as you might say, “when it had one.” So I picked up a couple of old books on the subject. And this is one of them.’

“‘Ah!’ I said, nodding however reluctantly.

“‘Even in those days there were people like me who deplored the waste,’ she went on. ‘And when you look at this you can see why. It’s perfectly horrible!’ Opening the book to a bookmarked page, she handed it to me. I knew at once what it was that Laurilu found so disturbing, and said:

“‘Buying this was probably a mistake. An aunt of mine moved into an old house and explored the attic. She found a five-hundred-year-old book on human diseases—the
Compendium of Common Ailments & Household Cures
, or some such. And from that time on she had every disease you can name! If they were in the book my aunt got them, one at a time and often, or so it seemed, by the half-dozen! It was all in the mind. And you know what, Laurilu? She’s still going strong at eighty-two! Still thinks she’s sick, too.’ 

“She shook her head. ‘But this isn’t imagination. It really happened. Go on, look at it.’ As she leaned to look at the book with me her zipper slipped an inch or two more. But like a fool I didn’t look, except at the book. Well, mainly at the book.

“It was a picture of the bloody deck of a fishing boat. One of the fishermen had driven a long knife or machete through the head of a shark, almost nailing it to the deck, and another was slicing off its dorsal fin. There was a big basket full of fins to one side of the picture….

“And Laurilu said, ‘It was the fins, Mike. They only wanted the fins…
to make soup
!
The rest of the fish got tossed back in the ocean, and as often as not alive! Before that it was the whales, those huge great beasts, cut up alive for their livers, their oils. And those beautiful jungle cats—skinned for their furs. Ecology? On planet Earth? It was us,
we
murdered the home world, Mike! And we did it despite the warnings of
real
ecologists, like the man who wrote this book.’

“‘Laurilu—’ I began, without knowing how to continue. But as her arms crept round my neck it appeared that as suddenly as that her entire attitude had changed, and cutting me off before I could find any soothing or conciliatory words she went on:

“‘Yet now—now like some kind of fantastic psychoanalyst or layer-on-of-hands—it seems that you’ve solved my problem, Mike! In giving me hope, you may even have cured me. It was the
waste
that was becoming my obsession, but now I see that it was just a part of everything that the human race does. Moreover, I think I know how to handle it now.’

“‘And can you also see,’ I said, taking her zipper all the way down, ‘that we’ve simply got to make the best of what we’ve got? Get as much out of our short little lives as we can, while our hearts are still hammering and our blood still coursing? We—and now I mean you and me—we have to live our lives to the full, Laurilu, snatching at every opportunity we’re given just as often and, er, as naturally as possible.’

“‘Yes, I see that,’ she answered, shrugging out of her uniform and assisting me with mine. ‘And now maybe I’ll be able to sleep without dreaming those dreams.’ She began to bite my ear.

“‘Dreams?’ I repeated her, purely for the sake of something to say as we got down to business. ‘About sharks, you mean?’

“‘Well, that’s one of them,’ she answered between bites. ‘I see them in my dream: unable to swim, dying and rotting away in their own environment, and not knowing how or why it happened.’

“‘Exactly!’ I told her. ‘Not knowing how or why: non-sentient. And the reason the fishermen threw them back was so they’d go toward feeding other fishes, and them to feeding us. The sea was like—I don’t know—like a big compost heap. The fishermen couldn’t take those carcasses back to land where they’d rot and stink the place up, so they simply returned them to the sea where they had caught them, toppled them overboard into the big watery compost heap.’ Our bodies were working in perfect unison now, becoming slippery as the temperature rose.

“‘But there are other dreams,’ she said, clawing at me spastically.

“‘Oh, really? And what are they about, Laurilu?’

“‘Well, there’s one that’s been bothering me quite a lot.’

“‘And which one’s that?’ Actually, at that point in time, I couldn’t have cared less.

“‘The one where I look at the stars flickering by, and then look at the ship’s engines, and find myself thinking that if we had never discovered the grav-drive, worlds like Ophiuchus VIII would be safe forever. But no, we’ll soon be taking all of this knowledge, everything we’ve learned, back home with us. And me, I myself—Laurilu Nagula, Second Engineer—I’ll be in
large
part responsible for bringing the
Starspike Explorer
home again in one…one piece.’ She had gone quiet and thoughtful again, and had almost stopped moving under me.

“‘But of course you will!’ I
groaned. ‘And I’ll be responsible for what I do, and likewise the rest of the crew: everyone responsible for the things they do.’ Utter gibberish!

“‘But now—’ she came alive again, her hips powering, ‘why, now
I
know my duty to…to everything! I know what I must do, Mike! You’ve helped me to realize that. But Mike?’

“‘Yes?’ I panted.

“‘Please don’t impregnate me.’

“‘Don’t worry about it,’ I told her. ‘Low sperm count. And anyway the radiation in your engine room will take care of what few tadpoles might manage to squirm through.’

“‘My engine room, yes,’ she whispered. ‘It would seem to be the answer to everything.’

“‘I’m glad I’ve been able to help you,’ I told her. ‘As for my feasibility report: well, you’ve also helped me. I can probably write it up from our conversation alone—without all the gloomy bits, of course.’

“‘Do you think we can do this more often?’ she said, sounding as sexy as anything I ever heard before, her need as strong as mine.

“‘Often as you like,’ I answered, my head beginning to buzz.

“‘And on the way home, too?’

“‘Absolutely!’ (But wait a minute! Wasn’t she beginning to sound just a little too serious?) ‘Er, before we’ve been reassigned, split up, sent in our different directions, do you mean? Which of course we’re almost certain to be.’

“‘Something like that,’ she said, her nails digging in just one last time. ‘Before we…before we’re split up and sent in our many different directions, yes.’ But it was all babble now, meaningless babble as the sugar boiled over and began its melt-down onto our singing, soaring brains.

“Then, in a little while and after we had recovered, we did it again. Only this time without speaking. And I was especially satisfied because I’d not only had it
out
with Laurilu but
off
with her, too….”

VIII

NOTE:—
On 12 Sept. 2405, having returned from exploring Ophiuchus VIII, and while attempting a landing at the Darkside Luna Base,
Starside Explorer
suffered a catastrophic failure of its engines. There were no survivors of the crash. While culpability—if such exists—is yet to be properly established, the ship’s log and all shipboard books and documents have been recovered to Space Central, there to be studied, catalogued, and retained in the library’s “restricted” archives until suitable excerpts can be released for general perusal and information….

IX

SESSION ELEVEN.

(Eleventh Week)

Subject: James Goodwin,

former crew member United Earth Station IV.

NOTE:—
The fitting of Goodwin’s prosthetic, just eight days ago, has had something of the desired effect. His spirits appear to have been substantially elevated and he is now far more positively receptive in respect of casual conversation.