Specimen Days (40 page)

"I'm sure they do," Simon answered.

"I had twice this many when I started. But people come to their senses. They find other things to do. They fall in love with someone who doesn't want to leave Earth forever."

Luke said, "You really want us to come along?"

"There's room. And Simon, I hope you won't be offended if I say that someone as young as Luke would be particularly welcome. The adults who survive the trip at all will be quite old by the time we land on Paumanok."

The infant gurgled on Othea's lap. She rocked the child with a certain insistence Simon recognized as distinctly Nadian. She said, "We need the most diverse possible gene pool among our younger members."

Luke said, "So basically you're interested in my youth andDNA."

"You're Exedrol, right?" Othea asked. "Yep."

"The deformities are not passed along genetically. Did you know that?"

"Uh-huh."

Simon said, "I too haughty Shade also sing war, and a longer and greater one than any." He had not meant to speak quite so loudly.

"She doesn't mean to offend," Emory said. "Do you, Oth? Nadians are a little more direct than we are is all."

"I just can't seem to get the knack of circumspection," Othea replied, continuing to rock her child with an urgency Simon could only hope would not be damaging in some long-range, unforeseeable way. "At a certain point I simply decided to give it up altogether."

"I find it extremely interesting," Emory said to Simon, "that you take offense so easily. It's not in your programming."

"My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach," Simon said.

"As a matter of fact," Luke said, "being wanted for my youth and my DNA doesn't bother me at all. In case anybody cares what I think."

"Everybody cares what you think," Simon said.

Luke said to Emory, "He doesn't have any particular allegiance to the truth. Do you find that peculiar?"

"Very," Emory answered.

"Please don't talk about me as if I'm not here," Simon said.

"You're really making great progress," Emory told him.

"Fuck you."

"See? See what I mean?"

Later, Simon sat with Catareen in her upstairs room. Emory and Othea had returned to their work. Luke had joined the children in their farmyard games. Simon could tell from their voices that Luke had introduced certain improvements and refinements and was patiently explaining why such changes were necessary.

Catareen was asleep. Or doing that sleeplike thing.

Simon said to her, "They're nuts, you know. The whole crew."

She opened her eyes. She said, "You go with them."

"I don't know. I mean, can you picture being on a spaceship for thirty-eight years with these people?"

"You go. Happier there."

"Why are you saying this?"

"I dream."

"What?"

"That world. I dream."

"What have you dreamed?"

"You go to mountains. Changed. As you want."

"You've dreamed of me changed, walking in some kind of mountains?"

"Yes."

"Have you had a dream like that before?"

"No."

"And so you think I should go with them. You think I should spend the next thirty-eight years on a spaceship with these idiots because you dreamed I'd be happier on another planet."

"Yes."

"You're crazy, too."

She made some sort of breathy sound he had never heard from her before, a modest three-note trill.

"Did you laugh?" he asked.

"No."

"Yes. You did. That was actual laughter. I'll be goddamned."

She made the sound again.

He leaned over her. He said, "Are you in pain?"

"No pain."

"What does it feel like?"

"Dying."

"More specific, please."

"Less. Am less."

"You feel like you're less."

"Room is big. Bright."

"You feel like the room has gotten bigger and brighter."

"Yes."

"Do I seem bigger and brighter?"

"Loud, too."

He lowered his voice. "Sorry," he said.

"No. I like."

"You like me being big and bright and loud?"

"Yes."

She closed her eyes then, and slipped away.

Simon went downstairs again and walked onto the front porch of the farmhouse. The evening sky was dull red, striped with cloud tatters of livid orange. He could hear the children's voices but could not see them. Soon, however, Luke ran into view. He was being chased by Twyla, who brandished the pool-cue spear. Her cardboard wings rattled behind her. Luke shrieked. Simon could not determine whether he was delighted or terrified.

When Luke saw Simon he immediately stopped running. He collected himself. He seemed to wish to appear as if he had never run or shrieked in his life. Twyla stopped as well. She stood examining the point of the spear, as if that had been her true objective, while Luke approached Simon on the porch.

Luke said, "Geekville, U.S.A."

"You seem to be having a reasonably good time," Simon answered.

"I'm mingling with the locals. I can pass for just about anything."

He ambled up onto the porch and stood beside Simon, looking out at the deepening sky. Twyla remained where she stood, adjusting the knife on the end of the pool cue.

Luke said, "I've been thinking. I might want to go with them."

"Uh-huh."

"To tell you the truth, I like the idea of being a valued member. As opposed to being, say, stuck in Denver again, with no money."

"I understand that." "And you?"

"They're an odd bunch." "No question."

"Emory thinks he could make some modifications on me during the trip."

"That'dbegood." "It would."

"And you know," Luke said, "I'd rather go if you go, too. You've come to feel familiar to me."

"Ditto."

"Okay. See you later, then."

"See you."

Luke left the porch and went back out to the place where the little Nadian stood waiting for him. She did not raise the spear as he approached. They spoke to each other softly. Simon could not make out what they said. They went off together, away from the house and the barn, in the direction of the open country.

The next morning, Catareen was more receded. She appeared smaller in the small white bed. She lay compactly atop the sheet with her eyes closed, breathing rapidly and shallowly. She had folded her hands over her abdomen. Her legs were pressed together. It appeared as if she were trying to make herself as small as possible, as if death were a narrow aperture and she had to be ready to slip through.

Apart from her rapid breathing, there was no sign of illness. And yet she was diminishing. Simon could see it. No. He could apprehend it. Her flesh was unaffected, but she was drawing in, as if some animating force were retreating inward from the skin's surface. Her skin was darker now, more deeply emerald. It put out a slick, mineral shine. She was becoming not alive.

She awakened, however, when Simon entered the room. Her eyes were changed. They were fading from orange to a deep, unhealthy-looking yellow, like egg yolks gone bad.

"Good morning," Simon said. "How do you feel?"

"Dying," she answered.

"But no pain."

"No much."

"Do you think you could eat something?"

"No."

"It's not irradiated groundhog, you know."

"I know."

He stood beside her. Still, even in extremis, there was this feeling that they were on a date that wasn't going well but refused to end. He made to put his hand on her forehead but decided she probably wouldn't wan't him to. Besides, it would have been an empty gesture, a ritual expression of concern for the afflicted. There was no point in performing such gestures for a Nadian.

He said, "They killed your family and sent you to Earth."

"Yes."

"I wonder-"

She waited for him to finish the question. He waited as well. He hadn't been sure when he launched that sentence where, exactly, he expected it to land, though he could think of any number of possibilities. /
wonder ifthafs why youre so remote and strange. I wonder ifthats why you came with me. I wonder if you helped me because you feel guilty about what you brought down on your own family.

When it had become apparent that he was not going to speak further, she said, "Simon?"

"Uh-huh?"

"Window."

"You want me to close the window? Is it cold in here for you?"

"No. Take."

"You want me to take you to the window."

"Yes."

"Sure. No problem."

He paused over how and where to touch her. She helped him by lifting her long, thin Giacometti arms and putting her hands around his neck. Apparently she could no longer walk, then. He slipped his right forearm under her upper back, his left under the sinewy stalks of her thighs. He lifted her.

For a moment, she held herself apart from him. It was subtle but palpable. She maintained herself briefly as a dependent but private being. Then she relaxed and gave herself over into his arms. She was, he thought, too weak to do otherwise.

Gently, carefully (he wasn't sure whether or not to believe her when she said she was not in pain or not in much pain), he carried her to the window. The window looked out over the packed dirt of the yard, beyond which stood the single tree under which they had had their dinner the night before. He thought it was an elm. Or an oak. He wasn't programmed for the identification of trees. The tree stood in the precise middle of the view, like a sentry. Beyond it was the vast green flatness of the plain, bright in the early sun, suspended, without wind or cloud, as if all that empty land were waiting for something to begin, for a note to strike or a pair of hands to clap. But most prominently there was the tree, dead center, in full leaf, shimmering in the expectant silence of the morning. Simon wondered how strange this must be to Catareen this green terrestrial silence spread out under this ice-blue sky. Where she came from it was (according to the vids) mostly rock and mud, variously black, pewter, and an opaque silvery-yellow, from which tangles of moss and bracken struggled, black-green like seaweed under an eternally clouded sky that bled a soft, drizzly semilight. It was whatever villages had managed to establish themselves in the rifts and valleys that occurred here and there among the mountains, sheer and ice-tipped, pinnacled, like titanic dead gray cathedrals, vast impassive assertions of volcanic rock and permafrost that towered over the huts and corrals, the modest squares of unprosperous garden, the tiny turrets and steeples of the kings, miniature replicas of the darkly glittering peaks.

Had it been beautiful to her? Had she felt stroth there?

Simon held her before the window that looked out onto the tree. It might have been the tree and only the tree Simon had brought her to see, though of course neither he nor Catareen had thought anything of it, one ordinary tree spreading over a standard-issue patch of dirt. It was only now, at this window, with the dying Catareen in his arms and the tree so perfectly centered in the view, that Simon understood it to be in any way singular or mysterious.

He said, "Urge and urge and urge, always the procreant urge of the world."

"Yes," she answered.

They said nothing further. He held her as she looked out the window. Her face was brighter in the strong light. Her eyes seemed to take on a hint of their familiar depths, their orange and amber. She seemed, briefly, more alive, and it occurred to him that she might be undergoing an unexpected resurgence. Was being taken to the window some sort of healing ritual? It seemed possible. It did not seem impossible.

Then he felt her arms slackening around his neck. He understood that even this was a strain for her. He said softly, "Shall I take you back to bed now?"

"Yes," she answered, and he did.

The compound pulsed with last-minute preparations. People and Nadians rushed from house to barn and back again. The three Nadian men, who were technicians of some kind, went up and down the ramp of the spaceship, in and out of its entry portal, with such rapidity it seemed they must be doing nothing more than touching an agreed-upon goal and hurrying out again, laughing, emitting odd little yips and yelps, slapping palms whenever they passed one another. Simon, without duties, wandered the grounds. Emory was on the front porch arguing passionately with one of the Nadian women (she was, it seemed, a doctor) and Lily, the tattooed human scientist. The mustached, small-chinned man (whose name was Arnold) seemed to have been charged with the care of Emory and Othea's baby. He walked the infant in circles in the yard, bouncing it and saying, "Little snip, little snip, little snip." In the barn, among the consoles and keyboards, Othea and the other Nadian woman did their best to calm the frumpily majestic Ruth, who sat performing her last-minute calculations through a fit of inexplicable tears as the bells around her neck chimed softly.

Crazy, Simon thought. They're all crazy. Though of course the passengers on the
Mayflower
had probably been like this, too: zealots and oddballs and ne'er-do-wells, setting out to colonize a new world because the known world wasn't much interested in their furtive and quirky passions. It had probably always been thus, not only aboard the
Mayflower
but on the Viking ships; on the
Ninafinta,
and
Santa Maria;
on the first convoys sent off to explore Nadia, about which the people of Earth had harbored such extravagant hopes. It was nut jobs. It was hysterics and visionaries and petty criminals. The odes and monuments, the plaques and pageants, came later.

Simon could not settle. He could not find a plausible spot for himself. After meandering from place to place, trying to stay out of the way, trying not to look as idle as he was, he ran into Othea coming out of the barn. He spoke to her, though he knew she wouldn't welcome it. It was something for him to do. And he did, in fact, have a question or two only she could answer.