A Handful of Time (10 page)

I was totally unprepared for what we saw within.

It was an empty room.

An enormous, square, red room, carved from the living rock, and empty as the craters on Luna.

“Where,” I asked, “is the thing for which your Temple was created?”

She led me to one huge wall and ran a tentacle over it. I saw there were carvings in the wall. Writing, obviously. No pictures at all. The writing surprised me, for I had seen no sign of books or inscriptions and I had assumed the culture was not literate.

“What does it say?”

“The things that the children need to know. How to make the tents. How to cook the meals. How to hunt. The times for silence. Many things.”

The children! Why had I not noticed? Perhaps because I have none myself and have no awareness of them. “I have seen no children,” I said.

“They are not yet conceived,” Grecthchra answered.

“There are
no
children?”

“How could there be?” This was, really, a statement.

Grecthchra did not dislike my questioning. If she had answers she gave them to me. But most of my questions were meaningless to her.

“Are there no old people?” I asked her one day, for it had struck me that they all seemed to be the same age. It could be, of course, that there were signs of age I could not recognize. Still, there had been no funerals. The only death had been that of a hunter, who died of what appeared to me to be blood poisoning. He was buried with no ceremony.

My question was greeted with silence. Again I had asked a question with no meaning.

“Where is your mother?” I asked. “The woman who gave you birth?”

“I do not know.”

We were occupied with the Morning Inspection. We stood watching a potter. He had polished the sides of his stone bowl. This must have taken years. He was now grinding out the inside with a stone. Every day the hollow was a fraction of an inch deeper. Every day he held it out for our inspection.

“It is well,” Grecthchra said, as she did every day.

We were, I had gathered, part of the Ruling Class, though this tribe seemed to have no need of a ruling class. There was never a thing of which Grecthchra did not say, “It is well.”

The function of the ruling class was mostly, as far as I could see, to express appreciation of what the others did. Whether the potter was pleased to be told, It is well, I do not know. I assume that he was.

Two things happened to me on this planet that can never be understood by those who have led only one life. Remember that I was newborn in nakedness and loneliness on this planet, and that all I had of my own world was a memory that, after a year or two (as I approximate the time), became almost unreal. Remember that I had not even a mirror to remind me that I was a Terran.

The first thing that happened was that I became as static and formalized as the natives with whom I lived. I was not merely acting like them so as to study their culture. I all but forgot to study them. I was engrossed in the Morning Food Motions, the Morning Walk, the Watching of the Double Moons, and the rest of it.

The second thing that happened was that of course I fell in love with Grecthchra.

These things did not happen all at once but I became aware of them all at once, on separate occasions.

One night I had a vivid dream, a strong, real dream of home. I was in my apartment having a drink with Jack and Vivian Stall, my cocker spaniel nuzzled against my knee, the air tanged with the familiar smells of dog, tobacco and alcohol. Jack was asking, “How long will you be gone?” and suddenly a wild alarm spread through my body. I sat up with a thudding heart. In heavy blackness of the night, after the moons have set and the tent shuts out the stars, I had the illusion that I was struggling to open nerveless eyelids, or that I had gone blind.

The only reality was the slow, measured sea-keening of Grecthchra’s breathing on the floor beside me.

HALFWAY MARK. The words spread across my mind.

It was, of course, the warning signal. I had no way of measuring time by Earth standards. But like anyone who has lived his life with clocks, I had a very good time sense, buried too deep for me to consult consciously. The alarm had been planted by post-hypnotic suggestion.

There would be another when the five years were up. I would have a day to get to the monad.

But it was this alarm, and the dream that preceded it, that made me conscious of how completely I had given myself over to the culture of Algol II.

It had, as a matter of fact, become a habit.

There is nothing more dangerous than a habit.

It had been necessary for me to discard most of my Terran habits, from smoking to brushing my teeth. I was not aware, until the moments of the alarm, that I had replaced them with the cultural habits of Algol II.

And I had seen, on all Algol II, an area of about two miles in diameter. Only the hunters went further than this, and I was not a hunter.

I had made no systematic study of the culture. Because there were those questions I did not know how to ask and those questions I soon realized it was not proper to ask.

More, I had lost the spirit of curiosity and adventure that I had suddenly remembered possessing that night back in my old apartment back on Terra, discussing my coming trip with Jack and Vivian.

What, then, had I been doing for two and a half years? In the morning I rose, at the proper time, when the sun flashed off the emerald sand at the edges of my tent and made shadows like the sea on the roof. Grecthchra and I folded our cushions and coverlets neatly, walked out and observed the sky from all directions. We observed, inevitably, that it would be a day without rain. After observing the sky, we observed the earth, always the same, glittering, green sand. Occasionally the light would be particularly interesting on a large piece of sand, perhaps the size of a marble. Then we observed, without criticism, the tents of our neighbors. One, perhaps, might be sagging slightly and need a pole shifted.

Then, in a leisurely fashion, we strolled over to the Washing Place, perhaps half a mile away. Here we handed our bedclothes to the Washer and went to separate tents where there were bowls of water for washing and fresh garments, all exactly the same.

We then lined up at the Cooking Place, received our food and carried the heavy bowls back to our tent to eat with the single spoon that came with it. We ate slowly and in silence. After breakfast, we returned our bowls and spent the morning Inspecting.

Lunch was the same as breakfast. After lunch we walked each day to one of the red hills in the distance, all like the hill into which the Temple was carved. Though they appeared red from a distance, there was white rock folded in with the red.

We sat on a red or white boulder, rested, and looked about to the far horizon. Green sand, red hills and small outcrop-pings of trees were all that were to be seen. Occasionally one of the small, plated desert animals darted out of its burrow in the sand and across the desert. A few small birds wheeled in the sky, apparently reptilian in character, though I never saw one close enough to be sure.

Then came the walk back to the village and the social gathering. This was not formalized. All the tents were open, and the custom was to look in at random and if anyone were home, to visit. Socializing involved small talk. Very small talk. Remark upon the weather, which was always the same. Discussion of the progress of the weavers on a certain garment. The growth of the grain, which was artificially irrigated by the spring. The most interesting conversation was that of the hunters. How an animal was pursued. How caught. When one hunter died, as I have mentioned, that, too was small talk. Casually mentioned.

After Socializing came dinner, the same as breakfast and lunch. And every night, when I had brought my bowl to the Washing Place and returned to my tent, I was tired enough to sleep without thinking. I had, after all, spent most of the day walking in the open air.

And so I spent two and a half years doing exactly nothing, vaguely happy to drift from day to day in the inertial force of habit.

When the alarm came and reminded me of who and what I was, and a sense of time possessed me again, I was amazed at what I had done. One week of such purposeless activity on Terra would have driven me mad. And yet on Algol II I had so taken it for granted that I never for a moment felt time wasted.

Now, of course, I resolved to set out the next day to explore the planet further. Since I had two and a half years left, I could go a long way and still get back in time.

But the next morning something highly unusual happened. I awoke to a noise like Grecthchra’s breathing magnified a thousand times, like an angry sea upon us. I sat up in the grey light and Grecthchra looked at me, nodding her head pleasantly.

“It is raining,” she said.

We walked out for our breakfast as usual. The rain was warm. The whole world was gray, now, instead of green, and Grecthchra laughed when little rivulets dripped over her lid-less eyes.

“The world,” she said, “looks strange through drops of water.”

The day’s activities went on as usual and the rain stopped in the middle of the morning. The raindrops flashed so on the tents and the sand, when the sun came out, I could hardly bear to look at it.

It was during the afternoon walk that I abandoned all thoughts of leaving the village for an expedition further into the planet.

The desert had covered its face completely. As far as the eye could see, a heavy, bluish-green foliage had sprung up, and tiny red, yellow and white flowers opened their eyes to the sun.

Only the hills rose red and bare.

I could hardly bring myself to walk on the foliage. It seemed an almost sacred eruption of life after all the barren years.

But Grecthchra expressed no surprise. She did, however, have a spring in her step which I took to denote pleasure.

We set out for the hill. Grecthchra always chose which we would climb, and I always followed her. We clambered up the red rocks, noting little pockets of flowers where the sand had collected here and there. There was a tremendous burgeoning joy in the world, a color and promise such as had never been before.

A clear wind blew, and I looked around to see a little wave run through the sea of flowers. I felt as though the sunshine itself were running through my veins.

“Look!” Grecthchra cried from the top of the hill. Her voice was like a bell and I climbed to it.

I found her bent over a flower. It was a deep, gentian blue, fringed with black. It was the only blue one we had seen and it trembled a little under our breath as we watched it.

“It is blue,” Grecthchra said, with wonder in her voice. Her face was full on mine. “Like your eyes.”

Grecthchra held the soft blue flower in her strange, silver hand. The sunshine glittered on her silver skin. I knew that I had never seen anything so beautiful.

After that, my days and nights ran together in a silver stream. I did not know whether Grecthchra was more beautiful when she was like amber under the green and yellow moons, or when, lying on the emerald sand in the day, she was like a silver fish coming up from the sea.

A sense of time, oddly enough, returned to me. I felt as though we were running with a mighty wave, as though we must some day be flung up from the enchanted sea.

I could not get my meaning across to Grecthchra.

“A day and a night,” she told me, “are like the day and night before and the day and night to come. Why would anyone count the number of them?”

“But Grecthchra, are you not to grow old? And die? Am I to grow old all by myself?”

“We do not grow old,” she said, “like vegetation and animals. How could we?”

“There is something here,” I said, “that I do not understand.” Could they be immortal?

“Why should you understand?” She swapped her bowl for mine, a gesture of love. Indeed, when I looked at her I could care for nothing else. Not even understanding.

But the days and nights, as it turned out, were not all the same. Grecthchra, I think, could not have told me what was going to happen. But when things did happen, suddenly it was as though she knew it all along. Like the post-hypnotic suggestion which had waked me up in the middle of the night. It had been there and I was not aware of it. And by now I had forgotten it, for I was determined to live out my life with Grecthchra.

One night I woke to hear Grecthchra sobbing. I thought she was strangling, and it was like the sound of the sea struggling against the rocks.

“Grecthchra!” I reached out for her in the blind darkness but she was not there. I started to get up and feel for her, for I could see no faintest light.

“Stay there!” she cried. “It is the pain. It is not proper for you to be by me.”

And so I lay there through the night, and late, late she crept into my arms, and slept.

In the morning I saw what it had been. There lay on the green sands a large, silvery egg, veined with blue.

Grecthchra seemed, somehow, proud, and so, though there was something a little ludicrous about it, I said, “It is well.” I wondered if she realized that such was the difference in our races that this egg would never hatch.

We spent the days as we had been spending them, the egg remaining always in the corner of the tent.

In other tents, I noticed when we socialized, there were other eggs.

One morning we wakened suddenly before dawn. There was a wild, cold wind that blew through the flaps of the tent and spattered the sand against the sides.

It was gone in a moment, but it left a chill upon me and I held Grecthchra to me. Somewhere in the eternal summer, ice was forming.

That day was not as other days. The tents were empty. The weavers did not weave and the pots of the potters were stacked up neatly before their tents.

“Where are they?” I asked.

“They are preparing for the children,” she said, as though she had known all along, though I am sure that when we went out she expected the potters to be in their usual places.

We walked to the Temple. Most of the village seemed to be there, working. They were bringing the green sand in from the desert and piling it in the rear of the Temple.