Anywhen (17 page)
Authors: James Blish
"It won't be possible for me to behave as if this hadn't happened," he said, in a voice intended to convey good will. "The cats are smart enough to spread the word, and it'll take months to pound home to them that your behavior doesn't mean anything. But if I can have your promise not to say anything further about it, at least I won't be forced to have you shipped home by the next rocket."
"Five months from now," joe Kendricks added helpfully.
"It had better mean something, and it'd better be just the beginning," Karen said. "Do you think women would go on using these pomanders if they knew what they were—and what they cost? This story's going to be told."
There was a brief silence. Then Kendricks said: "One story doesn't make a scandal."
"Not even with the base commander in the middle of it?"
But the colonel only smiled gently. "I don't mind being a villain, if the colony needs one," he said. "You can hang me by my thumbs if you like. I'd be interested to see how many people back home take your word against mine, though."
"I've never pilloried anybody in my life, and my editors know it," Karen said. "But that's a long way from the point. It isn't just one story. It's the pomander trade as a whole that's the scandal."
The colonel abruptly turned his back and looked out of the window at the domed colony—a spectacle of struggle against a terrible world, a vast planetary desert about which Karen knew she knew very little. He said: "All right, I tried. Now it's your turn, JoKe. Set her straight."
"Don't call me that," Kendricks growled. Then: "But Miss Chandler, the Corps isn't going to let you stop the pomander trade—don't you know that? It's supposed to be immune even from petty graft. And this is far from petty. If the law's been broken—and Cod knows it has—half the men in Port Ares have a slice of the profits. It can't be stopped now."
"All the worse," Karen said. "But we can stop it, Joe; you can help me. They can't ship both of us home."
"Don't you think I've tried to get this story off Mars before?" Kendricks said angrily. "The Corps 'reviews' every line that leaves the planet. After this incident, the colonel here will read my copy himself—"
"You bet," Colonel Margolis said, with a certain relish.
"—and I've got to live with this crew the year around." After a moment, Kendricks added, "Six hundred and sixty-eight days a year."
"That's just why they can't kill the story in the long
run," Karen said eagerly. "If they're censoring you, you can slip the word to me somehow, sooner or later. I know how to read between the lines—and you know how to write between them. The censor doesn't exist who's awake every second!"
"They can kill me," Joe Kendricks said stolidly. "Both of us, if they have to. The next ship home is five months away, and people get killed on Mars all the time."
Karen let fly an unladylike snort. "JoKe, you're scared. Do you think a Corps commandant would kill the only two reporters on Mars? How would
that
look in his record, no matter how careful he was?"
Colonel Margolis turned back to glare at them. But when he spoke, his voice was remarkably neutral.
"Look, let's be reasonable," he said. "Why so much fuss over one small irregularity, when there's so much being accomplished on Mars that's positive, that's downright great? This is one of humanity's greatest outposts. Why spoil it for the sake of a sensation? Why not just live and let live?"
"Because that's just what you're
not
doing," Karen said. "You told me that you weren't going to kill the cat this afternoon, but you didn't tell me it would die later, in the winter, when you were through stealing from it. It's the Spaniards and the Incas all over again! Are we spending billions to reach the planets, just to export the same old crimes against the natives?"
"Now, calm down a minute, please, Miss Chandler. The cats are only animals. You're exaggerating a good deal, you know."
"I don't think she is," Joe Kendricks said in a low voice. "The dune cats are intelligent. Killing them off is criminal —I've always thought so, and so does the law. Karen, I'll try to get the dope out to you, but the Corps has the man
power here to stop me if it really tries. I may have to bring the rest of the story back to Earth with me, instead —a matter of years. Can you wait that long?"
They looked at each other for a long moment. His expression was much changed.
Karen said: "You bet I'll wait."
He drew a deep breath. "You're sure you mean that?" "Dead sure, Joe," Karen said. "The jokes are over."
A good many years ago, Damon Knight discovered that—unbeknownst to me—two early stories of mine were heavily loaded with symbols; and that these symbols showed that the stories, despite quite different overt contents, were about the same basic theme. When Damon later asked me to write a story for the first issue of his book-magazine
Orbit, I
thought it appropriate to give the piece such a symbol system consciously, and this is the result.
Feeling as naked as a peppermint soldier in her transparent film wrap, Dr. Ulla Hillstrom watched a flying cloak swirl away toward the black horizon with a certain consequent irony. Although nearly transparent itself in the distant dim arc-light flame that was Titan's sun, the fluttering creature looked warmer than what she was wearing, for all that reason said it was at the same minus 316° F. as the thin methane it flew in. Despite the virus space-bubble's warranted and eerie efficiency, she found its vigilance—itself probably as close to alive as the flying cloak was—rather difficult to believe in, let alone to trust.
The machine—as Ulla much preferred to think of it—was inarguably an improvement on the old-fashioned pressure suit. Fashioned ( or more accurately, cultured) of a single colossal protein molecule, the vanishingly thin sheet of life-stuff processed gases, maintained pressure, monitored radiation through almost the whole of the electromagnetic spectrum, and above all did not get in the way. Also, it could not be cut, punctured, or indeed sustain any damage short of total destruction; macroscopically, it was a single, primary unit, with all the physical integrity of a crystal of salt or steel.
If it did not actually think, Ulla was grateful; often it almost seemed to, which was sufficient. Its primary drawback for her was that much of the time it did not really seem to be there.
Still, it seemed to be functioning; otherwise, Ulla would in fact have been as solid as a stick of candy, toppled forever across the confectionery whiteness that frosted the knife-edge stones of this cruel moon, layer upon layer. Outside—only a perilous few inches from the lightly clothed warmth of her skin—the brief gust the cloak had been soaring on died, leaving behind a silence so cataleptic that she could hear the snow creaking in a mockery of motion. Impossible though it was to comprehend, it was getting still colder out there; Titan was swinging out across Saturn's orbit toward eclipse, and the apparently fixed sun was secretly going down, its descent sensed by the snows no matter what her Earthly eyes, accustomed to the nervousness of living skies, tried to tell her. In another two Earth days it would be gone, for an eternal week.
At the thought, Ulla turned to look back the way she had come that morning. The virus bubble flowed smoothly with the motion, and the stars became brighter as it compensated for the fact that the sun was now at her back. She still could not see the base camp, of course. She had come too far for that, and in any event it was wholly underground except for a few wiry palps, hollowed out of the bitter rock by the blunt-nosed ardor of prolapse drills; the repeated nannosecond birth and death of primordial ylem the drills had induced while that cavern was being imploded, had seemed to convulse the whole
demon womb of this world, but in the present silence the very memory of the noise seemed false.
Now there was no sound but the creaking of the methane snow; and nothing to see but a blunt, faint spearhead of hazy light, deceptively like an Earthly aurora or the corona of the sun, pushing its way from below the edge of the cold into the indifferent company of the stars. Sat-turn's rings were rising, very slightly awaver in the dark-blue air, like the banners of a spectral army. The idiot face of the giant gas planet itself, faintly striped with meaningless storms as though trying to remember a childhood passion, would be glaring down at her before she could get home if she didn't get herself in motion soon. Obscurely disturbed, Dr. Hillstrom faced front and began to unlimber her sled.
The touch and clink of the instruments cheered her a little, even in this ultimate loneliness. She was efficient —many years, and a good many suppressed impulses had seen to that; it was too late for temblors, especially so far out from the sun that had warmed her Stockholm streets and her silly friendships. All those null-adventures were gone now like a sickness. The phantom embrace of the virus suit was perhaps less satisfying—only
perhaps—but
it was much more reliable. Much more reliable; she could depend on that.
Then, as she bent to thrust the spike of a thermocouple into the wedding-cake soil, the second flying cloak (or was it that same one?) hit her in the small of the back and tumbled her into nightmare.
With the sudden darkness there came a profound, ambiguous emotional blow—ambiguous, yet with something shockingly familiar about it. Instantly exhausted, she felt herself go flaccid and unstrung, and her mind, adrift in nowhere, blurred and spun downward too into the swamps of trance.
The long fall slowed just short of unconsciousness, lodged precariously upon a shelf of a dream, a mental buttress founded four years in the past—a long distance, when one recalls that in a four-dimensional plenum every second of time is one hundred eighty-six thousand miles of space—and eight hundred millions of miles away. The memory was curiously inconsequential to have arrested her, let alone supported her: not of her home, of her few triumphs, or even of her aborted marriage, but of a sordid little encounter with a reporter that she had talked herself into at the Madrid genetics conference, when she herself had already been an associate professor, a Swedish Government delegate, a twenty-five-year-old divorcee, and altogether a woman who should have known better.
But better than what? The life of science even in those days had been almost by definition the life of the eternal campus exile; there was so much to learn—or, at least, to show competence in—that people who wanted to be involved in the ordinary, vivid concerns of human beings could not stay with it long, indeed often could not even be recruited; they turned aside from the prospect with a shudder, or even a snort of scorn. To prepare for the sciences had become a career in indefinitely protracted adolescence, from which one awakened fitfully to find one's self spending a one-night stand in the body of a stranger. It had given her no pride, no self-love, no defenses of any sort; only a queer kind of virgin numbness, highly dependent upon familiar surroundings and valueless habits, and easily breached by any normally confident
siege in print, in person, anywhere—and remaining just as numb as before when the seizure of fashion, politics, or romanticism had swept by and left her stranded, too easy a recruit to have been allowed into the center of things or even considered for it.
Curious—most curious—that in her present remote terror she should find even a moment's rest upon so wobbling a pivot. The Madrid incident had not been important; she had been through with it almost at once. Of course, as she had often told herself, she had never been promiscuous, and had often described the affair, defiantly, as that one (or at worst, second) test of the joys of impulse which any woman is entitled to have in her history. Nor had it really been that joyous: She could not now recall the boy's face, and remembered how he had felt primarily because he had been in so casual and contemptuous a hurry.
But now that she came to dream of it, she saw with a bloodless, lightless eye that all her life, in this way and in that, she had been repeatedly seduced by the inconsequential. She had nothing else to remember even in this hour of her presumptive death. Acts have consequences, a thought told her, but not ours; we have done, but never felt. We are no more alone on Titan, you and I, than we have ever been.
Basta, per carita!—so
much for Ulla.
Awakening in this same darkness as before, Ulla felt the virus bubble snuggling closer to her blind skin, and recognized the shock that had so regressed her: a shock of recognition, but recognition of something she had never felt herself. Alone in a Titanic snowfield, she had eavesdropped on an . . .
No. Not possible. Sniffling, and still blind, she pushed the cozy bubble away from her breasts and tried to stand up. Light flushed briefly around her, as though the bubble had cleared just above her forehead and then clouded again. She was still alive, but everything else was utterly problematical. What had happened to her? She simply did not know.
Therefore, she thought, begin with ignorance. No one begins anywhere else . . . but I didn't know even that, once upon a time.
Hence:
Though the virus bubble ordinarily regulated itself, there was a control box on her hip—actually an ultrashort-range microwave transmitter—by which it could be modulated, against more special environments than the bubble itself could cope with alone. She had never had to use it before, but she tried it now.
The fogged bubble cleared patchily, but it would not stay cleared. Crazy moires and herringbone patterns swept over it, changing direction repeatedly, and outside the snowy landscape kept changing color like a delirium. She found, however, that by continuously working the frequency knob on her box—at random, for the responses seemed to bear no relation to the Braille calibrations on the dial—she could maintain outside vision of a sort in pulses of two or three seconds each.
This was enough to show her, finally, what had happened. There was a flying cloak around her. This in itself was unprecedented; the cloaks had never attacked a man before, or indeed paid any of them the least attention during their brief previous forays. On the other hand, this was the first time anyone had ventured more than five or ten minutes outdoors in a virus suit.