Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS) (35 page)

Connie nods. “Kay, how’s your face?”

“I felt it!” Andy/Kay says excitedly through puffed lips. “I felt physical anger, I wanted to hit him. Woo-ee!”

“Put that man in my wardroom,” Dave orders as they pass. He has moved into the sunlight over the lettuce rows. Lady Blue and Judy Dakar are back by the wall, watching. Lorimer remembers what he wanted to ask.

“Dave, do you really know?”

Dave eyes him broodingly, floating erect with the sun on his chestnut beard and hair. The authentic features of man. Lorimer thinks of his own father, a small pale figure like himself. He feels better.

“I always knew they were trying to deceive us, Lorimer. Now that this woman has admitted the facts, I understand the full extent of the tragedy.”

It is his deep, mild Sunday voice. The women look at him interestedly.

“They are lost children. They have forgotten He who made them. For generations they have lived in darkness.”

“They seem to be doing all right,” Lorimer hears himself say. It sounds rather foolish.

“Women are not capable of running anything. You should know that, Lorimer. Look what they’ve done here, it’s pathetic. Marking time, that’s all. Poor souls.” Dave sighs gravely. “It is not their fault. I recognize that. Nobody has given them any guidance for three hundred years. Like a chicken with its head off.”

Lorimer recognizes his own thought; the structureless chattering, trivial, two-million-celled protoplasmic lump.

“The head of the woman is the man,” Dave says crisply. “Corinthians one eleven three. No discipline whatsoever.” He stretches out his arm, holding up his crucifix as he drifts toward the wall of vines. “Mockery. Abominations.” At the stakes he turns, framed in the green arbor.

“We were sent here, Lorimer. This is God’s plan. I was sent here. Not you, you’re as bad as they are. My middle name is Paul,” he adds in a conversational tone. The sun gleams on the cross, on his uplifted face, a strong, pure, apostolic visage. Despite some intellectual reservations Lorimer feels a forgotten nerve respond.

“Oh, Father, send me strength,” Dave prays quietly, his eyes closed. “You have spared us from the void to bring Your light to this suffering world. I shall lead Thine erring daughters out of the darkness. I shall be a stern but merciful father to them in Thy name. Help me to teach the children Thy holy law and train them in the fear of Thy righteous wrath. Let the women learn in silence and all subjection; Timothy two eleven. They shall have sons to rule over them and glorify Thy name.”

He could do it, Lorimer thinks, a man like that really could get life going again. Maybe there is some mystery, some plan. I was too ready to give up. No guts . . . He becomes aware of women whispering.

“This tape is about through.” It is Judy Dakar. “Isn’t that enough? He’s just repeating.”

“Wait,” murmurs Lady Blue.

“And she brought forth a man child to rule the nations with a rod of iron, Revelations twelve five,” Dave says, louder. His eyes are open now, staring intently at the crucifix.
“For God so loved the world that He sent His only begotten Son.”

Lady Blue nods; Judy pushes off toward Dave. Lorimer understands, protest rising in his throat. They mustn’t do that to Dave, treating him like an animal, for Christ’s sake, a man—

“Dave! Look out, don’t let her get near you!” he shouts.

“May I look, Major? It’s beautiful, what is it?” Judy is coasting close, her hand out toward the crucifix.

“She’s got a hypo, watch it!”

But Dave has already wheeled around. “Do not profane, woman!”

He thrusts the cross at her like a weapon, so menacing that she recoils in midair and shows the glinting needle in her hand.

“Serpent!” He kicks her shoulder away, sending himself upward. “Blasphemer. All right,” he snaps in his ordinary voice, “there’s going to be some order around here, starting now. Get over by that wall, all of you.”

Astounded, Lorimer sees that Dave actually has a weapon in his other hand, a small gray handgun. He must have had it since Houston. Hope and ataraxia shrivel away, he is shocked into desperate reality.

“Major Davis,” Lady Blue is saying. She is floating right at him, they all are, right at the gun. Oh, god, do they know what it is?

“Stop!” he shouts at them. “Do what he says, for god’s sake. That’s a ballistic weapon, it can kill you. It shoots metal slugs.” He begins edging toward Dave along the vines.

“Stand back.” Dave gestures with the gun. “I am taking command of this ship in the name of the United States of America under God.”

“Dave, put that gun away. You don’t want to shoot people.”

Dave sees him, swings the gun around. “I warn you, Lorimer, get over there with them. Geirr’s a man, when he sobers up.” He looks at the women still drifting puzzledly toward him and understands. “All right, lesson one. Watch this.”

He takes deliberate aim at the iguana cages and fires. There is a pinging crack. A lizard explodes bloodily, voices cry out. A loud mechanical warble starts up and overrides everything.

“A leak!” Two bodies go streaking toward the far end, everybody is moving. In the confusion Lorimer sees Dave calmly pulling himself back to the hatchway behind them, his gun ready. He pushes frantically across the tool rack to cut them off. A spray canister comes loose in his grip, leaving him kicking in the air. The alarm warble dies.

“You will stay here until I decide to send for you,” Dave announces. He has reached the hatch, is pulling the massive lock door around. It will seal off the pod, Lorimer realizes.

“Don’t do it, Dave! Listen to me, you’re going to kill us all.” Lorimer’s own internal alarms are shaking him, he knows now what all that damned volleyball has been for and he is scared to death. “Dave, listen to me!”

“Shut up.” The gun swings toward him. The door is moving. Lorimer gets a foot on solidity.

“Duck! It’s a bomb!” With all his strength he hurls the massive canister at Dave’s head and launches himself after it.

“Look out!” And he is sailing helplessly in slow motion, hearing the gun go off again, voices yelling. Dave must have missed him, overhead shots are tough—and then he is doubling downward, grabbing hair. A hard blow strikes his gut, it is Dave’s leg kicking past him but he has his arm under the beard, the big man bucking like a bull, throwing him around.

“Get the gun, get it!” People are bumping him, getting hit. Just as his hold slips, a hand snakes by him onto Dave’s shoulder and they are colliding into the hatch door in a tangle. Dave’s body is suddenly no longer at war.

Lorimer pushes free, sees Dave’s contorted face tip slowly backward looking at him.

“Judas—”

The eyes close. It is over.

Lorimer looks around. Lady Blue is holding the gun, sighting down the barrel.

“Put that down,” he gasps, winded. She goes on examining it.

“Hey, thanks!” Andy—Kay—grins lopsidedly at him, rubbing her jaw. They are all smiling, speaking warmly to him, feeling themselves, their torn clothes. Judy Dakar has a black eye starting, Connie holds a shattered iguana by the tail.

Beside him Dave drifts, breathing stertorously, his blind face pointing at the sun.
Judas . . .
Lorimer feels the last shield break inside him, desolation flooding in.
On the deck my captain lies.

Andy-who-is-not-a-man comes over and matter-of-factly zips up Dave’s jacket, takes hold of it, and begins to tow him out. Judy Dakar stops them long enough to wrap the crucifix chain around his hand. Somebody laughs, not unkindly, as they go by.

For an instant Lorimer is back in that Evanston toilet. But they are gone, all the little giggling girls. All gone forever, gone with the big boys waiting outside to jeer at him. Bud is right, he thinks.
Nothing counts anymore.
Grief and anger hammer at him. He knows now what he has been dreading: not their vulnerability, his.

“They were good men,” he says bitterly. “They aren’t bad men. You don’t know what bad means. You did it to them, you broke them down. You made them do crazy things. Was it interesting? Did you learn enough?” His voice is trying to shake. “Everybody has aggressive fantasies. They didn’t act on them. Never. Until you poisoned them.”

They gaze at him in silence. “But nobody does,” Connie says finally. “I mean, the fantasies.”

“They were good men,” Lorimer repeats elegiacally. He knows he is speaking for it all, for Dave’s Father, for Bud’s manhood, for himself, for Cro-Magnon, for the dinosaurs too, maybe. “I’m a man. By god, yes, I’m angry. I have a right. We gave you all this, we made it all. We built your precious civilization and your knowledge and comfort and medicines and your dreams. All of it. We protected you, we worked our balls off keeping you and your kids. It was hard. It was a fight, a bloody fight all the way. We’re tough. We had to be, can’t you understand? Can’t you for Christ’s sake understand that?”

Another silence.

“We’re trying,” Lady Blue sighs. “We are trying, Dr. Lorimer. Of course we enjoy your inventions and we do appreciate your evolutionary role. But you must see there’s a problem. As I understand it, what you protected people from was largely other males, wasn’t it? We’ve just had an extraordinary demonstration in that. You have brought history to life for us.” Her wrinkled brown eyes smile at him; a small tea-colored matron holding an obsolete artifact.

“But the fighting is long over. It ended when you did, I believe. We can hardly turn you loose on Earth, and we simply have no facilities for people with your emotional problems.”

“Besides, we don’t think you’d be very happy,” Judy Dakar adds earnestly.

“We could clone them,” says Connie. “I know there’s people who would volunteer to mother. The young ones might be all right, we could try.”

“We’ve been
over
all that.” Judy Paris is drinking from the water tank. She rinses and spits into the soil bed, looking worriedly at Lorimer. “We ought to take care of that leak now, we can talk tomorrow. And tomorrow and tomorrow.” She smiles at him, unselfconsciously rubbing her crotch. “I’m sure a lot of people will want to meet you.”

“Put us on an island,” Lorimer says wearily. “On three islands.” That look; he knows that look of preoccupied compassion. His mother and sister had looked just like that the time the diseased kitten came in the yard. They had comforted it and fed it and tenderly taken it to the vet to be gassed.

An acute, complex longing for the women he has known grips him. Women to whom men were not simply—
irrelevant.
Ginny . . . dear god. His sister Amy. Poor Amy, she was good to him when they were kids. His mouth twists.

“Your problem is,” he says, “if you take the risk of giving us equal rights, what could we possibly contribute?”

“Precisely,” says Lady Blue. They all smile at him relievedly, not understanding that he isn’t.

“I think I’ll have that antidote now,” he says.

Connie floats toward him, a big, warmhearted, utterly alien woman. “I thought you’d like yours in a bulb.” She smiles kindly.

“Thank you.” He takes the small pink bulb. “Just tell me,” he says to Lady Blue, who is looking at the bullet gashes, “what do you call yourselves? Women’s World? Liberation? Amazonia?”

“Why, we call ourselves human beings.” Her eyes twinkle absently at him, go back to the bullet marks. “Humanity, mankind.” She shrugs. “The human race.”

The drink tastes cool going down, something like peace and freedom, he thinks. Or death.

WITH DELICATE MAD HANDS

C
AROL
P
AGE, OR
CP as she was usually known, was an expert at being unloved.

She was a sweetly formed, smallish girl of the red-hair-green-eyes-and-freckles kind, but her face was entirely spoiled and dominated by a huge, fleshy, obscenely pugged nose.

A nurse at the State Orphans’ Crèche told her that a student OB had crushed it, in the birthing that killed her mother. What resulted was a truly hideous snout, the nostrils gaping level with her squinted eyes, showing hair and mucus. The other children called her Snotface.

As she grew older she became CP, and later yet, when her natural fastidiousness was known, the spacers called her Cold Pig, sometimes to her face.

Had CP been officially born to one of the world’s ruling Managers, a few passes with a scalpel would have returned that snout to its dainty pixie form; her eyes would have been as nature intended, provocatively tilted green stars, and her lips would have retained their delicious curves. Then, too, her skin would have remained cream-and-rose petals, instead of its dry angry workhouse red, and her slim fingers would have stayed delightful.

The lack of these amenities cost the world a girl of delicate, impish beauty—but this world was precariously recovering from many and much more terrible losses, and individual desolations counted for little.

CP was, in fact, lucky to be alive at all.

At fifteen her mother had been assigned to a visiting Manager who fancied virgins. She became pregnant through an unexpected delay in his schedules. He had become fond enough of the child so that when he saw how passionately she wanted her baby, and how she dreaded her destined future, he took the trouble to find a place for her in a State hospital. Here, of course, she died, but the baby, CP, retained her place-rights in the State Enclave.

This Enclave was one of a small number of city-form complexes on clean ground, where a shadowy form of oldstyle middle-class life was maintained. It served as a source of skilled labor and very occasional potential Managers. CP’s basic health needs were attended to and she was placed in the Enclave’s Orphans’ School, where she became Snotface.

Here CP developed two traits, the first well-known and the second totally secret.

What was known to all was that she was a hard, smart worker—tireless, unstoppable. Whatever came her way, she drove herself into the first percentile at it, and looked for more. It presently became clear what she was aiming at—in a school where mere survival was a feat, CP was dreaming of an all but impossible achievement: Space Crew Training.

She was doing it by simple hard work, undistracted, of course, by anyone who wanted personal relations with a Snotface. Whatever could conceivably be of help, she learned, fast and well. She plowed from arithmetic through calculus into vector math, she tackled metallurgy, electronics, computers of any and all kinds. Astronomy she devoured. Being a realist, she neglected no menial art—metal-cleaning, nutrition, space cookery, nursing, massage, the twenty-seven basic sexual stimulations, how to fix any common appliance, space laundry. She took a minor in space medicine. And always she went at engines; engines, more engines, and whatever she could find on orbital flight and thrust maneuvers. Her meager State allowance she saved from childhood until she could actually afford simple flying lessons at the Enclave strip.