Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS) (67 page)

And so I did, didn’t I my Lilli? Silly Moggadeet, how I hunted, how I brought lizards, hoppers, fatclimbers, and banlings by the score. What a fool! For of course they rotted, there in the heat, and the heaps turned green and slimy—but still tasting good, eh, my berry?—so that we had to eat them then, gorging ourselves like babies. And how you grew!

Oh, beautiful you became, my jewel of redness! So bursting fat and shiny-full, but still my tiny one, my sun-spark. Each night after I fed you I would part the silk, fondling your head, your eyes, your tender ears, trembling with excitement for the delicious moment when I would release your first scarlet limb to caress and exercise it and press it to my pulsing throat-sacs. Sometimes I would unbind two together for the sheer joy of seeing you move. And each night it took longer, each morning I had to make more silk to bind you up. How proud I was, my Leely, Lilliloo!

That was when my greatest thinking came.

As I was weaving you so tenderly into your shining cocoon, my joyberry, I thought, why not bind up living fatclimbers? Pen them alive so their flesh will stay sweet and they will serve us through the winter!

That was a great thinking, Lilliloo, and I did this, and it was good. Fatclimbers in plenty I walled in a little tunnel, and many, many other things as well, while the sun walked back toward winter and the shadows grew and grew. Fatclimbers and banlings and all tasty creatures and even—oh, clever Moggadeet!—all manner of leaves and bark and stuffs for them to eat! Oh, we had broken the Plan for sure now!

“We have broken the Plan for sure, my Lilli-red. The fatclimbers are eating the twigs and bark, the banlings are eating juice from the wood, the great runners are munching grass, and we will eat them all!”

“Oh, Moggadeet, you are brave! Do you think we can really break the Plan? I am frightened! Give me a banling, I think it grows cold.”

“You have eaten fifteen banlings, my minikin!” I teased you. “How fat you grow! Let me look at you again, yes, you must let your Moggadeet caress you while you eat. Ah, how adorable you are!”

And of course—Oh, you remember how it began then, our deepest love. For when I uncovered you one night with the first hint of cold in the air, I saw that you had changed.

Shall I say it?

Your secret fur. Your
Mother-fur
.

Always I had cleaned you there tenderly, but without difficulty to restrain myself. But on this night when I parted the silk strands with my huge hunting claws, what new delights met my eyes! No longer pink and pale but fiery red!
Red!
Scarlet blaze like the reddest sunrise, gold-tipped! And swollen, curling, dewy—Oh! Commanding me to expose you, all of you. Oh, how your tender eyes melted me and your breath musky-sweet and your limbs warm and heavy in my grasp!

Wildly I ripped away the last strands, dazed with bliss as you slowly stretched your whole blazing redness before my eyes. I knew then—
we
knew!—that the love we felt before was only a beginning. My hunting-limbs fell at my sides and my special hands, my weaving hands grew, filled with new, almost painful life. I could not speak, my throat-sacs filling, filling! And my lovehands rose up by themselves, pressing ecstatically, while my eyes bent closer, closer to your glorious
red!

But suddenly the Me-Myself, Moggadeet awoke! I jumped back!

“Lilli! What’s happening to us?”

“Oh, Moggadeet, I love you! Don’t go away!”

“What is it, Leelyloo? Is it the Plan?”

“I don’t care! Moggadeet, don’t you love me?”

“I fear! I fear to harm you! You are so tiny. I am your Mother.”

“No, Moggadeet, look! I am as big as you are. Don’t be afraid.”

I drew back—oh, hard, hard!—and tried to look calmly.

“True, my redling, you have grown. But your limbs are so new, so tender. Oh, I can’t look!”

Averting my eyes I began to spin a screen of silk, to shut away your maddening redness.

“We must wait, Lilliloo. We must go on as before. I don’t know what this strange urging means; I fear it will bring you harm.”

“Yes, Moggadeet. We will wait.

And so we waited. Oh, yes. Each night it grew more hard. We tried to be as before, to be happy. Leely-Moggadeet. Each night as I caressed your glowing limbs that seemed to offer themselves to me as I swathed and unswathed them in turn, the urge rose in me hotter, more strong. To unveil you wholly! To look again upon your whole body!

Oh, yes, my darling, I feel—unbearable—how you remember with me those last days of our simple love.

Colder . . . colder. Mornings when I went to harvest the fatclimbers there was a whiteness on their fur and the banlings ceased to move. The sun sank ever lower, paler, and the cold mists hung above us, reaching down. Soon I dared not leave the cave. I stayed all day by your silken wall, humming Motherlike,
Brum-a-loo, Mooly-mooly, Lilliloo, Love Leely
. Strong Moggadeet!

“We’ll wait, fireling. We will not yield to the Plan! Aren’t we happier than all others, here with our love in our warm cave?”

“Oh, yes, Moggadeet.”

“I’m Myself now. I am strong. I’ll make my own Plan. I will not look at you until . . . until the warm, until the Sun comes back.”

“Yes, Moggadeet . . . Moggadeet? My limbs are cramped.”

“Oh, my precious, wait—see, I am opening the silk very carefully, I will not look—I won’t—”

“Moggadeet, don’t you love me?”

“Leelyloo! Oh, my glorious one! I fear, I fear—”

“Look, Moggadeet! See how big I am, how strong!”

“Oh, redling, my hands—my hands—what are they doing to you?”

For with my special hands I was pressing, pressing the hot juices from my throat-sacs and tenderly, tenderly parting your sweet Mother-fur and
placing my gift within your secret places
. And as I did this our eyes entwined and our limbs made a wreath.

“My darling, do I hurt you?”

“Oh, no, Moggadeet! Oh, no!”

Oh, my adored one, those last days of our love!

Outside the world grew colder yet, and the fatclimbers ceased to eat and the banlings lay still and began to stink. But still we held the warmth deep in our cave and still I fed my beloved on the last of our food. And every night our new ritual of love became more free, richer, though I compelled myself to hide all but a portion of your sweet body. But each dawn it grew hard and harder for me to replace the silken bonds around your limbs.

“Moggadeet! Why do you not bind me! I am afraid!”

“A moment, Lilli, a moment. I must caress you just once more.”

“I’m afraid, Moggadeet! Cease now and bind me!”

“But why, my lovekin? Why must I hide you? Is this not some foolish part of the Plan?”

“I don’t know, I feel so strange. Moggadeet, I—I’m changing.”

“You grow more glorious every moment, my Lilli, my own. Let me look at you! It is wrong to bind you away!”

“No, Moggadeet! No!”

But I would not listen, would I? Oh, foolish Moggadeet-who-thought-to-be-your-Mother. Great is the Plan!

I did not listen, I did not bind you up. No! I ripped them away, the strong silk strands. Mad with love, I slashed them all at once, rushing from each limb to the next until all your glorious body lay exposed. At last—I saw you whole!

Oh, Lilliloo, greatest of Mothers.

It was not I who was your Mother. You were mine.

Shining and bossed you lay, your armor newly grown, your mighty hunting limbs thicker than my head! What I had created. You! A Supermother, a Mother such as none have ever seen!

Stupefied with delight, I gazed.

And your huge hunting-limb came out and seized me.

Great is the Plan. I felt only joy as your jaws took me.

As I feel it now.

And so we end, my Lilliloo, my redling, for your babies are swelling through your Mother-fur and your Moggadeet can speak no longer. I am nearly devoured. The cold grows, it grows, and your Mother-eyes are growing, glowing. Soon you will be alone with our children and the warm will come again.

Will you remember, my heartmate? Will you remember and tell them?

Tell them of the cold, Leelyloo. Tell them of our love.

Tell them . . .
the winters grow
.

ON THE LAST AFTERNOON

“Y
OU
’
LL HAVE TO
help us,” Mysha said painfully. “One last time. You can do it, can’t you?”

The
noion
said nothing. It hung on its stalk as it had hung since he first found it here in the headland grove: a musty black indescribably shabby object or entity, giving no more sign of life than an abandoned termite nest. No one but he believed it was alive. It had not changed in the thirty years of the colony’s life, but he had known for some time that it was dying.

So was he. That was not the point, now.

He pulled himself up from the case of tapes and frowned out over the mild green sea, rubbing his wrecked thigh. The
noion
’s grove stood on a headland beside the long beach. To the left lay the colony’s main fields, jungle-rimmed. Below him on his right were the thatch roofs, the holy nest itself. Granary, kilns, cistern, tannery and workshops, the fish sheds. The dormitories, and the four individual huts, one his and Beth’s. At the center was the double heart: the nursery and the librarylabs: their future and their past.

The man Mysha did not look there now, because he had never stopped looking at it. Every brick and beam and pipe and wire was mapped in his inner eye, every cunning device and shaky improvisation, every mark of plan or accident down to the last irreplaceable component from the ship whose skeleton rusted at the jungle’s edge behind him.

Instead he gazed out, beyond the people laboring and splashing on the jetty in the bay, beyond the placid shoals that stretched to a horizon calm as milk. Listening.

Faintly he heard it: a long sourceless whistle.

They were out there. Out beyond the horizon, where the world-ocean crashed forever on the continent’s last reefs, the destroyers were gathering.

“You can do it one last time,” he told the
noion
. “You must.”

The
noion
was silent, as usual.

Mysha made himself stop listening, turned to study the seawall being built below him. A cribbed jetty stretched from the headland, slanting out across the shoals to meet a line of piling coming from the far side of the colony beach. They formed a broad arrowhead pointing at the sea. Shelter for the colony.

In the unfinished apex gap, brown bodies were straining and shouting among rafts piled with rock. Two pirogues wallowed, towing cribs. Another work-team splashed toward the pilings pulling a huge spliced beam.

“They can’t finish in time,” Mysha muttered. “It won’t hold.” His eyes roved the defense-works, reviewing for the thousandth time the placing of the piles, the weak points. It should have been in deeper water. But there was no time, it was all too late. They wouldn’t believe him until the stuff had started washing ashore.

“They don’t really believe yet,” he said. “They aren’t afraid.”

He made a grimace of pride and agony, looking now at the near beach where boys and girls were binding logs with vineropes, assembling the cribs. Some of the girls were singing. One boy jostled another, who dropped his end of the log, tumbling them both. Hoots, laughter. “Get on with it, get on with it,” he groaned, pounding his broken thighs, watching old Tomas fussing them back to work. Tomas would outlive him if they survived, if any of them survived what was coming. He groaned again softly. His beloved ones, seed of his race on this alien world. Tall, unfearing, unscarred, as he had never been.

“Man is an animal whose dreams come true and kill him,” he told the
noion
. “Add that to your definitions. . . . You could have warned me. You were here before. You knew. You knew I didn’t understand.”

The
noion
continued silent. It was very alien. How could it grasp what this haven had meant to them, thirty years ago? This sudden great pale clearing at the last edge of the land, and they roaring down to death on the rocks and jungle in their crippled ship. At the last minute of their lives this place had opened under them and received them. He had led the survivors out to bleed thankfully into the churned sand.

A tornado, they decided, must have swept it bare, this devastated square mile stretching to the sea. It had been recent; green tips were poking up, fed with fresh water from an underground flow. And the sand was fertile with organic mulm, and their wheats and grasses grew and the warm lagoon teamed with fish. An Eden it had been, those first two years. Until the water—

“Are you not . . . mobile?” The
noion
had spoken in his head suddenly, interrupting his thought. As usual it had “spoken” when he was not looking at it. Also as usual, its speech had been a question.

From long habit he understood what it meant. He sighed.

“You don’t understand,” he told it. “Animals like me are nothing, in ourselves, without the accumulated work of other men. Our bodies can run away, yes. But if our colony here is destroyed, those who survive will be reduced to brutes using all their energy to eat and breed. The thing that makes us human will be lost. I speak with you as a rational being, knowing for example what the stars are, only because the work of dead men enables me to be a thinker.”

In fact, he was not a thinker, his inmost mind commented sadly; he was a builder of drainage lines now.

The
noion
emanated blankness. How could it understand, a creature of solitary life? Hanging forever on its limb, it was more impressed with his ability to move his body than with anything in his mind.

“All right,” he said. “Try this. Man is a creature that stores time, very slowly and painfully. Each individual stores a little and dies leaving it to his young. Our colony here is a store of past time.” He tapped the box of tapes on which he rested.

“If that generator down there is destroyed, no one can use the time-store in these. If the labs and shops go, the kilns, the looms, the irrigation lines and the grain, the survivors will be forced back to hunting roots and fruits to live from day to day. Everything beyond that will be lost. Naked savages huddling in the jungle,” he said bitterly. “A thousand generations to get back. You have to help us.”