Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS) (75 page)

“What’s that?”

“Oh, the seatrain. It goes to the River landing.”

“Are there people on it?”

“Not anymore. Look, I’ll show you.” She jumped up and was opening a console in the corner, when a sweet computer voice spoke into the air.

“Seatrain Foxtrot Niner calling Station Juliet! Come in, Station Juliet!”

“It hasn’t done that for years,” Peachthief said. She tripped tumblers. “Seatrain, this is Station Juliet, I hear you. Do you have a problem?”

“Affirmative. Passenger is engaging in nonstandard activities. He-slash-she does not conform to parameters. Request instructions.”

Peachthief thought a minute. Then she grinned. “Is your passenger moving on four legs?”

“Affirmative! Affirmative!” Seatrain Foxtrot sounded relieved.

“Supply it with bowls of meat food and water on the floor and do not interfere with it. Juliet out.”

She clicked off, and they watched the far web of lights go by on the horizon, carrying an animal.

“Probably a dog following the smell of people,” Peachthief said. “I hope it gets off all right. . . . We’re quite a wide genetic spread,” she went on in a different voice. “I mean, you’re so light, in body type and all.”

“I noticed that.”

“It would give good heterosis. Vigor.”

She was talking about being impregnated, about the fantasy child. He felt angry.

“Look, you don’t know what you’re saying. Don’t you realize you’d have to stay and raise it for years? You’d be ethically and morally bound. And the River places are shrinking fast, you must know that. Maybe you’d be too late.”

“Yes,” she said somberly. “Now it’s sucked everybody out it’s going. But I still mean to stay.”

“But you’d hate it, even if there’s still time. My mother hated it, toward the end. She felt she had begun to deteriorate energically, that her life would be lessened. And me—what about me? I mean, I should stay, too.”

“You’d only have to stay a month. For my ovulation. The male parent isn’t ethically bound.”

“Yes, but I think that’s wrong. My father stayed. He never said he minded it, but he must have.”

“You only have to do a month,” she said sullenly. “I thought you weren’t going on the River right now.”

“I’m not. I just don’t want to feel bound, I want to travel. To see more of the world, first. After I say good-bye.”

She made an angry sound. “You have no insight. You’re going, all right. You just don’t want to admit it. You’re going just like Mungo and Ferrocil.”

“Who are they?”

“People who came by. Males, like you. Mungo was last year, I guess. He had an aircar. He said he was going to stay, he talked and talked. But two days later he went right on again. To the River. Ferrocil was earlier, he was walking through. Until he stole my bicycle.”

A sudden note of fury in her voice startled him; she seemed to have some peculiar primitive relation to her bicycle, to her
things
.

“Did you want them to impregnate you, too?” Jakko noticed an odd intensity in his own voice as well.

“Oh, I was thinking about it, with Mungo.” Suddenly she turned on him, her eyes wide open in the dimness like white-ringed jewels. “Look! Once and for all, I’m not going! I’m alive, I’m a human woman. I am going to stay on this Earth and do human things. I’m going to make young ones to carry on the race, even if I have to die here. You can go on out, you—you pitiful shadows!”

Her voice rang in the dark room, jarring him down to his sleeping marrow. He sat silent as though some deep buried bell had tolled.

She was breathing hard. Then she moved, and to his surprise a small live flame sprang up between her cupped hands, making the room a cave.

“That’s a candle. That’s me. Now go ahead, make fun like Mungo did.”

“I’m not making fun,” he said, shocked. “It’s just that I don’t know what to think. Maybe you’re right. I really . . . I really don’t want to go, in one way,” he said haltingly. “I love this Earth, too. But it’s all so fast. Let me. . . .”

His voice trailed off.

“Tell me about your family,” she said, quietly now.

“Oh, they studied. They tried every access you can imagine. Ancient languages, history, lore. My aunt made poems in English. . . . The layers of the Earth, the names of body cells and tissues, jewels, everything. Especially stars. They made us memorize star maps. So we’ll know where we are, you know, for a while. At least the Earth-names. My father kept saying, when you go on the River you can’t come back and look anything up. All you have is what you remember. Of course you could ask others, but there’ll be so much more, so much new. . . .”

He fell silent, wondering for the millionth time: is it possible that I shall go out forever between the stars, in the great streaming company of strange sentiences?

“How many children were in your tribe?” Peachthief was asking.

“Six. I was the youngest.”

“The others all went on the River?”

“I don’t know. When I came back from the cities the whole family had gone on, but maybe they’ll wait awhile, too. My father left a letter asking me to come and say good-bye, and to bring him anything new I learned. They say you go slowly, you know. If I hurry there’ll still be enough of his mind left there to tell him what I saw.”

“What did you see? We were at a city once,” Peachthief said dreamily. “But I was too young, I don’t remember anything but people.”

“The people are all gone now. Empty, every one. But everything works, the lights change, the moveways run. I didn’t believe everybody was gone until I checked the central control offices. Oh, there were so many wonderful devices.” He sighed. “The beauty, the complexity. Fantastic what people made.” He sighed again, thinking of the wonderful technology, the creations abandoned, running down. “One strange thing. In the biggest city I saw, old Chio, almost every entertainment screen had the same tape running.”

“What was it?”

“A girl, a young girl with long hair. Almost to her feet, I’ve never seen such hair. She was laying it out on a sort of table, with her head down. But no sound, I think the audio was broken. Then she poured a liquid all over very slowly. And then she lit it, she set fire to herself. It flamed and exploded and burned her all up. I think it was real.” He shuddered. “I could see inside her mouth, her tongue going all black and twisted. It was horrible. Running over and over, everywhere. Stuck.”

She made a revolted sound. “So you want to tell that to your father, to his ghost or whatever?”

“Yes. It’s all new data, it could be important.”

“Oh, yes,” she said scornfully. Then she grinned at him. “What about me? Am I new data, too? A woman who isn’t going to the River? A woman who is going to stay here and make babies? Maybe I’m the last.”

“That’s very important,” he said slowly, feeling a deep confusion in his gut. “But I can’t believe, I mean, you—”

“I mean it.”
She spoke with infinite conviction. “I’m going to live here and have babies by you or some other man if you won’t stay, and teach them to live on the Earth naturally.”

Suddenly he believed her. A totally new emotion was rising up in him, carrying with it sunrises and nameless bonds with Earth that hurt in a painless way; as though a rusted door was opening within him. Maybe this was what he had been groping for.

“I think—I think maybe I’ll help you. Maybe I’ll stay with you, for a while at least. Our—our children.”

“You’ll stay a month?” she asked wonderingly. “Really?”

“No, I mean I could stay longer. To make more and see them and help raise them, like Father did. After I come back from saying good-bye I’ll really stay.”

Her face changed. She bent to him and took his face between her slim dark hands.

“Jakko, listen. If you go to the River you’ll never come back. No one ever does. I’ll never see you again. We have to do it now, before you go.”

“But a month is too long!” he protested. “My father’s mind won’t be there, I’m already terribly late.”

She glared into his eyes a minute and then released him, stepping back with her brief sweet laugh. “Yes, and it’s already late for bed. Come on.”

She led him back to the room, carrying the candles, and he marveled anew at the clutter of strange activities she had assembled. “What’s that?”

“My weaving room.” Yawning, she reached in and held up a small, rough-looking cloth. “I made this.”

It was ugly, he thought; ugly and pathetic. Why make such useless things? But he was too tired to argue.

She left him to cleanse himself perfunctorily by the well in the moonlit courtyard, after showing him another waste-place right in the garden. Other people’s wastes smelled bad, he noticed sleepily. Maybe that was the cause of all the ancient wars.

In his room he tumbled into his hammock and fell asleep instantly. His dreams that night were chaotic; crowds, storms, jostling, and echoing through strange dimensions. His last image was of a great whirlwind that bore in its forehead a jewel that was a sleeping woman, curled like an embryo.

He waked in the pink light of dawn to find her brown face bending over him, smiling impishly. He had the impression she had been watching him, and jumped quickly out of the hammock.

“Lazy,” she said. “I’ve found the sailboat. Hurry up and eat.”

She handed him a wooden plate of bright natural fruits and led him out into the sunrise garden.

When they got down to the beach she led him south, and there was the little craft sliding to and fro, overturned in the shallows amid its tangle of sail. The keel was still protruding. They furled the sail in clumsily, and towed it out to deeper water to right it.

“I want this for the children,” Peachthief kept repeating excitedly. “They can get fish, too. Oh, how they’ll love it!”

“Stand your weight on the keel and grab the side rail,” Jakko told her, doing the same. He noticed that her silks had come loose from her breasts, which were high and wide-pointed, quite unlike those of his tribe. The sight distracted him, his thighs felt unwieldy, and he missed his handhold as the craft righted itself and ducked him. When he came up he saw Peachthief scrambling aboard like a cat, clinging tight to the mast.

“The sail! Pull the sail up,” he shouted, and got another faceful of water. But she had heard him, the sail was trembling open like a great wing, silhouetting her shining dark body. For the first time Jakko noticed the boat’s name, on the stern:
Gojack
. He smiled. An omen.

Gojack
was starting to move smoothly away, toward the reef.

“The rudder!” he bellowed. “Turn the rudder and come back.”

Peachthief moved to the tiller and pulled at it; he could see her strain. But
Gojack
continued to move away from him into the wind, faster and faster toward the surf. He remembered she had been handling the mast where the computer was.

“Stop the computer! Turn it off, turn it off!”

She couldn’t possibly hear him. Jakko saw her in frantic activity, wrenching at the tiller, grabbing ropes, trying physically to push down the sail. Then she seemed to notice the computer, but evidently could not decipher it. Meanwhile
Gojack
fled steadily on and out, resuming its interrupted journey to the River. Jakko realized with horror that she would soon be in dangerous water; the surf was thundering on coral heads.

“Jump! Come back, jump off!” He was swimming after them as fast as he could, his progress agonizingly slow. He glimpsed her still wrestling with the boat, screaming something he couldn’t hear.

“JUMP!”

And finally she did, but only to try jerking
Gojack
around by its mooring lines. The boat faltered and jibbed, but then went strongly on, towing the threshing girl.

“Let go! Let go!” A wave broke over his head.

When he could see again he found she had at last let go and was swimming aimlessly, watching
Gojack
crest the surf and wing away. At last she turned back toward shore, and Jakko swam to intercept her. He was gripped by an unknown emotion so strong it discoordinated him. As his feet touched bottom he realized it was rage.

She waded to him, her face contorted by weeping. “The children’s boat,” she wailed. “I lost the children’s boat—”

“You’re crazy,” he shouted. “There aren’t any children.”

“I lost it—” She flung herself on his chest, crying. He thumped her back, her sides, repeating furiously, “Crazy! You’re insane!”

She wailed louder, squirming against him, small and naked and frail. Suddenly he found himself flinging her down onto the wet sand, falling on top of her with his swollen sex crushed between their bellies. For a moment all was confusion, and then the shock of it sobered him. He raised to look under himself, and Peachthief stared too, round-eyed.

“Do you w-want to, now?”

In that instant he wanted nothing more than to thrust himself into her, but a sandy wavelet splashed over them and he was suddenly aware of chafing wet cloth and Peachthief gagging brine. The magic waned. He got awkwardly to his knees.

“I thought you were going to be drowned,” he told her, angry again.

“I wanted it so, for—for them. . . .” She was still crying softly, looking up desolately at him. He understood she wasn’t really meaning just the sailboat. A feeling of inexorable involvement spread through him. This mad little being had created some kind of energy vortex around her, into which he was being sucked along with animals, vegetables, chickens, crowds of unknown things; only
Gojack
had escaped her.

“I’ll find it,” she was muttering, wringing out her silks, staring beyond the reef at the tiny dwindling gleam. He looked down at her, so fanatic and so vulnerable, and his inner landscape tilted frighteningly, revealing some ancient-new dimension.

“I’ll stay with you,” he said hoarsely. He cleared his throat, hearing his voice shake. “I mean I’ll really stay, I won’t go to the River at all. We’ll make them, our babies now.”

She stared up at him openmouthed. “But your father! You promised!”

“My father stayed,” he said painfully. “It’s—it’s right, I think.”

She came close and grabbed his arms in her small hands. “Oh, Jakko! But no, listen—
I’ll go with you
. We can start a baby as we go, I’m sure of that. Then you can talk to your father and keep your promise and I’ll be there to make sure you come back!”