Limits (31 page)

He wore a rough pair of coveralls that fit him well enough, but he would have looked ludicrous if there had been anything to laugh about. Soft brown fur covered every inch of him. As Doc appeared he turned his head with a bird-quick movement, saw his father, and scampered over. Jerry bounced into him, wrapped long arms tight about his rib cage and said, eagerly, “Daddy.”

There was a slight pause.

“Hello, Jerry.” Doc slowly bent to the ground, looking into his son’s eyes.

“Daddy Doc, Daddy Doc,” he chattered, smiling up at his father. His vocabulary was about fifteen words. Jerry was six years old and much too big for his age. His fingers were very long and strong, but his thumbs were small and short and inconsequential. Doc had seen him handle silverware without much trouble. His nose pugged, jaw massive with a receding chin. There were white markings in the fur around his eyes, accentuating the heavy s
u
praorbital ridges, making the poor child look like—

The poor child.
Doc snorted with self-contempt.
Listen to me. Why not my child?

Because I’m ashamed.
Because we lock our children away to ease the pain.
Because they look like—

Doc gently disengaged Jerry’s fingers from his shirt, turned and half-ran back to the ship. Shivering, he curled up on one of the cots and cursed hi
m
self to sleep.

Hours later he roused himself and, woozy with fatigue, he went looking for Jase. He found him on a work detail in the north fields, picking fruit.

“I’m not sure,” he told Jase. “They’re not old enough for me to be sure. But I want your opinion.”

“Show me,” said Jase, and followed him to the library.

The picture on the tape was an artist’s rendering of Pithecanthropus erectus. He stood on a grassy knoll looking warily out at the viewer, his
long-fingered hand clutching a sharp-edged throwing rock.

“I’ll smack your head,” said Jase.

“I’m wrong, then?”

“You’re calling them apes!”

“I’m not. Read the copy. Pithecanthropus was a small-brained Pleist
o
cene primate, thought to be a transitional stage between ape and man. You got that? Pith is also called Java Man.”

Jase glared at the reader. “The markings are different. And there is the fur—”

“Forget ’em. They’re nothing but guesswork. All the artist had to go on were crumbling bones and some broken rocks.”

“Broken rocks?”

“Pith used to break rocks in half to get an edged weapon. It was about the extent of his tool-making ability. All we know about what he looked like comes from fossilized bones—very much like the skeleton of a stoop shouldered man with foot trouble, topped with the skull of an ape with h
y
drocephalus.”

“Very nice.
Will Eve’s children be fish?”

“I don’t know, dammit. I don’t know anything at all. Look, Pith isn’t the only candidate for missing link. Homo
Habilis
looked a lot more like us and lived about two million years ago. Kenyapithecus Africanus resembled us less, but lived eighteen million years earlier. So I can’t say what we’ve got here. God only knows what the next generation will be like. That depends on whether the children are moving backwards or maybe sideways. I don’t know, Jase, I just don’t
know
!” The last words were shrill, and Doc punct
u
ated them by slamming his fist against a wire window screen. Then, because he could think of nothing more to say, he did it again.
And again.
And—

Jase caught his arm. Three knuckles were torn and bleeding. “Get some sleep,” he
said,
eyes sad. “I’ll have them send Earth a description of Eve the way she is now. She’s oldest, and best developed. We’ll send them all we have on her. It’s all we can do.”

Momentum and the thoroughness of their training had kept them going for eight years. Now the work of making a world slowed and stopped.

It didn’t matter. The crops and the meat animals had no natural enemies on Ridgeback. Life spread along the continent like a green plague. Already it
had touched some of the islands.

Doc was gathering fruit in the groves. It was a shady place, cool, quiet, and it made for a tranquil day’s work. There was no set quota. You took home approximately a third of what you gathered. Sometimes he worked there, and sometimes he helped with the cattle, examining for health and pregnancy, or herding the animals with the nonlethal sonic stunners.

He wished that Elise were here with him, so they could laugh together, but that was growing infrequent now. She was growing more involved with the nursery, and he spent little of his time there.

Jill’s voice hailed him from the bottom of the ladder. “Hey up there, Doc.
How about a break?”

He grinned and climbed down, hauling a sack of oranges.

“Tired of spending the day reading, I guess,” she said lightly. She offered him an apple. He polished it on his shirt and took a bite.
“Just needed to talk to somebody.”

“Kinda depressed?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I guess it’s just getting hard to cope with some of the problems.”

“I guess there have been a few.”

Jill gave a derisive chuckle. “I sure don’t know Greg anymore. Ever since he set up the brewery and the distillery, he doesn’t really want to see me at all.”

“Don’t take it so hard,” Doc comforted. “The strain is showing on all of us. Half the town does little more than read or play tapes or drink. Personally, I’d like to know who smuggled the hemp seeds on board.”

Jill laughed, which he was glad for, then her face grew serious again. “You know, there’d probably be more trouble if we didn’t need someone to look after the kids.” She paused, looking up at Doc. “I spend a lot of my time there,” she said unnecessarily.

“Why?” It was the first time he’d asked. They had left the groves and were heading back into town along the gravel road that Greg and Brew and the others had built in better days.

“We…I came here for a reason. To continue the human race, to cross a new frontier, one that my children could have a part in. Now, now that we know that the colony is doomed, there’s just no motive to anything. No
reason. I’m surprised that there isn’t more drinking, more carousing and foursomes and divorces and everything else. Nothing seems to matter a whole lot.
Nothing at all.”

Doc took her by the shoulders and held her. Go on and cry, he silently said to her. God, I’m tired.

The children grew fast. At nine Eve reached puberty and seemed to shoot skyward. She grew more hair. She learned more words, but not many more. She spent much of her time in the trees in the children’s complex. The older girls grew almost as fast as she did, and the boys.

Every Saturday Brew and Nat took some of the children walking. Sometimes they climbed the foothills at the base of the continental range; sometimes they wandered through the woods, spending most of their efforts keeping the kids from disappearing into the trees.

One Saturday they returned early, their faces frozen in anger. Eve and Jerry were missing. At first they refused to discuss it, but when Jase began organizing a search party, they talked.

They’d been ready to turn for home when Eve suddenly scampered into the trees. Jerry gave a whoop and followed her. Nat had left the others with Brew while she followed after the refugees.

It proved easy to find them, and easier still to determine what they were doing with each other when she came upon them.

Eve looked up at Nat, innocent eyes glazed with pleasure. Nat trembled for a moment, horrified,
then
drove them both away with a stick, screaming filth at them.

Over Nat’s vehement objections and Brew’s stoney refusal to join, Jase got his search party together and set off. They met the children coming home. By that time Nat had talked to the other mothers and fathers at the children’s complex.

Jase called a meeting. There was no way to avoid it now, feelings were running too deep.

“We may as well decide now,” he told them that night. “There’s no question of the children marrying. We could train them to mouth the words of any of our religions, but we couldn’t expect them to understand what they were saying. So the question is
,
shall we let the children reproduce?”

He faced an
embarrassed
silence.

“There’s no question of their being too young. In biological terms they aren’t, or you could all go home. In our terms, they’ll never be old enough. Anyone have anything to say?”

“Let’s have Doc’s opinion,” a hoarse voice called. There was a trickle of supportive applause.

Doc rose, feeling very heavy. “Fellow colonists…” The smile he was trying on for size didn’t fit his face. He let it drop. There was a desperate compassion in his voice. “This world will never be habitable to mankind until we find out what went wrong here. I say let our children breed. Someday someone on Earth may find out how to cure what we’ve caught. Maybe he’ll know how to let our descendants breed men again. Maybe this problem will only last a generation or two,
then
we’ll get human babies again. If not, well, what have we lost? Who else is there to inherit Ridg
e
back?”

“No!” The sound was a tortured meld of hatred and venom. That was Nat, sunhaired loving mother of six, with her face a strained mask of fru
s
tration. “I didn’t risk my life and leave my family and, and train for years and bleed and sweat and toil so my labor could fall to…to…a bunch of go
d
damned
monkeys
!”

Brew pulled her back to her seat, but by now the crowd was muttering and arguing to itself. The noise grew louder. There was shouting. The yel
l
ing, too, grew in intensity.

Jase shouted over the throng. “Let’s talk this out peacefully!”

Brew was standing, screaming at the people who disagreed with him and Natalie. Now it was becoming a shoving match, and Brew was getting more furious.

Doc pushed his way into the crowd, hoping to reach Brew and calm him. The room was beginning to break down into tangled knots of angry, em
o
tionally charged people.

He grabbed the big man’s arm and tried to speak, but the Swede turned bright baleful eyes on him and swung a heavy fist.

Doc felt pain explode in his jaw and tasted blood. He fell to the ground and was helped up again, Brew standing over him challengingly. “Stay out of our lives,
Doctor
,” he sneered, openly now. “You’ve never helped anything before. Don’t try to start now.”

He tried to speak but felt the pain, and knew his jaw was fractured. A soft
hand took his arm and he turned to see Elise, big green eyes luminous with pity and fear. Without struggling, he allowed her to take him to the ship infirmary.

As they left the auditorium he could hear the shouting and struggling, Jase on the microphone trying to calm them, and the coldly murderous voices that screamed for “no monkey Grandchildren.”

He tried to turn his head toward the distant sound of argument as Elise set the bone and injected quick-healing serums. She took his face and kissed him softly, with more affection than she had shown in months, and said, “They’re afraid, Harry.” Then kissed him again, and led him home.

Doc raged inwardly at his jaw that week. Its pain prevented him from joining in the debate which now flared in every corner of the colony.

Light images swam across his closed eyes as the sound of fists pounding against wood roused him from dreamless sleep. Doc threw on a robe and padded barefoot across the cool stone floor of his house, peering at the front door with distaste before opening it. Jase was there, and some of the others, sombre and implacable in the morning’s cool light.

“We’ve decided, Doc,” Jase said at last. Doc sensed what
was coming. “The children are not to breed. I’m sorry, I know how you feel—” Doc grunted. How could Jase know how he felt when he wasn’t sure himself? “We’re going to have to ask you to perform the sterilizations…” Doc’s hearing faded down to
a low
fuzz, and he barely heard the words. This is the way the world ends.…

Jase looked at his friend, feeling the distaste between them grow.
“All right.
We’ll give you a week to change your mind. If not, Elise or Greg will have to do it.” Without saying anything more they left.

Doc moped around that morning, even though Elise swore to him that she’d never do it. She fussed over him as they fixed breakfast in the kitchen. The gas stove burned methane reclaimed from waste products, the flame giving more heat control than the microwaves some of the others had. Normally Doc enjoyed scrambling eggs and
woking
fresh slivered veget
a
bles into crisp perfection, but nothing she said or did seemed to lift him out of his mood.