Bright Segment (7 page)

“That’s … parturition, isn’t it?”

He shook his head. “Parturition is Surgery
Kappa
,” he said painfully. He swallowed. “
Lambda’s
cesarean.”

Her crimson eyes widened. “Cesarean?
Alma?
She’d never need a cesarean!”

He turned to look at her, but he could not see, his eyes stung so. “Not while she lived, she wouldn’t,” he whispered. He felt the small white hands tighten painfully on his arm. Across the room, Carl sat quietly. Tod squashed the water out of his eyes with the heel of his hand. Carl began pounding knuckles, very slowly, against his own temple.

Teague and Moira were busy for a long time.

II

Tod pulled in his legs and lowered his head until the kneecaps pressed cruelly against his eyebrow ridges. He hugged his shins, ground his back into the wall-panels, and in this red-spangled blackness he let himself live back and back to Alma and joy, Alma and comfort, Alma and courage.

He had sat once, just this way, twisted by misery and anger, blind and helpless, in a dark corner of an equipment shed at the spaceport.
The rumor had circulated that April would not come after all, because albinism and the Sirius Rock would not mix. It turned out to be untrue, but that did not matter at the time. He had punched her, punched
Alma!
because in all the world he had been given nothing else to strike out at, and she had found him and had sat down to be with him. She had not even touched her face, where the blood ran; she simply waited until at last he flung himself on her lap and wept like an infant. And no one but he and Alma ever knew of it.…

He remembered Alma with the spaceport children, rolling and tumbling on the lawn with them, and in the pool; and he remembered Alma, her face still, looking up at the stars with her soft and gentle eyes, and in those eyes he had seen a challenge as implacable and pervasive as space itself. The tumbling on the lawn, the towering dignity—these co-existed in Alma without friction. He remembered things she had said to him; for each of the things he could recall the kind of light, the way he stood, the very smell of the air at the time. “Never be afraid, Tod. Just think of the worst possible thing that might happen. What you’re afraid of will probably not be
that
bad—and anything else just has to be better.” And she said once, “Don’t confuse logic and truth, however good the logic. You can stick one end of logic in solid ground and throw the other end clear out of the cosmos without breaking it. Truth’s a little less flexible.” And, “Of
course
you need to be loved, Tod! Don’t be ashamed of that, or try to change it. It’s not a thing you have to worry about, ever. You are loved. April loves you. And I love you. Maybe I love you even more than April, because she loves everything you are, but I love everything you were and ever will be.”

And some of the memories were deeper and more important even than these, but were memories of small things—the meeting of eyes, the touch of a hand, the sound of laughter or a snatch of song, distantly.

Tod descended from memory into a blackness that was only loss and despair, and then a numbness, followed by a reluctant awareness. He became conscious of what, in itself, seemed the merest of trifles: that there was a significance in his pose there against the bulkhead. Unmoving, he considered it. It was comfortable, to be so turned
in upon oneself, and so protected, unaware … and Alma would have hated to see him this way.

He threw up his head, and self-consciously straightened from his foetal posture.
That’s over now
, he told himself furiously, and then, dazed, wondered what he had meant.

He turned to look at April. She was huddled miserably against him, her face and body lax, stopped, disinterested. He thumped his elbow into her ribs, hard enough to make her remember she had ribs. She looked up into his eyes and said, “How? How could …”

Tod understood. Of the three couples standard for each ship of the Sirian project, one traditionally would beget children on the planet; one, earlier, as soon as possible after awakening; and one still earlier, for conception would take place within the Coffin. But—not
before
awakening, and surely not long enough before to permit of gestation. It was an impossibility; the vital processes were so retarded within the Coffin that, effectively, there would be no stirring of life at all. So—“How?” April pleaded. “How could …”

Tod gazed upon his own misery, then April’s, and wondered what it must be that Teague was going through.

Teague, without looking up, said, “Tod.”

Tod patted April’s shoulder, rose and went to Teague. He did not look into the Coffin. Teague, still working steadily, tilted his head to one side to point. “I need a little more room here.”

Tod lifted the transparent cube Teague had indicated and looked at the squirming pink bundle inside.

He almost smiled. It was a nice baby. He took one step away and Teague said, “Take ’em all, Tod.”

He stacked them and carried them to where April sat. Carl rose and came over, and knelt. The boxes hummed—a vibration which could be felt, not heard—as nutrient-bearing air circulated inside and back to the power-packs. “A nice normal deliv—I mean, a nice normal batch o’ brats,” Carl said. “Four girls, one boy. Just right.”

Tod looked up at him. “There’s one more, I think.”

There was—another girl. Moira brought it over in the sixth box. “Sweet,” April breathed, watching them. “They’re sweet.”

Moira said, wearily, “That’s all.”

Tod looked up at her.

“Alma …?”

Moira waved laxly toward the neat stack of incubators. “That’s all,” she whispered tiredly, and went to Carl.

That’s all there is of Alma
, Tod thought bitterly. He glanced across at Teague. The tall figure raised a steady hand, wiped his face with his upper arm. His raised hand touched the high end of the Coffin, and for an instant held a grip. Teague’s face lay against his arm, pillowed, hidden and still. Then he completed the wiping motion and began stripping the sterile plastic skin from his hands. Tod’s heart went out to him, but he bit the insides of his cheeks and kept silent.
A strange tradition
, thought Tod,
that makes it impolite to grieve …

Teague dropped the shreds of plastic into the disposal slot and turned to face them. He looked at each in turn, and each in turn found some measure of control. He turned then, and pulled a lever, and the side of Alma’s Coffin slid silently up.

Good-bye …

Tod put his back against the bulkhead and slid down beside April. He put an arm over her shoulders. Carl and Moira sat close, holding hands. Moira’s eyes were shadowed but very much awake. Carl bore an expression almost of sullenness. Tod glanced, then glared at the boxes. Three of the babies were crying, though of course they could not be heard through the plastic incubators. Tod was suddenly conscious of Teague’s eyes upon him. He flushed, and then let his anger drain to the capacious inner reservoir which must hold it and all his grief as well.

When he had their attention, Teague sat cross-legged before them and placed a small object on the floor.

Tod looked at the object. At first glance it seemed to be a metal spring about as long as his thumb, mounted vertically on a black base. Then he realized that it was an art object of some kind, made of a golden substance which shimmered and all but flowed. It was an interlocked double spiral; the turns went round and up, round and down, round and up again, the texture of the gold clearly indicating, in a strange and alive way, which symbolized a rising and
falling flux. Shaped as if it had been wound on a cylinder and the cylinder removed, the thing was formed of a continuous wire or rod which had no beginning and no end, but which turned and rose and turned and descended again in an exquisite continuity.… Its base was formless, an almost-smoke just as the gold showed an almost-flux; and it was as lightless as ylem.

Teague said, “This was in Alma’s Coffin. It was not there when we left Earth.”

“It must have been,” said Carl flatly.

Teague silently shook his head. April opened her lips, closed them again. Teague said, “Yes, April?”

April shook her head. “Nothing, Teague. Really nothing.” But because Teague kept looking at her, waiting, she said, “I was going to say … it’s beautiful.” She hung her head.

Teague’s lips twitched. Tod could sense the sympathy there. He stroked April’s silver hair. She responded, moving her shoulder slightly under his hand. “What is it, Teague?”

When Teague would not answer, Moira asked, “Did it … had it anything to do with Alma?”

Teague picked it up thoughtfully. Tod could see the yellow loom it cast against his throat and cheek, the golden points it built in his eyes. “Something did.” He paused. “You know she was supposed to conceive on awakening. But to give birth—”

Carl cracked a closed hand against his forehead. “She must have been awake for anyway two hundred and eighty days!”

“Maybe she made it,” said Moira.

Tod watched Teague’s hand half-close on the object as if it might be precious now. Moira’s was a welcome thought, and the welcome could be read on Teague’s face. Watching it, Tod saw the complicated spoor of a series of efforts—a gathering of emotions, a determination; the closing of certain doors, the opening of others.

Teague rose. “We have a ship to inspect, sights to take, calculations … we’ve got to tune in Terra Prime, send them a message if we can. Tod, check the corridor air.”

“The stars—we’ll see the stars!” Tod whispered to April, the heady thought all but eclipsing everything else. He bounded to the
corner where the door controls waited. He punched the test button, and a spot of green appeared over the door, indicating that with their awakening, the evacuated chambers, the living and control compartments, had been flooded with air and warmed. “Air okay.”

“Go on then.”

They crowded around Tod as he grasped the lever and pushed.
I won’t wait for orders
, Tod thought.
I’ll slide right across the corridor and open the guard plate and there it’ll be—space, and stars!

The door opened.

There was no corridor, no bulkhead, no armored port-hole, no—

No
ship!

There was a night out there, dank, warm. It was wet. In it were hooked, fleshy leaves and a tangle of roots; a thing with legs which hopped up on the sill and shimmered its wings for them; a thing like a flying hammer which crashed in and smote the shimmering one and was gone with it, leaving a stain on the deck-plates. There was a sky aglow with a ghastly green. There was a thrashing and a scream out there, a pressure of growth, and a wrongness.

Blood ran down Tod’s chin. His teeth met through his lower lip. He turned and looked past three sets of terrified eyes to Teague, who said, “Shut it!”

Tod snatched at the control. It broke off in his hand …

How long does a thought, a long thought, take? Tod stood with the fractured metal in his hand and thought:

We were told that above all things we must adapt. We were told that perhaps there would be a thin atmosphere by now, on Terra Prime, but that in all likelihood we must live a new kind of life in pressure-domes. We were warned that what we might find would be flash-mutation, where the people could be more or less than human. We were warned, even, that there might be no life on Prime at all. But look at me now—look at all of us. We weren’t meant to adapt to this! And we can’t …

Somebody shouted while somebody shrieked, each sound a word, each destroying the other. Something thick as a thumb, long as a hand, with a voice like a distant airhorn, hurtled through the door
and circled the room. Teague snatched a folded cloak from the clothing rack and, poising just a moment, batted it out of the air. It skittered, squirming, across the metal door. He threw the cloak on it to capture it. “Get that door closed.”

Carl snatched the broken control lever out of Tod’s hand and tried to fit it back into the switch mounting. It crumbled as if it were dried bread. Tod stepped outside, hooked his hands on the edge of the door, and pulled. It would not budge. A lizard as long as his arm scuttled out of the twisted grass and stopped to stare at him. He shouted at it, and with forelegs much too long for such a creature, it pressed itself upward until its body was forty-five degrees from the horizontal, it flicked the end of its long tail upward, and something flew over its head toward Tod, buzzing angrily. Tod turned to see what it was, and as he did the lizard struck from one side and April from the other.

April succeeded and the lizard failed, for its fangs clashed and it fell forward, but April’s shoulder had taken Tod on the chest and, off balance as he was, he went flat on his back. The cold, dry, pulsing tail swatted his hand. He gripped it convulsively, held on tight. Part of the tail broke off and buzzed, flipping about on the ground like a click-beetle. But the rest held. Tod scuttled backward to pull the lizard straight as it began to turn on him, got his knees under him, then his feet. He swung the lizard twice around his head and smashed it against the inside of the open door. The part of the tail he was holding then broke off, and the scaly thing thumped inside and slid, causing Moira to leap so wildly to get out of its way that she nearly knocked the stocky Carl off his feet.

Teague swept away the lid of the Surgery
Lambda
kit, inverted it, kicked the clutter of instruments and medicaments aside and clapped the inverted box over the twitching, scaly body.

“April!” Tod shouted. He ran around in a blind semicircle, saw her struggling to her feet in the grass, snatched her up and bounded inside with her. “Carl!” he gasped, “Get the door …”

But Carl was already moving forward with a needle torch. With two deft motions he sliced out a section of the power-arm which was holding the door open. He swung the door to, yelling, “Parametal!”

Tod, gasping, ran to the lockers and brought a length of the synthetic. Carl took the wide ribbon and with a snap of the wrists broke it in two. Each half he bent (for it was very flexible when moved slowly) into a U. He placed one against the door and held out his hand without looking. Tod dropped the hammer into it. Carl tapped the parametal gently and it adhered to the door. He turned his face away and struck it sharply. There was a blue-white flash and the U was rigid and firmly welded to the door. He did the same thing with the other U, welding it to the nearby wall plates. Into the two gudgeons thus formed, Moira dropped a luxalloy bar, and the door was secured.