Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume Two (11 page)

He joined us for dinner and drew a map showing the warehouse he had found. His freehand map was more reliable than the printed ones we had brought with us. I suspected that he was salvaging what he could for his own boat. Unless he was a fool, that was what he was doing. When Evinson asked him what else he had seen that day, he simply shrugged.

“How’s chances of a swim?” I asked Delia after we ate.

“No radiation. But you’d better wait for Corrie to run some analyses. Too much that we don’t know about it to chance it yet.”

“No swimming, damn it!” Evinson said sharply. “For God’s sake, Sax.” He issued orders rapidly for the next day, in effect telling everyone to do what he had come to do.

Strut and puff, you little bastard, I thought at him. No one protested.

The same ruins lay everywhere in the city. After the first hour it was simply boring. My bicycle was more awkward than going on foot, since I had to carry it over rubble as much as I got to ride it. I abandoned it finally. I found the Miami River and dutifully got a sample. It was the color of tea, very clear. I followed the river a long time, stopped for my lunch, and followed it some more. Ruins, sand, junk, palm trees. Heat. Silence. Especially silence. I was not aware of when I began to listen to the silence, but I caught myself walking cautiously, trying to be as quiet as the city, not to intrude in any way. The wind in the dry fronds was the only thing I heard. It stopped, then started again, and I jerked around. I went inside a building now and then, but they were worse than the ruined streets. Rusty toys, appliances, moldering furniture, or piles of dust where the termites had been, chairs that crumbled when I touched them, and the heat and silence.

I got bored with the river and turned in to what had been a garden park. Here the vegetation was different. A banyan tree had spread unchecked and filled more than a city block. A flock of blackbirds arose from it as I approached. The suddenness of their flight startled me and I whirled around, certain that someone was behind me. Nothing. Vines and bushes had grown wild in the park and were competing with trees for space—a minijungle. There were thousands of parakeets, emerald green, darting, making a cacophony that was worse than the silence. I retraced my steps after a few minutes. There might have been water in there, but I didn’t care. I circled the park and kept walking.

The feeling that I was being followed grew stronger, and I stopped as if to look more closely at a weed, listening for steps. Nothing. The wind in some pampas grass, the louder rustle of palm fronds, the return of the blackbirds. And in the distance the raucous cries of gulls. The feeling didn’t go away, and I walked faster and sweated harder.

I got out my kit and finished the last of the beer in the shade of a live oak with branches eighty feet long spreading out sideways in all directions. Whatever had poisoned Miami and reduced its population to zero hadn’t affected the flora. The wind started, the daily storm. I sat in the doorway of a stinking apartment building and watched sheets of water race down the street. After the storm passed I decided to go back and try to get Corrie to go to bed with me. It never occurred to me to snuggle up to Delia, who seemed totally asexual. Delia and J.P., I thought.

Corrie was alone, and she said no curtly. She was as hot as I was and as tired. But she had a working lab set up, complete with microscopes and test tubes and flasks of things over Bunsen burners. She glanced contemptuously at the collecting bottle that I handed her. They knew about me, all of them.

“What did I do wrong?”

“Label it, please. Location, depth, source, time of day. Anything else you can think of that might be helpful.”

Her tone said, and leave me alone because I have real work to do. She turned back to her microscope.

“So I’m not a hydrologist. I’m a pamphlet writer for Health, Education and Welfare.”

“I know.” She glanced at me again. “But why didn’t they send a real hydrologist?”

“Because we don’t have one.”

She stood up and walked to the window netting and looked out. Her shirt was wet under her sleeves and down her back, her hair clung to her cheeks and the nape of her neck. “Why?” she whispered. “Why? Why? Why?”

“If they knew that we wouldn’t be here.”

She walked back to her chair and sat down again, drawing the microscope toward her once more.

“Is the bay all right?”

“Yes.” She adjusted the focus and forgot about me. I left.

The warehouse where Trainor had found the boats was half a dozen blocks up the waterfront. I walked and sweated. Trainor had dragged some small boats outside, and I chose the smallest of them and took it down to the water. I rowed out into the bay, undressed, and swam for half an hour; then I started to row, going no place in particular.

The water was marvelously calm, and I felt cooler and less tense after the swim. I stopped to dive a couple of times around a sunken yacht; it had been stripped. I stopped again, this time ashore at what looked like a copy of the Parthenon. It had been a museum. The water lapped about the foundation; marble stairs and massive fountains indicated that it had been a grandiose thing. A statue had toppled and I considered it. A female form—vaguely female, anyway. Rounded, curving, voluptuous-looking, roughly hewn out of granite, it was touching somehow. The eye-hollows were facing out to sea, waiting, watching the water, waiting. The essence of woman as childbearer, woman as nourisher, woman as man’s sexual necessity. Her flesh would be warm and yielding. She would be passive, accept his seed, and let it come to life within her. Those great round arms would hold a child, let it suckle at the massive breasts. I wished I could stand the statue upright again. When it fell one of the arms had broken; it lay apart from the bulk of the work. I tried to lift it: too heavy. I ran my hand over the rough rock and I wanted to sit on the floor by the woman and talk to her, cry a little, rest my cheek against that breast. I began to feel suffocated suddenly and I turned and ran from the museum without looking for anything else. The sun was setting, the sky crimson and blue and green, incredible colors that looked like cheap art.

It was dark when I got back to headquarters. All the others were there already, even Trainor. Delia was cooking. I watched her as she added water to the dehydrated stew and stirred it over canned heat. She was angular, with firm muscles and hardly any breasts at all. Her hips were slim, boyish, her legs all muscle and bone. I wondered again about her sexuality. I had seen her studying Trainor speculatively once, but nothing had come of it, and I had seen almost the same expression on her face a time or two when she had been looking at Corrie.

I turned my attention to Corrie—a little better, but still not really woman, not as the statue had signified woman. Corrie was softer than Delia, her hips a bit rounder, her breasts bouncier, not much, but Delia’s never moved at all. Corrie had more of a waistline. My thoughts were confusing to me, and I tried to think of something else, but that damn statue kept intruding. I should have talked to her, I found myself thinking. And she would have looked at me with contempt. She would have looked at any of our men with contempt—except, possibly, Trainor.

I watched and listened to Trainor then, speaking with Bernard. Trainor was tall and broad shouldered, his hair white, face browned by the sun, very lean and very muscular.

“Have you ever seen any wild animals as far north as the cape?” Bernard asked, sketching. His fingers were swift and sure: that characterized him all the way, actually. He was soft looking, but he moved with a sureness always. A dilettante artist, photographer, in his mid-thirties, rich enough not to work. There had been a mild affair with Corrie, but nothing serious. I didn’t know why he was here.

“Deer,” Trainor said in answer to his question. “There’s a lot of things up in the brush. Foxes, rabbits, muskrats, possum.”

“Anything big? I heard that lions were let loose, or escaped around West Palm Beach. Did they live, multiply?”

“Can’t say.”

“Heard there were panthers.”

“Can’t say.”

“How about Indians? You must know if any of them are left in the swamps.” Bernard’s pencil stopped, but he didn’t look at Trainor.

“Could be. Don’t go inland much. No way to get inland, hard going by boat, hyacinths, thick enough to walk on. Too much stuff in the water everywhere. St. John’s River used to be open, but not now.”

“How about fish then? See any porpoises?”

“They come and go. Don’t stay around long. Hear they’re thick down around South America and in the Caribbean. Might be.”

I watched Bernard for a long time. What was he after? And Trainor? I had a feeling that the seven people who had come to the city had seven different reasons, and that mine was the only simple one. Orders. When you work for the government and an undersecretary says go, you go. Why were the others here?

In bed later, I couldn’t sleep. The odors all came back in triple strength after dark. I could feel the mold growing around me, on me, in my bedroll. The humidity was a weight on my chest. I finally got up again, drenched with sweat, my bed soaked through, and I went back to the second floor where I interrupted Delia and Bernard in a quiet conversation. I got a beer and sat down near the window, my back to them both. After a moment Delia yawned and got up.

At the doorway she paused and said, “Why don’t you take him?”

I looked at her then. Bernard made a snorting sound and didn’t answer. I turned back to the window. The silence was coming in along with the nighttime humidity, and I realized that I had chosen my room on the wrong side of the building. The night air blew from the land to the sea. There was a faint breeze at the window. The oil lamp was feeble against the pressure of the darkness beyond the netting.

“Night,” Delia said at the door, and I looked at her again, nodded, and she started through, then stopped. A high, uncanny, inhuman scream sounded once, from a long way off. It echoed through the empty city. The silence that followed it made me understand that what I had thought to be quiet before had not been stillness. Now the silence was profound; no insect, no rustling, no whir of small wings, nothing. Then the night sounds began to return. The three of us had remained frozen; now Bernard moved. He turned to Delia.

“I knew it,” he said. “I knew!”

She was very pale. “What was it?” she cried shrilly.

“Panther. Either in the city or awfully close.”

Panther? It might have been. I had no idea what a panther sounded like. The others were coming down again, Evinson in the lead, Corrie and J.P. close behind him. Corrie looked less frightened than Delia, but rattled and pale.

“For heaven’s sake, Bernard Was that you?”!” J.P. said.”

“Don’t you know?” Corrie cried. At the same time Delia said, “It was a panther.”

“No! Don’t be a fool!” Corrie said.

Evinson interrupted them both. “Everyone, just be quiet. It was some sort of bird. We’ve seen birds for three days now. Some of them make cries like that.”

“No bird ever made a sound like that,” Corrie said. Her voice was too high and excited

“It was a panther,” Bernard repeated. “I heard one before. In Mexico I heard one just like that, twenty years ago. I’ve never forgotten.” He nodded toward the net-covered window. “Out there. Maybe in one of the city parks. Think what it means, Evinson. I was right! Wildlife out there. Naturalized, probably.” He took a breath. His hands were trembling, and he spoke with an intensity that was almost embarrassing. Corrie shook her head stubbornly, but Bernard went on. “I’m going to find it. Tomorrow. I’ll take Sax with me, and our gear, and plan to stay out there for a day or two. We’ll see if we can find a trace of it, get a shot. Proof of some kind.”

Evinson started to protest. If it wasn’t his plan, he hated it. “We need Sax to find water for us,” he said. “It’s too dangerous. We don’t know what the beast is; it might attack on sight.”

I was watching Bernard. His face tightened, became older, harsher. He was going. “Drop it, Evinson,” I said. “They know about me. The only water I’ll find is the river, which I already stumbled across, remember. And Bernard is right. If there’s anything, we should go out and try to find it.”

Evinson grumbled some more, but he couldn’t really forbid it, since this was what the expedition was all about. Besides, he knew damn well there was no way on earth that he could enforce any silly edict. Sulkily he left us to plan our foray.

It was impossible to tell how the waterways had been laid out in many places. The water had spread, making marshes, and had changed its course, sometimes flowing down streets, again vanishing entirely, leaving dry beds as devoid of life as the Martian canals. Ruined concrete and sand lay there now. And the ruins went on and on. No frame houses remained; they had caved in, or had been blown down, or burned. A trailer court looked as if someone had taken one corner of the area and lifted it, tipping the chrome and gaudy-colored cans to one side. Creepers and shrubs were making a hill of greenery over them. We rowed and carried the boat and our stuff all day, stopped for the storms, then found shelter in a school building when it grew dark. The mosquitoes were worse the farther we went; their whining drowned out all other noises; we were both a mass of swollen bites that itched without letup. We saw nothing bigger than a squirrel. Bernard thought he glimpsed a manatee once, but it disappeared in the water plants and didn’t show again. I didn’t see it. There were many birds.

We were rowing late in the afternoon of the second day when Bernard motioned me to stop. We drifted and I looked where he pointed. On the bank was a great gray heron, its head stretched upward in a strange but curiously graceful position. Its wings were spread slightly, and it looked like nothing so much as a ballerina, poised, holding out her tutu. With painful slowness it lifted one leg and flexed its toes, then took a dainty, almost mincing step. Bernard pointed again, and I saw the second bird, in the same pose, following a ritual that had been choreographed incalculable ages ago. We watched the dance of the birds in silence, until without warning Bernard shouted in a hoarse, strange voice, “Get out of here! You fucking birds! Get out of here!” He hit the water with his oar, making an explosive noise, and continued to scream at them as they lifted in panicked flight and vanished into the growth behind them, trailing their long legs, ungainly now and no longer beautiful.