We Have Fed Our Sea Part 7

"Uh," grunted Sverdlov. He narrowed his eyes to peer at the detector dial. There certainly was a significant deflection yet, when whole grams of matter were being thrown out every second. It didn't heat up the ring very much, maybe not enough to notice; but negatrons plowed through terrene elec-tron sh.e.l.ls, into terrene nuclei, and atoms were destroyed. Presently there would be crystal deformation, fatigue, ulti-mate failure. He reported his findings and added with a sense of earned boasting: "I was right.

This had to be done."

"I shall halt blast, then. Stand by."

Weightlessness came back. Sverdlov reached out delicately with his wrench, nipped a coil nut, and loosened the bolt. He s.h.i.+fted the coil itself backward. "I'll have this fixed in a min-ute. There! Now give me three gees for about thirty seconds, just to make sure."

"Three? Are you certain you-"

"I am. Fire!"

It came to Sverdlov that this was another way a man might serve his planet: just by being the right kind of man. Maybe a better way than planning the extinction of people who hap-pened to live somewhere else.Oh, come off it, he told himself,next thing you'll be teaching a Humane League kindergarten.

The force on him climbed, and his muscles rejoiced in it. At three gees there was no deflection against the ring or was there? He peered closer. His right hand, weighted by the tool it still bore, slipped from the member on which it had been leaning. Sverdlov was thrown off balance. He flung both arms wide, instinctively trying not to fall. His right went be-tween the field coils and into the negatron stream.

Fire sprouted.

Nakamura cut the drive. Sverdlov hung free, staring by starlight at his arm. The blast had sliced it across as cleanly as an industrial torch. Blood and water vapor rushed out and froze in a small cloud, pale among the nebulae.

There was no pain. Not yet. But his eardrums popped as pressure fell. "Engine room!" he snapped. A part of him stood aside and marveled at his own mind. What a survival ma-chine, when the need came!

"Emergency! Drop total accelera-tor voltage to one thousand. Give me about ten amps down the tube.

Quick!"

He felt no weight, such a blast didn't exert enough push on the hull to move it appreciably. He thrust his arm back into the ion stream. Pain did come now, but in his head, as the eardrums ruptured. One minute more and he would have the bends. The gas of antiprotons roared without noise around the stump of his wrist. Steel melted. Sverdlov prodded with a hacksaw gripped in his left hand, trying to seal the s.p.a.cesuit arm shut.

He seemed far away from everything. Night ate at his brain. He asked himself once in wonderment: "Was I planning to do this to other men?"

When he thought the sleeve was sealed, he withdrew it. "Cut blast," he whispered. "Come and get me."

His airtanks fed him oxygen, pressure climbed again inside the suit. It was good to float at the end of a life line, breathing. Until he began to strangle on his own blood. Then he gave up and accepted the gift of darkness.

NOW, about winter solstice, day was a pale glimmer, low in the south among steel-colored clouds.

Tamara had been walking since the first light sneaked across the ocean, and already the sun was close to setting. She wondered if s.p.a.ce itself could be blacker than this land. At least you saw the stars in s.p.a.ce.

On Skula you huddled indoors against the wind, and the sky was a blind whirl of snow.

A few dry flakes gusted as she came down off the moor to the beach. But they carried no warmth with them, there was not going to be a snowfall tonight. The wind streaked in from a thousand kilometers of Atlantic and icebergs. She felt the cold snap its teeth together around her; a hooded cloak was small protection. But shewould not go back to the house. Not till day had drained from the world and it would be unsafe to remain outdoors.

She said to herself, drearily: "I would stay here even then, except it might harm the child, and the old man would come looking for me. David, help me, I don't know which would be worse!"

There was a twisted pleasure in being so honest with her-self. By all the conventions, she should be thinking only of David's unborn baby, herself no more than its vessel. But it was not real to her . . . not yet . . . so far it was only sick-ness in the mornings and bad dreams at night. The reality was Magnus Ryerson, animallike hairiness and a hoa.r.s.e grumble at her for not doing the housework his way and incomprehen-sible readings aloud-his island and his sea and his language lessons!

For a moment her hands clawed together. If she could so destroy Magnus Ryerson!

She fought for decorum. She was a lady. Not a technic, but still a professor's daughter; she could read and write, she had learned to dance and play the flute, pour tea and embroider a dress and converse with learned men so they were not too bored while waiting for her father . . . the arts of gracious-ness. Her father would call it contrasocial, to hate her hus-band's father. This was her family now.

But.

Her boots picked a way down the hillside, through snow and heather bushes, until she came out on a beach of stones. The sea came directly in here, smas.h.i.+ng at heaped boulders with a violence that s.h.i.+vered through the ground. She saw how the combers exploded where they struck. Spindrift stung her skin.

Beyond the rocks was only a gray waste of galloping white-bearded waves, and the wind keening down from the Pole. It rolled and boomed and whistled out there.

She remembered a living greenish blue of southern waters, how they murmured up to the foot of palm trees under infi-nitely tall skies.

She remembered David saying wryly: "My people were Northerners as far back as we can trace it-Picts, Norse, Scots, sailors and crofters on the Atlantic edge-that must be why so many of them have become s.p.a.cemen in the last sev-eral generations. To get away!"

And then, touching her hair with his lips: "But I've found what all of them were really looking for."

It was hard to imagine that David's warmth and tenderness and laughter had arisen in this tomb of a country. She had always thought of the religion which so troubled him-he first came to know her through her father, professor and student had sat up many nights under Australian stars while David groped for a G.o.d not all iron and h.e.l.lfire-as an alien stamp, as if the legendary Other Race Out There had once branded him. The obscurity of the sect had aided her: Christians were not uncommon even today, but she had vaguely imagined a Protestant was some kind of Moslem.

Now she saw that Skula's dwellers and Skula's G.o.d had come from Skula itself, with winter seas in their veins. David had not been struggling toward normality; he had been re-shaping himself into something which-down underneath- Magnus Ryerson thought was not human. Suddenly, almost blindingly, Tamara remembered a few weeks ago, one night when the old man had set her a ballad to translate.

"Our folk have sung it for many hundreds of years," he said-and how he had looked at her under his heavy brows.

He hath taken off cross and iron helm, He hath bound his good horse to a limb, He hath not spoken Jesu name Since the Faerie Queen did first kiss him.

Tamara struck a fist into one palm. The wind caught her cloak and peeled it from her, so that it flapped at her shoulders like black wings. She pulled it back around her, shuddering.

The sun was a red sliver on the world's rim. Darkness would come in minutes, so thick you could freeze to death fumbling your way home. Tamara began to walk, quickly, hoping to find a decision. She had not come out today just because the house was unendurable. But her mind had been stiff, as if rusted. She still didn't know what to do.

Or rather,she thought,I do know, but haven't saved up enough courage.

WHEN she reached the house, the air was already so murky she could almost not make out whitewashed walls and steep snowstreaked roof. A few yellow gleams of light came through cracks in the shutters. She paused at the door. To go in-! But there was no choice. She twisted the k.n.o.b and stepped through. The wind and the sea-growl came in with her.

"Close the door," said Magnus. "Close the door, you little fool."

She shut out all but a mumble and whine under the eaves, hung her cloak on a peg and faced around.

Magnus Ryerson sat in his worn leather chair with a worn leather-bound book in his hands. As always, as always! How could you tell one day from the next in this den? The radiglobe was turned low, so that he was mostly shadow, with an icicle gleam of eyes and a dirty-white cataract of beard. A peat fire sputtered forlornly, trying to warm a tea kettle on the hob.

Ryerson put the book down on his lap, knocked out his archaic pipe-it had made the air foul in here-and asked roughly: "Where have you been all day, girl? I was about to go look for you. You could turn an ankle and die of exposure, alone on the ling."

"I didn't," said Tamara. She exchanged her boots for zori and moved toward the kitchen.

"Wait!" said Magnus. "Will you never learn? I want my high tea just at 1630 hours-Now. You must be more careful, la.s.s. You're carrying the last of the Ryersons."

Tamara stopped. There was a downward slant to the ancient brick floor, she felt vaguely how her body braced itself. More nearly she felt how her chilled skin, which had begun to tingle as it warmed, grew numb again.

"Besides David," she said.

"If he is alive. Do you still believe it, after all these weeks?" Magnus began sc.r.a.ping out his pipe. He did not look at her.

"I don't believe he is dead," she answered.

"The Lunar crew couldn't establish gray-beam contact. Even if he is still alive, he'll die of old age before that s.h.i.+p reaches any star where men have an outpost. No, say rather he'll starve!"

"If he could repair whatever went wrong-"

The m.u.f.fled surf drums outside rolled up to a crescendo. Magnus tightened his mouth. "That is one way to destroy yourself . . . hoping," he said. "You must accept the worst, because there is always more of the worst than the best in this universe."

She glanced at the black book he called a Bible, heavy on one of the crowded shelves. "Do your holy writings claim that?" she asked. Her voice came out as a stranger's croak.

"Aye. So does the second law of thermodynamics." Magnus knocked his pipe against the ashtray. It was an unexpectedly loud noise above the wind.

"And you . . . and you . . . won't even let me put up his picture," she whispered.

"It's in the alb.u.m, with my other dead sons. I'll not have it on the wall for you to blubber at. Our part is to take what G.o.d sends us and still hold ourselves up on both feet."

"Do you know-" Tamara stared at him with a slowly rising sense of horror. "Do you know, I cannot remember just what he looked like?"

She had had some obscure hope of provoking his rage. But the s.h.a.ggy-sweatered broad shoulders merely lifted, a little shrug. "Aye, that's common enough. You've the words, blond hair and blue eyes and so on, but they make not any real image. Well, you didn't know him so very long, after all."

You are telling me I am a foreigner,she thought.An inter-loper who stole what didn't belong to me.

"There's time to review a little English grammar before tea," said the old man. "You've been terrible with the irregular verbs."

He put his book on the table-she recognized the t.i.tle,Kipling's Poems, whoever Kipling had been-and pointed at a shelf. "Fetch the text and sit down."

Something flared in the girl. She doubled her fists. "No."

"What?" The leather face turned in search of her.

"I am not going to study any more English."

"Not-" Magnus peered as if she were a specimen from an-other planet. "Don't you feel well?"

She bit off the words, one after another: "I have better ways to spend my time than learning a dead language."

"Dead?" cried the man. She felt his rage lift in the air be-tween them. "The language of fifty million-"

"Fifty million ignorant provincials, on exhausted lands be-tween bombed-out cities," she said. "You can't step outside the British Isles or a few pockets on the North American coast and have it understood. You can't read a single modern author or scientist or . . . or anybody . . . in English-I say it's dead! A walking corpse!"

"Your own husband's language!" he bawled at her, half ris-ing.

"Do you think he ever spoke it to anyone but you, once he'd he'd escaped?" she flung back. "Did you believe . . . if David ever returns from that s.h.i.+p you made him go on and we go to Rama-did you imagine we'd speak the language of a dying race? On a new world?"

SHE felt the tears as they whipped down her face, she gulped after breath amidst terror. The old man was so hairy, so huge. When he stood up, the single radiglobe and the wan firelight threw his shadow across her and choked a whole corner of the room with it. His head bristled against the ceil-ing.

"So now your husband's race is dying," he said like a gun. "Why did you marry him, if he was that effete?"

"Heisn't!" she called out. The walls wobbled around her. "You are! Sitting here in your dreams of the past, when your people ruled Earth-a past we're well out of! David was going where . . . where the future is!"

"I see," Magnus Ryerson turned half away from her. He jammed both fists into his pockets, looked down at the floor and rumbled his words to someone else-not her.

"I know. You're like the others, brought up to hate the West because it was once your master. Your teacher. The white man owned this planet a few centuries ago. Our sins then will follow us for the next thousand years . . . till your people fail in their turn, and the ones you raised up take revenge for the help they got. Well, I'm not going to apologize for my ancestors. I'm proud of them. We were no more vicious than any other men, and we gave . . . even on the deathbed of our civiliza-tion, we gave you the stars."

His voice rose until it roared. "And we're not dead yet! Do you think this miserable Protectorate is a society? It isn't! It's not even a decent barbarism. It's a glorified garrison. It's one wors.h.i.+pping thestatus quo and afraid to look futureward. I went to s.p.a.ce because my people once went to sea. I gave my sons to s.p.a.ce, and you'll give yours to s.p.a.ce, because that's where the next civilization will be! And you'll learn the history and the language of our people-your people-you'll learn what itmeans to be one of us!"

His words rang away into emptiness. For a while only the wind and a few tiny flames had voice. Down on the strand, the sea worried the island like a terrier with a rat.

Tamara said finally: "I already know what it means. It cost me David, but I know."

He faced her again, lowered his head and stared as if at an enemy.

"You murdered him," she said, not loudly. "You sent him to a dead sun to die. Because you-"

"You're overwrought," he broke in with tight-held anger. "I urged him to try just one s.p.a.ce expedition.

And this one was important. It could have meant a deal to science. He would have been proud afterward, whatever he did for a career, to say, 'I was on theCross.'"

"So he should die for his pride?" she said. "It's as senseless a reason as the real one. But I'll tell you why you really made him go . . . and if you deny you forced him, I'll say you lie! You couldn't stand the idea that one child of yours had broken away-was not going to be wrenched into your image-had penetrated this obscene farce of s.p.a.ce exploration, covering distance for its own sake, as if there were some virtue in a large number of kilometers. David was going to live as nature meant him to live, on a living soil, with untanked air to breathe and with mountains to walk on instead of a spinning coffin . . . and his children would too . . . we would have been happy! And that was what you couldn't stand to have happen!"

Magnus grinned without humor. "There's a lot of meaning-less noise for a symbolics professor's daughter to make," he said. "To begin at the end, what proof have you we were meant to be happy?"

"What proof have you we were meant to jump across light-years?" she spat. "It's another way of running from yourself- no more. It's not even a practical thing. If the s.h.i.+ps only looked for planets to colonize, I could understand. But . . . theCross herself was aimed for three giants! She was diverted to a black clinker! And now David is dead . . . for what? Scientific curi-osity? You're not a research scientist, neither was he, and you know it. Wealth? He wasn't being paid more than he could earn on Earth.

Glory? Few enough people on Earth care about exploration; not many more on Rama; he, not at all.

Adven-ture? You can have more adventure in an hour's walk through a forest than in a year on a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p. I say you murdered your son because you saw him becoming sane!"

"Now that's enough," growled Magnus. He took a step to-ward her. "I've heard enough out of you. In my own house. And I never did hold with this new-fangled notion of letting a woman yap-"

"Stand back!" she yelled. "I'm notyour wife!"

He halted. The lines in his face grew suddenly blurred. He raised his artificial hand as if against a blow.

"You're my son's wife," he said, quite gently. "You're a Ryer-son too . . . now."

"Not if this is what it means." She had found the resolution she sought. She went to the wall and took her cloak off its peg. "You'll lend me your aircar for a hop to Stornoway, I trust. I will send it back on auto-pilot and get transport for myself from there."

"But where are you going?" His voice was like a hurt child's.

"I don't know," she snapped. "To some place with a bearable climate. David's salary is payable to me till he's declared dead, and then there will be a pension. When I've waited long enough to be sure he won't come back, I'm going to Rama."

"But, la.s.s . . . propriety-"