Kate Wilhelm: Let the Fire Fall

Anyway, I shall be home next week, and am looking forward to seeing you and the children…

Dear Matt,

This is probably illegal. I have been sworn to secrecy, but I think I’ll interpret that as secrecy concerning the location of the estate where I live now. We have a twenty-man board in charge of the Star Child’s Core and Development. I’m one of them. Also in residence at the estate-prison. A fantastic place: thirty-four-room house, hospital wing, nursery, staff’s wing, barracks for the guards, several large guest houses. Swimming pool, tennis court, stables…. While the nutty debate goes on back at the U.N.—what to feed the baby, how to train him, all that, here he is established, and I guess that here he’ll stay. I am so depressed that I could cry. Oh, for a shoulder! If I tried it with any of this group here I might short-circuit a snooper and electrocute the poor guy. Everybody’s on agent here… except me, I think.

To get to the point of this breach of security. I have a vacation coming up in a couple of months, and I need to be with someone I can talk to, really talk to and scream and cry. May I come to your house?

Love to Lisa and the children.

Dear Winifred,

Please do come here, whenever you can. No time now for writing. See you soon. M.

Please excuse Matt’s scrawl, Winifred. He is working so hard and there doesn’t seem to be much time any more. You know the government condemned our property to build a superhighway to the alien ship, so we had to move and now we’re in a thing that looks like a wasp’s nest. There are over two hundred houses all stacked up against a hillside. But we do have room and we are very eager to see you. The children are fine. Blake grows and grows. He has six teeth and is walking and even says a few things. Nine months!

Obie Cox returned from his tour of the states last-week a rich man, according to the rumors. It must have paid well. He’s planning to tour Europe starting in June, the first anniversary of the aliens’ landing. I wish we could trace Blake’s mother and make the adoption legal, but no luck so for. I hate to think of Obie as his father. What a motley crew. Dee Dee, Billy Warren Smith, a fat, mildly crooked little lawyer, and Everett Slocum, the ex-pharmacist, of whom it is said, don’t send your small son to have a prescription filled by him. But enough for now. When you arrive we’ll gossip properly. Do come when you can and stay as long as you like.

THE world thought of him as the Star Child, although his name actually was Johannes Mann, chosen after a long debate in which once more shoes pounded tabletops, find delegations walked from the U.N. chamber, and Sunday supplements exhausted the readership with explanations for the hot tempers. In the end each delegation had agreed to select three given names and three surnames and deposit them in two drums and Miss Universe, dazzling in a silver paper gown, had pulled out Johannes. Mann had been on the third slip of paper to be pulled from the drum. The second had been someone’s idea of a joke with Jesus Christ on it, and it was dismissed out of hand. He had been named Johannes Mann, but he was called Johnny, and was thought of as the Star Child.

There had been many fights during the first five years: how much permissiveness, how much discipline; what kind of a diet, the American baby diet of commercially strained foods and cereals, or fresh scraped meats and vegetables, cheeses and sour milk, goat’s milk (lobbied for strenuously by the goat people), or cow’s milk, or a wet nurse, and if a wet nurse, of what race and religion and nationality; schooling to start at two in the modem method, or at seven or even eight in the Slavic tradition; weaning at what age; bladder and bowel control when (as it turned out he was still a bed wetter at five, so it had become an academic question by then); playmates, whose children, and what sort of children should be permitted in his presence? And so on.

There was a sharp division regarding his abilities and his progress. Some held that his people probably attained maturation later than Earth people, claiming that such a pattern followed a higher degree of intelligence, and they cited authorities to prove this. The Star Child was maturing rather later than his peers: he still wet his bed; he sucked two fingers when tired, or ill, or restless, or frustrated in any way; he hadn’t learned yet to write his name, or count, or give more than passive aid when being bathed and dressed. He cried often and easily and ate poorly and slept fitfully. He had been a colicky baby, and still caught every bug that got into the grounds, was always with a runny nose, and seemed always to be getting over or starting a bout of diarrhea. He was the sort of child that if parents have him first they tend to practice birth control assiduously, many times limiting the number of children to one. He was not pretty, but he was sometimes cute and often beguiling, but only with those few of the many who attended him that he liked. Winifred was one of them, a Negro doctor was another, a Japanese music teacher was a third. One or two of the nurses rated a spontaneous smile, and that was about it.

The other group held that he was simply not too bright, not retarded, but not bright. They rated his IQ at 105 on his good days, and 90 to 95 on his bad. He hated their tests and seldom did well on them. His personality profile claimed he was dependent, suspicious, selfish, ill tempered, timid, introverted, humorless. When the testing psychologist gave the study to Winifred for comments, she scrawled on it: Wouldn’t you be in his place?

Winifred reluctantly came to the conclusion that she agreed with the second group about his mental abilities. Johnny simply wasn’t the brightest kid in the world, but he was sweet, and with her, at any rate, he was biddable. Emotionally he was as stable as could be expected considering the conditions under which he lived. In appearance he was as human as any of the children who were allowed in to play with him; the differences they had discovered in the inside plumbing of the aliens was so slight and meaningless that they could be dismissed as totally inconsequential. No appendixes, for example, and a slight alteration of the arrangement of the spleen and kidneys, and slightly enlarged lungs and heart. It was assumed that some of those things resulted from living in a different environment; the Star Child, as far as could be determined from external examinations, and interior examination with barium and such had been forbidden, showed no real anomalies. Small, delicate, very blond with pale skin and almost white hair, light blue eyes, a natural clumsiness, and a slightly recessive chin, he could have passed for the son of any blond couple on Earth.

Winifred had packed her things for a vacation and was on her way to tell the Star Child good-by. He was having a swimming lesson then. She watched him floundering in the water, obviously afraid of it, and she knew that the decision she had been trying to reach had formed itself. She would quit here and go back to her practice in New York. The sense of relief was tempered by the knowledge that Johnny would miss her terribly. She would come back, she’d tell him. She’d come back every month or so and stay a week with him. If they’d let her. She bit her lip in vexation. She wouldn’t tell him anything yet. There would be time, she’d have to hand in her resignation six weeks before she wanted out. There would be time.

Johnny was permitted to leave the water, stood shivering while he was dried off, and continued to shiver while he took his sunbath. Winifred sat down next to him and told him she was going away for two weeks.