Hal Clement - The Nitrogen Fix

“They’re not really common,” replied Endrew. “Yes, they used to be called Animals until we learned better. What do you call them?”

Again the habit of truthfulness prevailed.

“Natives.”

“What? But that’s ridiculous! A native is a — a person who is born in a place, and whose parents and grandparents have been — it’s someone who belongs. How can one of these things belong? We’re the natives!”

“How can we be?” Kahvi asked in astonishment. “We can’t even live here without special equipment.

We have to breathe oxygen, and we have to have real or pseudo plants to make that by photosynthesis.

There aren’t enough of those to make a whole world full of oxygen, and if there were there are too many other plants to take the oxygen and make nitric acid. You’ve been taking your mythology too seriously.

Calling people natives is simply silly. I suppose we must be natives of somewhere, but it certainly isn’t this world.”

“That’s right — you probably went to a Surplus school, didn’t you?” sneered the Hiller. “They never told you about the change — that Earth used to have air people could breathe. It was the Invaders who made the change, and destroyed the oxygen.”They taught me the change myths, all right,” retorted Kahvi, “but they claimed it was human beings who made the change with science. I don’t see why I should believe any of the stuff they taught in Surplus school — all they really wanted was to convince me it was right and proper for me to be aborted from Blue Hill on my twelfth birthday.”

“From Blue Hill? You’re one of our Nomads?”

“I was born in Blue Hill, the third child of my highly respectable parents, and therefore Surplus.

You’re a bit young to remember — and of course you wouldn’t have been in contact with such undesirables anyway.”

She stopped, realizing that her temper had made her say too much. Neither she nor her husband cared greatly about their state of exile — both liked the Nomad life; but they had decided long before that if their “home” cities happened to forget them, trading and other relationships would be more comfortable. Most city-dwellers were more negative about their “own” Nomads than others, for reasons not obvious to either of the Fyn family adults. Presumably Endrew would be the same.

If he was, though, it didn’t show. There was no change in his tone as he answered, “Thanks for telling me. That must have happened, as you say, before I was old enough to know. Abortions don’t happen very often, after all; the last one was when I was about eight, and that was an older person. I might tell you about that some time, if you don’t mind listening to something besides mythology — and don’t mind risking the discovery that what you think is mythology really happened.”

“One Surplus school is enough, thanks.” Kahvi was just barely polite. “I must thank you also for telling me about my husband, and trying to protect him from your — Invader, if that’s what you call the natives. I’m sorry you had to wait so long; you could have come to the raft to tell me.”

“Your husband had already started with the others when I was told to wait to tell you. He said nothing about sharing your air. I had the jail nearby for recharging if I needed to.”

“Thanks again. I hadn’t realized he went unwillingly.”

“How do — what makes you think he did?”

“Something you just told me. I’ll keep the details. I’m not worried about what the ‘Invaders’ might do to Earrin, but I hope he’s safe with your friends. If you don’t need our air, I’ll go back to get some sleep. I will come ashore in the morning to complete whatever arrangements are in order about the cargo — and about my husband. Breathe freely.”

“Breathe freely.” The dark figure made no attempt to dispute her implied charges, and moved away toward the jail with no further words.

Back on the raft Kahvi could not sleep, though she couldn’t guess why. She was not really worried about Earrin, in spite of her words to Endrew; she could not really believe that Hillers, or any other city-dwellers, who Nomadded their Surplus children so they could ignore the unpleasant fact of what usually happened to them, would actually resort to violence. What they wanted him for was still unclear, but she expected to see him again unharmed.

Danna was where she belonged, breathing quietly. The life support plants all smelled as they should — Kahvi got up and checked them again, after a while, as the most likely source of her wakefulness. Bones’ absence was a little unusual, but not really surprising. Kahvi knew enough about her drives to guess that there would be information the next day about what had gone on at the fire site. The fire itself must have been caused by Hillers, since there had been no lightning in the Boston area for days.

What did these people want with all that metal and glass? She and Earrin had wondered after receiving the order, but had found no answer which they could believe. There was little use now for either material. Glass furnished smooth surfaces for growing tissue sheets, and of course sharp edges. Copper was mostly used for art work, though it was sometimes hammered into tools which needed no edge, or at least no durable one.

Earrin had never been inside the Blue Hill city, and the northern one from which he had been aborted had not given him enough knowledge to make good guesses; its Surplus school had been no better than, if as good as, Blue Hill’s. Kahvi knew more about city life, and was better read, than her husband because she had not been Nomadded so young. Most Surplus children, of course, were not ejected; death rates were such that most of them reentered their societies long before reaching the key age oftwelve. Kahvi had made it by only one day, and never really recovered from the tension of the preceding few months. She had hated the school, hated the community, hated her status, and for the most part hated her fellow citizens. The school had, of course tried to make her regard the whole system as natural, inevitable, and right. A city had air for just so many people; if any couple had more than two children, the surplus ones could not be kept unless death made room for them. The guilty parents could not, of course, be dispensed with; they were already useful citizens and real people.

The Surplus children could not, of course, be destroyed — that would be violence. They were educated to provide for themselves outside the city, and aborted at the age of twelve unless reprieved by a convenient death. The fact that most of them died within a few days was never faced.

The failure to credit deaths to children not yet born was based on historical argument; at first, when this had been done, a black market in death records had been developed which had actually increased the city’s population and endangered the air supply — there was just so much sunlight per year available to the indoor plants, and there was seldom any success in growing photosynthetic organisms outside and transporting the oxygen indoors. The net result was that in about two thousand years the Blue Hill population had shrunk to about a quarter of its original twelve thousand.

Kahvi’s bitterness had not decreased. She had had friends both younger and older who had been Nomadded both during her time in the school and after she had become a citizen. She had never been able to forget them. After her reprieve she had often gone outside with the hope of meeting one of them among the Nomads who occasionally passed; she had neither seen nor heard of them.

Shortly after her sixteenth birthday, however, she had come across human remains in one of the “jails” scattered around the area to give recently aborted youths a chance for life and serve as living quarters for citizens doing necessary work outdoors. The fragments had not been recognizable as any particular individual, but she had never really gotten over the shock. Also, she had not been at all tactful in her remarks about the system for the next few months, and by the time she was seventeen had won the distinction of being the first adult in over five decades to be Nomadded.