Damon Knight: Orbit 21

For a very long time. . . .

“Why did you rescue me from the time crack!” Dea had cried out, railing against Kathin, protesting an incredible and unwanted future. “Why didn’t you just let me stay in stasis and rot!”

“We felt—” Kathin tested the word gingerly—”responsible. It was our unsuccessful experiments in time-travel that caused the shock-wave up and down the line of history. Your mining base was not the only instance of destruction. So far we have recovered four hundred seventy-three bodies, and you.”

“I don’t care. This isn’t my time. This isn’t my world. You made me come here. I have my own place and time, Kathin. Send me home!”

“Our experiments in time-travel continue, Dea, and will do so until we have achieved success. Please believe us. We will learn to manipulate time. It is not a matter of choice.”

The forest surrounded her with its own rhythms. It was a vast, pervasive organism in which the insects and the animals and the people spun out their daily lives, living in the green heartbeat of the forest. “Life here is good,” Ambik said once. “We are children of the forest. It is good.”

Dea had been accepted. She had learned which grubs and roots were safe to eat, which leaves shed rain, which vines gave water. She had run the woman races with Esst and Tendati through the night-long festivals, sung with them, danced with them. She slept in the hut with the unmarried females and, usually, a few courting males. She was propositioned once or twice. She rarely dreamed of Brazil,

Once she tried for an entire afternoon, sitting lizard-still in the shade of an herb tree, to remember her father’s face. She could not.

They were gleaning shellfish on a stream bank when Dea saw something glisten, tumbled among the pebbles. She picked it up, pleased with its smooth black weight.

“A Ymon bead,” Tendati identified it, seeming genuinely glad for her. “Good luck coming, Dea.”

“Pretty,” Dea said. She dropped it in her belt-pocket. Perhaps she would knot a string about it, to tie around her neck. Like them, a child of the forest. . . .

The forest was eternally the same. It had existed for over a billion years without change. Outside, mountains reared themselves up from the plains, seas dried, animals disappeared, wheels or atom bombs were invented. Not in the forest. There a way of life, meshing evenly with the trees, continued without time—as narrowly constricted and as absolutely free as any life that had ever existed.

“No more hunting here,” Kie said, a month or so later. His tail was drooping. Everyone knew he was right.

“Time to go walking?” Bina hinted.

“The animals are all gone.” “The leaves on the hut are dead and dry.” “There are no more nut trees close.” “Time to walk.” “Woman, pack up the baskets, we’re walking!” “Ho, man, you walk, you pack the baskets!” “No more animals.” “Time to go.”

“My feet are sore!” Tendati wailed.

“Too bad. It’s time to walk.”

“Yes.”

Were they going? Leaving her behind? As she hurried to gather things together, a last, dim flicker of memory assailed Dea. Some ride she and Josinho had taken to a far corner of the fazenda. Both of them laughing, at something— Their horses danced, picking their way through the rotting logs. They were pushing the forest back hard that year. And the momentary glimpse of an Indian, silent, staring after them from the felled trees.

Dea snatched up a last bundle and hastened to catch up. She could walk as they did. She was one of the Ymon, a child of the forest. Her breath steadied, her head came up. She walked with the Ymon.

In the gentle dimness of the forest she left herself behind, washed by the rain and recombined by forest soil into something new. Her father’s world lost to her now, forever.

The planet altered around them unseen as they walked.

“Better game that way.” Kie pointed right. Ambik’s nostrils flared, sniffing.

“Ay-yii,” she agreed. They turned, time flowing around them like water.

“Further up . . .” “That way—” “Across the stream!” Once Dea, glancing through a wall of brush, saw things like dinosaurs cropping the pampas a kilometer away. Once she heard a screech like no bird she had ever heard before, and she knew them all. Those things were not important and she ignored them. She was one of the Ymon; she felt the time they sought pluck deeply inside her, turning her, tuning her to its own unmistakable song. “Over the rise, now—there.”

“Good hunting here,” Kie announced with satisfaction.

“Good hunting,” Dea agreed.

She left the Ymon a few days later, with a word of farewell and words of thanks. She walked to the edge of the forest, walked to the time they’d left her there. The transmitter was waiting; she activated it. A human ship arrived within days. Kathin was aboard.

“You have been gone only ten days,” Kathin began. “What progress do you expect to have made—”

“I have been gone eight months,” Dea told her. The other woman’s eyes widened, traveling slowly over Dea. Dea smiled faintly. Was the change so obvious? “Take me back, Kathin. Take me to Earth, and I will walk time for you.”

They conveyed her to Earth with all reasonable and even unreasonable speed. She stood in the transport that was taking her down to walk Earth’s surface for the first time in two hundred years, absently zipping her softsuit up and down. She had asked to disembark at a spot near the old fazenda. That was close enough to the forest for a starting point. When the ramp arched out she went down, head bowed. She had a debt to repay, to help these future humans get whatever they seemed to need so desperately—

The wind slammed into her like falling timber. She staggered and half fell. Then the heat blasted the rest of her senses like an open flame and she slipped to her hands and knees. Kathin was at her side, helping her up, explaining. Dea heard only part of it. She was staring at the single colorless blade of grass between her feet.

“. . . massive deforestation by the twenty-first century . . . continued in the twenty-second ... by our time . . . tropical rainforest produced eighty percent of the oxygen on Earth. We needed the land. We didn’t realize . . . the greenhouse effect, erosion, climate changes . . . atmosphere rapidly deteriorating . . .”

Dea stood, turning in a full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree circle. The forest of Brazil, the most immense untapped natural resource in the world—the forest was gone. No trees. No green. No life. Just the grey rocky soil, stretching endlessly to the horizon.

“Our world is dying!” Kathin yelled at her. Her face was contorted. “Tell us what to do to put it back. Tell us!”

Watching the untouchable, unreachable woman of times that had come, Dea told her the truth.

“Nothing can be put back, Kathin. Nothing can ever be put back. All you can do is live with what time has left you. . . .” Disbelieving, Kathin raged at her, demanded— Dea held her like a child and wept for the loss that was not hers alone.

We are advancing into an unknown land with a deliberate air of nonchalance, our elbows out or our hands on hips, or standing one foot on a rock when there’s the opportunity for it. Always to the left, the river, as they told us it should be. Always to the right, the hills. At every telephone booth we stop and call. Frequently the lines are down because of high winds or ice. The Commander says we are already in an area of the sightings. We must watch now, he has told us over the phone, for those curious two-part footprints no bigger than a boy’s and of a unique delicacy. “Climb a tree,” the Commander says, “or a telephone pole, whichever is the most feasible, and call out a few of the names you have memorized.” So we climb a pole and cry out: Alice, Betty, Elaine, Jean, Joan, Marilyn, Mary . . . and so on, in alphabetical order. Nothing comes of it.