Damon Knight - Orbit 15

But Margaret didn’t wait five weeks. In two weeks she gave birth to a stillborn child. Zelda had a miscarriage the following week, and in the next week May lost her child. That spring the rains kept them from planting anything more than a truck garden.

Walt began testing the men for fertility. He reported to David and Vlasic that no man in the valley was fertile.

“So,” Vlasic said softly, “we now see the significance of David’s work.”

Winter came early in sheets of icy rain that went on day after day after day. The work in the laboratories increased, and David found himself blessing his grandfather for his purchase of Selnick’s equipment, which had come with detailed instructions for making artificial placentas as well as nearly completed work on computer programs for chemical amniotic fluids. When David had gone to talk to Selnick about the equipment, Selnick had insisted—madly, David had thought at the time—that he take everything or nothing. “You’ll see,” he had said wildly. “You’ll see.” The following week he hanged himself, and the equipment was on its way to the Virginia valley.

They worked and slept in the lab, leaving only for meals. The winter rains gave way to spring rains, and a new softness was in the air.

David was hardly aware of the spring until one day his mother found him in the cafeteria. He hadn’t seen her for weeks, and would have brushed past her with a quick hello if she hadn’t stopped him. She looked strange, childlike; he turned from her to stare out the window, waiting for her to release his arm.

“Celia’s coming home,” she told him. “She’s well, she says.”

David felt frozen; he continued to stare out the window, seeing nothing. “Where is she now?” He listened to the rustle of cheap paper and when it seemed that his mother was not going to answer him, he wheeled about. “Where is she?”

“Miami,” she said finally, after scanning the two pages. “It’s postmarked Miami, I think. It’s over two weeks old. Dated May twenty-eighth. She never got any of our mail.”

David didn’t read the letter until his mother had left the cafeteria. I was in Colombia for a while, eight months, I think. And I got a touch of the bug that nobody wants to name. The writing was spindly and uncertain. He looked for Walt.

“I have to go get her. She can’t walk in on that gang at the Wiston place.”

“You know you can’t leave now.”

“It isn’t a question of can or can’t. I have to.”

Walt studied him for a moment, then shrugged. “How will you get there and back? No gas. You know we don’t dare use it for anything but the harvest.”

“I know,” David said impatiently. “I’ll take Mike and the cart. I can stay on the back roads with Mike.” He knew that Walt was calculating, as he had done, the time involved, and he felt his face tightening, his hands clenching. Walt simply nodded. “I’ll leave as soon as it’s light in the morning.” Again Walt nodded. “Thanks,” David said suddenly. He meant: for not arguing with him, for not pointing out what both already knew; that there was no way of knowing how long he would have to wait for Celia, that she might never make it to the farm.

Three miles from the Wiston farm David unhitched the cart and hid it in thick underbrush. He swept the tracks where he had left the dirt road, then led Mike into the woods. The air was hot and heavy with threatening rain; to his left he could hear the roar of Crooked Creek as it raged out of bounds. The ground was spongy and he walked carefully, not wanting to sink to his knees in unsuspected mud here in the lowlands. The Wiston farm always had been flood-prone; it enriched the soil, Grandfather Wiston had claimed, not willing to damn nature for its periodic rampages. “God didn’t mean for this piece of ground to have to bear year after year after year,” he said. “Comes a time when the earth needs a rest, same as you and me. We’ll let it be this year, give it some clover when the ground dries out.” David started to climb, still leading Mike, who whinnied softly at him now and again.

“Just to the knob, boy,” David said quietly. “Then you can rest and eat meadow grass until she gets here.” The horse whinnied.

Grandfather Wiston had taken him to the knob once, when David was twelve. He remembered the day, hot and still, like this day, he thought, and Grandfather Wiston had been straight and strong. At the knob his grandfather had paused and touched the massive bole of a white oak tree. “This tree saw the Indians in that valley, David, and the first settlers, and my great-grandfather when he came along. It’s our friend, David. It knows all the family secrets.”

“Is it still your property up here, Grandfather?”

“Up to and including this tree, son. Other side’s national forest land, but this tree, it’s on our land. Yours too, David. One day you’ll come up here and put your hand on this tree and you’ll know it’s your friend, just like it’s been my friend all my life. God help us all if anyone ever lays an ax to it.”

They had gone on that day, down the other side of the knob, then up again, farther and steeper this time until once more his grandfather had stopped and, his hand on David’s shoulder, paused for a few moments. “This is how this land looked a million years ago, David.” Time had shifted suddenly for the boy; a million years ago, or a hundred million, was all the same distant past, and he had imagined the tread of giant reptiles. He had imagined that he smelled the fetid breath of a tyrannosaur. It was cool and misty beneath the tall trees, and under them the saplings grew, their branches spread horizontally as if to catch any stray hit of sunlight that penetrated the high canopy, and where the sun did find a path through, it was golden and soft, the sun of another time. In even deeper shadows grew bushes and shrubs, and at the foot of it all were the mosses and lichens, liverworts and ferns. The arching, heaving roots of the trees were clothed in velvet emerald plants.

David stumbled and caught himself against the giant oak tree that was, somehow, his friend. He pressed his cheek against the rough bark, and stayed there for a few minutes. Then he pushed himself away and looked up through the luxuriant branches; he could see no sky beyond them. When it rained, the tree would protect him from the full force of the storm, but he needed shelter from the fine drops that eventually would make their way through the leaves to fall quietly on the absorbent ground.

He examined the farm through his binoculars. Behind the house there was a garden being tended by five people, impossible to tell immediately if they were male or female. Long-haired, jeans, barefoot, thin. It didn’t matter. He noted that the garden was not producing yet, that the plants were sparse and frail. He studied the east field, aware that it was changed, not certain how. Then he realized that it was planted to corn. Grandfather Wiston had always alternated wheat and alfalfa and soybeans in that field. The lower fields were flooded, and the north field was grown up in grasses and weeds. He studied the people he could see and swung the glasses slowly over the buildings. He spotted seventeen of them altogether. No child younger than eight or nine. No sign of Celia, nor of any recent use of the road; it was also overgrown with weeds. No doubt the people down there were just as happy to let the road hide under weeds.

He built a leanto against the oak where he could lie down and observe the farm. He used fir branches to roof his shelter, and when the storm came half an hour later, he stayed dry. Rivulets ran among the garden rows below, and the farmyard turned silver and sparkly from this distance, although he knew that closer at hand it would simply be muddy water, inches deep. The ground was too saturated in the valley to absorb any more water. It would have to run off into Crooked Creek, which was inching higher and higher toward the north field and the vulnerable corn there.