The Un-Reconstructed Woman
By HAYDEN HOWARD
At first Paul wished fervently for the return of
the Doric. But now ... now that he was getting to know
and understand this strange, blue-tressed vision????
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories September 1953.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
A few long bones in the fallen leaves with the shadows of the tree dancing, a glint of gold where the jawbone sat beneath the nameless tree—
"Look at the char marks on that rib!" the young man exclaimed. "So they had heat guns back then."
"That wasn't so long ago." The old man peered up at Paul's face. "They stole 'em from a government arsenal. That's how they was able to massacre so many colonies. That wasn't so long ago. I watched that man drive his uniharvester out of the ship. I even remember that gold tooth shining in his mouth."
"But this is an Earth tree, a peach maybe; they planted it; look how tremendous it's grown." He liked to tease the old man. "It took a long, long time."
It seemed to be the only Earth-life that remained. But a mouse rustled through the leaves and confounded Paul. And he did not see the old man staring beyond the tree, jaw open.
And the old man was hesitant to tell Paul what he had seen.
As they climbed the opposite hill that hid the ship Paul kicked questioningly at the drums that had contained nitrogen-fixing bacteria. He raised the rusty hood of the tractor. He stopped and went into the shed again, a lot of freeze boxes in there. The way the mines on the outer planets were booming, no fresh vegetables for them, these people would have been rich by now.
As he ran past the old man, his voice rang loud in that silent world: "I could fix that generator."
Its power pile had given his chest geiger a friendly buzz. If his brother Harry was alive—
Over the hill the spaceship poised like a monument.
To every man who ever died away from home, Paul thought as he ran over the leaves. Harry brother, there she stands, boy.
She was going. Already tiny figures were dismantling the well rig. They had refilled the tanks with water, the fist for the mighty arm that was the power pile. The heat exchanger was the wrist. The steam, disassociated into H and O by the manmade sun, would provide the mass to push back, pushing them forward to a rock in the sky where there might be heavy metals and there might not. While more efficient expansion compounds were used by the military, water was most practical for poor men who went shares.
"What would it take to own this land, Cap?" Paul gasped while his arm swept in endless rolling hills and many-shadowed valleys. One sun was nuzzling the horizon so the air was red with afternoon. The suns arranged it so there was no night.
"A fool," retorted the elected captain and he slammed the crowbar against the oxidation on the fin.
Above this continuing racket, Paul shouted: "A smart guy could get richer here than on one of those damned rocks."
The old man's voice came between blows. "You won't get rich anywhere." He said something Paul couldn't hear. "—not the type." He smiled as though it were a compliment. "But if you're thinking of watching peaches ripen—" The hammering drowned him out. "—and the drooling lip because that's what men get all alone on alien planets."
"Not me. Hey Cap, lay off for a minute. My folks homesteaded Syrtis Major. Before they shipped Harry and me off to school, I had the proverbial green thumb," he grinned. "Sure, get rich here and spend it for psycho treatments," the captain laughed. He was not familiar with what is called in small children at least, the negativistic reaction.
The old man, who still felt uncomfortable from what he might have seen on the hill, reinforced this with a mutter: "Only man in a world, with a hole for a belly and a spook for a shoulder."
To his own surprise almost as much as theirs, Paul set his feet firmly. "I'm going to cash in my sixteenth of this space coffin for supplies we got for the Mormon colony on Smith. I'll get rich here!"
The captain grew patient, then he grew angry. The rest gathered around, fifteen shareholders to one. But Paul would not pull in his neck. In a brawl on Mars while they were loading for the Outer Systems, the fifteen had seen him nearly kill a Guardsman with his feet and fists. Since Harry's death he was a terror. Also they would have only fifteen ways to split if he stayed here. Like all spacebums, they knew THIS time they would hit it rich.
Afterward, Paul stowed the seeds and hatching eggs in the dead freeze boxes where the mice could not get at them, reclimbed the hill to the peach tree, at least he thought it was peach, and made a little hole for the bones. A libation to the dead colonists he poured on the leaves, then swigged one for Harry, a third for himself, wondering what the old man had started to tell him when he slipped him the bottle. Probably that he would never get rich.
Blinking, he lazed on his back. When his face nuzzled the leaves, bean rows sprang higher than a man, leghorns were scratching everywhere and the spacemen came with bright sheaves of credits in their fists. The bean rows spread beyond the horizon and the dust of plowing tractors rose like smoke against the sky, while Paul and Harry, hardly distinguishable, for Paul was only three minutes older, proudly led a ragged old man and a slack-jawed captain through the flowering avenue of peach trees.
"Now you must meet my wife," said Paul, and he squirmed uncomfortably on the leaves.
He awoke bolt upright with his automatic pointing. Wind? Of course. He repeated the thought as he circled the hill on the double. A chip of damp leaves, dark side up with alien things dragging their larvae from the sun, down the slope another, he pursued scars in the leaves over the hill, down, lost the trail in the dry watercourse, zig-zagging, circling like a hound dog, found it again. Ran. His leg muscles were soft from months without gravity. Steep hills. Rollercoasters. Winded.
Resting, listening to his heart, listening, smiling: the mouse was not the largest fauna in his private world. Doubtless the thing that ran like a man was hills and valleys ahead, a world to hide in. As he trudged back to the shed he was not afraid, his heart was thumping, a-hunting we will go.
He was listening and watching the hills while he strung the electric fence to keep out the mice. He was listening while he cleaned out a room in the old supply shed. He listened in his sleep, even after he had stretched alarm trip wires criss cross beneath the leaves and planted nooses with the sliding catch deer poachers use. Although he did not expect to hold the thing, since it surely would have more intelligence than a deer, he might get a look at it, a flick of time in which he could decide whether to shoot.
The snares worked as he was sometimes to think afterward too well. The afternoon he charged into a world of shrieks and crashing leaves and saw a bronzed, hair-whirling fury, her leaf-clotted mane glinted blue in the sunlight, straining from the humming wire with the self-destroying terror of a filly trapped in a cattle guard, he stared, then ran for the wire snips. When he cautiously approached he saw the wire had bitten deep into her ankle. As she squawled, she was beating the leaves with blood. It would be many afternoons before she would run again, if ever. If he loosed this lone thing now, she would die.
Once, on Mars, he shot a sand lizard that wriggled into a crevasse and would take a long time to die. To him, although it must be waiting in the darkness with yawning jaws, there was nothing for him to do but inch down and finish the mess he had begun.
So he went back to his room for a blanket. Holding it open before him, he edged toward the snarling, drooling animal that backed away along the circle of its tether, leaving blood and liquid on the leaves. It stunk, it made him gag from excitement and the rank odor of its sweat and hate. He wanted to run and never come back, for he could not finish it like a sand lizard, it was going to be snarling and watching until the Doric rescued him, took it away, and that would be six months!
Its hard bones thrashing beneath the blanket frightened him. He yelled as its teeth found his knee. He swung his fist to dislodge it, for it was no more female to him than is a bitch fox in a trap. It was a fearful thing, outside his experience, and he moaned as he lay across it, plucking at the snare, staring at the blue, dirt-grained foot with broad yellow nails, until the noose widened and it tried to crawl beneath him like a tortoise. Then he bundled it up, it was no heavier than a whining bundle of sticks, and ran into his room, where, after carefully wrapping the snapping head, he bound the hands and feet and tied it by a sheet about its middle to the bed. After opening the window to clear the stench, he sat on its legs and, wincing each time it squawled, washed and disinfected its ankle.
Whipping off the head rag so it could breathe more softly, he fled outside and watched it through the window. It was a bird cage and knife blades tightly wrapped in brown, scroflous skin, with little pools of sweat in the hollows and sticks for legs and arms. There was a purple, imperfectly healed tear above its navel. It was past puberty. Its present condition might be excused by fright, but he had a sickening suspicion it was not housebroken.
Its huge deep eyes seemed to swallow him. When it shrieked, he jumped and retreated into the sunlight where he nursed his flask, muttering, "Six months, six months. Harry, what did I ever do to deserve this? Six months, just me and it."
After he had pulled himself together, he marched inside, blanketed the head so it couldn't watch him, took a detergent, a rag and a bucket of water and began to scrub away layers of grease and filth. "Shut up," he yelled, "I don't like this either. One job I never asked for was attendant in a lunatic asylum." But he was wise enough to consider that until he trapped her from her own environment she was probably no more insane than a fox is insane. How she would adjust herself to her new life he did not know. Was it possible that with certain skills, if you didn't learn them young, you could never learn them?
He welded a cage from pipe the Ventura settlers left and carried her out to it. Trying to ignore her screams, he bundled her in and welded the last two bars in place. After he dexterously freed her hands without being bitten, he was disappointed, for she seemed too stupid to untie her feet. The first time he tried to help her, he leaped away with blood streaming down his cheek; she had come within a half inch of taking his eye.
When the breeze came up, he saw she bristled with cold. She shrank from the blanket he proffered. What did she do, burrow in the leaves? After pacing up and down and swearing to himself, he got a hammer and crowbar and pried a wall off his room. He dragged her cage inside and nailed the wall up again, while she shrieked and shook the bars so the little cage thumped on the floor.
When he set a cup of water inside the bars, she shrank into the far corner of the cage. When he drank from it himself and smacked his lips, she squawled and turned her face away. He replaced the cup and waited outside. He heard her knock it over. With raised eyebrows, he fitted a frying pan through the bars and poured water into that, but all day she did not drink.
When he went out to the land he was spading, he heard her strike the pan as she had the cup, then scream with pain. Then he heard the pan clanging against the bars. Apparently she was not so weak as she looked. He was searching for excuses to put off what he would have to do if she would not eat.
The next day his attempts at forcefeeding netted him a finger bitten to the bone and numerous scratches even though he had drawn her tightly against the bars with a coiled sheet. Whether she had taken anything he could not tell. What had gone down when he held her nostrils seemed about equal to what leaped out against his shirt front.
The third day she was weaker, more a huge-eyed, painful what-ever-it-was than the fierce, stinking animal he found in the snare. She would not eat. He considered loosing her, but he knew under best conditions her margin of survival must be slight. She would crawl away and die. She was his fault.
With considerable imagination, he rummaged in his kit until he found some rubber gloves. After tying her against the bars, he forced a sleeping pill between her jaws and held them shut between his knee and arm while he dammed her mouth with his hand. When she began to relax, he pried loose three of the bars, quickly poured a solution of nutrient tablets into the rubber glove, pricked a hole in the thumb and wriggled into the cage, almost filling it. While he held her head so she would not see him if she opened her eyes, very gently he began her training.
Sometimes he would sing to her, and she would smile. Gradually he saw himself transformed in her eyes from the horrible thing that gives fear and pain to something that gives food.
By the time her limp was gone, he could take her into the garden without a leash. Smiling, for she rarely made a sound unless hungry or angry, she would stand where he wanted to spade and watch his eyes. So the garden did not go so well as he had planned, although he reassured himself that when the Doric had taken her to Earth where she could be properly trained there would be plenty of time to fill the freezers and grow rich; he was young yet.
While she watched everything he did with intense interest, she seemed discouragingly stupid. She learned to speak only a few words, although she understood a good many of the simple commands he gave her and went through a stage when she was quick to obey them. Her own chirps, he discovered had a certain internal logic. And before he realized it she had imposed her language system on him. They got along quite well this way, since they did not bother to hold symposiums on art or science, but he began to worry about what she would do when she came into the uncompromising atmosphere of an institution.
Probably throw a tantrum the way she did when I slapped her for eating baby chicks, he thought. He could understand her feeling, for to her they must have seemed as intended for eating as the mice she sometimes caught and crunched with delight.
As the months crept by she seemed to lose her awe of him. She would not sweep or hoe without whining. His imperative voice had to be reinforced with a slap to make her obey.
He was worrying about this on a walk one day, far down the valley where the peach tree grew, when she ran to him waving a human pelvis and smiling and chirping.
"Don't smile," he said, talking now as he would talk to a dog. "That was probably your mother. What I think is that a woman, your grandmother, escaped with several children, one of them your mother. But your grandmother died very soon and the children were afraid of the shack for some reason, for I have found no signs of them there, and they hunted through the woods like wild things and forgot what they knew. They bred you at least. Then they died while you were quite small, perhaps five or six years old, and you forgot whatever was left to forget of man's five hundred thousand years of cumulative learning. It isn't like instinct; it can all be lost like that!" He snapped his fingers in her face.
He made her throw the bone away before they reached home. He suspected that some things like language, if not learned when the organism is young, might always prove difficult. He thought of stories of wolf children and of how they soon died when placed in institutions.
As she danced before him, he noticed how prettily she was filling out. The conviction that she had better have a dress and soon, hit him like an axe blow. He began to watch the trees, the sky, the ground.
He made it from one of his shirts, and she squawled with fright when he slipped it over her head. Whenever she started to take it off, he would speak sharply to her. But she had a strong will. Soon he was forced to chase her and slap her to make her obey. She would pretend to pull it off just to tease him and one day when he was burning leaves she threw it on the fire and fled.
Although he made her another and decorated it with bottle caps in the hope that since historians claimed dress began as decoration she too would see the light. It was too late to change her original dislike, even though he paraded around in it and pretended to be very proud of himself. It was war after that. She smiled knowingly when he told her bugs would bite her if she didn't wear it or that a great ship would come out of the sky and take her away. The dress was off as much as it was on.
Normally she would accept whatever he said, but not when it had to do with the dress. She didn't like it. It made her itch and sweat. It was her enemy. And when he allied with it he was too.
She was a beautiful animal when she was angry.
Now he was in a haste for the sixth month to come. For as he often told her: "I've loused you up and you've loused me up enough as it is."
At sleeping time, his dreams of beautifully gowned women leaning over the piano and beckoning, bending in velvet curves to refill his glass, dancing up to him with their arms outstretched, standard spacemen's dreams, no longer gave him pleasure because he could never be sure when they disrobed in their softly lit apartments that they might not turn revealed, the nameless girl.
When the afternoon was cold, she would creep beneath his blanket and, because he couldn't bear her shocked expression when he shoved her out, he would turn his face to the wall and review navigation problems. It was true, the way the farm was going, he'd probably end back with the space bums never knowing which vector series was correct.
When the seventh month passed, he began to worry. The Doric couldn't go much longer without supplies. If they'd hit it rich, they'd still have to send the ship back, they would have to add water on his planet; then they would take the girl to Earth and he could breathe again.
Now when she ran suddenly and threw her arms about him, it was quite plain she was not motivated by childish affection. He began to take long walks, to try hiding from her, for she pestered him continually. He would run away until his lungs were bursting and hear a little chirp and she would be peering around a tree, without her dress of course.
"You're like a deer through the woods," he'd laugh, for she would smile so prettily that all the anger drained out of him. Then she would crawl forward pretending she was stalking a mouse and he would jump up and start walking again.
She learned nothing these days, in fact he thought she was less capable than a month ago. She helped him gather seeds as usual and then, when he sent her to feed the chickens, he discovered she was chewing the seeds herself, although he fed her whenever she patted her stomach. One morning his favorite young rooster was gone, but he found its feet on top of the empty freezers and the woods were adrift with feathers.
He asked her and she nodded and covered her face with her skirt. "Why?" he asked, "Hungry?" She shrugged; all of her gestures were his. He saw himself in them. Suddenly he realized he had not thought of his brother Harry and the flaming heat exchanger room for months. I've traded one pain for another, he mused, and did not have the heart to slap her for killing the rooster.
Another thing that amazed him: he had never given her a name.
"Harriet," he said, pointing at her, but she shook her hair in a swirl about her head; she was nameless as the tree was nameless; it had cling peach characteristics but there were non-Earthly shapes to its leaves and the ripening fruits were blue. He didn't press the matter; with the two of them, names were unnecessary. When one called it was for the other.
He learned she behaved in cycles. For several weeks she would be attentive, watching closely while he pushed seeds into the earth, helping when he directed her, although she rarely volunteered. Then she would begin to stand with her bare foot on his, to put her hand in his pocket, to chatter and push him to attract his attention, to sneak her arms about him and chew gently on his shoulder. Sometimes when he would push her away she would snarl and squawl at him, other times, she would stand with her lip pushed out and her eyes blinking so that he was near tears himself. He listened for the rocket with eager unhappiness.
In the ninth month, without warning, she bit the tip off his ear. The impetus of the pain swung his fist against her mouth. When she stumbled to her feet, she tore off her dress, spitting blood and hatred, and fled into the woods. He watched her go with mixed feelings.
In the afternoon, when he began to gather the peaches, he could feel her burning gaze, but he gave no sign. When mealtime came, he did not call her and she did not come, although he glimpsed her once through the alien trees.
Silently he mashed the peaches in five gallon cans, then welded the tops on. He found useful copper tubes in the junk of the Ventura venture. But the world was for waiting. Perhaps the spaceship would come first. It was strange, he reflected, that no other ships had paused. The Sirius System was supposed to be a sure thing.
The girl took her meals with him again, but there was a razor edge between them. She watched silently when he cut open the swollen cans and poured off the top liquid. Idly she rubbed dirt in her hair while he set the distiller perking. She whined when he wouldn't give her any.
Soon the freeze box room shimmered with colored lights, New Chicago, with copters honking and girls hurrying along the mobo-walk in striped woolen slacks, very tight, and high plastic hats, the latest style. They were smiling and the world was flowing by, but the nameless girl sat quietly, blocking out the Radfriend Building and three bars, much too large, right smack in the middle of it.
"Get out of the panorama," he yelled, and she stared at him, large-eyed.
"No, come sit with daddy," he smirked, but she made no move.
When he lunged at her, she fled silently, and he bumped his head on the wall; the blow did not sober him but turned his thoughts so that he concentrated very hard on being steady as he swung the axe against the still and the unopened cans until the room flowed like a dipsomaniac's dream. Then he tramped solidly into the afternoon, with difficulty found the nameless tree and swung the axe with a great shout and echoed with a surprised laugh as the axe deflected with a solid "chunk" against his shin bone.
She shook him and squawled at him, while he reflected it was unfortunate he had never taught her to make a tourniquet. It was really quite amusing.
When the blow began to reverberate up his leg, he troubled to examine his shin and saw the blood was not rhythmically jetting over the leaves. It was oozing to a stop. The axe had solved nothing. So he crawled wearily to the shack.
A clattering woke him. She had lit the wood in the stove, which he had warned her never to do, and was stirring whole, jaggedly peeled potatoes in the frypan. This surprised him, for he had never tried to teach her to cook. It seemed far too complicated for an animal incapable of consistently picking ripe tomatoes from among the green or of hoeing a bean row for more than a few minutes without losing interest and running over to hug him.
"In water," he offered, "cook them in water."
He was awakened by a burning hot potato trying to get in his mouth. He pulled it apart with his hands, forced himself to down it with a smile although it was like a rock in the center and he was woozy to begin with. Raising his head, he saw she had wrapped his foot in a sheet.
He grinned as he felt her hand on his cheek. "Next you'll be lecturing me on Pasteur."
She chirped happily.
Later when he heard her smiling, he twisted his head and realized she was trying to thread a needle; of course she had watched him sew. He did not offer to help since his hands were trembling like an old man's, and finally she gave it up and began boiling peas without shelling them.
"And I always suspected you were an idiot," he laughed. He suspected, no, he had to admit to himself, that he was nearer the idiot. Apparently you do not train a girl the same way you train an animal; that should be obvious, yet he had given her no more responsibility and less incentive than he would have given a dog. "From now on, strategy will be my middle name."
He stretched and grinned as though something wonderful had been accomplished.
But with morning, rocket deceleration thundered overhead.
He sent her running into the hills until he could see who the rocket contained. It was not the Doric, and he was relieved, for suddenly they seemed a villainous, lecherous bunch. He could never have sent her to Earth with them.
Slipping his automatic into his waistband, he hobbled, with his double shadows lurching before him, toward the lowering cloud of dust that obscured the rocket at the watering place.
When the people flowed out, he saw it was the Mormons and was not pleased, although it would be safe enough to turn the girl over to their women, he supposed. If they intended to stay, they could try the other side of the planet, he'd tell them that. This land was staked.
When they reached him, the one who was a doctor pounced on his ankle the way the nameless girl would pounce on a mouse.
When he enquired for the Doric, they shook their heads. Their farming supplies had never arrived, but it made no difference now. They were being forced out of the system, which was not the first time they had been pushed around, their bearded leader said.
"You are lucky we paused here to fill the water tanks for the long trip in. We are the last ship. Unless they have been lying to us about the New System, I doubt if ships will bother with these planets for generations. You see, they found heavy metals there and the Government has decreed all colonization must be in that system to support development of mining colonies. They would not have forced us from Smith in a military sense, but we are not yet prepared for isolation; we must trade for many things. Six light years is a long way to be cut off. How lucky you are. You would have been the last man in this solar system. I shiver at the thought."
"Oh?" said Paul calmly enough. "I have vegetables in the ground, your people are welcome to them."
They spread over the field, pulling carrots and potatoes and chewing them raw, for they had been a month now on concentrates.
"We will repay you," the leader assured.
Paul shrugged: "Just so you leave enough for seed."
The doctor chuckled at this. "Come on man. Put your arm about my shoulder, we will take you home."
Paul stood back with his thumb hooked in his belt.
"I wonder if you could pay me for the vegetables now, in books."
"Certainly, we have a first class library. Come aboard."
"You misunderstand, I want to read them here. Not trash; medical books, teachers' training, how-to-do-it manuals."
"You have been alone too long. You need not be afraid of our ways. We do not try to convert spacemen in any case." The doctor took a forward step but stopped, off balance, when Paul's hand slapped the automatic.
"My wife—," Paul had a perplexed, embarrassed look.
The old man was right about him never getting rich. "We have decided to stay here. This is our home."
He saw the doctor raise an eyebrow: no doubt he had run across spacemen who dreamed that convincingly of women many times before. It was difficult when they awoke. Paul had seen a guy in a cage once that had had that happen to him. Very disconcerting, unbearable in fact, when you woke up after a year or two of love and affection and couldn't find her again.
The leader and the doctor made a triangle of glances between each other and the gun, but Paul forestalled any ideas with a backward step, coupled with a deft extraction of what men do not like to look in the muzzle of.
The leader opened his hands. "Get him some books." He smiled rather gently at Paul. "Will you have children?"
"A lot of them, I hope." He wondered if he should take the man to see her tracks, but it was a windy day. They might not find any and the men might take him off guard. He had no intention of calling her down; he was afraid to, somehow.
The doctor set down a double armload of books. On top, with a crooked smile he laid a thick treatise: WELTY'S CARE OF THE EXPECTANT MOTHER-AND CHILD CARE—ONE VOLUME EDITION.
But he began telling Paul about Earth, the great railyachts and gay cities, the chic girls and cool drinks, plumbing, radiant heat, libraries, dancing, Feelies, Tellies, everyone lived well since the thirty-hour work week.
"Then what are you people pioneering around for?" retorted Paul.
When that last manmade sun was lost in the sky and the loud sound was the blowing of the leaves, Paul limped back up the hill, whistling. But she did not come. And he did not find her or her tracks.
The leaves fluttered with amazement, flew up in familiar patterns that frightfully burst. The hill surged red as the sun found the horizon. Down through the alien treetops, across the leaf-shrouded peaches, its bent rays javelinned the mouse on the trunk of the tree. Chittering, it vanished.
Paul cried out and ran. Down the hill toward the shed, the leaves were rattling together.
>
He didn't see her till she giggled.
For a long moment he stared, breathing, as she struggled guiltily into her dress. She was watching him so intently she could not seem to find her hand into the armhole. A leaf flitted between them.
Paul smiled; her elbow was sticking out of the armhole.
"Leave it off," he breathed. "That sack isn't necessary any more." He held out his hand. "We'll go look at our peach tree."
No comments:
Post a Comment