[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
come back and find the dome empty, that will be the end of it. Not enough
budget for a search through obviously hostile territory. Not enough resources
on this planet for anybody to want to exploit it, so no new money to find our
teeth. We'll pass into Plathy legend and be forgotten, or distorted beyond
recognition.
A good thing for them. If there was anything of use here,we'd be like the
Eskimo anthropologists Maria talks about, recording the ways of a race
doomed by the fact of recording. So maybe the Plathys will have another
million years of untroubled evolution. Maybe they'll learn table manners.
I'm afraid of them but can't be mad at them. Even after Derek. They are
what they are and we should have been more careful. Maybe I'm becoming a
real xenologist, at this late date. Derek would say I'm trying to compose
myself into a state of grace. Before dying.
It infuriated me that he always had answers. All I ever had was questions.
So two days' push and we're safe inside the dome. Food and cube and books
and spears bounce off. Maybe I've read too much, written too much; the
pattern seems inescapable. We're at death's door. Capital Death's Door. If we
make it to the dome we'll break the rules.
Calmate. Calm. Maybe I'm projecting, making patterns. Here there's only
real things: cause, effect, randomness, entropy your death is like the falling
of a leaf, Derek said; like the leaf falling, it's a small tragedy, but necessary. If
everything lived forever the universe would fill up in short order.
Mustn't blather. Reality, not philosophy. We rest so we can be alert. If we're
alert enough we'll beat the jungle. Beat the Plathys that aren't there. It's all in
my head. For the next two days take the head out of the circuit. Only reflex.
Smell, listen, watch: react. React fast enough, you live.
Only I keep thinking about Derek. He never knew what hit him.
Brenda
Gab asked me to watch both banks for a while so he could give love to
Maria before it got dark. Hard to watch both banks when I want to watch him.
Men look so vulnerable from this angle, bouncing; a new perspective for me.
I've never been an audience except for watching on the cube. It's different.
Admit I'm jealous of her. She's fifteen years older than I and shows it. But
he wants her for his last one. That was obvious in his tone of voice. At some
level I think he's as scared as I am.
If he thinks this is his last one he doesn't know much about women. Maria
will let me wake him up when our shift is over.
If I can wait that long. I've watched him sleeping; he has the refractory
a
a
T
T
n
n
s
s
F
F
f
f
o
o
D
D
r
r
P
P
m
m
Y
Y
e
e
Y
Y
r
r
B
B
2
2
.
.
B
B
A
A
Click here to buy
Click here to buy
w
w
m
m
w
w
o
o
w
w
c
c
.
.
.
.
A
A
Y
Y
B
B
Y
Y
B
B
r r
period of a twelve-year-old. To be exact, I know from observation that he can
do it twice and still get an erection in his sleep. No privacy under our
circumstances.
Funny friendly sound, don't hear it like that while you're doing it what
was that? Something move?
Just a lizard, I guess. Nothing now. We've been seeing them the last two
days on the jungle side, around dusk and in the firelight. They don't come in
the water. What's going to happen tomorrow night, no island, no fire? Don't
want to die that way, jumped by a pack of dinosaurs. Nor have my head bitten
off by a sentient primitive. I was going to be a grandmother and sit on the
porch and tell doctor stories and die with no fuss.
Why won't they attack? I know they're out there, waiting. If they would
only come now, I could die that way. I remember the feeling, fifty or a
hundred of them against the three of us and our two crazers. Not a fair fight,
perhaps, but God it did feel good, holding our own, epinephrine from head to
toe. This waiting and worrying. Light the fire.
Stack the wet wood around to dry. Gives me something to do while they're
finishing up. Being quiet for the sake of my sensibilities, or theirs. Just heavier
breathing and a faster rhythm of liquid sounds. I've followed that unspoken
code, too; we haven't been all three together since the water hole. She's had
him seven times since, to my four. To my knowledge. Why am I keeping
score? They were made for each other. Iron man, iron woman.
I was in love once or twice and know, this is something else. Not just sex;
I've been that way before, too. Hysteria is part of it, but not in the old-
fashioned womanish sense, the womb taking over. This is a certainty-of-death
hysteria, to coin a category. It's different from just fear. It's like, it's like I
don't know. As if you had never tasted water before, or seen colors, and
suddenly here is a cold spring or a rainbow. Minus the joy. Just something
primal and unlike anything before. Does that make sense? We've been in
danger God knows constantly for how long? Not the same. There was always
hope. Now we're two days away from total sanctuary and for some reason I
know we won't make it.
I remember from psych class a lesson about people who seemed to know
they were going to die. Not sick people; soldiers, adventurers, whose sudden
violent death seemed to resonate backwardin time they told their friends that
somehow they felt that this was it, and by God it was. You can call it
coincidence or invoke pragmatic causality they were nervous and therefore
careless and therefore died-but here and now I think there's more to it. Once
I'm safe inside the dome I'll publish a retraction. Right now I feel my death as
strongly as I feel the need for that man inside of me.
a
a
T
T
n
n
s
s
F
F
f
f
o
o
D
D
r
r
P
P
m
m
Y
Y
e
e
Y
Y
r
r
B
B
2
2
.
.
B
B
A
A
Click here to buy
Click here to buy
w
w
m
m
w
w
o
o
w
w
c
c
.
.
.
.
A
A
Y
Y
B
B
Y
Y
B
B
r r
Maria
Somehow we lived through that one.
We'd been in the jungle for perhaps twelve hours, dusk approaching, when
a lizard pack hit us, or two packs, from in front and behind. The trail is
scarcely two meters wide, which saved us. The carcasses piled up and
impeded their charge. We must have killed forty of them, man-sized or
slightly smaller. Not a type we'd seen on the way down.
Were they intelligent enough to coordinate their charge, or is it some kind
of instinctive attack pattern? Scary either way. Used up a lot of energy. If it
happens a few more times . . . it happens. No use thinking about it.
At least the action seems to have been good for morale. Both of them have
been radiating depression and fear since we started out this morning.
Reinforcing each other's premonitions of doom. I shouldn't have let her go to
him at watch change, or I should have admonished her to fuck, don't talk. It
was too much like saying goodbye. I got that feeling from Gab too, last night,
but I tried to reassure him. Words.
By my reckoning we have fourteen to eighteen hours to go, depending on
how much ground we can cover without light. Decided against torches, of
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]