If All Else Fails (21 page)

The trip back to
the cabin was a silent one, an uneasy trip, with Gantry sitting as far away from her as possible.
He knew she was in pain, but he could not bring himself to touch her, to offer her any comfort.
He was not so sure, now that she was fertile, now that he had made it possible for them to have
children, if he did not hate her. He had long since stopped thinking of her as a possession. At
times, it seemed as if he belonged to her.

Things went on as
before, his life a flow of conflicting feelings, a flow of emotions he could no longer control.
It seemed to him, like the stefel dogs that he fed, that he could never really own her. Her
alienness was always between them. Her customs were strange, her manner unlike that of his race.
And she was guided by this alien quality, this traditional way so unlike his own, to live in a
way he could not hope to touch or change. There were certain things be­tween them. She would not
eat at the table, eating instead on the floor, after the manner of her people. Then, too, like a
raccoon on earth, she washed every morsel of food she ate. There was something very animal, very
alien about her as she swished a slice of bread in a saucer of water before eat­ing it. He had
beat her for that once, but it made him un­comfortable to see her sitting across the table from
him, not eating, staring in the Riyallian way. In a way, it was how she expressed her anger, if
indeed she ever experienced it. He sensed her displeasure and, once, when he had been
par­ticularly cruel, he thought he heard a trilling sound, a throaty vocalization like the death
rattle of the stefel dogs. He thought perhaps it was her way of crying. But he could never be
sure.

And they had a
child, a boy.

Often when the
pebble storms of winter kept him inside, he sat before the heating unit watching the boychild
crawling across the floor. She sat motionlessly on the other side of the room, sitting there like
some ill-conceived statue, lost in streams of thought he could never touch, moving with memories
he never could share.

He talked her
tongue so poorly, he could not make her understand and she spoke no English, seemingly would not
allow herself to learn it. There were times, holding his young son, staring into the child's
eyes, blue and single-pupiled like his own, when he wanted to talk to her, to tell her the things
and dreams within him. It was never to be.

The days passed
silently for them while all around them, like silt deposited by a flooding stream, the immigrants
to the planet continued to come. Women, children, entire fami­lies moving to Kingane, now safely
settled by those who went before them. And as the years rolled by, towns were
born and with them came the civilization that had brought
them. Gantry noticed it gradually, the weeks when the trail beyond the end of his land became
full of travelers whereas, before, he rarely saw more than one or two people a month. One day he
stood on the hill behind his cabin and he could see houses going up, maybe two or three miles
away, and it was then that he knew a moment of unease, of dread. His own people had caught up
with him.

A week later,
finding himself dissatisfied, unaccountably restless, he took her into the new town that had
sprung up almost overnight just ten miles from his cabin. In a way, his taking her there was a
part of the blindness that had grown around him. He'd been with her so long, got so familiar and
comfortable around her in their quietly spent years together, it had faded from his mind that she
was an alien, that she might not be welcome.

He'd dressed her in
a bright dress, purchased from the harvest buyers who stopped three times a year to buy his
harvest of stefel tissue. But he had forgotten her customs, as unchangeable as the blue-green sky
above. When they walked across the sidewalks, she followed him, moving be­hind him at her
customary five paces. And in the eyes of those he met, in the eyes of those townspeople, he knew
how she would look to them. He felt an anger rising in him. He heard comments from the people on
the street, nothing direct, nothing he heard quite clearly, but he knew what they were saying
about him, knew what they were thinking about her.

She saw the
darkness in his eyes, when he turned to look at her, and without a word she turned and walked
back to their landcar and got in to wait for him. She took it as she took all things, silently,
matter-of-factly. But there was no way she could change who she was. He followed her and got into
the landcar, driving away from the town, looking neither to the left nor right but aware that
people had
moved out of buildings to
look at her, to look at them, and it burned into him with a bitterness and a loss that he knew
would never stop. And he was never to take her into town again.

He knew then how it
would be. When the stefel buyers decided they could no longer afford to visit each stefel rancher
individually, when the buyers decided to open up an office in town where the ranchers could bring
in then-harvest, he knew his life, his aloneness, was lost to him.

At harvesttime,
when he took his tank, now fitted with wheels, into town to sell his crop of tissue, he could
sense the barrier between himself and the others of his kind. As he waited in the outer offices,
waiting until his wagon was weighed and unloaded, the others sat apart from him as if he was a
man of their race who was somehow not of their race. And the way women of his own kind passed
their eyes over him, as if he were something unclean, filled him with a chill that seized him by
the heart.

One day he met
Droble at the weighing office, Droble who had two Riyall women. And as Gantry sat there, he
lis­tened to the talk around him. The men were talking about the changes around them, about the
men who had pio­neered this land. The pioneers were sending their Riyall women back into the wild
lands from which they had come, sending away their half-breed children, sending them back to
their own kind; at least, the ones with any brains were was what the men said. Droble turned pale
as he heard their conversation, the idle chatter of men who had come to this world long after
others had made it soft and easy for them. Droble stood up and stalked out of the office with a
kind of hurtful violence. Droble still had his two Riyall women. Droble was the kind of man who
needed people, a loner who still must be a part of society. Later, as Gantry was picking up his
check for his crop, a man ran into the office shouting that Droble had just blown his head off in
the middle of the street. The men in the office all dashed out to see if for themselves. Gantry
felt all the weight, the hope­lessness of his mistakes come crashing down on him. It might have
been him out there on the street instead of Droble.

He went home late
that morning, very, very drunk. In the morning, the last part of the night, the f atalness of his
mis­takes was apparent to him. He was no Charlie Droble and he knew that the decision that Droble
had made was an easy one compared to the one he knew he would have to make. Couldn't help but
make.

But home in his own
cabin, watching her and the boy eat­ing, washing their food as was her custom, he found that he
did not have the strength to do it. He remembered back to the time before his people had caught
up with him. Had she ever really held him tenderly? Was it his imagination that had built her
into a person, into a human being? Perhaps she was a fabrication, a cold, emotionless creature he
had shaped with his imagination and his great need into more than what she really was. She had
never told him that she loved him, for there was no way for her to communicate that, to tell him
that. But he had always assumed it, hadn't he? Hadn't the care, the expressionless but gentle
caring for the boy convinced him of that?

The winter came
and, with it, a deep gloom that settled over the little cabin. There was no help for himself,
Gantry knew. He was committed to her, to his son, and he could not sever those ties. She in her
strange way sensed his great sor­row and, whether comprehending its source or not, seemed to
spend more time with the boy, less time with him, a thing that Gantry experienced with a kind of
relief. He had found himself very critical of her lately, found himself very quick to notice
faults in her, faults that had never seemed obvious to him before.

The meteor shower
had lasted two days, longer than any
other shower he ever remembered. He sat at the table, eat­ing his food, lost in the kind
of misery that comes over a child forced to stay inside when it rains and there's nothing to do.
He kept running it over and over in his mind, kept staring at them as they ate their meal,
washing each bite of food first. The day before, the boy had said his first word. He had sensed
it, had sensed that the boy was beginning to take on her personality even though the boy seemed
to look a great deal like him. He had understood that first word of his and it was one of her
language and not his.

It was funny how
that bothered him the most. That the child would speak her words and not his. And it came to him,
then, it came to him like a painful tearing sound, and he knew that he could not save himself. He
knew he could not save her. There was no hope for her. No hope for him. There was nothing that
could be done. Out the window he could see the shells of houses going up at the edge of his land,
houses waiting till the summer and the right time to build them. His people had caught up with
him.

He got up from the
table slowly, his food untouched and he moved toward them. She knew what was to happen and in
that unreadable face, he found the knowledge of what he was about to do. He lifted the boy away
from the mat on the floor and cradling him against his chest, turned and walked back to the
table. She sat motionlessly in the corner and, in that moment, he knew, he finally knew she was
capable of emotion, that she had feelings of her own.

He pulled a chair
up beside his and set the boy gently down upon the chair. He turned to her and, without a word,
she knew that the boy's place would hereafter be at the table; she knew it by the sad unrelenting
look on his face.

He took a piece of
bread and put it unwashed into the boy's mouth. And then he heard it and turned to look at her.
Her face was turned away, her shoulders motionless.

But he heard it and
this time knew what it was. That melodious, birdlike sound, the way the creatures of Kingane
cried, the sound the creatures of Kingane made when they were dying.

But he had his back
hardened against it and would not relent, having made the judgment for the boy. But after the way
of his own kind, his shoulders shook and he made the harsh, broken rasping sound, the way the
creatures of Earth cried, the sound the creatures of Earth made when they were dying.

The medicine
shaker, the bonebreaker. I have seen and been all these. It is nothing but trouble.

I have sat on the
good side of the fire. I have cried over young women. It is nothing but trouble.

Miss Dow leaned
against the observation window. Her stomach revolted and she backed away. Unable to quell the
nausea rising within her she clamped a hand to her mouth.

Dr. Santell gently
took her arm, led her away from the window and helped her to a couch facing away from the
ob­servation window.

Nausea passed; Miss
Dow smiled weakly. "You did warn me," she said.

Dr. Santell did not
return the smile. "It takes getting used to. I'm a doctor and immune to gore, but still I find it
un­settling. He's a biological impossibility."

"Not even human,"
Miss Dow suggested.

"That's what the
government sent you here to decide," said Dr. Santell. "Frankly, I'm glad he's no longer my
re­sponsibility."

"I want to look at
him again."

Santell shrugged,
lit a syntho. Together they walked back to the observation window. He seemed amused at her
dis­comfort.

Again, Miss Dow
peered through the window. This time it was easier.

A young man, tall
and well-muscled, stood in the middle of the room. He was naked. His uncut black hair fell to the
small of his back.

His chest was slit
with a gaping wound that bled pro­fusely; his legs and stomach were soaked with blood.

"Why is he smiling?
What is he staring at?" she asked, unable to take her eyes off the figure before her.

"I don't know,"
said Dr. Santell. "Why don't you ask him?"

"Your sense of
humor escapes me," said Miss Dow through tightly closed lips.

Dr. Santell grinned
and shrugged. His synthetic cigarette reached the cut-off mark and winked out. The butt flashed
briefly as he tossed it into the wall disposal.

"Doesn't
everything?" suggested Dr. Santell, trying not to laugh at his little joke.

Miss Dow turned
away from the window. Her look was sharp, withering. "Tell me about him," she snapped, each word
like ice. "How did he get—that way?"

His amusement
faded. He licked his lips nervously, nod­ded. "He has no name, at least no official name. We call
him Joe. Sort of a nickname. We gave him that name about—"

"Fascinating,"
interrupted Miss Dow, "but I didn't come here to be entertained by some droll little tale about
his nickname."