West Of The Sun Part 3

It was dark when Wright's finger prodded him. "A visitor."

The darkness was rose-tinged, not with sunset. There were two moons, Paul remembered, one white and large and far away, one red and near.

Should the red moon be shining now? He gazed through the half-open doorway, wondering why he was not afraid, seeing something pale and vast, washed in--yes, surely in reddish moon-light. A thing swaying on the pillars of its legs, perhaps listening, tasting the air for strangeness. And scattered through the night, sapphires on black velvet, were tiny dots of blue, moving, vanishing, reappearing. "Blue fireflies," Dorothy whispered, "blue fireflies, that's all they are."

He felt her controlled breathing, forced down a foolish laugh. _We could have done without a white elephant._

Nine or ten feet tall at the shoulder, a tapir-like snout, black tusks bending more nearly downward than an elephant's, from milk-white flesh. The ears were mobile, waving to study the night. There was an oval hump near the base of the neck. The beast had been facing them; it turned to pull down a branch, munch the leaves, casually drop the stalk. In silence it drifted away, pausing to meditate, grumbling juicily, but with no alarm.

Wright whispered, "The planet Lucifer did not ask for us."

"Paul--I stepped out for a minute, while you were both asleep. Firm ground. A smell--flowers, I think--made me remember frangipani."

"I'll try it."

"Oh, but not with that thing----"

"He didn't seem to mind us. I'll stay near the door." He knew Dorothy would come with him. Feeling earth under legs that had nearly forgotten it, he turned to help her down; her dark eyes played diamond games with the moon-light.

It could have been a night anywhere in the Galaxy, up there beyond torn branches, stars, and red moon in a vagueness of cloud. Blue fireflies....

But there was a child wailing somewhere. Far-off and weak, a dim rise and fall of sound, grief and remoteness. A waterfall? Wind in upper branches? But they were still, and the sound carried the timbre of animal life. Dorothy murmured, "It's been crying that way ever since moon-rise." She came closely into his arms.

"I can read one thing inside of you--you're not scared."

"I'm not, Paul?"

"No."

"But don't ever leave me--Adam."

3

This was dawn: vision out of the dark: ripples of music coalescent in one forest voice moving toward a crescendo of daytime.

Paul watched a spreading of color in the leaves, a shift from black to gray to a loveliness more green than red; the trees were ma.s.sively old, with varied bark of green or purple-brown. Phantoms in the more distant shadows could be understood now that light was advancing: they were thick trees with a white bark like that of the never-forgotten birches of New Hampshire. Underfoot Paul felt a humus that might have been a thousand years in growing; he prodded it with his knife--a white worm curled in mimic death.

Everywhere purple-leaved vines, vastly proliferating, climbed in a riot of greed for the sunlight of the forest ceiling. Paul sensed a mute cruelty in them, a shoving l.u.s.t of growth. It might have been these, elastically yielding, that had saved the lifeboat from total ruin.

Overnight the gravity of Lucifer had become natural. His close-knit body accepted and relished it, finding a new pleasure in strength: thirty-seven years old and very young.

One tiny voice was near, persistent. Paul walked around the boat, where Dorothy and Wright still slept. The starboard wing, parting from the lifeboat, had gashed a tree trunk, littering the ground with branches. The source of the voice was a brown lump, twenty feet up, clinging head downward, a body small as a sparrow's, wings folded like a bat's. As he watched they spread, quivered, and relaxed. Head and ears were mousy, the neck long, with a hump at its base. The throat pulsed at each cry. Near Paul's foot lay a fabric like an oriole's nest, fastened to a twig that had been torn from the tree. Three young had tumbled out. One was not mangled but all were dead, hairless, poignantly ugly. "Sorry, baby--our first act on Lucifer."

The parent creature made another abortive motion as Paul took up the young.

Its high lament was not what he and Dorothy had heard in the night.

That had been continuing when he slipped out to watch for dawn, and it had ended at some unnoticed moment--profoundly different, surely far off....

He tried to study the dead things as Sears Oliphant would want to do.

Two were hopelessly torn; he dug a hole in the humus and dropped those in, smoothing the surface, wondering at his need for an act which could mean nothing to the unhappy morsel of perception on the tree trunk. The third, and the nest, he carried around the boat where the light was better.

All seven digits of the forelimb spread into a membranous wing; the hind leg divided at the ankle, three toes anchoring the wing, the other four fused into a slim foot which had suction pads. He cradled the bit of mortality in his palm, recalling a thing Wright had said when they entered the lifeboat. Captain Jensen, waiting for take-off at the s.p.a.ceport, trying, as he drank sherry with Christopher Wright, to look at the venture under the aspect of eternity, had said he liked the philosophical implications of _Argo's_ converter, into which his own body was strangely soon to pa.s.s. What was Wright's comment eleven years later? "All life is cannibalism, benign or not: we are still eating the dinosaurs." There had been more, which Paul could not remember. So, man drove eleven years through s.p.a.ce and killed three babies. _But there was no element of malevolence_....

Perhaps there was none in most of man's actions over the millennia.

Wright crawled out, stiff-limbed and unrested.

"'Morning, Doc. Let me introduce _Enigma Luciferensis_."

"'Luciferensis' won't do." Wright peered down. "Everything is 'Luciferensis,' including the posterity Dot mentioned. Well now, what----"

"A nestling. Our crash broke the nest and killed the young."

Wright fingered the fabric. "Beautiful. Leaves gummed together with some secretion." With a doctor's intentness he added: "How d'you feel?"

"Good."

A shadow circled Paul, settled on his arm, hobbling toward his palm and what it held. He felt the suction cups; with a careful mouth the creature took up its dead and flew away. "I've been remembering something you said: life eating life--without too much concern for the second law of thermodynamics. Forgive us our trespa.s.ses.... Good morning, lady."

"What did I miss?" Dorothy had glimpsed the departure.

"Lucifer's idea of a bat. I think that big flying thing I saw from the lifeboat was shaped like this midget. Haven't seen any birds."

Dorothy hugged his arm. "Not even one measly robin?"

"Sorry, Whifflepuff--fresh out of robins."

Wright blinked at his compa.s.s. "Meadow that way." Paul was inattentive, needing the warm quiet of the woman beside him. Wright added: "First, breakfast." He broke the seal of a ration package and snarled. "Thirty days, I b'lieve you said. Antique garbage--dehydrated hay."

Dorothy said, "You're nicest when you're mad, Doc. We'll soon have to try the local stuff, I suppose."

"Uh-huh. But no guinea-pig work for you or Ann."

She was startled. "Why not? I can digest boilerplate."

"Two women on Lucifer: valuable livestock." Wright smiled with his mouth full. "I'm boss, remember? For guinea-pig work, the men draw lots."

She was grave. "I won't argue. It so happens----" She peeked into the nest. "Poor little fuzzies lined it with fur. Their own, I'll bet."

"It so happens what, dear?"

"Ah.... This eleven-year-old gook.u.m claims to be coffee. Can we make a fire? Looks like dead wood over there."

The branches burned aromatically; the morning was growing into deep warmth, but still with freshness. Wright said, "Coffee my shirt."

Dorothy tasted it. "Brr...! I was about to say when I interrupted myself, it so happens I'm six or seven weeks pregnant, I think."

"Six----" Wright set his aluminum cup carefully upside down. Paul mumbled, "That's what's been on your mind."