25 Short Stories and Novellas Part 13

That night, the three of us stood guard in the control-room together. The drive was smashed anyway. The wires were soldered in so many places by now that the control panel was a ma.s.s of s.h.i.+ning alloy, and I knew that a few more such sabotagings and it would be impossible to patch it together any more -- if it wasn't so already.

The next night, I just didn't knock off. I continued soldering right on after dinner (and a pretty skimpy dinner it was, now that we were on close rations) and far on into the night.

By morning, it was as if I hadn't done a thing.

'I give up,' I announced, surveying the damage. 'I don't see any sense in ruining my nerves trying to fix a thing that won't stay fixed.'

Holdreth nodded. He looked terribly pale. 'We'll have to find some new approach.'

'Yeah. Some new approach.'

I yanked open the food closet and examined our stock. Even figuring in the synthetics we would have fed to the animals if we hadn't released them, we were low on food. We had overstayed even the safety margin. It would be a hungry trip back -- if we ever did get back.

I clambered through the hatch and sprawled down on a big rock near the s.h.i.+p. One of the furless dogs came over and nuzzled in my s.h.i.+rt. Davison stepped to the hatch and called down to me.

'What are you doing out there, Gus?'

'Just getting a little fresh air. I'm sick of living aboard that s.h.i.+p.' I scratched the dog behind his pointed ears, and looked around.

The animals had lost most of their curiosity about us, and didn't congregate the way they used to. They were meandering all over the plain, nibbling at little deposits of a white doughy substance. It precipitated every night. 'Manna,' we called it. All the animals seemed to live on it.

I folded my arms and leaned back.

We were getting to look awfully lean by the eighth day. I wasn't even trying to fix the s.h.i.+p any more; the hunger was starting to get me. But I saw Davison puttering around with my solderbeam.

'What are you doing?'

'I'm going to repair the drive,' he said. 'You don't want to, but we can't just sit around, you know.' His nose was deep in my repair guide, and he was fumbling with the release on the solderbeam.

I shrugged. 'Go ahead, if you want to.' I didn't care what he did. All I cared about was the gaping emptiness in my stomach, and about the dimly grasped fact that somehow we were stuck here for good.

'Gus?'

'Yeah?'

'I think it's time I told you something. I've been eating the manna for four days. It's good. It's nouris.h.i.+ng stuff.'

'You've been eating -- the manna? Something that grows on an alien world? You crazy?'

'What else can we do? Starve?'

I smiled feebly, admitting that he was right. From somewhere in the back of the s.h.i.+p came the sounds of Holdreth moving around. Holdreth had taken this thing worse than any of us. He had a family back on Earth, and he was beginning to realize that he wasn't ever going to see them again.

'Why don't you get Holdreth?' Davison suggested. 'Go out there and stuff yourselves with the manna. You've got to eat something.'

'Yeah. What can I lose?' Moving like a mechanical man, I headed towards Holdreth's cabin. We would go out and eat the manna and cease being hungry, one way or another.

'Clyde?' I called. 'Clyde?'

I entered his cabin. He was sitting at his desk, shaking convulsively, staring at the two streams of blood that trickled in red spurts from his slashed wrists.

_'Clyde!'_ He made no protest as I dragged him towards the infirmary cabin and got tourniquets around his arms, cutting off the bleeding. He just stared dully ahead, sobbing.

I slapped him and he came around. He shook his head dizzily, as if he didn't know where he was.

'I -- I -- '.

'Easy, Clyde. Everything's all right.'

'It's _not_ all right,' he said hollowly. 'I'm still alive. Why didn't you let me die? Why didn't you -- '

Davison entered the cabin. 'What's been happening, Gus?'

'It's Clyde. The pressure's getting him. He tried to kill himself, but I think he's all right now. Get him something to eat, will you?'

We had Holdreth straightened around by evening. Davison gathered as much of the manna as he could find, and we held a feast.

'I wish we had nerve enough to kill some of the local fauna,' Davison said. 'Then we'd have a feast -- steaks and everything!'

'The bacteria,' Holdreth pointed out quietly. 'We don't dare.'

'I know. But it's a thought.'

'No more thoughts,' I said sharply. 'Tomorrow morning we start work on the drive panel again. Maybe with some food in our bellies we'll be able to keep awake and see what's happening here.'

Holdreth smiled. 'Good. I can't wait to get out of this s.h.i.+p and back to a normal existence. G.o.d, I just can't wait!'

'Let's get some sleep,' I said. 'Tomorrow we'll give it another try. We'll get back,' I said with a confidence I didn't feel.

The following morning I rose early and got my tool-kit. My head was clear, and I was trying to put the pieces together without much luck. I started towards the control cabin.

And stopped.

And looked out the viewport.

I went back and awoke Holdreth and Davison. 'Take a look out the port,' I said hoa.r.s.ely.

They looked. They gaped.

'It looks just like my house,' Holdreth said. 'My house on Earth.' 'With all the comforts of home inside, I'll bet.' I walked forward uneasily and lowered myself through the hatch. 'Let's go look at it.'

We approached it, while the animals frolicked around us. The big giraffe came near and shook its head gravely. The house stood in the middle of the clearing, small and neat and freshly painted.

I saw it now. During the night, invisible hands had put it there. Had a.s.sembled and built a cosy little Earth-type house and dropped it next to our s.h.i.+p for us to live in.

'Just like my house,' Holdreth repeated in wonderment.

'It should be,' I said. 'They grabbed the model from your mind, as soon as they found out we couldn't live on the s.h.i.+p indefinitely.'

Holdreth and Davison asked as one, 'What do you mean?'

'You mean you haven't figured this place out yet?' I licked my lips, getting myself used to the fact that I was going to spend the rest of my life here. 'You mean you don't realize what this house is intended to be?'

They shook their heads, baffled. I glanced around, from the house to the useless s.h.i.+p to the jungle to the plain to the little pond. It all made sense now.

'They want to keep us happy,' I said. 'They know we weren't thriving aboard the s.h.i.+p, so they -- they built us something a little more like home.'

'_They?_ The giraffes?'

'Forget the giraffes. They tried to warn us, but it's too late. They're intelligent beings, but they're prisoners just like us. I'm talking about the ones who run this place. The super-aliens who make us sabotage our own s.h.i.+p and not even know we're doing it, who stand someplace up there and gape at us. The ones who dredged together this motley a.s.sortment of beasts from all over the galaxy. Now we've been collected too. This whole d.a.m.ned place is just a zoo -- a zoo for aliens so far ahead of us we don't dare dream what they're like.'

I looked up at the s.h.i.+mmering blue-green sky, where invisible bars seemed to restrain us, and sank down dismally on the porch of our new home. I was resigned. There wasn't any sense in struggling against _them_.

I could see the neat little placard now: * * * *

EARTHMEN. Native Habitat, Sol III.

Death Do Us Part.

by Robert Silverberg.

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IT WAS her first, his seventh. She was 32, he was 363: the good old April/September number. They honeymooned in Venice, Nairobi, the Malaysia Pleasure Dome, and one of the posh L-5 resorts, a s.h.i.+mmering gla.s.sy sphere with round-the-clock sunlight and waterfalls that tumbled like cascades of diamonds, and then they came home to his lovely sky-house suspended on tremulous guy-wires a thousand meters above the Pacific to begin the everyday part of their life together.

Her friends couldn't get over it. "He's ten times your age!" they would exclaim. "How could you possibly want anybody that old?" Marilisa admitted that marrying Leo was more of a lark for her than anything else. An impulsive thing; a sudden impetuous leap. Marriages weren't forever, after all -- just thirty or forty years and then you moved along. But Leo was sweet and kind and actually quite s.e.xy. And he had wanted her so much. He genuinely did seem to love her. Why should his age be an issue? He didn't appear to be any older than 35 or so. These days you could look as young as you liked. Leo did his Process faithfully and punctually, twice each decade, and it kept him as das.h.i.+ng and vigorous as a boy.

There were little drawbacks, of course. Once upon a time, long long ago, he had been a friend of Marilisa's great-grandmother: they might even have been lovers. She wasn't going to ask. Such things sometimes happened and you simply had to work your way around them. And then also he had an ex-wife on the scene, Number Three, Katrin, 247 years old and not looking a day over 30. She was constantly hovering about. Leo still had warm feelings for her. "A wonderfully dear woman, a good and loyal friend," he would say. "When you get to know her you'll be as fond of her as I am." That one was hard, all right. What was almost as bad, he had children three times Marilisa's age and more. One of them -- the next-to-youngest, Fyodor -- had an insufferable and presumptuous way of winking and sn.i.g.g.e.ring at her, that hundred-year-old son of a b.i.t.c.h. "I want you to meet our father's newest toy," Fyodor said of her, once, when yet another of Leo's centenarian sons, previously unsuspected by Marilisa, turned up. "We get to play with her when he's tired of her." Someday Marilisa was going to pay him back for that.

Still and all, she had no serious complaints. Leo was an ideal first husband: wise, warm, loving, attentive, generous. She felt nothing but the greatest tenderness for him. And then too he was so immeasurably experienced in the ways of the world. If being married to him was a little like being married to Abraham Lincoln or Augustus Caesar, well, so be it: they had been great men, and so was Leo. He was endlessly fascinating. He was like seven husbands rolled into one. She had no regrets, none at all, not really.

In the spring of '87 they go to Capri for their first anniversary. Their hotel is a reconstructed Roman villa on the southern slope of Monte Tiberio: alabaster walls frescoed in black and red, a brilliantly colored mosaic of sea-creatures in the marble bathtub, a broad travertine terrace that looks out over the sea. They stand together in the darkness, staring at the awesome sparkle of the stars. A crescent moon slashes across the night. His arm is around her; her head rests against his breast. Though she is a tall woman, Marilisa is barely heart-high to him.

"Tomorrow at sunrise," he says, "we'll see the Blue Grotto. And then in the afternoon we'll hike down below here to the Cave of the Mater Magna. I always get a s.h.i.+ver when I'm there. Thinking about the ancient islanders who wors.h.i.+pped their G.o.ddess under that cliff, somewhere back in the Pleistocene. Their rites and rituals, the offerings they made to her."

"Is that when you first came here?" she asks, keeping it light and sly. "Somewhere back in the Pleistocene?"

"A little later than that, really. The Renaissance, I think it was. Leonardo and I traveled down together from Florence -- "

"You and Leonardo, you were just like that."

"Like that, yes. But not like that, if you take my meaning."

"And Cosimo di' Medici. Another one from the good old days. Cosimo gave such great parties, right?"

"That was Lorenzo," he says. "Lorenzo the Magnificent, Cosimo's grandson. Much more fun than the old man. You would have adored him."

"I almost think you're serious when you talk like that."

"I'm always serious. Even when I'm not." His arm tightens around her. He leans forward and down, and buries a kiss in her thick dark hair. "I love you," he whispers.

"I love you," she says. "You're the best first husband a girl could want."

"You're the finest last wife a man could ever desire."

The words skewer her. Last wife? Is he expecting to die in the next ten or twenty or thirty years? He is old -- ancient -- but n.o.body has any idea yet where the limits of Process lie. Five hundred years? A thousand? Who can say? No one able to afford the treatments has died a natural death yet, in the four hundred years since Process was invented. Why, then, does he speak so knowingly of her as his last wife? He may live long enough to have seven, ten, fifty wives after her.

Marilisa is silent a long while.

Then she asks him, quietly, uncertainly, "I don't understand why you said that."

"Said what?"

"The thing about my being your last wife."

He hesitates just a moment. "But why would I ever want another, now that I have you?"

"Am I so utterly perfect?"

"I love you."

"You loved Tedesca and Thane and Iavilda too," she says. "And Miaule and Katrin." She is counting on her fingers in the darkness. One wife missing from the list. "And -- Syantha. See, I know all their names. You must have loved them but the marriages ended anyway. They have to end. No matter how much you love a person, you can't keep a marriage going forever."

"How do you know that?"

"I just do. Everybody knows it."

"I would like this marriage never to end," he tells her. "I'd like it to go on and on and on. To continue to the end of time. Is that all right? Is such a sentiment permissible, do you think?"

"What a romantic you are, Leo!"

"What else can I be but romantic, tonight? This place; the spring night; the moon, the stars, the sea; the fragrance of the flowers in the air. Our anniversary. I love you. Nothing will ever end for us. Nothing."