Fish Tails (29 page)

“Now, your pa might have told you your farm is a hundred acres, or four hundred, or whatever . . .”

“Four hunnert twenty.”

“Four hundred twenty. But have you ever measured it?”

Willum started to get up, then decided he was comfortable where he was, resting against Abasio's chest, with Abasio's arms around him. He frowned and shook his head. “No. Nobody does that. Dad just takes us out and shows us the land starts from the big white rock by the road, the one with his great-­great-­grandpa's name cut into it, then you walk straight by the shortest way to the creek, left along the creek all the way to where it runs into the big gully, left again, back along the gully to the big red rock shaped like a cow, and then straight across to the black standing stone by the road, and from there down the road to the white rock again. Like that. Dad must've showed all us kids twenty times 'zackly like that.”

“Yes,” Abasio agreed. “And you believed that was the way to do it, right? We tend to accept things ­people tell us, especially family and good friends. So when some of our folks told us everyone else went to the stars but we were left behind or our families chose not to go, we believed that. We thought everyone else going off to the stars was perfectly believable. Just so long as nobody counted up—­”

Xulai interrupted him, crying out, “But, Abasio! Remember, there were two ships that did go to the stars from there!”

“I know, you told me. It bothers me a little. You know Olly, she went in that last ship, and she did it to keep those crazy ­people from getting to the solar cannons on the moon. And when she left, she gave me her helmet, and she said to me, ‘Man never went to the stars.' But you say two ships did go . . .”

Xulai nodded. “Yes, that's exactly what she said. She did NOT say, ‘Men never went to the stars.' Or even ‘Men and women never went to the stars.' She said
‘man,'
as in
mankind, the race of man
! The ­people of Earth, all of mankind, all the missing human population of the planet did not go to the stars. I only know of those two ships that went to Lom, about two thousand ­people, and that didn't diminish Earth's population one bit. There were probably more than two thousand babies born on Earth the same day the ships went.” She fetched her own pillow and came to sit in front of Abasio.

“So it really was the Big Kill that took the population down to almost nothing,” he said, shaking his head.

Xulai concluded, “It's all in the library helmet, Abasio. You can find it there.”

Abasio said softly, “But Olly is in the library helmet. So wouldn't she have known? And it was she who told me.”

Xulai never talked to him about Olly. Olly was one of those almost sacred memories that many ­people have, the ones that must not be intruded upon. Like her own deeply secret memories of her mother. She had been afraid to say too much to Abasio! But
someone
had obviously said
too little
. She put her hand on his free shoulder, shaking it gently.

“Abasio, Olly gave you her helmet when she left. Before she gave it to you, she asked the helmet to grant her residence. It's the same technology that was used to send the two ships all that way, a thousand-­year flight. It records the mind and puts the body in stasis. With the helmet, it only records the mind: it read her, right down to the least little memory she had, and gave her residence within the helmet
. The Olly in the helmet
knows only what that Olly knew at that time or what the helmet Olly has chosen to learn since.”

He murmured, “I thought all the information inside the library was shared among the ­people in there!”

He sounded so dismayed, so hurt. Willum stirred. Xulai said very softly, “Abasio, dear heart! If that were so, then they'd all be alike, wouldn't they? They wouldn't be human ­people, they'd be helmet ­people, no difference among them, no individuals. That's not how it works.”

“Then how the hell does it work!” It came out as an accusation. He didn't mean that . . .

She kept her voice low, quiet, unemotional. ”A person taking residence in a library helmet can say where they want to live. The person might say, ‘I want a sunny room, looking out on a lake that changes with the weather.' Or, ‘I want a little house beside a stream.' If the person wants it to be very real, the person can ask to live in the helmet as it would on Earth, sleep, wake up, get hungry, eat and poop just as they would if they were alive. Or the person can experience hunger and the taste and repletion of food perfectly well without experiencing digestion. ­People can define what kind of existence they want . . .

“However, one thing is the same for everyone: whatever the person's place is, house or palace or tent, it has some kind of an entry or door on it. When you put on the helmet and ask for Olly, the helmet knocks on her door or rings her bell or shouts into her tent and tells her Abasio is there to asking for her. Then
it's up to her
whether she talks to you or not. If she talks to you, she can remember anything you tell her. She learns things the same way she would if she were still with us: either
she asks questions and gets answers, or ­people tell her things
.”

“The library helmet could tell her!”

“
Only if she asks it to tell her!
It's up to her! It isn't the helmet's job to educate her or inform her. It's the helmet's job to keep her as a whole person, as she is or becomes. ­People who visit her can tell her things, but the telling is just like in real life.
If she isn't interested in what they say, she will probably forget it.
Or she can ask the helmet to file it for her and bring it up if she needs it or wants it. Just the way you would yourself, writing yourself a note and putting it away.”

“So I could have gone in there, been with her . . . Olly never asked me to do that . . .”

“Abasio, that's
not what she wanted
. She didn't want a helmet Abasio. She wanted
to share your continuing life out here, where you are.
She wanted to be visited by the Abasio who is living in the world, an Abasio who is experiencing new things to share with her.”

“Because she knew she would not have any more . . . experiences.” He felt his own tears and turned his head away.

“That's not true. She
can
have them, through you and others who enter the library from the outside world and knock on her door and say you have things to tell her. Or she can experience anything she asks to experience. I hope you have told her about your life, about our mission
, about your children
. I am positively sure that what she most wanted to know was whether her sacrifice had been worth it. Knowing about your children will convince her of that! She wanted to share your life. That is what made her sacrifice worthwhile. Don't deny it to her.”

She stood up and went to refill her glass, her eyes wavering between Abasio's still, white face and Willum's sleeping one. She had assumed he knew! Wrong assumption. He had
not wanted
to know about it. He had preferred to think of her as if she were living in some other country. Living there, aging, changing in accord with what was happening to her, as though this outside world still affected her. And, of course, if she asked the helmet to do that, it would do that. If the helmet person grew weary of being, the helmet would let the person age and die. And if one did, then someone who asked for that person would be taken to the grave.

Willum sighed, yawned, half opened blurry eyes, and took advantage of the momentary silence. “Tell about the two ships that went to the stars, Xulai.”

“Yes,” said Abasio, as from a great distance. “Tell us a little about them.”

Her mind was wandering, scattered, like a flock of sheep! She mentally circled the flock, making shooing motions, forcing her voice to be as soothing as possible: “Well, they already had the core of a station on the moon, because they'd been beaming sun power down to Earth for several generations. The shuttles took the pioneers up there a hundred or so at a time to be processed and stored in the ships. Processing meant the minds were recorded and filed, the bodies were preserved for later revivification.

“Three ships were planned. Things got so bad on Earth that they decided not to wait for the third ship to be finished. They decided to send the two that were ready. That meant there was one whole shipload of passengers up there on the moon that might not get to go at all, and there was some last-­minute shuffling around as to who would be put into the two ships that went. That's why we don't know for sure who went, unless they were mentioned in messages after they got there.”

Willum asked, “So they did get there?”

Xulai looked up, surprised. “Oh, yes, we know the ships got there. The ships left in our year 2140. In Earth year 3110, after roughly a thousand Earth years, both ships reached what we called the Q System and landed on the fourth planet from its sun. The planet already had intelligent life on it, and both ships sent messages saying they'd landed.”

“A thousand years?” Abasio mused. “Forty generations of ­people here on Earth. Why doesn't anyone outside your little circle know about this?”

She shook her head at him. “Oh, for heaven's sake, Abasio! As you told Willum, it happened over a thousand years ago! Everyone who had any interest in it knew! By that time, we were beginning to hear about the waters rising, and Tingawa switched its attention to long-­term survival here on Earth—­that was also about the time of the Visitation!”

“Visitation?”

“Yes. In Tingawa. Shortly after or concurrent with ­people on Earth learning about the waters rising, they received a visitor. In referring to the episode, the ­people in Tingawa always referred to it as ‘the Visitation' because the visitor was so mysterious, wearing long robes and a veil, speaking in a strange voice. He—­our ­people assumed it was a he—­told them he had just completed a translation of some pre–Big Kill documents on genetic research, and he had thought it best to bring them to Tingawa.”

“Odd, but scarcely memorable for later ages,” Abasio remarked.

She looked past him with a peculiar smile. “Well, dear one, I'm of the later ages, and I choose to remember it because those documents are why I was born, and my mother, and possibly you, and certainly our babies. What the Wazeer Nawt gave to Tingawan scientists formed the basis of the sea-­children research. We wouldn't be here except for them.”

He turned to her in amazement. “You're joking? You're not joking! Who or what was this Wazeer Nawt?”

“That's almost a rhyme. I wish we had an answer to who or what! Our ­people evidently asked the strange visitor what his name was, and he told them they could call him
the
Wazeer Nawt. Our ­people believed ‘wazeer' was a title, like doctor or professor or reverend.”

“Did he say where the documents came from?”

“Salvage. He was quite mysterious about it. He said they'd been salvaged from a buried university. What were we talking about before I mentioned the the Visitation?” She leaned into the wagon and retrieved a light blanket.

“The ships. You were saying you did hear from the ships.”

“Well, one of the ships landed down in a valley, all the women on it left it, and the men who were left there started what they called a ‘university.' That was kind of strange. It blew itself up later, some fault in its systems. The other ship sent its settlers out; they joined the women who had left the other ship, and within fifty years, there were a dozen villages and many farms. The place was called Lom, as you know. You've dreamed about it.”

“Did they know about the waters rising?”

She spread the blanket over the sleeping boy. “We didn't know the whole world was going to be drowned. We didn't know about that until much later, but yes, Lom was told about it.”

Leaving Willum asleep by the wagon, the two of them took a stroll along the road, taking time to admire the late-­blooming flowers peering up through the drying grasses. As they returned, they passed a gooseherd with his flock of geese just leaving one of the little river ponds downhill from the Saltgosh poultry houses. Abruptly, responding to some stimulus Xulai neither saw nor heard, the flock changed its character as simultaneously each slowly walking, gabbling goose suddenly extended its wings and ran to get under cover. Being domestic geese, too large to fly, they moved instead in a kind of foot-­pumping, wing-­scooping pace that propelled them rapidly in a series of neck-­stretched, half-­sailing broad jumps. In a moment all were hidden among a grove that clustered against the cliff wall. Here and there a muffled honk marked a hiding place. Xulai saw one bright yellow beak stretched vertically alongside a young, white-­trunked tree, bill pointed straight up, beady eyes searching the sky.

Xulai looked up. High! Higher! Wings at the very summit of the sky. The thing was far, very far up there, flying east toward a mountain that loomed enormously on the serrated horizon. After a time, wings slipped
behind
the mountain, almost at its peak. The wings . . . too large! Far too large! Nothing that flew could be large enough to be seen at that distance! Not flying
behind
that peak and still be seen from here!

Abasio's voice was sepulchral. “Speak of the devil—­or near as: Griffin! That's the only thing it could be. The one I knew lived on the eastern slope of the mountains where we're going.” Though the one he knew had not been anywhere near that size! Could it have grown? Surely it had been fully grown when he had been carried back to the Gaddir House, cushioned in its mane.

Something stirred in Xulai like a live thing in a burrow, an occupant of a closed box, something moving that did not often move. She felt it with all of her. As she had felt when she met Abasio. As she had felt at various other times when warnings had been sent or traps had been laid in her path. She did not want to speak of the feeling, but could not do otherwise. Something portentous, busy portending!