If All Else Fails (19 page)

The old man stared,
blind, into the cameras like a fish out of water.

"I no longer speak
of him as my son. He is a stranger to me. He is not of our way. He is some dead man who lives in
his body." That was what the old man tried to say but they switched back to the network and his
words went un-broadcast as if they had never been spoken.

"Some people have
no pride in anything," said the com­mentator, folding up the microphone cable with
disgust.

Through the silence
of space, the lunar module sank like a metal fist toward the surface of the moon. His eyes were
blind with control. His hands moved in predetermined paths, pushing predesignated buttons. The
instrumentation controlled the ship and his understanding of it was as cold and calculated a
piece of instrumentation as the on-board computer was.

Touchdown was by
the book, smooth, precise, no waste motion.

The dancers moved
again. The wind had gone, the sounds had died. The empty moon rolled over on its back. "Raven!"
cried the dancers and they moved, rising in a wave. They moved beside the ocean and the fishwoman
moved with them, rose up from the blood and followed them with the dead hope. Dead hope. No.
There was always the stars. The
stars.
Hope would yet live, climbing valleys into the shade.

The sun come again?
Raven?

The reptiles,
protesting, breed impatiently beneath the shore of the ballroom floor. "Yes, he yet lives," they
cry in anguish and they shed their skins in mourning for a reptile age that might have been.
Raven comes.

The fishwoman moves
through the night, shattering the slender rib cages of the dead with her heavy footsteps. Across
the dead valley, away from the ocean, into the frozen light.

Just outside the
airlock door, his face awaits him. The thing that covers his heart beckons. All that he has
sought throughout his life, the answer to some mystery greater than the life that would have
trapped him had he stayed in the village and ways of his people. He savors the moment. All of his
life, escaping his past, has been for this moment. He depresses the door lever and there is a
small snake hiss of es­caping air.

His rush to step
out sends him spinning down the ladder, dangerously. The first man, the first human being to step
here! Down he moves, stepping off the last step onto the gray soil! The first! His eyes are
electrified with wonder, with completion. No regrets, alive, no sense of loss.

The fishwoman moves
down the slope of the crater. It is true. Raven has come. She approaches unseen.

"I am the first,"
he shouts, filled with some terrible ec­stasy.

She speaks. Once.
And he turns to look at her, all covered with woman dust and blood and filled with drowned
oceans. She speaks again. Softly, the almost recognizable words.

His face breaks and
shrivels, crushing his heart like an angry wave beating the shore.

She speaks again,
pleading, beckoning. Why can he not understand her? The words are not his. He has never owned
them.

She speaks. She
begs. He falls silently into the soft soil, death in his eyes. She holds out a shield decorated
with the symbol of his father's clan.

"Make us live again
in you!" cries the fishwoman pite-ously, in words that do not touch him. And he does not take the
shield from her. She falls beside him, bleeding, pulled down by lizards, and the dance is
finished.

He had never
learned the language or ways of his father. He could not understand her. He had lost his people.
Raven was dead.

It was strange and
spring and the clouds did barrel rolls overhead. He awoke before dawn and went into the empty
room where his waking life lived. The glassless windows brought the cool winds of the twin-moon
season into the room and a chill worked into him slowly, a sleepless chill that moved through
him.

He faced himself in
the shaving mirror and remembered how it had been. There had been a time when he had taken pride
in his aloneness, in having no people of his own kind closer than fifty miles away. But the
dark-eyed young man he now faced in his mirror had been made over, had been changed by something
deep and restless within him. Five years of the new world, five years living a life unfurnished
with the complicated cloth of other human beings.

He rolled his
tongue over his lips uneasily, disturbed by an unfamiliar taste, and his hand unconsciously
strayed to his cheek in an imagined caress.

Behind the cabin,
the stefel dogs moved restlessly on poi­son-tipped spines in the corral. They were strangely
sensi­tive to the moods of those around them and now they shifted nervously, coiling and
uncoiling spinal tendrils in flowing sheaves around their brain pouches. Their seasonal
restlessness matched his own.

Gantry moved
through the doorless-cabin entrance, pick­ing up the feeding pails near the door. The metal armor
on his legs clanked together as he walked. At the sound of his
approach, the stefel dogs began moving together in the cen­ter of
the corral. They massed their coils around a central core, forming an interwoven tube dangling
into the air like a cannon barrel.

Gantry moved into
the feeding shed near the corral and emerged with two pails of honey, heavily laced with
potas­sium cyanide. The tube widened at the end as he leaned the bucket over the rail of the
metal fence. The poison spines hissed through the air, beating against the fence at him. The
spines bounced off his leg armor. One spine grazed the bucket, nearly hitting his hand. He jumped
back with a curse, nearly dropping the bucket. The spines were instantly fatal. It was the second
time in three weeks that he had come near to getting stung. I'm getting careless, he told
himself; either that, or I don't care anymore.

He put the bucket
back to the fence, being a little more careful where he placed his hands on the bucket this time.
The tube of coiled tendrils widened even further as he poured the sweet poison down the fleshy
straw the stefel dogs had formed. The honey mixture ran slowly down the tube and the blue beast
began the first color change, turning a faint green as the poison began working through the
cel­lular walls.

It took a long time
for the bucket to empty and it gave him time to think. His thoughts turned to the time when he
had come here. Five years ago he had been a different per­son and this world had been all new to
him. The call for vol­unteers, for pioneers, had come and Gantry had been the restless type,
filled with a burning itch for something differ­ent He'd been one of the first to sign up, one of
the first col­onists to settle on Kingane planet and for five years he had had no
regrets.

He was twenty-four
when he landed, impatient of the stay-at-home life he had left on earth. He had come here
hoping to rid himself forever of the settled
ways of his own kind.

But in the end of
his fifth year, as he tended his herd of stefel dogs under the twin moons, a dissatisfaction and
a longing began in him that made his steps slow and uncer­tain. There was no longer any pleasure
in the long stretches of Kingane summers, summers that brought the darbyo birds across the sky,
circling in complicated patterns above. Beautiful creatures they were, fire red and snow white,
si­lent like nights of dreams, wheeling like specters across the twilight skies.

But now the coming
of the winter and the pebble storms oppressed him. The weather was always mild in the dead of
winter and though the storms, really meteor-fragment showers, were short, it was necessary to
stay inside for the two months of winter. He had faced four winters without in­cident, exercising
daily, planning the new buildings, the stefel dog barns he knew he would someday build. But now
this spring, winter yet five months away, he was already looking toward the next winter with a
feeling of being trapped within himself.

He made good money,
more than a man almost had a right to make. And with that money, he'd filled his empty cabin with
things—amusements, books, things that occupied, him for a little while. Stefel dogs, carefully
tended until they reached four and one half months old and then poi­soned with potassium cyanide,
produced a very fine crop of nerve tissue—nerve tissue unlike human tissue in that it could
regenerate. It had become the most important discov­ery of the five new worlds. It made him a
rich man and kept the idle rich on earth very, very young. A rich man would pay plenty for a
stefel-tissue transplant. The stefel tissue re­placed nerve tissue, replicating the exact genetic
structure and information encoded on the decaying nerve tissue it re­placed. A small transplant
of stefel tissue eventually replaced the entire cellular structure of a man's brain, becom­ing an
effectual replacement immune to the ravages of time and able to regenerate itself
constantly.

It was the
discovery of the stefel dogs that had given man the promise of immortality. Before stefel
transplants, the ability to synthesize organs had increased the life-span of man to two hundred
years. They had synthetic hearts, syn­thetic lungs, livers, all the organs, even veins, arteries
and skin. All these things had been possible because they could implant grafts taken from each of
these organs and grow them in nutrient plastic, shaping them into new organs, tougher than the
old ones. But the one thing beyond man's capabilities was the ability to regenerate brain and
nerve tis­sue. They could slow down the aging process but they could not stop it entirely, not
until Kingane planet opened itself to colonists and the hardy settlers discovered the stefel
dogs.

The tube had filled
with the honey mixture and the second color change began and Gantry watched them carefully. It
was important that they not separate until he was sure they had each absorbed enough of the
poison. His first year there, they had separated too quickly and the pools of nerve tissue that
the stefel dogs degenerated into at death had been contaminated with unconverted brain tissue, an
unpleasant experience and a very costly one. The unoxidized brain tis­sue began forming into
crippled stefel dogs, crying piteously through their half-formed air sacs, fouling the nerve
tissue with tiny synaptic runners expanded through the pools of oxidized material.

One of the tendrils
near the rim of the feeding tube began fluttering, beginning to uncoil. Just narrowly missing the
waving rows of poisonous spines that clattered up at him, Gantry ran his hand around the rim of
the tube. His quick movement enticed the creatures into thinking that more food was coming down
the tube. The tendril curled back into position as his hand made a complete circuit of the tube
rim. Gantry moved his hand away, satisfied that the tendrils would stay in place long enough to
allow enough poison through to complete the process.

He turned away from
the creatures, absorbed in his thoughts, and walked back into the feeding shed. The sound of the
generators kicking in caused a ripple in the brain-pouch fabrics of the stefel dogs. The
vibration of the pump engines, which kicked on as soon as the generators had reached a sufficient
level to run them, caused boil-like cor­rugations across the flat surfaces of the creatures'
hairless bodies. The eyestalks began receding, settling into the folds of flesh above the exposed
air sacs that flowed freely across the surface of the squat, now blue-gray creatures.

Gantry emerged from
the building dragging a flexible length of tubing obviously connected to the machines within the
interior of the feeding shed. There was a nozzle attached to the end of the hose and a thin metal
tube, with a rubberoid bulb attached, dangled from a point about five inches away from the end of
the tubing.

Gantry climbed over
the low corral bars and moved to­ward the low end of the corral. The floor of the corral was made
of hard-formed plastic, tilted at an angle, divided by a shallow trench around the outside of the
enclosure that also bisected the middle of the corral. Mindful of the swinging poison spines
reaching out toward him, Gantry inserted the hose in a groove fitted to the side of the center
pool. The end of the tubing dangled into the center of the trench. He squeezed the bulb several
times to force air out of the line.

Already the tube of
the dogs was beginning to fold in on itself. The air sacs began sinking into the skin as the
struc­tures that held them in place began dissolving. The blood red color of the last change
suffused through the dying crea­tures like a dying sunset. There was a hissing, melting sound and
Gantry sensed a harsh, unpleasant chemical tang to the air.

It was this part of
the process that had always disturbed him. It was the alienness of the creatures that bothered
him. Their silence, their lack of struggle. A kind of alien intelli­gence that seemed in no way
affected by external circum­stance, yet that was sensitive to things like fear, loneliness and
restlessness but contained no seeming awareness of its own destruction. At times Gantry was
convinced that the creatures were humoring him, as if they were somehow above mortal
considerations. Once when he had taken ill, he'd found them clustered sympathetically around the
front entrance of his cabin, their poison spines folded inward inoffensively. Of course it was
only his impression of them, but they seemed to radiate emotions, to be sensitive to things
around them. How they had crawled out of their pen without the legs that were removed surgically
at birth, he never knew. He was positive he had sensed their concern, intuited it from the waving
motions of the spinal tendrils. It had been an unnerving experience, one that had remained with
him for a long, long time.