The Many-Coloured Land - 1 (6 page)

Claude never thought about the inevitable end unI'll it was upon them. He had a vague notion that they would someday drift off quietly together in their sleep. The reality, of course, was less tidy. Claude's Polish peasant body proved in the end to have a much greater staying power than that of his Afro-American wife. The time came when Genevieve had to go to the Hospice with Claude accompanying her. They were welcomed by Sister Roccaro, a tall and open-faced woman, who took personal charge of the physical and spiritual consolation of the dying scientist and her husband.

Genevieve, riddled with osteoporosis, partly paralyzed and dulled by a series of small strokes, was a long time passing. She may have been aware of her husband's efforts to comfort her, but she gave very little evidence of it. Suffering no pain, she spent her days sedated in a dreamy reverie or in sleep. Sister Roccaro found that more and more of her professional efforts were devoted to dealing with Claude, who was frustrated and deeply depressed by his wife's slow drift toward life's end.

The old man was still physically sturdy at the age of one hundred and thirty-three, so the nun often took him walking in the mountains. They tramped the misty evergreen forests of the Cascade Range and fished for trout in streams running off the Mount Hood glaciers. They checklisted birds and wild-flowers as high summer came on, climbed the flanks of Hood, and spent hot afternoons sitting in the shade on the mountainside without speaking, for Majewski was unable or unwilling to verbalize his grief.

One morning in the early Jury of 2110, Genevieve Logan began to sink quickly. She and Claude could only touch one another now, since she could no longer see or hear or speak. When the sickroom monitor showed that the old woman's brain had ceased to function, the Sister celebrated the Mass of Departure and gave the last anointing. Claude turned off the machines himself and sat beside the bed holding Genevieve's skeletal brown hand unI'll the warmth left it.

Sister Roccaro gently pressed the wrinkled coffee-colored lids down over the dead scientist's eyes. "Would you like to stay with her awhile, Claude?"

The old man smiled absently. "She's not here, Amerie. Would you walk with me if no one else needs you for a while? It's still early. I think I'd like to talk."

So they put on boots and went out again to the mountain, the trip via egg taking only a few minutes. Parking at Cloud Cap, they ascended Cooper Spur by an easy trail and came to a hah below Tie-in Rock, on a ridge at the 2800-meter level. They found a comfortable place to sit and took out canteens and hutches. Just below was Hood's Eliot Glacier. To the north, beyond the Columbia River Gorge, were Mount Adams and distant Rainier, both snow-crowned like Hood. The symmetrical cone of Mount St. Helens, to the west downriver, sent up a gray plume of smoke and volcanic steam.

Majewski said, "Pretty up here, isn't it? When Gen and I were kids, St. Helens was cold. They were still logging the forests. Dams blocked the Columbia, so the salmon had to climb upstream on fish ladders. Port Oregon Metro was still called Portland and Fort Vancouver. And there was a little smog, and some overcrowding if you wanted to live where the jobs were. But all in all, life was pretty good out here, even in the bad old days when St. Helens erupted. It was only toward the very end, before the Intervention when the world was running out of energy and the technoeconomy collapsing, that this Pacific North-west country started to share some of the griefs of the rest of the world."

He pointed eastward, toward the dry canyons and the high-desert scrub of the old lava plateau beyond the Cascades.

"Out there lie the John Day fossil beds. Gen and I did our first collecting there when we were students. Maybe thirty or forty million years ago, that desert was a lush meadowland with forested hills. It had a big population of mammals, rhinos, horses, camels, oreodonts, we call them cookie monsters, and even giant dogs and saber-tooth cats. Then one day the volcanoes began to erupt. They spread a deep blanket of ash and debris all over these eastern plains. The plants were buried and the streams and lakes were poisoned. There were pyroclastic flows, kind of a fiery cloud made of gas and ash and bits of lava, racing along faster than a hundred-fifty kloms an hour."

He slowly unwrapped a sandwich, bit, and chewed. The nun said nothing. She took off her bandanna head scarf and used it to wipe the sweat from her wide brow.

"No matter how fast or how far those poor animals ran, they couldn't escape. They were buried in the layers of ash. And then the volcanism stopped. Rain washed away the poisons and the plants came back. After a while, the animals returned, too, and repopulated the land. But the good life didn't last. The volcanoes erupted again, and there were more showers of ashes. It happened over and over again throughout the next fifteen million years or so. The killing and the repopulating, the shower of death and the return of life. Layer after layer of fossils and ashes were laid down out there. The John Day formation is more than half a klom thick, and there are similar formations above and below it."

As the old man spoke, the nun sat staring at the tableland to the east. A pair of giant condors circled slowly in a thermal. Below them, a tight formation of nine egg-shaped flying craft wafted slowly along the course of an invisible canyon.

"The ash beds were capped with thick lava. Then, after more millions of years, rivers cut down through the rock and into the ash layers below. Gen and I found fossils along the watercourses, not just bones and teeth, but even leaf-prints and whole flowers pressed into the finer layers of ash. The records of a whole series of vanished worlds. Very poignant. At night, she and I would make love under the desert stars and look at the Milky Way in Sagittarius. We'd wonder how the constellations had looked to all those extinct animals. And how much longer poor old mankind could hang on before it was buried in its own ash bed, waiting for paleontologists from Sagittarius to come dig us up after another thirty million years."

He chuckled. "Melodrama. One of the hazards of digging fossils in a romantic setting." He ate the rest of his sandwich and drank from the canteen. Then he said, "Genevieve," and was quiet for a long time.

"Were you shocked by the Intervention?" Sister Roccaro asked at last. "Some of the older people I've counseled seemed almost disappointed that humanity was spared its just ecological deserts."

"It was tough on the Schadenfreude crowd," Majewski agreed, grinning. 'The ones who viewed humankind as a sort of plague organism spoiling what might otherwise have been a pretty good planet. But paleontologists tend to take a long view of life. Some creatures survive, some become extinct. But no matter how great the ecological disaster, the paradox called life keeps on defying entropy and trying to perfect itself. Hard times just seem to help evolution. The Pleistocene Ice Age and phivials could have killed off all the plant-eating hominids. But instead, the rough climate and the vegetation changes seem to have encouraged some of our ancestors to become meat eaters. And if you eat meat, you don't have to spend so much time hunting food. You can sit down and learn to think." "Once upon a time, hunter-killer was better?" "Hunter doesn't equate with murderer. I don't buy the totally depraved ape-man picture that some ethnologists postulate for human ancestry. There was goodness and altruism in our hominid forebears just as there's good in most people today."

"But evil is real," said the nun. "Call it egocentrism or malignant aggression or original sin or whatever. It's there. Eden's gone."

"Isn't biblical Eden an ambivalent symbol? It seems to me that the myth simply shows us that self-awareness and intelligence are perilous. And they can be deadly. But consider the alternative to the Tree of Knowledge. Would anyone want innocence at such a price? Not me, Amerie. We really wouldn't want to give back that bite of apple. Even our aggressive instincts and stubborn pride helped make us rulers of the Earth."

"And one day maybe of the galaxy?" Claude gave a short laugh. "God knows we used to argue long enough about the notion when the Gi and the Poltroyans cooperated with us on salvage digs. The consensus seems to be that despite our hubris and pushiness, we humans have incredible potential, which justified the Intervention before we got ourselves too screwed up. On the other hand, the trouble we caused during the metapsychic flap back in the 'Eighties makes you wonder whether we haven't simply transferred our talent for spoiling to a cosmic stage instead of just a planetary one."

They ate some oranges and after a time Claude said "Whatever happens, I'm glad that I lived to reach the stars, and I'm glad that Gen and I met and worked with other thinking beings of goodwill. It's over now, but it was a wonderful adventure." "How did Genevieve feel about your travels? "She was more strongly tied to Earth, even though she enjoyed the outworld journeyings. She insisted on keeping a home here in the Pacific Northwest, where we had been raised. If we had been able to have children, she might never have agreed to leave. But she was a sickle-cell carrier, and the technique for modifying the genetic codon was developed after Gen had passed optimal child-bearing age. Later on, when we were ready for rejuvenation, our parenting instincts were pretty well atrophied, and there was so much work to do. So we just kept on doing it together. For ninety-four years..."

"Claude." Sister Roccaro reached out her hand to him. A light breeze stirred her short curly hair. "Do you realize that you're healed?"

"I knew it would happen. After Gen was dead. It was only her going that was so bad. You see, we'd talked it all out months ago, when she was still in control of her faculties, and did a lot of commiserating and accepting and emotional purging. But she still had to go, and I had to watch and wait while the person I loved more than my own life slipped farther and farther away but was never quite gone. Now that she's dead, I'm functional again. I just ask myself what in the world I'm going to do?"

"I had to answer the same question," the nun said carefully.

Majewski gave a start, then studied her face as though he had never seen it before. "Amerie, child. You've spent your life consoling needy people, serving the dying and their mourners. And you still have to ask a question like that?"

"I'm not a child, Claude. I'm a thirty-seven-year-old woman and I've worked at the Hospice for fifteen of those years. The job... has not been easy I'm burnt out. I had decided that you and Genevieve would be my last clients. My superiors have concurred with my decision to leave the order."

Shocked beyond words, the old man stared at her. She continued, "I found myself becoming isolated, consumed by the emotions of the people I was trying to help. There's been a shriveling of faith, too, Claude." She gave a small shrug "The kind of thing that people in the religious life arc all too likely to suffer. A sensible scientific type like you would probably laugh..."

"I'd never laugh at you, Amerie. And if you really think I'm sensible, maybe I can help you."

She rose up and slapped gritty rock dust off her jeans. "It's time for us to get off this mountain. It'll take at least two hours to walk back down to the egg."

"And on the way," he insisted, "you're going to tell me about your problem and your plans for the future."

Annamaria Roccaro regarded the very old man with amused exasperation. "Doctor Majewslti, you're a retired bone digger, not a spiritual counselor."

"You're going to tell me anyhow. In case you don't know it, there's nothing more stubborn in the Galactic Milieu than a Polack who's set his mind to something. And I'm a lot more stubborn than a lot of other Polacks because I've had more time to practice. And besides that," he added slyly, "you would never have mentioned your problem at all if you hadn't wanted to talk it over with me. Come on. Let's get walking."

He set off slowly down the trail and she followed. They tramped along in silence for at least ten minutes before she began to speak.

"When I was a little girl, my religious heroes weren't the Galactic Age saints. I could never identify with Pere Teilhard or Saint Jack the Bodiless or Illusio Diamond Mask. I liked the really old-time mystics: Simeon Stylites, Anthony the Hermit, Dame Julian of Norwich. But today, that kind of solitary commitment to penitence is contrary to the Church's new vision of human energetics. We're supposed to chart our individual journey toward perfection within a unity of human and divine love."

Claude grimaced at her over his shoulder. "You lost me, child."

"Stripped of the jargon, it means that charitable activity is in; solitary mysticism is out Our Galactic Age is too busy for anchoresses or hermits. That way of life is supposed to be selfish, escapist, masochistic, and counter to the Church's social evolution."

"But you don't think so, is that it, Amerie? You want to go off and fast and contemplate in some lonesome spot and suffer and attain enlightenment."

"Don't you laugh at me, Claude. I tried to get into a monastery . . . the Cistercians, Poor Clares, Carmelites. And they took one look at my psychosocial profile and told me to get lost. Counseling, they advised! Not even the Zen-Brigittines would give me a chance! But I finally discovered that there is one place where an old-fashioned solitary mystic wouldn't be out of place Have you ever heard of Exile? "

"What paleobiologist hasn't?"

"You may know that there's been a sort of underground railroad to it for a good many years. But you may not know that use of the time portal was given official Milieu sanction four years ago in response to an increasing demand. An kinds of people have gone into Exile after undergoing a survival regimen. People from every imaginable educational background and profession, from Earth and from the human colonies. All of those time-travelers have one thing in common: They want to go on living, but they can't function any longer in this complex, structured world of galactic civilization."

"And this is what you've chosen?"

"My application was accepted more than a month ago."

They came to a tricky scree slope, the remnant of an old avalanche, and concentrated on traversing it safely. When they reached the other side they rested for a moment. The sun beat down hotly. The retroevolved condors were gone.