Daughters of Earth and Other Stories Read online

  Copyright © 1985 by Judith Merril

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law.

  McClelland and Stewart Limited The Canadian Publishers

  25 Hollinger Road

  Toronto, Ontario

  M4B 3G2

  Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Merril, Judith, 1923-

  Daughters of earth and other stories

  ISBN 0-7710-5837-3 I. Title.

  PS8576.E77D38 1985 C813'.54 C85-099738-0 PR9199.2.M47D38 1985

  Printed and bound in Canada

  To

  Beth Appeldoorn who kept pushing

  and to

  John Bell who kept pulling

  with much thanks

  Table of Contents

  AUTHOR'S NOTES

  Note #1

  Note #2

  WISH UPON A STAR

  DAUGHTERS OF EARTH

  THE LONELY

  THE SHRINE OF TEMPTATION

  WHOEVER YOU ARE

  PEEPING TOM

  IN THE LAND OF UNBLIND

  HOMECALLING

  THE FUTURE OF HAPPINESS

  THAT ONLY A MOTHER

  DEAD CENTER

  AUTHOR'S NOTES

  Note #1

  The stories in this book are written in a specialized contemporary form —future fiction — which is usually (mis)called "science fiction." H.G. Wells, who invented the modern genre, coined the term scientific romances for his Utopian Socialist visions of "A World Set Free" from ignorance, injustice, and inequalities by sweet scientific reason and the plenty-for-all of technological progress. Hugo Gernsback, founding publisher/editor of U.S. mass-market "scientifiction," devoted his pulp-paper magazines to forecasting technologies (and technocracy) for the "conquest of nature" by "man."

  These dichotomies we have ever with us. Setting aside the confoundment of science with technology, let me emphasize the distinction between prediction and prophecy. If I could forecast the future, I would be making it in banking, betting, religion or politics. As a simple working prophet, I devise hypothetical futures to try to gain some perspective on the dynamics (and possible directions) of the present — much as historians use contemporary hypotheses to seek understanding of how the present developed from the dynamics of the past.

  The prophecy business is not always comfortable. If you're not being stoned in the marketplace, you're likely to get hustled off in a straitjacket. The lucky prophet who squeezes between the rock of martyrdom and the hard place of ridicule runs the subtler risk of burial alive by canonization—entombment in holy writ. Finally, there is the unique ambivalence, for a prophet, of becoming "dated."

  The Gernsback-era evangelists of space flight are of course overjoyed at the realization of many of their visions—but the more accurate their predictions were, the more likely their stories are to be considered too "dated" for space-age readers.

  The stories in this book, mostly written more than thirty years ago, have sadly/happily experienced no such epiphany. All the "conventional science fiction" stories were first published before the first moon landing. (The exceptions are a story-poem and a story-article, both from the seventies.) Those that were set in a near-future on Earth contain some errors of "future history." (One in fact is about a quite different first lunar landing.) I have resisted the temptation to "update" these pieces, but I would urge readers to note the original publication dates: the sad fact is that errors in prediction have not quite blunted the prophetic content. "Real history" has done little or nothing to resolve the various problems to which they were addressed.

  Maybe in another thirty years . . . ?

  Judith Merril Toronto, 1985

  Note #2

  S p a c e is sparse

  planets are profligate

  peripatetic

  s p a c e soundless

  separate sad?

  perhaps

  a planet will have

  plants plains palaces plateaus plates plots

  perambulators

  planets swim in solar s p a c e

  soliloquize

  plantains pearls pastorales petroleum plums purple

  penicillin

  palominos

  people.

  Planets

  prop up petrels planes and parachutes

  proliferate peasantry protozoa pasturage pestilence

  pallbearers

  paleontology

  people

  on planets pop up

  past all the panic planet pageantry -

  plinths plazas pampas patios palms poles poplars—

  pop!

  poppoppoppoppopulating

  pristine parsecs of sane

  silent

  sanitary

  space.

  WISH UPON A STAR

  First Publication: December, 1958.

  I WISH, I WISH, I WISH . . .

  Sheik sat under the shadow of a broad-leaf shrub, his head back, eyes closed against the glare from overhead, mouth open for a shout of protest he could never voice.

  He stifled the thought with the sound, pushed it out of his head as he pushed his body backward, throwing his weight straight-armed on the flat palms of his hands behind him. Flexing his calves below bent knees, he pulled against the long thigh sinews and tightened the slanting muscles of his back, driving all tension from his mind into his body as he raised his buttocks up off the ground and hung suspended, arching from knees to elbows, hands and feet rooted to the soil. Wholly intent on the immedate physical effort, he stayed so till the blood rushing to his head choked in his throat, and arms and legs were trembling beyond control. Then with a last summoning of purpose, he flipped over and sprawled contentedly collapsed on chest and stomach, head turned so one cheek also rested on the resilient softness of the granular stuff that made the plant beds. With each great breath of air his nostrils sucked up the rich sweet damp aroma of the roots.

  For a moment there was peace; and then, again, I wish, I wish, I wish ...

  Tears filled his eyes. He sat up and angrily and brushed them off. He was too old for crying. Crying wouldn't help. He was too old to be sitting idle here, wasting time, wasting wishes on absurdities. Old enough not to be bothered by anything Naomi said or did . . . but not yet old enough (smart enough?) to know better than to try to tell her anything.

  She had listened so meekly, watched so quietly, while he repaired the rootpack she had broken, holding the torn parts—just so—together, tamping the soil down—just so—around the fiber, explaining as he worked why it was just this way. He let her silence fool him; well, it was no one's fault but his own. He should have known better by now.

  When he was finished, she smiled, very sweetly. "It', so comforting to know you'll be here, Sheik," she said, "when I'm in charge. You're so efficient." Then a quick glance at the chrono, which she must have been watching all the time from the corner of her eye, or she couldn't have timed it all so perfectly. "Oh-OOOh! I better run! I'm late for Sessions now . . ." And she was off, flashing a hand free of dirt or work, leaving him, trowel in hand, to realize he had just finished doing her job for her.

  It wasn't fair. Naomi was twelve and a half, more than a year younger than he was. In Standard School she was behind him in almost everything; and never, never as long as she lived, would she be able to handle a plant, to feel it and understand it, as he did. But she was the one in Special Sessions classes now, learning the things he ought to know. They'd make her read all t
he books he wanted, whether she cared or not, and put her to learn in the lab, mastering all the mysteries and intricacies of advanced Bichem. While he, Yashikazu, would go on day after day, trowel in hand, taking her jibes now, and later—much later, when he replaced Abdur in charge of the plantroom—taking her orders as Ab took his orders from Lieutenant Johnson.

  It just wasn't fair!

  I wish, I wish I was ...

  He stopped it, cut it off sharply. He was not going to think that way any more. I wish Sarah was here, he finished the thought instead. Tonight, maybe, she would ask him again. He had nursery duty, but if he told Bob . . . if she asked him, that was . . . well, if she did, he'd get off duty somehow ...

  Without even closing his eyes, he could see her there now, as she had been the night before last, sprawled on the rootpacks beside him, her shining long legs golden under the ultras, her face in the shadow of the leafy shrub a deep dark brown, but somehow giving out the gold-glow, too. Her eyes were closed and her hand, smooth and cool, soft and small, lay inside his as he watched her in warm and perfect comradeship.

  For most of an hour, they had barely moved or talked: they just lay there together in the private shadow, sharing what had been his alone, thinking and dreaming silently but not separately at all.

  Nothing Naomi said or did ought to matter now, because things-as-they-were had given him this special thing, a place and a significance, to share with Sarah. Never before had he told anyone about the shadows—how he felt about them. (No one but Ab, of course, but that was different; Ab knew.) She had seen them, naturally, most every day of her life; everyone in the ship had. The nursery-age children spent at least an hour each day hullside, for ultra exposure and exercise as well as their basic fichem. When they started with Standard School class-work, they were required to spend a half-hour of play-ti me every day under the lamps. But it was the light they came for; the shadows belonged to Sheik.

  When he was just old enough to be allowed to go about alone, he started coming down hullside every chance he had; the shadows drew him. Later, the plants became important, too, and now he knew that they would be his work all his life. That was good in itself, but better because the shadows were part of the plants.

  Nowhere else in the whole ship was there anything like it. Once in a while, the floorlight or one of the walls in the regular living and work rooms would go out of whack, and for a brief time the diffusion would be distorted and patches of dark-and-bright showed when people moved. But only here, where the thick rootpack lined the whole inner shell of the ship's hull, where then were only struts instead of walls, and the great ultra lamps glared day and night overhead, only here were there real shadows, under the plants, stationary, permanent, and shaped.

  The ultras were never dimmed. They shone, Sheik thought, with the same brilliant fixity of time and purpose as the pinpointed stars on the black satin of the lounge viewplate. And in the center of this same clump of shrubbery where he lay now there was a hollow spot where some of the oldest, tallest plants grew so thick no light could penetrate, where it was dark, black, almost as black as the space between the stars: the way, he thought, a planet's night must be.

  And this spot, where he had taken Sarah, was—depending where you held your head—a moonlit planet night, a "twilight," "morning," or "afternoon" . . . all words in books, until they took on meaning here where the leaves and lights produced an infinitude of ever-changing shades and combinations of black, gray, green, brown, and gold.

  He had never told anyone how he thought about that. Not Abdur; not even Sarah, yet. But if she asked him to take her here again, he thought, he could tell her; she would really understand.

  He sat up sharply, the faint rustling sound like an answer to a prayer. Sarah?

  Two plant stalks parted cautiously and a small, round, brown face stared into his own.

  "What are you doing down here now?" Sheik demanded. How had the fool kid found him here?

  "I told 'm I'd find you," Hari said triumphantly. "I told 'm I could. You better hurry. Ab's mad at you. He has to work onna mew-tay-shuns," the small boy said the new word carefully, "an' you're supposed to be our teacher this time."

  Sheik scrambled to his feet. Nursery class here already? That late? He'd spent half the afternoon doing nothing, dreaming . . . Ab must be mad, all right!

  "You forgot about us," Hari said.

  He hadn't forgotten; he had just forgotten time. "Come on, shrimpy," he told Harendra gruffly. "Better hop on if you want to get back quick." He squatted and Hari climbed on his shoulders—a rare and special treat; it would make up for his seeming to forget. He started for Abdur's workroom at a trot.

  Harendra was three years old now, almost four, but he was Yoshikazu's favorite in the nursery still. He had been Sheik's first full-charge baby; sometimes he didn't seem too sure himself which one was his father, Abdur or Sheik. Certainly he didn't care; he loved them both with the same fierce intensity. And it upset him if Ab was angry with the Sheik.

  Abdur had been spending all his time the past few days struggling to save a planting of mutant seedlings newly developed in the Bichem lab. It was a high-protein lentil with a new flavor, but some mysterious lack in root-pack nourishment—the kind of thing that showed up only in actual growth conditions—made it essential to nurse each plant with extra care while the lab techs tried to find the cause of the trouble.

  The intricate, patient skill with which Abdur tended the delicate young plants was fascinating to Sheik. And the young children, he thought, would be interested in the luminous unfamiliar yellow of the sickly leaves.

  Abdur agreed with evident satisfaction to having the children visit the sick patch. He rebuked Sheik only briefly and without heat for his forgetfulness, and set out immediately for his plants, taking the way cross-ship, through the central living section, to reach the area on the other side of the hull without further delay. Yoshikazu took his troupe of six around by the huflside route, routinely replying to the inevitable routine questions at each step: why was this plant taller, the other stalk thicker, a leaf a darker green or different shape. To most of the grown people on board, the endless rows of plants covering the whole inner surface of the ship's hull were monotonous 'and near identical. Abdur knew better; so did Sheik; and the nursery kids noticed things sometimes that Yoshikazu hadn't seen himself.

  But this time he didn't want to stop at every plant. It was a slow enough trip with their short legs, and he hurried them past spots where he might otherwise have tried to show them something new or slightly changed. Then Dee, silly dimpled shrieking Dina, who, at barely two, should not (in Sheik's opinion) have come into the nursery class as yet, sat herself down on the rootpacks and refused to budge.

  Yoshikazu bent to pick her up. He'd carry her, rather than waste time coaxing now. But she pointed to one root, growing wrong, malformed and upended, and stopped progress completely by-spilling out a spurt of only half-coherent but entirely fascinated inquiry.

  Well, he had been wrong; she was old enough. Sheik sat down beside her and got to work, framing his answer, to her questions carefully, trying to give her a new mystery each time to provoke the next useful question. He pulled packing away from around the upended root, dug down, and placed the root where it belonged, giving all the children a chance to see how the other roots lay in the pack before he covered it. He explained how the roots drank nourishment from the soil, and floundered attempting to explain the action of the ultraviolet lamps.

  All the while, Hari hung over his shoulder, watching the boy had seen it all before, when Dina was too little to care, but he drank in every sight and every word as if it were the first time for him, too.

  "It's like being tucked in," he broke in suddenly, offering his own level of lucidity in place of Sheik's complications. "Like when your daddy tucks you in at night and kisses you and you feel warm and good all over you and you grow in your sleep."

  Dina's black eyes were shining with excitement. "I know," she said. "Every nigh
t when I sleep I grow." She lifted a hand to prove the point. "Way up!"

  "Well, that's how it is," Hari nodded commendation to his pupil. "Only the lights don't have to go out for the plants to sleep, because they're asleep all the time. Underneath there. That's why they never go anyplace."

  His voice lost some confidence at the end. He looked to Yoshikazu for approval, and Dina looked for confirmation.

  Sheik hesitated, failed to find words for a more adequate explanation, and decided Hari had probably put across more than he could for right now. He nodded and smiled at them both. "Come on, now, or we won't have time to see the new plants." They all ran after him.

  Lieutenant Johnson was on duty at the children's supper that evening. She strolled casually from one of the four tables to another, listening to a scrap of conversation here, answering a question there, correcting a younger child somewhere else, reminding Fritzi—who at eleven had just become a table leader—to keep her group quieter.

  At Sarah's table she paused only briefly; the officer on duty never had to stop there except for a greeting. Sarah and Sheik had seven in their group, more than anyone else, but they never had trouble. They were a good combination; Sheik glowed inwardly with his awareness of this, and with the feeling that the same thought was passing through Johnson's mind as she looked from one end of the table to the other. He didn't need any smiles from Johnson to keep him happy tonight, though. In the lounge, just before, Sarah had asked him. As soon as he could swap his evening duty, he was to meet her and take her down hullside again.

  He caught her glance across the table as the Lieutenant walked away and saw her wink at him. With astonishment he thought, She's as happy as I am! She wants to go, too!

  He knew, though he could not see as she bent over the carving, how her breasts had begun to swell under her shirt, and he knew by heart, though they were hidden behind the table, the long clean curves of those golden legs. Mechanically he added lentils to carrobeet top and passed a plate down, reminding Adolph Liebnitz that there was a fork at his place, and he should use it. He answered a question of Irma's without ever knowing what she asked, filled another plate, kept his eyes off Sarah thinking, This time . . . this time I'll ... Added a little extra greens to Justin's plate, skimping on the carrobeets the kid hated . . . This time I'll . . . Looked up, caught Sarah's eye again, felt himself going hot and red, and dropped the thought.