Starburst

30

ON THE MORNING OF DAY 9563 I WOKE UP NEXT TO A perfect stranger. Well, I think it was Day 9563— somewhere around there, anyway—maybe as much as ten days after we had finally set down on Earth—how can you tell for sure, with all the relativistic corrections and complicated counting? Close enough. And Toby wasn't wholly a stranger, and not absolutely perfect.

But close enough.

He had sprawled one big thigh over my (big enough) thigh, which was friendly but inclined to cut off the circulation. My whole leg was asleep but, as 1 slid myself out from under and sat briefly on he edge of the bed, the part of me I sat on was happily awake and reminiscing of good fun gone by. Not perfect? Compared to what I'd been waking up next to for the past twenty years or more, Tobias Pettyvass was perfect enough.

So I woke up feeling like rather a different woman—no, not like a different woman. Like the woman I used to be when I was saucy young Eve Barstow, Queen of the Space Rangers, back around Day 250 or so when we were all young and medium innocent and very very scared of what we were into. Those were about the best days of my whole life, with Jim and me taking our turns in the Honeymoon Hotel and Eve and Ski tossing the ruble and Flo just beginning to play games with the hydroponics plants. Up to then, growing up. After then—God! But in that little time while we still thought we were doing something fine and never suspected anyone was manipulating us, yes, those were days to be glad to be alive in. . . .

And the funny thing was, when I caught a glimpse of myself in Toby's bathroom mirror, I looked like that little fresh Mrs. Eve Barstow! I had lost at least five kilos. I looked like somebody who was getting laid nicely. I wasn't any spring chicken—you might guess I was past the big Five Oh and you might even suspect the ten thousand liters of alcoholic bevs that had poured past those cupid's-­bow lips. No Miss America! Not with the sagging stuff behind the cheekbones and under the chin, not to mention the eyes— And yet, you know, not bad! I wasn't a puddle of Silly Putty that walked like a woman any more. The drag of one-G exercise had sucked some of it off me, and there was a sparkle in the old blue eyes.

The sun was well up over the gorgeous blue Pacific, which meant it was late morning, pushing noon; I thought about waking Toby, but that peaceful bearded Toby mug lay so happily on the pillow that I didn't bother. And in the shower I found I was singing to myself. Softly. I didn't want to wake the man who had been guiding me so nicely around the wonders of Puget by day and the wonders of his bedroom by night. It was really astonishing what a few days had done for me, not just physically, not just mentally, not just emotionally— I don't know in what way. For instance. I'd been clinging to the illusion that I was the one person around Alpha Centauri who was essentially the same as the common run of humanity on Earth. Not flying off into the peculiar, like the rest of the grownups. Not raised to be bent, like the kids. Just normal. . . . But I wasn't! The experience had changed me too. Although I was the dummy of the group, I had learned the knack of learning and there was much to be learned: Toby was impressed, I could tell, by how much I knew and how much I could do as he showed me around the sleepy police station and the self-tending sewage plant and the parks and the bars of Puget. I wasn't Aunt Mommy—the kids were off on their own. I wasn't the wife of the famous astronaut, or even the local drunk and easy lay; I was just me, Eve Barstow, and me, Eve Barstow, seemed by then to be a very good thing to be. Good enough, it struck me, to have goodness to share.

Why not share it?

Why not spend the rest of my life right here in Puget, helping these people get their world together?

The more I thought of it the better I liked it; and so I stepped out of the shower, wrapped a towel around me, and shook Toby's shoulder. "Wake up, it's morning," I caroled, "and I'm going to stay here in Pugetl"

There was another nice thing about Toby Pettyvass. He woke up nicely. He didn't snort and struggle, like my whilom husband, or jerk like a galvanized frog leg, like Ski, or sulk, or glower, or do any of the other things my few recent bedmates had taught me to expect. He just opened his eyes and woke up. "That's nice," he said.

"But you'd better get up!" I leaned forward to let my hair hang down, then wrapped it in the towel. Toby was just lying there, admiring me. Fair exchange. I was admiring him, too: big man, former football player, now Darien's Chief of Special Services, which meant, mostly, that he was in charge of Puget's police and firefighters. And squiring around visiting ladies. "Look at the sun," I scolded.

Then I looked at it myself. The confounded thing was distinctly lower than it had been. "Oh, God," I said, "wrong ocean! It's the middle of the afternoon! We've been in bed all day!" So much for the swift and impressive Eve Barstow. . . .

But it was not for my brain alone that Toby admired me. "I like your outfit," he said, and grabbed. Since my outfit consisted of a soggy towel wrapped around my hair, I understood at once what he had in mind. Quel homme! Older than I was, waking up out of a sound sleep after an unusually active night, and he grabbed! Well. I knew what to do about that. 1 grabbed back, and the sun was lower still by the time we were conversational again. He at least had known well that it was afternoon, because he had been up for a couple of hours in the forenoon while sated Eve replenished her powers in sleep, had checked with the department to see if he was needed, wasn't, came back to bed without waking me.

"But don't they need you now and then?"

He shrugged. "They'll call me on the beeper if it's important. There was a little brushfire in the hills—we don't get them often, and they kind of appreciated the chance to handle it by themselves. How else are they going to learn?"

Now, do you see how quick and intelligent Eve Barstow is, after all?

I wasn't listening to him, I was listening to the urgings inside my own head. "I guess you didn't hear what I said," I told him, taking his hand off my breast and kissing him to show that he wasn't to take it personally. "I'm going to stay here, Toby."

He grinned and gave a good answer. "I'm glad."

"And I'm going to help you people!" I-threw my arms around him—nice hard warm male skin over nice hard strong male bones— but he didn't exactly respond. He looked as though he thought, but wasn't sure, that his message beeper had gone off.

When I am naked and put my arms around a naked man I expect more of his attention than that, no matter how many times we have been making it. I was feeling really good, and it was a downer to suspect that Toby didn't seem to be. "What is it, love? What they say, Omnes triste post coito or something like that?"

He looked at me as though I had suddenly begun speaking Greek, but of course it wasn't. "That's Latin," I explained, "meaning all men seem to get gloomy after making love, only if that's what it is how come you never showed any signs of it before?"

"Oh, no," he said, stirring himself. "I was just thinking about— something. Say! Aren't you getting hungry?"

Well, of course I was, once he mentioned it, but it didn't answer my question. It did change the subject, because we certainly couldn't go out to eat the way we were.

You hear a lot about how long men have to wait for their lady friends to get dressed. It wasn't like that with us. I was out of the shower and into a dress and sandals and perched on Toby's nice, solid window ledge, watching nice, solid Toby lace his boots, in about seven minutes. He was slower. He had to buckle his belt with the big Puget medallion, and load it up with his beeper and his handcuffs and his flashlight, and then he had to call in on the beeper to say he was back on duty. I just sat there admiring him, and working up an appetite. "Don't you have to blow-dry your hair or something?" he asked, while he was checking the cartridges in his gun.

"Not with hair like mine. Do you ever shoot that thing?" I asked, because guns make me feel as though I'd eaten tuna salad that had been in the fridge a day too long.

He grinned. "Not usually, not counting snakes and now and then a wolf, up in the hills. What do you want to eat?"

"Seafood!"

"What else?" he sighed, and took my arm as we went out the door. Of course, the fruits of the sea were old stuff to Toby because he'd been eating them all his life. Not me. We had had five meals together, and had them in five different fish restaurants. I had scored sand dabs, crabmeat cakes, abalone, poached salmon, and that thing they call dolphin, although it isn't, and I was ready to run right down the menu, one by one, to make up for twenty-some years of eating nothing that didn't come out of the garden patch. Even the kids had taken to Earth food, especially seafood; when we took Jeron along the night before he'd ventured oyster stew, and loved it until he found a whole oyster in his mouth. I didn't blame him for that. I'd finished his plate for him, and all that that did for me was make me want some oysters of my own. So when we got to the new place Toby had picked out, nice ramshackle frame building looking right out over the bay, I ordered them fried, and a shrimp cocktail to start with, and when Toby ordered a beer I virtuously declined. I hadn't even cracked a malt- nut in forty-eight hours. Didn't need it. I was intoxicated enough just with being where I was and thinking about all the great things we were going to do for these poor people in Puget—and with Toby. I explained all this while he worked on his beer. That took us through the shrimp and well into the fried oysters and home-fries. And there it was again. He wasn't lighting up with joy. He was just nodding, and staring out over the bay at the sailboats and the big lumber vessel and the wreck of the Japanese cruiser across the water, and it was enough to make a girl wonder if her deodorant had failed to work.

So the first oyster was a delight, crisp outside and gummy and sinewy inside, with that marvelous iodine Pacific taste; and the second very good, and the third nice enough, but by the time I got to the fifth the salt had lost its savor. I put down my fork. "Toby?" I said.

He turned to look at me. "Yeah?"

I said, feeling my way, "Listen, love, I'm not talking about getting married, or anything like that. I mean, I'm not claiming any kind of rights."

He had a forkful of crab Louis halfway to his mouth, and he stopped there. "Ah, no, Eve," he said. "It's not that."

"Then it is something, right? What?"

He put the crabmeat in his mouth and chewed thoughtfully. An ox could have finished a mouthful of hay before he got that mouthful pulpy enough to suit him. "I was thinking about all you people staying here to, what you said, help us."

"Right!" I cried. "You've had a tough time, and we want to make up for it! We're going to show you ways to live you never even dreamed of—not just the vegetable womb and the other presents we brought—although you wouldn't be drinking that stuff out of a bottle if you'd ever tasted a malt-nut! No. A whole new life-style, Toby dear. We've had twenty-five years to work it out, and we've got a lot to teach you—"

I stopped, because his beeper had beeped. He spoke into it, put the plug in his ear, listened a moment, and then frowned. He put it away and glanced at me. "You finished with that?" he asked.

"What's the matter?"

He rubbed two fingers across his lips. "Your friendly ghost is the matter," he said. "He's at the ship, and so is everybody else. And they're not alone. There's something pretty funny going on."

Now, the term "pretty funny" could easily be applied to almost anything involving us. I admit that. It's all a matter of perspective. If you grow up with a cross-eyed kid sister you get used to her, but you know that strangers are going to look at her in a different way. So it was with our little family. Sassy Jeron, flabby me, weird littler kids— but the prize for funniness had to belong to Will Becklund.

However, there was something funny in a different way, and that was that Toby had known that Uncle Ghost existed. We'd been having fun about that, all of us, dodging questions in Washington and letting the President and Darien and all the others wonder if their eyes had played tricks on them; but Toby had not been fooled. And I didn't know why not. In his bright red little gas-burner, cruising along the bay front to the beach where the golden ship nestled on the shore, I tried to figure out how that, was. I didn't succeed, and then we were there.

There was a crowd of Pugets surrounding a smaller crowd that was all the rest of us from Alpha-Aleph, just in front of the ship. People who have never seen Willis Becklund have many varying reactions. The Pugets had them all, but mostly what they had was narrowed eyes and closed-in expressions. Not me. My jaw dropped. Because there really was someone else. Someone no more than four feet tall, with a great hooked nose and blubbery lips. When it moved its nearly transparent head around to stare at the staring crowd I could not fail to recognize it. Although it looked like a baggy-pants burlesque version of a Jewish comic, I knew who it was. Had been. Was again. Whatever! It was none other than Dieter, or anyway the ghost of Dieter, the dreadful von Knefhausen.

"My God," I said, hopping out of Toby's three-wheeler and almost falling because I wasn't looking at what I was doing. When Toby came around the car I grabbed his hand to steady myself and tugged him through the crowd of silent Pugets.

Dieter and Will and the kids turned to me at once, all excited and kind of glowing, and, oh, what a clatter of words and clash of tongues! We were talking so fast that it was almost quick-speech, and, of course, everybody was talking at once.

Twenty-plus years with our little extrusion of the human race had trained me to certain expectations. One of them was that whatever I wanted to do, the next person I talked to would want to do something else; whatever I thought or felt, most of the rest of our bunch would disagree. With me; with each other. But not this time! The least-mean- square measure of difference was almost undetectable, because all our great minds had run in the same channels. Jeron had been brainwashing the younger kids, who were wild to try altruism and beneficence now that they'd heard of it; Will had roamed the Earth all by himself until he came out of the wilderness with the same idea. And with this curiously malformed version of Dieter von Knefhausen. I couldn't help it; I had to ask. "Why'd you bring this funny-looking ghost, and why—"

"Soliton!" Will corrected angrily; he never did like those race names.

"This funny-looking soliton, then, and why does he look that way?"

"I almost didn't," he whispered, while Dieter's ripply face expressed polite interest, "but then I figured he ought to have a chance to mend his karma with the rest of us."

"And for this," Dieter von Knefhausen said politely, "I am quite grateful, although the alterations you have "made in my appearance are, you could say, most disagreeable."

"Shut up, Kneffie," Will whispered. "Just count yourself lucky you're here at all. Anyway! Listen. Here's what we've decided! Jeron, Bill, and the two girls are going to stay here, and so am I, for a while. Molomy and the others will take ten Earthies back to Alpha-Aleph for training. We'll radio for some more ships to be built. Lots of them— what?"

Knefhausen coughed and indicated the Pugets. The indrawn look was tighter than ever. Will sighed with a sound like a distant air-brake—an irritated one. The happy villagers were supposed to be dancing and throwing flowers by that point, but the script wasn't playing.

Will sighed. "How annoying it is," he remarked, "when you strike a spark and the audience does not catch fire. Well. If I can't tell you, then I will show you," he whispered, and flung a glassy arm toward the sea.

I will say for Uncle Ghost that he can put on a great show when he wants to. The distant shore began to wrinkle and fade; the setting sun turned glassy, paling from apple to peach to soft shimmering pineapple Jell-O, and then it all melted away. We were looking at a huge fluted shell of color, like what I think Radio City Music Hall used to look like, and within it Will was staging a show that beat the Rockettes.

Oh, none of it was real. The Pugets knew that as well as we did. It didn't even look real, because it was all that wrinkled-cellophane look that was the best Will could manage. Through the paler parts of the display you could see the sun and even the beached wreck of the Japanese warship—but, oh, what a show all the same! He threw a starry sky across the shell. Against it a dozen golden globes slid through space, then a hundred—many hundreds—then one spun directly toward us, growing huge, changing shape. It opened at the side and stretched and flowed aifd turned into an immense golden cornucopia, with all the treasures of the world—our world—spilling out. Trees that grew into barkless two-by-fours, then cabins, then handsome homes. Luscious fruits in a hundred shapes and colors— you could nearly smell them and touch them, though not quite. Vegetable wombs with cunning cherubs popping out, blinking adorable eyes and clapping fat little hands with glee—oh, Will was stretching it some. No doubt about that. We never grew a house like that, although I suppose we could have if we'd wanted to, and babies from the cabbage patch get just as wet and cranky as any from Nature's Gate.

But it was a real five-bell smash performance, and what astonished me was that it was falling flat. The Pugets weren't buying it. Will knew it, too; the vision collapsed and the sun popped out again.

I felt Toby let go of my hand, and realized how terribly confusing this must be for the poor darling. "It's all right," I said reassuringly. "It's good, really—no, wonderful! We've all come to the same conclusion, and we're going to turn your life right around!"

"Turn us around?"

His tone worried me. All the other Pugets were straining to hear, but not crowding around—they stayed back, almost out of earshot. It was all pretty peculiar. I said impatiently, "We're going to give you the help you need. Teach you how to use the I Ching, show you how we edit our offspring for any characteristics we like—why, Will might even teach you how to turn your terminally ill people into solitons, so that you don't even need to die!"

Toby sighed deeply and nodded. "I thought it was something like that," he remarked, and his hand went to the butt of his gun. And his was not the only one. All those Pugets lounging around were suddenly a guard perimeter, and half a dozen of them had guns.

"That's it," cried Darien McCullough. "You're all under arrest. Nobody moves, nobody goes near your ship until we get things straightened out."

It was one of the worst moments of my life. I mean, gunsl Rational adult human beings don't use guns to settle differences! And they were all in it together, that hypocritical Darien, my own all but perfect Toby, every one of them; they'd planned it all along and rehearsed it.

Much good it did them.

What they did not know, of course, was that five of the six children had grown up under Zen Master Ski's personal tutelage, and all those years of challenging each other with flower stems paid off at once. "Hai!" shouted Molomy, launching herself at Toby's knees, and "Hai!" yelled Jeron, spinning like a top with his two fists locked together; the battering ram of his fists bloodied the nose of one of Toby's gunmen while Jeron's foot in the abdomen of another took him out of action. "Hai!" and "Hai!" and "Hai!" and Araduk and Ringo and Modany each marked a target and clobbered them, and even little Jeromolo Bill, who had done most of his growing-up light-years away from Ski, threw himself at the two young women who were heading for the ship. Even I managed to get the old bones moving long enough to lay out the girl behind me, and Will Becklund, who had no body to charge with, blew himself up huge as a Macy's Thanksgiving monster. No Santa Claus or Mickey Mouse, he; he towered like a demon in a Chinese opera, hands the size of mattresses, tipped with talons as long as spears, and out of them he hurled grenades and firebombs, Napalm and fiery coals at the Pugets. None of them were real, of course. As with all Will's shapings, you could see clear through them when the light was right. But they sure were disconcerting. And he yelled-—if you can imagine a cobra yelling instead of hissing, immense volume but no voice to give it body—"Stop it, all of you! This minute!"

And when we sorted ourselves out, the biggest of the Pugets were rolling on the ground, mostly clutching their testicles, and all the rest of them were staring at a gun apiece in the hands of Araduk and Bill and Molomy, and one in each hand for Jeron.

"Let me up," said Toby from the ground, wriggling slightly under the not very considerable weight of Molomy sitting on his chest.

"For what?" Jeron demanded, trying to point both guns at him simultaneously.

Toby sighed. "Don't wave those things around, will you? We weren't going to shoot you."

"No!" sneered Jeron. "Of course not! You were just going to try to steal our ship and our technology!"

Toby lifted Molomy clear and sat up. "Wrong," he said. "One hundred percent dead wrong. We weren't trying to take any of that stuff from you. We were trying to get you to keep it."

Way, way back, ever so long ago, when I was a happy head in the beautiful California Southland, I made an anniversary present for my dad and mom. The present was me. For two solid weeks before their anniversary I didn't drink a drop or smoke a joint. I washed my hair every morning, and brushed it a hundred strokes every night; I took the money I made from hustling junk jewelry to the tourists and bought a white blouse and a dark skirt, and on the plane ride home I not only didn't take a drink from the airline stewardesses, I didn't even eat their peanuts. And you know what my mom said when I came in the door? She said, "Evelyn, why do you let yourself get so fat?"

I always thought that was the most unexpected stab in the back I'd ever had in my life, but that was before Puget. I just didn't know what to do, say, or think. Neither did anyone else. Jeron was scowling furiously, fiddling with the guns. Molomy was pouting, and the other kids were staring back and forth, trying to figure out what was going on; tableau. Then Darien broke it. "Put the guns away, please," she said. Jeron glowered at her furiously, then disdainfully hurled the guns to the ground. "Thank you," she said. "After all, we can't blame you."

"Blame us!" I squeaked. I couldn't help it.

She looked at me, sadly and sympathetically. "Excuse me if I'm hurting your feelings, Eve. I know you mean well-according to your lights. We've been bugging you since the day you landed, you know; we know everything you've said to each other. You think you can run our lives better than we can, and I guess that's natural enough. That's the kind of world you come from. Old von Knefhausen there, he learned how to trick and force and cajole from some of the best teachers in the world, and he manipulated the eight of you, and you manipulated your kids, and I guess you just can't imagine any other way of dealing with people. Any of you. But we don't want it. We know you think you'd be doing it for our own good. So were our Japanese friends, when they came around to include us in their Greater Pacific Co-Recovery Sphere, and we had a lot of trouble talking them out of it." She nodded across the bay, to the rusting warship on the beach. "The thing is, we want to make up our own minds what's for our good. And so what we'd like best of all from you folks, please, is if you'd leave. Go back to Alpha. We won't bother you, we promise. And we won't let you bother us, either—because," she finished, "I should tell you, it doesn't make much difference whether you got the guns away from us or not. Up on the rooftops there are twenty more of us with machine guns. If they start shooting they'll likely hit some people they're not aiming at, and some of us will get killed—as well as all of you. Or all of you that still can get killed. And you know what? It will be worth it."

We all looked up at the rooftops. Darien had told the truth, all right. I could see a black barrel pointing out over the red Howard Johnson's cupola, and two more over the K-Mart, and others all up and down the beach avenue.

Jeron looked at me. I looked at Jeron. None of us said a word, until I did. I sighed. "Kids," I said to Araduk and Molomy and Jeromolo Bill, "put the guns away. Darien? Toby? Leave us alone for a minute. We've got some talking to do."