We Have Fed Our Sea

12

Now, about winter solstice, day was a pale glimmer, low in the south among steel-colored clouds. Tamara had been walking since the first light sneaked across the ocean, and already the sun was close to setting. She wondered if space itself could be blacker than this land. At least you saw the stars in space. On Skula you huddled indoors against the wind, and the sky was a blind whirl of snow.

A few dry flakes gusted as she came down off the moor to the beach. But they carried no warmth with them, there was not going to be a snowfall tonight. The wind streaked in from a thousand kilometers of Atlantic and icebergs. She felt the cold snap its teeth together around her; a hooded cloak was small protection. But she would not go back to the house. Not till day had drained from the world and it would be unsafe to remain outdoors.

She said to herself, drearily: “I would stay here even then, except it might harm the child, and the old man would come looking for me. David, help me, I don’t know which would be worse!”

There was a twisted pleasure in being so honest with herself. By all the conventions, she should be thinking only of David’s unborn baby, herself no more than its vessel. But it was not real to her… not yet… so far it was only sickness in the mornings and bad dreams at night. The reality was Magnus Ryerson, animallike hairiness and a hoarse grumble at her for not doing the housework his way and incomprehensible readings aloud — his island and his sea and his language lessons!

For a moment her hands clawed together. If she could so destroy Magnus Ryerson!

She fought for decorum. She was a lady. Not a technic, but still a professor’s daughter; she could read and write, she had learned to dance and play the flute, pour tea and embroider a dress and converse with learned men so they were not too bored while waiting for her father… the arts of graciousness. Her father would call it contrasocial, to hate her husband’s father. This was her family now.

But.

Her boots picked a way down the hillside, through snow and heather bushes, until she came out on a beach of stones. The sea came directly in here, smashing at heaped boulders with a violence that shivered through the ground. She saw how the combers exploded where they struck. Spindrift stung her skin. Beyond the rocks was only a gray waste of galloping white-bearded waves, and the wind keening down from the Pole. It rolled and boomed and whistled out there.

She remembered a living greenish blue of southern waters, how they murmured up to the foot of palm trees under infinitely tall skies.

She remembered David saying wryly: “My people were Northerners as far back as we can trace it — Picts, Norse, Scots, sailors and crofters on the Atlantic edge — that must be why so many of them have become spacemen in the last several generations. To get away!”

And then, touching her hair with his lips: “But I’ve found what all of them were really looking for.”

It was hard to imagine that David’s warmth and tenderness and laughter had arisen in this tomb of a country. She had always thought of the religion which so troubled him — he first came to know her through her father, professor and student had sat up many nights under Australian stars while David groped for a God not all iron and hellfire — as an alien stamp, as if the legendary Other Race Out There had once branded him. The obscurity of the sect had aided her: Christians were not uncommon even today, but she had vaguely imagined a Protestant was some kind of Moslem.

Now she saw that Skula’s dwellers and Skula’s God had come from Skula itself, with winter seas in their veins. David had not been struggling toward normality; he had been reshaping himself into something which — down underneath — Magnus Ryerson thought was not human. Suddenly, almost blindingly, Tamara remembered a few weeks ago, one night when the old man had set her a ballad to translate. “Our folk have sung it for many hundreds of years,” he said — and how he had looked at her under his heavy brows.

Tamara struck a fist into one palm. The wind caught her cloak and peeled it from her, so that it flapped at her shoulders like black wings. She pulled it back around her, shuddering.

The sun was a red sliver on the world’s rim. Darkness would come in minutes, so thick you could freeze to death fumbling your way home. Tamara began to walk, quickly, hoping to find a decision. She had not come out today just because the house was unendurable. But her mind had been stiff, as if rusted. She still didn’t know what to do.

Or rather, she thought, I do know, but haven’t saved up enough courage.

When she reached the house, the air was already so murky she could almost not make out whitewashed walls and steep snowstreaked roof. A few yellow gleams of light came through cracks in the shutters. She paused at the door. To go in — ! But there was no choice. She twisted the knob and stepped through. The wind and the sea-growl came in with her.

“Close the door,” said Magnus. “Close the door, you little fool.”

She shut out all but a mumble and whine under the eaves, hung her cloak on a peg and faced around. Magnus Ryerson sat in his worn leather chair with a worn leather-bound book in his hands. As always, as always! How could you tell one day from the next in this den? The radiglobe was turned low, so that he was mostly shadow, with an icicle gleam of eyes and a dirty-white cataract of beard. A peat fire sputtered forlornly, trying to warm a tea kettle on the hob.

Ryerson put the book down on his lap, knocked out his archaic pipe — it had made the air foul in here — and asked roughly: “Where have you been all day, girl? I was about to go look for you. You could turn an ankle and die of exposure, alone on the ling.”

“I didn’t,” said Tamara. She exchanged her boots for zori and moved toward the kitchen.

“Wait!” said Magnus. “Will you never learn? I want my high tea just at 1630 hours — Now. You must be more careful, lass. You’re carrying the last of the Ryersons.”

Tamara stopped. There was a downward slant to the ancient brick floor, she felt vaguely how her body braced itself. More nearly she felt how her chilled skin, which had begun to tingle as it warmed, grew numb again.

“Besides David,” she said.

“If he is alive. Do you still believe it, after all these weeks?” Magnus began scraping out his pipe. He did not look at her.

“I don’t believe he is dead,” she answered.

“The Lunar crew couldn’t establish gray-beam contact. Even if he is still alive, he’ll die of old age before that ship reaches any star where men have an outpost. No, say rather he’ll starve!”

“If he could repair whatever went wrong—”

The muffled surf drums outside rolled up to a crescendo. Magnus tightened his mouth. “That is one way to destroy yourself… hoping,” he said. “You must accept the worst, because there is always more of the worst than the best in this universe.”

She glanced at the black book he called a Bible, heavy on one of the crowded shelves. “Do your holy writings claim that?” she asked. Her voice came out as a stranger’s croak.

“Aye. So does the second law of thermodynamics.” Magnus knocked his pipe against the ashtray. It was an unexpectedly loud noise above the wind.

“And you… and you… won’t even let me put up his picture,” she whispered.

“It’s in the album, with my other dead sons. I’ll not have it on the wall for you to blubber at. Our part is to take what God sends us and still hold ourselves up on both feet.”

“Do you know—” Tamara stared at him with a slowly rising sense of horror. “Do you know, I cannot remember just what he looked like?”

She had had some obscure hope of provoking his rage. But the shaggy-sweatered broad shoulders merely lifted, a little shrug. “Aye, that’s common enough. You’ve the words, blond hair and blue eyes and so on, but they make not any real image. Well, you didn’t know him so very long, after all.”

You are telling me I am a foreigner, she thought. An interloper who stole what didn’t belong to me.

“There’s time to review a little English grammar before tea,” said the old man. “You’ve been terrible with the irregular verbs.”

He put his book on the table — she recognized the title, Kipling’s Poems, whoever Kipling had been — and pointed at a shelf. “Fetch the text and sit down.”

Something flared in the girl. She doubled her fists. “No.”

“What?” The leather face turned in search of her.

“I am not going to study any more English.”

“Not—” Magnus peered as if she were a specimen from another planet. “Don’t you feel well?”

She bit off the words, one after another: “I have better ways to spend my time than learning a dead language.”

“Dead?” cried the man. She felt his rage lift in the air between them. “The language of fifty million—”

“Fifty million ignorant provincials, on exhausted lands between bombed-out cities,” she said. “You can’t step outside the British Isles or a few pockets on the North American coast and have it understood. You can’t read a single modern author or scientist or… or anybody… in English — I say it’s dead! A walking corpse!”

“Your own husband’s language!” he bawled at her, half rising.

“Do you think he ever spoke it to anyone but you, once he’d he’d escaped?” she flung back. “Did you believe… if David ever returns from that ship you made him go on and we go to Rama — did you imagine we’d speak the language of a dying race? On a new world?”

She felt the tears as they whipped down her face, she gulped after breath amidst terror. The old man was so hairy, so huge. When he stood up, the single radiglobe and the wan firelight threw his shadow across her and choked a whole corner of the room with it. His head bristled against the ceiling.

“So now your husband’s race is dying,” he said like a gun. “Why did you marry him, if he was that effete?”

“He isn’t!” she called out. The walls wobbled around her. “You are! Sitting here in your dreams of the past, when your people ruled Earth — a past we’re well out of! David was going where… where the future is!”

“I see,” Magnus Ryerson turned half away from her. He jammed both fists into his pockets, looked down at the floor and rumbled his words to someone else — not her.

“I know. You’re like the others, brought up to hate the West because it was once your master. Your teacher. The white man owned this planet a few centuries ago. Our sins then will follow us for the next thousand years… till your people fail in their turn, and the ones you raised up take revenge for the help they got. Well, I’m not going to apologize for my ancestors. I’m proud of them. We were no more vicious than any other men, and we gave… even on the deathbed of our civilization, we gave you the stars.”

His voice rose until it roared. “And we’re not dead yet! Do you think this miserable Protectorate is a society? It isn’t! It’s not even a decent barbarism. It’s a glorified garrison. It’s one worshipping the status quo and afraid to look futureward. I went to space because my people once went to sea. I gave my sons to space, and you’ll give yours to space, because that’s where the next civilization will be! And you’ll learn the history and the language of our people — your people — you’ll learn what it means to be one of us!”

His words rang away into emptiness. For a while only the wind and a few tiny flames had voice. Down on the strand, the sea worried the island like a terrier with a rat.

Tamara said finally: “I already know what it means. It cost me David, but I know.”

He faced her again, lowered his head and stared as if at an enemy.

“You murdered him,” she said, not loudly. “You sent him to a dead sun to die. Because you—”

“You’re overwrought,” he broke in with tight-held anger. “I urged him to try just one space expedition. And this one was important. It could have meant a deal to science. He would have been proud afterward, whatever he did for a career, to say, ‘I was on the Cross.’”

“So he should die for his pride?” she said. “It’s as senseless a reason as the real one. But I’ll tell you why you really made him go… and if you deny you forced him, I’ll say you lie! You couldn’t stand the idea that one child of yours had broken away — was not going to be wrenched into your image — had penetrated this obscene farce of space exploration, covering distance for its own sake, as if there were some virtue in a large number of kilometers. David was going to live as nature meant him to live, on a living soil, with untanked air to breathe and with mountains to walk on instead of a spinning coffin… and his children would too… we would have been happy! And that was what you couldn’t stand to have happen!”

Magnus grinned without humor. “There’s a lot of meaningless noise for a symbolics professor’s daughter to make,” he said. “To begin at the end, what proof have you we were meant to be happy?”

“What proof have you we were meant to jump across lightyears?” she spat. “It’s another way of running from yourself — no more. It’s not even a practical thing. If the ships only looked for planets to colonize, I could understand. But… the Cross herself was aimed for three giants! She was diverted to a black clinker! And now David is dead… for what? Scientific curiosity? You’re not a research scientist, neither was he, and you know it. Wealth? He wasn’t being paid more than he could earn on Earth. Glory? Few enough people on Earth care about exploration; not many more on Rama; he, not at all. Adventure? You can have more adventure in an hour’s walk through a forest than in a year on a spaceship. I say you murdered your son because you saw him becoming sane!”

“Now that’s enough,” growled Magnus. He took a step toward her. “I’ve heard enough out of you. In my own house. And I never did hold with this new-fangled notion of letting a woman yap—”

“Stand back!” she yelled. “I’m not your wife!”

He halted. The lines in his face grew suddenly blurred. He raised his artificial hand as if against a blow.

“You’re my son’s wife,” he said, quite gently. “You’re a Ryerson too… now.”

“Not if this is what it means.” She had found the resolution she sought. She went to the wall and took her cloak off its peg. “You’ll lend me your aircar for a hop to Stornoway, I trust. I will send it back on auto-pilot and get transport for myself from there.”

“But where are you going?” His voice was like a hurt child’s.

“I don’t know,” she snapped. “To some place with a bearable climate. David’s salary is payable to me till he’s declared dead, and then there will be a pension. When I’ve waited long enough to be sure he won’t come back, I’m going to Rama.”

“But, lass… propriety—”

“Propriety be damned. I’d rather have David’s child, alive.” She slipped her boots back on, took a flashlight from the cupboard, and went out the door. As she opened it, the wind came straight in and hit Magnus across the face.