Michael Bishop - Cathadonian Odyssey(1).pdf - Michael Bishop - margozap

Cathadonian Odyssey

Michael Bishop

Cathay. Caledonia. Put the words together: Cathadonia. That was what

the namer of the planet, a murderer with the sensitivity of a poet, had

done. He had put the two exotic words together— Cathay and

Caledonia—so that the place they designated might have a name worthy of

its own bewitching beauty. Cathadonia. Exotic, far-off, bewitching,

incomprehensible. A world of numberless pools. A world of bizarrely

constituted "orchards," a world with one great, gong-tormented sea.

Cathadonia.

And the first thing that men had done there, down on the surface, was

kill as many of the exotic little tripodal natives as their laser pistols could

dispatch.

Squiddles , the men off the merchantship had called them. They called

them other fanciful names, too, perhaps inspired by the sensitive

murderer who had coined the planet's name. Treefish. Porpurls. Pintails.

Willowpusses. Tridderlings. Devil apes .

The names didn't matter. The men killed the creatures wantonly,

brutally, laughingly. For sport. For nothing but sport. They were off the

merchantship Golden heading homeward from a colonized region of the

galactic arm. They made planetfall because no one had really noticed

Cathadonia before and because they were ready for a rest. Down on the

surface, for relaxation's sake, they killed the ridiculous-looking squiddles.

Or treefish. Or porpurls. Or willowpusses. Take your choice of names. The

names didn't matter.

Once home, the captain of the Golden reported a new planet to the

authorities. He used the name Cathadonia, the murderer's coinage, and

Cathadonia was the name that went into the books. The captain said

nothing about his crewmen's sanguinary recreation on the planet. How

could he? Instead, he gave coordinates, reported that the air was

breathable, and volunteered the information that Cathadonia was

beautiful. "Just beautiful, really just beautiful."

The men of the Golden , after all, were not savages. Hadn't one of them

let the word Cathadonia roll off his lips in a moment of slaughterous

ecstasy? Didn't the universe forgive its poets, its namegivers?

Later, Earth sent the survey probeship Nobel , on its way to the virgin

milkiness of the Magellanic Clouds, in the direction of Cathadonia. The

Nobel , in passing, dropped a descentcraft toward the planet's great ocean.

The three scientists aboard that descent-craft were to establish a floating

station whose purpose would be to determine the likelihood of

encountering life on Cathadonia. The captain of the Golden had not

mentioned life. The scientists did not know it existed there. Preliminary

sensor scans from the Nobel suggested the presence of botanicals and the

possibility of some sort of inchoate aquatic life. Nothing sentient, surely.

Whatever the situation down there, the scientists aboard the floating

station would unravel it.

Unfortunately, something happened to the descentcraft on its way

down, something that never happened to survey descentcraft and

therefore something the Nobel's crew had made no provision for. In fact,

the Nobel , as was usual in these cases, went on without confirming

touchdown; it went on toward the Magellanic Clouds. And some odd,

anomalous force wrenched the controls of the descentcraft out of the

hands of its pilots and hurled it planetward thousands of kilometers from

the great ocean.

It fell to the surface beside a sentinel willow on the banks of one of

Cathadonia's multitudinous pools. There it crumpled, sighed, ticked with

alien heat.

This, then, becomes the story of a survivor—the story of Maria Jill Ian,

a woman downed on an out-of-the-way world with no hope of immediate

rescue, with no companions to share her agony, with no goal but the

irrational desire to reach Cathadonia's ocean. A woman who did not

wholly understand what had happened to her. A woman betrayed by her

own kind and ambivalently championed by a creature carrying out a

larger betrayal.

—For Cathadonia.

I am standing on Cathadonia, first planet from an ugly little star that

Arthur called Ogre's Heart. I am writing in a logbook that is all I have

left of the materials in our descentcraft. God knows why I am writing .

Arthur is dead. Fischelson is dead. The Nobel is on its way to the

Magellanic Clouds. It will be back in three months. Small comfort. I will

be dead, too. Why am I not dead now ?

The "landscape" about me is dotted with a thousand small pools. Over

each pool a single willowlike tree droops its head. The pools are clear, I

have drunk from them. And the long slender leaves of the willows — or at

least of this willow — contain a kind of pulp that I have eaten. Trees at

nearby pools appear to bear fruit .

But drinking and eating are painful exercises now, and I don't know

why I do it. Arthur and Fischelson are dead.

The light from Ogre's Heart sits on the faces of a thousand pools as if

they were mirrors. Mirrors. Mirrors wherein I might drown and

rediscover the painlessness of who I was before…

Maria Jill Ian did not die. She slept by the wreck of the descentcraft.

She slept two of Cathadonia's days, then part of a third. The silver lacery

of the pulpwillow shaded her during the day, kept off the rains at night.

When she finally woke and began to live again, she "buried" Arthur and

Fischelson by tying pieces of the descentcraft's wreckage to their mangled

bodies and dragging them to the edge of the pool. Then she waded into the

mirror surface and felt the slick pool weeds insinuate themselves between

her toes. A strong woman well into middle age, she sank first Fischelson's

body and then that of Arthur, her husband. She held the men under and

maneuvered the weights on their corpses so that neither of them would

float up again. She was oblivious to the smell of their decaying bodies; she

knew only that it would be very easy to tie a weight about her own waist

and then walk deeper into the pool.

The day after accomplishing these burials, Maria Jill Ian looked away

to the western horizon and began walking toward the pools that

glimmered there. Just as she had not known why she bothered to eat and

drink, she did not now understand why the horizon should draw her

implacably toward the twilight baths of Ogre's Heart.

Later she would rediscover her reasons, but now she simply did what

she must.

Today I walked a distance I can't accurately determine. My feet fell on

the pliant verges of at least a hundred ponds.

A small thing has happened to keep me going.

The trees over the pools have begun to change. Although their long

branches still waterfall to the pools' surfaces, not all these trees are the

pulpwillows that stand sentinel in the region where Arthur, Fischelson,

and I crashed. Some have brilliant scarlet blossoms; some have trunks

that grow in gnarled configurations right out of the pools' centers; some

are heavy with globular fruit; some are naked of all adornment and trail

their boughs in the water like skeletal hands.

But I've eaten of the trees that bear fruit, and this fruit has been sweet

and bursting with flavor, invariably. It's strange that I don't really care

for any of it. Still, it's nourishment.

The sky turns first blazing white at twilight, then yellow like lemons,

then a brutal pink. And at night the trees stand in stark tableaux that

hail me onward.

I still hurt. I still hurt terribly, from the crash, from my loss—but I'm

beginning to heal. After sleeping, I'll continue to walk away from Arthur

and Fischelson — in the direction of falling, ever-falling Ogre's Heart …

One morning Maria Jill Ian came to a pond beside which grew a huge

umbrellalike tree of gold and scarlet. The tree bore a kind of large

thick-shelled mahogany-colored nut rather than the commonplace

varieties of fruit she had been living on for the past two or three days.

She decided to stop and eat.

The nuts, however, hung high in the branches of the tree. Its twisted

bole looked as if it might allow her to climb to the higher entanglements

where she could gather food as she liked. Her simple foil jumpsuit did not

impede her climbing. Leaves rustled and flashed. She gained a place where

she could rest, and stopped.

All about her the pools of Cathadonia lay brilliant and blinding beneath

their long-fingered sentinel trees.

Ogre's Heart was moving up the sky.

Maria Jill Ian turned her head to follow the sun's squat ascent. In the

whiteness cascading through the branches overhead, she saw a shape—a

shape at least as large as a small man, a form swaying over her, eclipsing

the falling light, a thing more frightening than the realization that she was

light-years from Earth, stranded.

Not thinking, merely reacting, she stepped to the branch below her and

then swung out from the willow. She landed on the marshy ground beside

the pond, caught herself up, and scrabbled away.

Something vaguely tentacular plunged from the scarlet-and-gold

umbrella of the tree and disappeared noiselessly into the pool.

Maria Jill Ian began to run. She ran westward, inevitably toward

another pool, struggling in ground that squelched around her boots,

looking back now and again in an effort to see the thing that had plunged.

She saw the silver water pearl-up, part, and stream down the creature's

narrow head. It was going to pursue her, she knew. Although it came on

comically, it flailed with a deftness that demolished the impulse to laugh.

Maria Jill Ian did not look back again.

All of Cathadonia breathed with her as, desperately, she ran.

I call him Eracero. It's a joke. He has no arms; he swims like the

much-maligned "wetbacks" of another time. I don't know what sort of

creature he is.

A description?

Very well. To begin: Eracero has no arms, but in other respects he

resembles a man-sized spider monkey—except his body is absolutely

hairless, smooth as the hide of a porpoise, a whitish-blue like the surfaces

of Cathadonia's pools.

To continue: He is arboreal and aquatic at once. He uses his feet and

his sleek prehensile tail to climb to the uppermost branches of any

Michael Bishop - Cathadonian Odyssey(1).pdf

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: