"Paul--I stepped out for a minute, while you were both asleep. Firm
ground. A smell--flowers, I think--made me remember frangipani."
"I'll try it."
"Oh, but not with that thing----"
"He didn't seem to mind us. I'll stay near the door." He knew Dorothy
would come with him. Feeling earth under legs that had nearly
forgotten it, he turned to help her down; her dark eyes played diamond
games with the moon-light.
It could have been a night anywhere in the Galaxy, up there beyond
torn branches, stars, and red moon in a vagueness of cloud. Blue
fireflies....
But there was a child wailing somewhere. Far-off and weak, a dim rise
and fall of sound, grief and remoteness. A waterfall? Wind in upper
branches? But they were still, and the sound carried the timbre of
animal life. Dorothy murmured, "It's been crying that way ever since
moon-rise." She came closely into his arms.
"I can read one thing inside of you--you're not scared."
"I'm not, Paul?"
"No."
"But don't ever leave me--Adam."
3
This was dawn: vision out of the dark: ripples of music coalescent in
one forest voice moving toward a crescendo of daytime.
Paul watched a spreading of color in the leaves, a shift from black to
gray to a loveliness more green than red; the trees were massively
old, with varied bark of green or purple-brown. Phantoms in the more
distant shadows could be understood now that light was advancing: they
were thick trees with a white bark like that of the never-forgotten
birches of New Hampshire. Underfoot Paul felt a humus that might have
been a thousand years in growing; he prodded it with his knife--a
white worm curled in mimic death.
Everywhere purple-leaved vines, vastly proliferating, climbed in a
riot of greed for the sunlight of the forest ceiling. Paul sensed a
mute cruelty in them, a shoving lust of growth. It might have been
these, elastically yielding, that had saved the lifeboat from total
ruin.
Overnight the gravity of Lucifer had become natural. His close-knit
body accepted and relished it, finding a new pleasure in strength:
thirty-seven years old and very young.
One tiny voice was near, persistent. Paul walked around the boat,
where Dorothy and Wright still slept. The starboard wing, parting from
the lifeboat, had gashed a tree trunk, littering the ground with
branches. The source of the voice was a brown lump, twenty feet up,
clinging head downward, a body small as a sparrow's, wings folded like
a bat's. As he watched they spread, quivered, and relaxed. Head and
ears were mousy, the neck long, with a hump at its base. The throat
pulsed at each cry. Near Paul's foot lay a fabric like an oriole's
nest, fastened to a twig that had been torn from the tree. Three
young had tumbled out. One was not mangled but all were dead,
hairless, poignantly ugly. "Sorry, baby--our first act on Lucifer."
The parent creature made another abortive motion as Paul took up the
young.
Its high lament was not what he and Dorothy had heard in the night.
That had been continuing when he slipped out to watch for dawn, and it
had ended at some unnoticed moment--profoundly different, surely far
off....
He tried to study the dead things as Sears Oliphant would want to do.
Two were hopelessly torn; he dug a hole in the humus and dropped those
in, smoothing the surface, wondering at his need for an act which
could mean nothing to the unhappy morsel of perception on the tree
trunk. The third, and the nest, he carried around the boat where the
light was better.
All seven digits of the forelimb spread into a membranous wing; the
hind leg divided at the ankle, three toes anchoring the wing, the
other four fused into a slim foot which had suction pads. He cradled
the bit of mortality in his palm, recalling a thing Wright had said
when they entered the lifeboat. Captain Jensen, waiting for take-off
at the spaceport, trying, as he drank sherry with Christopher Wright,
to look at the venture under the aspect of eternity, had said he liked
the philosophical implications of _Argo's_ converter, into which his
own body was strangely soon to pass. What was Wright's comment eleven
years later? "All life is cannibalism, benign or not: we are still
eating the dinosaurs." There had been more, which Paul could not
remember. So, man drove eleven years through space and killed three
babies. _But there was no element of malevolence_....
Perhaps there was none in most of man's actions over the millennia.
Wright crawled out, stiff-limbed and unrested.
"'Morning, Doc. Let me introduce _Enigma Luciferensis_."
"'Luciferensis' won't do." Wright peered down. "Everything is
'Luciferensis,' including the posterity Dot mentioned. Well now,
what----"
"A nestling. Our crash broke the nest and killed the young."
Wright fingered the fabric. "Beautiful. Leaves gummed together with
some secretion." With a doctor's intentness he added: "How d'you
feel?"
"Good."
A shadow circled Paul, settled on his arm, hobbling toward his palm
and what it held. He felt the suction cups; with a careful mouth the
creature took up its dead and flew away. "I've been remembering
something you said: life eating life--without too much concern for the
second law of thermodynamics. Forgive us our trespasses.... Good
morning, lady."
"What did I miss?" Dorothy had glimpsed the departure.
"Lucifer's idea of a bat. I think that big flying thing I saw from the
lifeboat was shaped like this midget. Haven't seen any birds."