Trina shook her head and looked up at Max. He was smiling out at the
town, nodding to some men he apparently knew, with nothing but eagerness
in his face. He seemed a stranger. She looked around for Curt Elias, but
he was in one of the other cars cut off from them by the crowd. She
couldn't see him at all.
"Don't you like it?" Saari said.
"I liked it better where we landed."
Max turned and glanced down at her briefly, but his hand found hers and
held it, tightly, until her own relaxed. "If you want to, Trina, we can
live out there, in those fields."
For a moment she forgot the crowd and the endless faces as she looked up
at him. "Do you mean that, Max? We could really live out there?"
Where it was quiet, and the sun was the same, and the birds sang sweetly
just before harvest time, where she would have room to ride and plenty
of pasture for her favorite horse. Where she would have Max, there with
her, not out somewhere beyond the stars.
"Certainly we could live there," he said. "That's what I've been saying
all along."
"You could settle down here?"
He laughed. "Oh, I suppose I'd be out in space a good deal of the time,"
he said. "The ships will come here now, you know. But I'll always come
home, Trina. To this world. To you."
And suddenly it didn't matter that the girl beside her chuckled, nor
that there were too many people crowding around them, all talking at
once in their strangely accented voices. All that mattered was Max, and
this world, which was real after all, and a life that seemed like an
endless festival time before her.
* * * * *
Evening came quickly, too quickly, with the sun dropping in an unnatural
plunge toward the horizon. Shadows crept out from the houses of the
town, reached across the narrow street and blended with the walls of the
houses opposite. The birds sang louder in the twilight, the notes of
their song drifting in from the nearby fields. And there was another
sound, that of the wind, not loud now but rising, swirling fingers of
dust in the street.
Trina sat in front of the town cafe with the planet girl, Saari. Max
Cramer was only a few feet away, but he paid no attention to her, and
little to Elias. He was too busy telling the planet people about space.
"Your man?" Saari asked.
"Yes," Trina said. "I guess so."
"You're lucky." Saari looked over at Max and sighed, and then she turned
back to Trina. "My father was a spaceman. He used to take my mother up,
when they were first married, when the ships were still running." She
sighed. "I remember the ships, a little. But it was such a long time
ago."
"I can't understand you people." Trina shook her head. "Leaving all of
this, just to go out in space."
The room was crowded, oppressively crowded. Outside, too many people
walked the shadowed streets. Too many voices babbled together. The
people of this planet must be a little mad, Trina thought, to live
cooped together as the spacemen lived, with all their world around them.
Saari sat watching her, and nodded. "You're different, aren't you? From
us, and from them too." She looked over at Max and Bernard and the
others, and then she looked at Curt Elias, who sat clenching and
unclenching his hands, saying nothing.
"Yes, we're different," Trina said.
Max Cramer's voice broke incisively into the silence that lay between
them then. "I don't see why," he said, "we didn't all know about this
world. Especially if more than one ship came here."
Saari's father laughed softly. "It's not so strange. The ships all
belonged to one clan. The MacGregors. And eventually all of them either
were lost in space somewhere or else grew tired of roaming around and
settled down. Here." He smiled again, and his high cheekboned face
leaned forward into the light. "Like me...."
Night. Cloudless, black, but hazed over with atmosphere and thus
familiar, not like the night of space. The two small moons, the stars in
unfamiliar places, and somewhere, a star that was her world. And Trina
sat and listened to the planet men talk, and to the spacemen among them
who could no longer be distinguished from the native born. Outside, in
the narrow street, wind murmured, skudding papers and brush before it,
vague shadows against the light houses. Wind, rising and moaning, the
sound coming in over the voices and the music from the cafe singers.
It was a stronger wind than ever blew on the world, even during the
winter, when the people had to stay inside and wish that Earth tradition
might be broken and good weather be had the year around.
"We'd better get back to the ship," Elias said.
They stopped talking and looked at him, and he looked down at his hands,
embarrassed. "They'll be worried about us at home."
"No, they won't," Max said. Then he saw the thin, blue-veined hands
trembling and the quiver not quite controlled in the wrinkled neck.
"Though perhaps we should start back...."
Trina let out her breath in relief. To be back in the ship, she thought,
with the needle and its forgetfulness, away from the noise and the crowd
and the nervousness brought on by the rising wind.
It would be better, of course, when they had their place in the country.
There it would be warm and homelike and quiet, with the farm animals
near by, and the weather shut out, boarded out and forgotten, the way it
was in winter on the world.
"You're coming with us?" Captain Bernard was saying.
"Yes, we're coming." Half a dozen of the men stood up and began pulling
on their long, awkward coats.
"It'll be good to get back in space again," MacGregor said. "For a
while." He smiled. "But I'm too old for a spaceman's life now."
"And I'm too old even for this," Elias said apologetically. "If we'd
found this planet the other time...." He sighed and shook his head and
looked out the window at the shadows that were people, bent forward,
walking into the wind. He sighed again. "I don't know. I just don't
know."
Saari got up and pulled on her wrap too. Then she walked over to one of
the other women, spoke to her a minute, and came back carrying a
quilted, rough fabricked coat. "Here, Trina, you'd better put this on.
It'll be cold out."
"Are you going with us?"
"Sure. Why not? Dad's talked enough about space. I might as well see
what it's like for myself."
Trina shook her head. But before she could speak, someone opened the
door and the cold breeze came in, hitting her in the face.
"Come on," Saari said. "It'll be warm in the car."
Somehow she was outside, following the others. The wind whipped her
hair, stung her eyes, tore at her legs. The coat kept it from her body,
but she couldn't protect her face, nor shut out the low moaning wail of
it through the trees and the housetops.
She groped her way into the car. The door slammed shut, and the wind
retreated, a little.
"Is it--is it often like that?"
Saari MacGregor looked at her. Max Cramer turned and looked at her, and
so did the others in the car. For a long moment no one said anything.
And then Saari said, "Why, this is _summer_, Trina."
"Summer?" She thought of the cereal grasses, rippling in the warm day.
They'd be whipping in the wind now, of course. The wind that was so much
stronger than any the world's machines ever made.
"You ought to be here in winter," Saari was saying. "It really blows
then. And there are the rainstorms, and snow...."
"Snow?" Trina said blankly.
"Certainly. A couple of feet of it, usually." Saari stopped talking and
looked at Trina, and surprise crept even farther into her face. "You
mean you don't have snow on your world?"
"Why, yes, we have snow. We have everything Earth had." But snow two
feet deep ... Trina shivered, thinking of winter on the world, and the
soft dusting of white on winter mornings, the beautiful powdery flakes
cool in the sunlight.
"They have about a sixteenth of an inch of it," Max said. "And even
that's more than some of the worlds have. It hardly ever even rains in
New California."
Saari turned away finally, and the others did too. The car started, the
sound of its motors shutting out the wind a little, and then they were
moving. Yet it was even more frightening, rushing over the roads in the
darkness, with the houses flashing past and the trees thrashing in the
wind and the people briefly seen and then left behind in the night.
The ship was ahead. The ship. Now even it seemed a safe, familiar place.
"This isn't like Earth after all," Trina said bitterly. "And it seemed
so beautiful at first."
Then she saw that Saari MacGregor was looking at her again, but this
time more in pity than in surprise.
"Not like Earth, Trina? You're wrong. We have a better climate than
Earth's. We never have blizzards, nor hurricanes, and it's never too
cold nor too hot, really."
"How can you say that?" Trina cried. "We've kept _our_ world like Earth.
Oh, maybe we've shortened winter a little, but still...."
Saari's voice was sad and gentle, as if she were explaining something to
a bewildered child. "My mother's ancestors came here only a few years
out from Earth," she said. "And do you know what they called this
planet? A paradise. A garden world."
"That's why they named it Eden," Max Cramer said.
Then they were at the ship, out of the car, running to the airlock, with
the grass lashing at their legs and the wind lashing at their faces and
the cold night air aflame suddenly in their lungs. And Trina couldn't
protest any longer, not with the world mad about her, not with Saari's
words ringing in her ears like the wind.
She saw them carry Curt Elias in, and then Max was helping her aboard,
and a moment later, finally, the airlock doors slipped shut and it was
quiet.
She held out her arm for the needle.
* * * * *
When she awoke again it was morning. Morning on the world. They had
carried her to one of the divans in the council hall, one near a window
so that she could see the familiar fields of her homeland as soon as she
awoke. She rubbed her eyes and straightened and looked up at the others.
At Elias, still resting on another divan. At Captain Bernard. At Saari
and her father, and another man from the planet. At Max.
He looked at her, and then sighed and turned away, shaking his head.
"Are we--are we going back there?" Trina asked.
"No," Elias said. "The people are against it."
There was silence for a moment, and then Elias went on. "I'm against it.
I suppose that even if I'd been young I wouldn't have wanted to stay."
His eyes met Trina's, and there was pity in them.
"No," Max said. "You wouldn't have wanted to."
"And yet," Elias said, "I went down there. Trina went down there. Her
father and I both went out into space." He sighed. "The others wouldn't
even do that."
"You're not quite as bad, that's all," Max said bluntly. "But I don't
understand any of you. None of us ever has understood you. None of us
ever will."
Trina looked across at him. Her fingers knew every line of his face, but
now he was withdrawn, a stranger. "You're going back there, aren't you?"
she said. And when he nodded, she sighed. "We'll never understand you
either, I guess."
She remembered Saari's question of the night before, "Is he your man?"
and she realized that her answer had not been the truth. She knew now
that he had never been hers, not really, nor she his, that the woman who
would be his would be like Saari, eager and unafraid and laughing in the
wind, or looking out the ports at friendly stars.
Elias leaned forward on the divan and gestured toward the master weather
panel for their part of the village, the indicators that told what it
was like today and what it would be like tomorrow all over the world. "I
think I understand," he said. "I think I know what we did to our
environment, through the generations. But it doesn't do much good, just
knowing something."
"You'll never change," Max said.
"No, I don't think we will."
Captain Bernard got up, and MacGregor got up too. They looked at Max.
Slowly he turned his head and smiled at Trina, and then he too stood up.
"Want to come outside and talk, Trina?"
But there was nothing to say. Nothing she could do except break down and
cry in his arms and beg him not to leave her, beg him to spend the rest
of his life on a world she could never leave again.
"No," she said. "I guess not." And then, the memories rushed back, and
the music, and the little lane down by the stream where the magnolias
spread their web of fragrance. "It's--it's almost festival time, Max.
Will you be here for it?"
"I don't know, Trina."
It meant no; she knew that.
* * * * *
The weeks slipped by, until it was summer on the world, until the
festival music sang through the villages and the festival flowers
bloomed and the festival lovers slipped off from the dances to walk
among them. There was a breeze, just enough to carry the mingled
fragrances and the mingled songs, just enough to touch the throat and
ruffle the hair and lie lightly between the lips of lovers.
Trina danced with Aaron Gomez, and remembered. And the wind seemed too
soft somehow, almost lifeless, with the air too sweet and cloying.
She wondered what a festival on the planet would be like.
Max, with Saari MacGregor, perhaps, laughing in the wind, running in the
chill of evening along some riverbank.