Chao Lin said quietly, "Captain, I don't see any other way. We
would have had to arrange it that way if Helen had actually died in
childbirth. Of two unsatisfactory solutions, we must choose the least
harmful." And Merrihew knew that he had no real choice.
"I still think you're both crazy," he blustered, but it was surrender,
and Helen knew it.
Ten days after the _Starholm_ took off, young Colin Reynolds,
technician, committed suicide by the messy procedure of slicing his
jugular artery, which--in zero gravity--distributed several quarts of
blood in big round globules all over his cabin. He left an incoherent
note.
Merrihew put the note in the disposal and Chao Lin put the blood in the
ship's blood-bank for surgery, and they hushed it up as an accident;
but Merrihew had the unpleasant feeling that the layover on the green
and windy planet was going to become a legend, spread in whispers by
the crew. And it did, but that is another story.
* * * * *
Robin was two years old when he first heard the voices in the wind. He
pulled at his mother's arm and crooned softly, in imitation.
"What is it, lovey?"
"Pretty." He crooned again to the distant murmuring sound.
Helen smiled vaguely and patted the round cheek. Robin, his infant
imagination suddenly distracted, said, "Hungry. Robin hungry. Berries."
"Berries after you eat," Helen promised absently, and picked him up.
Robin tugged at her arm.
"Mommy pretty, too!"
She laughed, a rosy and smiling young Diana. She was happy on the
solitary planet; they lived quite comfortably in one of the larger
shacks, and only a little frown-line between her eyes bore witness
to the terror which had closed down on her in the first months, when
every new day had been some new struggle--against weakness, against
unfamiliar sounds, against loneliness and dread. Nights when she lay
wakeful, sweating with terror while the winds rose and fell again
and her imagination gave them voices, bleak days when she wandered
dazedly around the shack or stared moodily at Robin. There had
been moments--only fleeting, and penanced with hours of shame and
regret--when she thought that even the horror of losing Robin in those
first days would have been less than the horror of spending the rest
of her life alone here; when she had wondered why Merrihew had not
realized that she was unbalanced, and forced her to go with them ... by
now, Robin would have been only a moment's painful memory.
Still not strong, knowing she had to be strong for Robin or he would
die as surely as if she had abandoned him, she had spent the first
months in a somnambulistic dream. Sometimes she had walked for days
at a time in that dream; she would wake to find food that she could
not remember gathering. Somehow, pervasive, the dream-voices had taken
over; the whispering winds had been full of voices and even hands.
She had fallen ill and lain for days sick and delirious, and had
heard a voice which hardly seemed to be her own, saying that if she
died the wind voices would care for Robin ... and then the shock and
irrationality of that had startled her out of delirium, agonized and
trembling, and she pulled herself upright and cried out "No!"
And the shimmer of eyes and voices had faded again into vague echoes,
until there was only the stir of sunlight on the leaves, and Robin,
chubby and naked, kicking in the sunlight, cooing with his hands
outstretched to the rustle of leaves and shadows.
She had known, then, that she had to get well. She had never heard the
wind voices again, and her crisp, scientific mind rejected the fanciful
theory that if she only believed in the wind voices she would see their
forms and hear their words clearly. And she rejected them so thoroughly
that when she heard them speak she shut them away from her mind, and
after a time heard them no longer, except in restless dreams.
By now she had accepted the isolation and the beauty of their world,
and begun to make a happy life for Robin.
For lack of other occupation last summer--though the winter was
mild and there was no lack of fruits and roots even then--Helen had
patiently snared male and female of small animals like rabbits, and
now she had a pen of them. They provided a change of diet, and after
a few smelly unsuccessful experiments she had devised a way to supple
their fur pelts. She made no effort at gardening, though when Robin was
older she might try that. For the moment, it was enough that they were
healthy and safe and protected.
... Robin was _listening_ again. Helen bent her ear, sharpened by the
silence, but heard only the rustle of wind and leaves; saw only falling
brightness along a silvered tree-trunk.
Wind? When there were no branches stirring?
"Ridiculous," she said sharply, then snatched up the baby boy and
squeezed him before hoisting him astride her hip. "Mommy doesn't mean
_you_, Robin. Let's look for berries."
But soon she realized that his head was tipped back and that he was
listening, again, to some sound she could not hear.
* * * * *
On what she said was Robin's fifth birthday, Helen had made a special
bed for him in another room of the building. He missed the warmth of
Helen's body, and the comforting sound of her breathing; for Robin,
since birth, had been a wakeful child.
Yet, on the first night alone, Robin felt curiously freed. He did
something he had never dared do before, for fear of waking Helen; he
slipped from his bed and stood in the doorway, looking into the forest.
The forest was closer to the doorway now; Robin could fuzzily remember
when the clearing had been wider. Now, slowly, beyond the garden patch
which Helen kept cleared, the underbrush and saplings were growing
back, and even what Robin called "the burned place" was covered with
new sparse grass.
Robin was accustomed to being alone, during the day--even in his first
year, Helen had had to leave him alone, securely fastened in the house,
or inside a little tight-fenced yard. But he was not used to being
alone at night.
Far off in the forest, he could hear the whispers of the other people.
Helen said there were no other people, but Robin knew better, because
he could hear their voices on the wind, like fragments of the songs
Helen sang at bedtime. And sometimes he could almost see them in the
shadowy spots.
Once when Helen had been sick, a long time ago, and Robin had run
helplessly from the fenced yard to the inside room and back again,
hungry and dirty and furious because Helen only slept on the bed with
her eyes closed, rousing up now and then to whimper like he did when
he fell down and skinned his knee, the winds and voices had come into
the very house; Robin had hazy memories of soothing voices, of hands
that touched him more softly than Helen's hands. But he could not quite
remember.
Now that he could hear them so clearly, he would go and find the other
people. And then if Helen was sick again, there would be someone else
to play with him and look after him. He thought gleefully, _won't Helen
be surprised_, and darted off across the clearing.
* * * * *
Helen woke, roused not by a sound but by a silence. She no longer heard
Robin's soft breaths from the alcove, and after a moment she realized
something else:
The winds were silent.
Perhaps, she thought, a storm was coming. Some change in air pressure
could cause this stillness--but Robin? She tiptoed to the alcove; as
she had suspected, his bed was empty.
Where could he be? In the clearing? With a storm coming? She slid her
feet into hand-made sandals and ran outside, her quivering call ringing
out through the silent forest:
"Robin--oh, Robin!"
Silence. And far away a little ominous whisper. And for the first
time, since that first frightening year of loneliness, she felt lost,
deserted in an alien world. She ran across the clearing, looking around
wildly, trying to decide which way he could have wandered. Into the
forest? What if he had strayed toward the river bank? There was a place
where the bank crumbled away, down toward the rapids--her throat closed
convulsively, and her call was almost a shriek:
"Oh, Robin! Robin, darling! Robin!"
She ran through the paths worn by their feet, hearing snatches of
rustle, winds and leaves suddenly vocal in the cold moonlight around
her. It was the first time since the spaceship left them that Helen had
ventured out into the night of their world. She called again, her voice
cracking in panic.
"Ro-bin!"
A sudden stray gleam revealed a glint of white, and a child stood in
the middle of the path. Helen gasped with relief and ran to snatch up
her son--then fell back in dismay. It was not Robin who stood there.
The child was naked, about a head shorter than Robin, and female.
There was something curious about the bare and gleaming flesh, as if
she could see the child only in the full flush of the moonlight. A
round, almost expressionless face was surrounded by a mass of colorless
streaming hair, the exact color of the moonlight. Helen's audible gasp
startled her to a stop: she shut her eyes convulsively, and when she
opened them the path was black and empty and Robin was running down the
track toward her.
Helen caught him up, with a strangled cry, and ran, clasping him to her
breast, back down the path to their shack. Inside, she barred the door
and laid Robin down in her own bed, and threw herself down shivering,
too shaken to speak, too shaken to scold him, curiously afraid to
question. I had a hallucination, she told herself, a hallucination,
another dream, a dream....
* * * * *
A dream, like the other Dream. She dignified it to herself as The
Dream, because it was not like any other dream she had ever had. She
had dreamed it first before Robin's birth, and been ashamed to speak of
it to Chao Lin, fearing the common-sense skepticism of the older woman.
On their tenth night on the green planet (the _Starholm_ was a dim
recollection now) when Merrihew's scientists had been convinced that
the little world was safe, without wild beasts or diseases or savage
natives, the crew had requested permission to camp in the valley
clearing beside the river. Permission granted, they had gone apart in
couples almost as usual, and even those who had no enduring liaison at
the moment had found a partner for the night.
_It must have been that night...._
Colin Reynolds was two years younger than Helen, and their attachment,
enduring over a few months of shiptime, was based less on mutual
passion than a sort of boyish need in him, a sort of impersonal
feminine solicitude in Helen. All her affairs had been like that,
companionable, comfortable, but never passionate. Curiously enough,
Helen was a woman capable of passion, of great depths of devotion; but
no man had ever roused it and now no man ever would. Only Robin's birth
had touched her deeply-pent emotions.
But that night, when Colin Reynolds was sleeping, Helen stayed
restlessly awake, hearing the unquiet stirring of wind on the leaves.
After a time she wandered down to the water's edge, staying a cautious
distance from the shore--for the cliff crumbled dangerously--and
stretched herself out to listen to the wind-voices. And after a time
she fell asleep, and had The Dream, which was to return to her again
and again.
Helen thought of herself as a scientist, without room for fantasies,
and that was why she called it, fiercely, a dream; a dream born of some
undiagnosed conflict in her. Even to herself Helen would not recall it
in full.
There had been a man, and to her it seemed that he was part of the
green and windy world, and he had found her sleeping by the river. Even
in her drowsy state, Helen had suspected that perhaps one of the other
crew members, like herself sleepless and drawn to the shining water,
had happened upon her there; such things were not impossible, manners
and mores being what they were among starship crews.
But to her, half-dreaming, there had been some strangeness about him,
which prevented her from seeing him too clearly even in the brilliant
green moonlight. No dream and no man had ever seemed so living to her;
and it was her fierce rationalization of the dream which kept her
silent, months later, when she discovered (to her horror and secret
despair) that she was with child. She had felt that she would lose the
haze and secret delight of the dream, if she openly acknowledged that
Colin had fathered her child.
But at first--in the cool green morning that followed--she had not been
at all sure it was a dream. Seeing only sunlight and leaves, she had
held back from speaking, not wanting ridicule; could she have asked
each man of the _Starholm_, Was it you who came to me last night?
Because if it was not, there are other men on this world, men who
cannot be clearly seen even by moonlight--
Severely she reminded herself, Merrihew's men had pronounced the world
uninhabited, and uninhabited it must be. Five years later, hugging
her sleeping son close, Helen remembered the dream, examined the
content of her fantasy, and once again, shivering, repeated, "I had a
hallucination. It was only a dream. A dream, because I was alone...."
* * * * *
When Robin was fourteen years old, Helen told him the story of his
birth, and of the ship.
He was a tall, silent boy, strong and hardy but not talkative; he
heard the story almost in silence, and looked at Helen for a long time
in silence, afterward. He finally said in a whisper, "You could have
died--you gave up a lot for me, Helen, didn't you?" He knelt and took
her face in his hands. She smiled, and drew a little away from him.
"Why are you looking at me like that, Robin?"
The boy could not put instant words to his thoughts; emotions were not
in his vocabulary. Helen had taught him everything she knew, but she
had always concealed her feelings from her son. He asked at last, "Why
didn't my father stay with you?"
"I don't suppose it entered his head," Helen said. "He was needed on
the ship. Losing me was bad enough."