* * * * *
I put a finger over his lips. “It doesn’t matter,” I said softly.
“Nothing matters that happened before. I don’t want to know. We were
born again here, and all the past is gone--so far away that we could
never find it if we searched a million lifetimes. It never happened.
There’s just--us.”
He kissed me and there was no passion in it--only wonder and happiness.
“Louise--” His voice was almost lost in his throat. “I love you,
Louise.”
“I love you, Sam.”
But when he slept, the name he muttered was “Fran.”
In the morning life begins again. In the morning we walked back to his
ship. Food was no problem. Fruits and berries were plentiful--apples
and peaches and pears and plums and cherries--every day we discovered
something new but familiar. From the ship’s stores we got canned meats
and vegetables--we never saw any other animals than Bambi, although Sam
insisted that obviously there must be others. Bambi wandered in and out
of camp, but he was always there when Sam wanted him. Sam liked to play
with him, and Bambi enjoyed it.
The first day Sam built a shelter--a bower was what he called it--at
the edge of the clearing where the ship was, under the trees. I didn’t
want to sleep in the ship or even go inside it.
“That’s the past,” I told Sam. “It’s as dead and meaningless as a
monument. The sooner we forget what it is and what it stands for the
happier we’ll be.”
Sam agreed with me. The next time he went to the ship for food he
returned without his gun. He built the bower, and he took a long time
at it, lacing limbs together and thatching it with leaves to keep off
the occasional showers. He was good with his hands, and he liked to
keep busy.
That night he slept peacefully.
The second day we explored a little and looked over our supplies. We
had the ship’s stores and fruit was plentiful, but there was nothing
growing that would keep. Sam worried about it.
“If it gets colder we might be in for something,” he said. “We could
weather one winter in the ship, I suppose, but the next--”
I shook my head. “I don’t think it will get any colder. I think it will
always be like this.”
He talked about wobbles and ecliptics and temperate zones, but it
didn’t mean anything. The weather wasn’t changing, and it wasn’t going
to. I was sure of that.
He stirred a little in his sleep that night.
* * * * *
The morning of the third day we went to look for my ship. I tried to
talk Sam out of it, but I knew it wasn’t any use. There might be fuel
left, he said, maybe even enough to make an exploratory trip, and we
could use the supplies. Maybe we could even locate some inhabitants.
All that day we walked away from the ocean, and we saw nothing
new--nothing at all. Trees identical with those that grew around our
camp, spaced out on soft green turf. No animals. We walked slowly but
steadily, eating fruit picked on our way. Sam began to get restless.
Sometimes he would peer far ahead or swing around and stare back the
way we had come.
Toward evening we were walking up the side of a low hill. Suddenly Sam
stopped. He looked toward me, his eyes vague and thoughtful.
“You know,” he said, his voice low and tense-sounding in the quietness,
“I have a strange feeling that maybe we’ll come to a place where all
this ends, where it stops being and there’s nothing. Like maybe we’ll
climb to the top of this hill and we’ll look down and there won’t be
any trees and turf or anything. Like it’s being created before us,
rolled out like a green carpet, and just beyond where we can see, it’s
something else entirely, something unimaginable.”
“You and all the other horizon-chasing explorers.”
I smiled and a moment later he smiled and shook his head and took my
hand and we climbed to the top of the hill. As far as we could see
there were the same trees and turf.
We slept under the sky that night, and Sam muttered but it never turned
into words.
* * * * *
The next day we reached a point farther than the distance Sam estimated
I could have walked, and we searched in circles the rest of that day
and the next. In the middle of one I finally stopped and shook my head
bewilderedly.
“They all look the same,” I said. “I don’t know where I put it down.
Let’s give it up, Sam. It isn’t important now. Later we can map this
area with landmarks and things and search for it, but I want to get
back to our--home. Funny, isn’t it? We’ve only been here a week, and
already there’s a place I think of as home.”
Sam argued. He really wanted to search some more, but he finally gave
in. We started back.
* * * * *
At our camp, life fell into a regular pattern. We woke. We ate. We
swam in the impossibly blue sea by the silver sands. We fished. We
ate and talked. We made love. We slept. It should have been paradise,
and it was. But Sam was restless. He needed something to do, and here
there was nothing that needed doing. He began to talk about building a
sailboat, and he did work at it now and then, but he never seemed to
get very far with it. And in the night he had begun to moan and say one
name over and over again.
One evening we were sitting together after our meal. The sun was still
shining through the trees and I knew it was building up in him and
there was nothing I could do but hope.
“Fran,” he said, “I think we should search--” He stopped. _Fran_, he
thought. _What a stupid thing to say. What a horrible thing to say._
He glanced at me to see if I had noticed, and I sat there with the sun
on me, not moving, not looking at him, feeling his eyes. _And yet_, he
thought, _there is a resemblance. The dark hair, the mouth_ ... _The
dark hair!_ He cast his mind back and I saw myself in his mind as he
had seen me when I stepped forth from the trees with blue eyes and a
generous mouth and ash-blonde hair. And it was something I couldn’t
help because he wanted it so hard.
He moved away from me a little. His thoughts churned. _Dark hair!_ He
looked around him slowly and suddenly scrambled to his feet and ran to
the ship and climbed up the ladder. I knew what he had gone for and I
waited for him to come back and I hoped. Because there was nothing left
but hope.
When he came back he had his gun hanging at his hip again.
“Stand up,” he said harshly. He towered above me, his feet spread
apart, his face dark and angry.