Hugo awards the short st.., p.164
Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 1), page 164
Bracero was still high in the tree. He clutched a narrow branch with his "tail" and both "feet," his head and torso swaying gently, freely, like a live pendulum.
Clusters of mahogany-colored nuts swayed, too, in the dawn wind.
Then, looking up, Maria Jill Ian saw one of the oversized nuts snap away from the others and float directly up to the creature that had pursued her. Bracero took one foot away from the limb, grasped the willownut, expertly shelled it, and fed himself.
Several times he repeated this procedure, on each occasion the willownut floating within his reach seemingly of its own volition.
The Earth woman stood up and watched in astonishment. Bracero paid her no mind until she moved as if to obtain her own breakfast. Then he shifted in the uppermost branches, descended a little, and made screeing noises with his teeth. Maria decided not to go after the mahogany-colored shells that split, so easily it seemed, into meat-filled hemispheres. Did Bracero intend to deny her access to food? Would she have to fight?
Then a willownut fell toward her. But it broke its own fall in midair, bobbed sideways, and floated just beyond her startled hands—a miniature planet, brown and crustily wrinkled, halted in its orbit just at eye level. Bracero had stopped making screeing sounds.
Maria Jill Ian looked up. Then she gratefully took the gift and ate.
For the next several weeks she did not have to clamber into a tree again to obtain her food, nor search among the sodden grasses where the fruits and nuts sometimes fell. Bracero saw to her wants. When these were filled, he plunged out of the sentinel willows and rippled the mirror pools. Blithely he swam—until the woman made a move to continue her odyssey westward. Then he again followed.
Maria supposed that the only payment Bracero wanted for serving her was the pleasure of her company. She didn't mind, but she couldn't stay her urge to march relentlessly on Cathadonia's western horizon. Something there pulled her, compelled her onward.
Bracero has telekinetic abilities. He's been with me for almost twelve days now, as best as I'm able to reckon days—and I've been trying very hard to mark the successive risings and settings of Ogre's Heart since it is impossible to determine time by distances covered or landmarks passed.
But for slight variations in the willows, the terrain of Cathadonia is beautifully self-repeating. Looking at it, I can't understand why Bracero is the only native of the planet I have so far encountered; he is so meticulously adapted to this environment that there must be others like him. Can it be that the men of the Golden were unfortunate enough to miss seeing even one creature like Bracero?
A word about telekinesis, Bracero's uncanny skill at manipulating objects at a distance.
He does it for me every day, several times a day, and does so for himself as well; afterward, he appears no worse for this not inconsiderable psychic strain than during times of simple physical activity. His mind is as sleek as his body.
just today, for instance, I have seen him move the casabalike melons of an unusual willow that we passed this morning. He moved them, in fact, all the way to the pool where we're now loitering. This is no mean distance. It indicates that Bracero can extend his psychic aura to far locations, fix upon a specific object, and draw it toward him at will. Without noticeable aftereffects.
Ordinarily, though, he puts under his influence only those foodstuffs in the trees by which we stop. The casabas (if I can call them that) were a rare exception, a treat that he lovingly tendered to both of us. And although I seldom think about what I eat, I enjoyed these melons, and Bracero seemed to appreciate the delight I took in them.
He has an intelligence that is both animal and human. I have begun to talk to him as if he were a close friend, or a small child, or (I hesitate to write this) a new incarnation of Arthur. Bracero watches me when I talk, and listens—truly listens.
But I'm off the subject.
I'm still amazed at the placidity with which Bracero accomplishes his psychokinetic feats, the childish nonchalance of this supra-normal juggling. Does it cost him nothing?
Aboard the Nobel, of course, we have two PK mediums: Langland Smart and Margaret Riva. Langland is the older, and his abilities are more fully developed than Margaret's. In free-fall he can maneuver an unresisting hypnotized subject in any direction he wants, can make the subject raise an arm and scratch his nose, can settle him gently into a padded lift-seat.
But afterward, and even during, Langland pays. He loses weight, suffers dizziness, has nightmares and insomnia later—and his heartbeat does not fall back into a steady, safe rhythm for hours, sometimes two or three days, after such activity.
It's the same with Margaret, although she can move only small objects and these only across relatively smooth surfaces. She has no ability to levitate things, as do Langland and, more impressively, Bracero. And only Bracero does not pay for the mental forces that he so astonishingly commands over the inert.
The Nobel, meanwhile, expected us to find this watery orchard of a planet uninhabited. Did the men off that merchantship see only pools and trees when they set down here? Arthur and I talked to its captain before we left. He was a nervous ferret of a man. . . .
Ogre's Heart has set. I'm going to stop writing. In the morning we'll be off again. I wonder how much longer it will be before we're there. The willows to the west, the pools limning the horizon— these things call me.
But for tonight it would be nice if'Cathadonia had a moon. . . .
For the next two days Maria Jill Ian kept up her compulsive journeying, through terrain that did not alter.
She began to suspect that Bracero was observing her for others of his own kind, that he followed her and fed her not merely to enjoy her company but to maintain a keen and critical surveillance of her movements. She was not an unintelligent woman, by any means, and she was as susceptible to doubts as any healthy paranoid human being.
She believed that she had evidence of Bracero's communicating telepathically with other members of his species. Her evidence consisted of the fact that she still hadn't stumbled across a single one of Bracero's brethren. Before the two of them approached each new willow, each new pool, her sleek friend undoubtedly "wired" ahead an imperative to stay out of sight. The recipient of this communication undoubtedly dove into the water and remained there, nearly insensate, until they departed. Undoubtedly.
That was what Maria Jill Ian believed, and once, as they approached, she saw rings on the surface of a pool. Bracero had been careless, she surmised, and wired his warning later than usual. The slowly fading rings on the surface of the pond corroborated her suspicions. But, of course, she saw nothing but the tree and the water when they had fully arrived. Little corroboration, very little indeed.
Her affection for Bracero did not dwindle because of these suspicions; surely, he did only what he must. Also, none of his brethren had made any hostile move against her. There had been no assaults on her person, nor even any attempts to impede their trek westward.
Maybe Bracero's people had decided jointly to save both her and them the confusion, the upheaval, of further contact. Because he'd seen her first, Bracero had necessarily assumed the combined role of his people's roving watchman and Maria Jill lan's solicitous escort. She was sure that he returned at least a small portion of the affection she felt for him. His attitude, his expressive face, conveyed as much.
One evening (the evening after she had written the last log entry) they stopped for the night, and Bracero moved as if to clamber up into the inevitable willow. Involuntarily, Maria held up her hand.
"Don't go up there," she said. "There'll be plenty of time to eat. Stay down here." She patted the ground beside her. "We'll talk."
Bracero responded as if he understood her.
His bluish porpoise's skin gleaming in the twilight, he faced her and assumed his comical tripod stance about two meters away. He appeared quite ready to converse—as clinically receptive, Maria thought, as a probeship psychiatrist. His smooth brow was slightly wrinkled, his eyes looked upon her with the estranging narrowness of a devilfish's eyes. Still, his posture suggested no hostility.
Maria Jill Ian talked: "I'm not a dependent woman, Bracero. I know what I'm about. Even now I realize that what draws me on isn't entirely rational. Maybe not rational at all. I know that my loss of Arthur and my idea of home may not be redeemed by following Ogre's Heart to the horizon every day—but because I understand my irrationality, I know what I'm doing. Do you see that, Bracero? One day I'll explain myself to you with more certainty, much more."
Bracero shifted his position. His expression allowed her to think that he did see her point, intuitively.
"Arthur and I used to talk, Bracero. Sometimes without words. Neither of us was dependent on the other, though we were somehow wordlessly interdependent. I know. That sounds like a contradiction—but it's not, not really.
"We had an affinity—a love, you have to call it—that synchronized our feelings and moods in a way not at all mechanical, a spiritual meshing. This was our interdependence, Bracero.
"But we could function with the same rigorous smoothness while apart. He worked his work, I mine; and our shared independence only bound us that much more closely in our love. I miss him, Bracero, I wish he were here beside me now—so that we could talk again, even wordlessly. As before."
She paused. The far ponds twinkled with the day's last light.
"Did you know that I didn't even weep when I buried Fischelson and my husband, when I sank them to the bottom of the pool two weeks behind us? I still can't weep, Bracero. The memory of Arthur's total aliveness is still too powerful.
"So different from other men," she concluded. "So different from the cruel ones, the petty ones, the men with stupid hates and overbearing passions. Fischelson, too. Both of them so different."
Maria Jill Ian fell silent. It had done her good to talk, especially to a listener who seemed so congenial. She wished that Bracero could talk. Since he couldn't, she said, "I think Arthur would approve of what we're doing."
A moment later she said, "You don't have to sit there anymore, Bracero. You can climb up into the willow if you like."
Bracero didn't move immediately. He waited as if refraining from the subtle rudeness of leaving too quickly. Then he gracefully swung himself aloft. He hung by his tail from a low limb.
More than on any other similar occasion, Maria Jill Ian was grateful for the Cathadonian's seemingly intentional courtesy. If he were deceiving her, she didn't care.
My hands are trembling almost too violently to write this.
The night before last, I engaged in a long monologue and made Bracero listen to me hold forth on independence, communication, spiritual meshing, love, et cetera.
We haven't moved from this pool, this willow, since that night. The reasons are astounding, they're out of the pale of credibility— but my heart, my head, my trembling hands, all attest to their realness. I have to put it down here. I have to set it down as everything happened—even if my scrawl is ultimately illegible even to me.
On the morning after our "conversation," I awoke and looked up to find Bracero. He was there, his legs and tail wrapped around a branch. When I stood, I could almost look him squarely in his topsy-turvy eyes, eyes that were open but glazed over as if with cataracts.
"Wake up," I said.
He didn't move. His cephalopod's clouded eyes looked as removed from me as two useless, tarnished Earth coins.
"It's morning, it's time to get going again, Bracero."
He didn't move, still didn't move, and a kind of subdued panic gripped me. I thought that I would try a feint, a bluff, to see if that wouldn't set the good warm blood circulating through him again.
"I'm going," I said. "You can join me if you like."
That said, I set off briskly and had slogged through a good half a kilometer of unending marshland before I actually convinced myself that Bracero wasn't going to follow and that it was wrong to leave him there: a sort of Cathadonian possum who had never before put on the stiff, frightening mask of Death.
I went back.
Bracero wasn't dead. I could tell that by putting my hand against his gimlet-hole nostrils and feeling the rapid but quiet warmth of his breathing. He was in a trance, a coma, a state of suspended animation—but not really any of these things, though, because his breathing was hurried, his sleek body feverish, his pulse (which I found in his throat) telegraphically insistent. Only in his relation to the ground was Bracero suspended; otherwise, his stupor—though deep—was very animate.
I felt I had to stay by him even if it meant losing a day to our assault on the horizon; I was morally obligated. Morally obligated. Too, my affection for Bracero has deepened to a point that embarrasses me. Even the horrible manner in which he chose to demonstrate his feeling for me has not turned me against him— though my hands shake, my head swims.
All of yesterday I stayed by him. Bracero didn't improve; his condition altered not at all.
Occasionally I fetched water in a bag made of my overtunic and then moistened Bracero's face. I tried to put food in his mouth— pulp from the willow's leaves, some nutmeat I had saved, a piece of fruit—but his mouth wouldn't accept these gifts; they dribbled from his lips.
I went to sleep when Ogre's Heart set. I had nightmares. Shapes moved, voices sang, eerie winds hissed. The awful clamminess of Cathadonia seeped into my bones.
Then, before this ugly little sun had come up again, in the haggard predawn glimmering of the pool, I saw a shape of genuine substance. A shape that wasn't Bracero. A shape floating over the pool.
It was a medieval vision, a fever picture out of Dante.
I screamed into the haggard silence. Inside, I am still screaming; the horrible no-sound of this inward screaming deafens my mind to my heart. Otherwise I couldn't even write this down.
Over the pool, stretched out there as if asleep on his back, a piece of our mangled descentcraft pulling his left leg down into the water, floated Arthur's corpse—horrible, horrible, horrible.
Mercilessly, Ogre's Heart came up to light this fever picture. And nothing I could do would stay its coming.
Maria Jill Ian calmed herself. For the second time in two weeks she waded into one of Cathadonia's pools and laid her husband to rest. She caught Arthur's beautiful, hideous body in her arms. The force that had been holding him in state above the water flicked off and shifted Arthur's melancholy weight entirely to her.
A strong woman, Maria Jill Ian accepted this weight. She lowered her no-longer-human, plundered-of-dignity husband gently into the pool. The anchor she had tied to him two weeks ago pulled him down, but she refused to let him sink away. She supported him. Strangely, it seemed that invisible hands in the water helped her steady Arthur's body and slide him with precision into the silt below.
But Bracero still hung from the branch where he had remained during the whole of his "illness." Weeping quietly, Maria waded toward him.
"You did that for me, didn't you, Bracero? You brought me my husband because I said I wanted him beside me again."
A bitter gift. Over an incredible distance, a distance that it had taken them fourteen of Cathadonia's days to walk, Bracero had exerted his will upon the dead Arthur Ian and reeled him in with his mind—in the space of two nights and one waking period.
The Earth woman could not bring herself to condemn the eel-beast, the agent of her horror. Although her heart still beat savagely, and her eyes were raw with the sting of salt, she couldn't condemn him.
"No matter what I wish about my husband now, Bracero, let him sleep in peace," she said. "But understand me now: I can respect you for this, I can respect you for your sacrifice."
And Bracero was looking at her again, she saw, with eyes more like a feeble old man's than a devilfish's. His breathing had slowed, too. His limbs and tail appeared less rigid. Three hours later he rippled out of the tree's golden umbrella and took up his expectant tripod stance only a meter away from her.
The Earth woman pulled on her boots and looked back toward the east, at Ogre's Heart climbing the pale yellow sky.
"You're right," she said. "It's time to go again. We've got to forget this place. Arthur wouldn't want us to linger here."
They ate—Bracero ravenously, she only a little—and set off again. Toward the horizon, the western horizon.
We were able to walk, to slog westward, only a half day today— because of Bracero's most recent tele kinetic exploit and its aftermath. I've resolved never to think of Arthur as I saw him this morning, but to remember him as he was when I met him, and as he grew to be over the years of our marriage.
I don't know why, but I haven't written here how wearying it is to trek across Cathadonia. The ground sucks at your feet, the marshy soil betrays your sense of balance, the lack of firmness tortures your knees. The muscles in my calves have become extremely hard, my upper thighs like supple marble. Even so, it's sometimes difficult to keep going.
Today, amazingly, I kept going by talking to Bracero. (I still haven't learned my lesson.) I told him everything I could remember about Arthur. Even quotes.
"I'm as hardy as you are," I told Bracero. "Men are hardy creatures. Arthur used to say, 'Men are the ultimate vermin, Maria, as indefatigable as cockroaches, capable of outlasting the universe.' I guess that's why I can keep up with you—go beyond you even."
Even though I can't really go beyond Bracero.
He doesn't have the same trouble with Cathadonia's marshiness that I do. His body is less heavy; his slender limbs are capable of skimming the ground almost without touching it. Usually he swims each of the pools that we come to and reemerges at the western shore, where he lets me catch up with him. But this afternoon, seeing that I wanted to talk, he stayed beside me every step and listened to my schoolgirl's chatter, my woman's wisdom, with the diplomacy of a probeship captain.
Once or twice he immersed himself in a pond, but he always came back, his glistening face radiating a depth of awareness about me, Maria Jill Ian, that I've seen before only in Arthur's face. And so I talked to him of Arthur, fed on Bracero's sympathy, and didn't tire—even though so much talking ought to have made me short of breath.
