Collected short fiction, p.664
Collected Short Fiction, page 664
My own faith in any united human undertaking was pretty well eroded by that time, but I was eager to stay at Skygate. I wanted more facts than anybody yet knew about those small black crystals. I wanted to know what had brought the seekers down and why the contradictory stories of Marko and his men differed so bizarrely from the apparent facts. I took the job.
At that point I had seen nothing remarkable in the sudden decision of all three men to marry. Nothing had prepared me for the coming of the moon children, whose lives I am trying to describe.
Somewhat ironically for me, it presently developed that my actual task in the publicity section was not to tell their story, but rather to conceal it. The unfolding wonders of their lives soon began to draw too much notice. My job, it turned out, was to protect them from the painful consequences of their own surprising strangeness.
Young Nick Marko’s first surprising act was his birth. Carolina had carried him less than seven months, and she was still at work in the exobiology lab, running amino acid tests on her cultures of microscopic bioforms, not an hour before he was born.
AT THREE pounds and no ounces, Nick surprised the neonatal specialists with his small-scale maturity. He breathed easily without waiting to be spanked and nursed with an uncommon eagerness.
His color was equally surprising. Born pink and white, neither tomato-vermilion nor with any visible touch of his mother’s rich pigmentation, he turned nut brown in five seconds under the lights on his father’s movie camera. Ten minutes later, that instant tan was gone.
His pattern of sleep perplexed his doctors and frightened his parents. For almost a month he stayed awake day and night, learning to turn himself over and ceaselessly exploring every object he could reach. On his twenty-eighth day, Carolina found him limp and cold in his crib. Marko felt no pulse and thought he was dead.
Two physicians agreed. No test found any sign of life. Even his brain waves had ceased. But Carolina wouldn’t give him up. She was with him all night, tending him as zealously as if he had been another Venusian bioform. At eighty-one degrees his falling temperature stabilized. Four hours later it began to rise. He woke in her arms at dawn, babbling happily and ready to nurse.
Valkyrie Thorsen was born that same night. No robust battle-maid, notwithstanding the name her father chose, she was even tinier than Nick and just as remarkably mature. Very fair at first, though Suzie Thorsen was almost as dark as Carolina, she turned briefly golden under the lights in the delivery room.
Oddly alike, Kyrie and Nick were equally precocious. They shared the same minute perfection, the same shy grace, the same happy tempers, the same traits of pleasing but nonhuman strangeness. Both had the same unearthly sort of slim, elfin, largeeyed beauty. Both were warmly and perceptive, yet often untouchably aloof. Both slept only at month-long intervals, in the same deathlike way.
They even seemed somehow aware of each other before they ever met. Carolina discovered that one morning when she had driven Marko to work at the Center, where he was now head of the Life Science Section. Baby Nick was with her, slung in a harness to the car seat. He began leaping and crowing as they passed Thorsen’s house on the way home.
Carolina had not meant to stop, but Nick cried out as she drove past the house and began moaning so sadly that she turned back around the block. He was yelling and wriggling again with glee when she parked in front of the house.
Inside, Kyrie had been sitting against the end of her crib, solemnly shaking a rattle in time to a dissonant blue jazz number that she had learned to request by beating out its syncopated rhythm. Before Carolina reached the door with Nick, she began tossing rattles and toys out of the crib. When Suzie let them in, she pulled herself upright to greet them, squealing with delight.
With eager screams they persuaded the mothers to put them together. Seated face to face, one at each end of the crib, they fell abruptly silent. Wide eyes changing slowly from opal-gold to midnight black, they studied each other for five endless minutes.
Nick pitched suddenly forward and got Kyrie’s doll foot into his mouth. Carolina swooped to the rescue, because Nick was already cutting teeth. Kyrie howled, however, when she tried to pull Nick away. They lay for another hour in the crib, prodding and kicking and gently biting each other, sometimes laughing, sometimes so grave that Carolina was frightened again.
They clung to each other when Carolina wanted to go, until the mothers promised that they could visit again whenever they pleased. Nick seemed to understand. He crooned solemnly to Kyrie until her somber eyes turned slowly golden and then he looked quietly up at his mother, ready to leave.
They let nothing stop those promised visits. One morning, when it was Kyrie’s turn to call on Nick, the mesa was buried under an unusual snowfall. Cars were stalled, and Suzie refused to go out. Kyrie whimpered so piteously, however, that Thorsen put on his skis and carried her to see Nick.
MY BROTHER’S child was also surprising, but in more distressing ways. Tom was still at Skygate, in a new job as assistant director of Operation Seeker, hut Robin had never liked the place. It was Sticksgate to her. She was abroad most of the time, flitting between her father’s floating resorts with her own set, until her unplanned pregnancy alarmed her.
She begged for an abortion, but Tom and her father opposed it. Howard Hudson wanted a grandson and Tom may still have been responsive to some undiscovered influence from the moon grit. She might have ignored both of them, but when her doctors heard about what they called the idiopathic births of Nick Marko and Kyrie Thorsen, they advised her for her own safety to come back to the space hospital and bear her child under expert care.
To Robin’s dismay the child wasn’t born at seven months. She waited fretfully, staying in a suite at the Skygate Hudson because my brother’s house had no room for her nurse and her French maid and her hypnotherapist, hating what the desert was doing to her skin.
At nine months the child was still unborn. By then Robin was growing hysterical about more than the fun things she was missing and the freckles she was getting. She called her father and her astrologer and a guru she had met at the Bengal Hudson. They all advised her to demand a Caesarean section, but the knife terrified her.
She had passed ten months when Nick and Kyrie came to call. It was a sunny afternoon and Marko had taken the babies and their mothers on a tour of the complex. They had watched a spaceplane roaring off toward the Earth platform and an ancient Indian building a mountain of juniper firewood on a tiny burro and a tall cactus blooming—watched all with the same silent intentness, but a chance glimpse of the Skygate Hudson tower sent the children into shrieking fits.
Their whooping eagerness was so insistent that Marko drove them to the hotel. Robin wouldn’t see them at first. My brother came down to meet them in the lobby. With an embarrassed glance at Carolina, he said his wife was not receiving anyone.
Nick and Kyrie refused to be taken away, however, and evidently the unborn child in the tower suite somehow sensed their presence. While the mothers were still trying to quiet the screaming babies, Robin’s nurse burst in with a whispered message for Tom.
He asked Marko to wait, while he went back to Robin. A few minutes later he came down again. Looking pale and shaken, he announced that his wife had changed her mind. She wanted to see Nick and Kyrie. Their mothers could come if they liked.
Carolina chose to wait in the lobby, but Suzie Thorsen told me later what happened up in the suite. They found Robin sprawled on a chaise lounge, under a heap of pillows and blankets that failed to conceal the bulge of her belly. The maid, the nurse and my brother were hovering over her uneasily. Her face was streaked with unbecoming tears. Suzie felt sorry for her.
NICK and Kyrie shrieked with joy to see her, but their interest was all in her swollen abdomen. They stared at it with wide and I darkening eyes. They leaned eagerly toward it. They prodded wildly at it when Robin tried to take them in her arms.
Suddenly savage, she shoved them off.
“Hideous little m-m-m-m-monsters!” Suzie mimicked her stammering rage with a quaint effect. “Horrid little b-b-b-b-bastards! They’re too bright to be h-h-h-h-human. Take ’em away!”
Marko and Suzie took them away. Strangely subdued, they went without protest. Their huge eyes remained solemn and dark. They clung to each other in a frightened way as Marko drove them home and Nick was disconsolate when Suzie took Kyrie out of the car.
Late that night, Marko and Carolina were awakened by Nick’s frantic screaming. They could find nothing wrong with him. The phone rang before they got him quiet and Suzie told them that Kyrie was also moaning and sobbing in terror that had no visible cause.
Hoping the two might comfort each other, they rushed Nick across town to Kyrie’s nursery. Sitting in the same crib, the two stared blankly at each other and howled in harmony.
When Marko thought of the third child he called Robin’s suite. The French maid told him that she had gone to the hospital for a Caesarian delivery. Marko talked to her doctors, who were already washing up. They said they had waited as long as they dared. They refused to delay the operation.
Nerved by a new burst of terror from Nick and Kyrie, Marko called Colonel Petrov. A nominal civilian, Maxim Petrov was the retired Sino-Soviet officer who had replaced Sherman Parkinson as head of the Space Studies Center. He had no more faith than had Parkinson in the altruistic ideals of COSMOS, but he was just as anxious to discover the power of the moon grit. When Marko pointed out that Robin’s unborn child would be another guinea pig that might help him crack the mystery, Petrov called the hospital.
Robin’s surgeons huffily agreed to wait for additional clinical tests. The tests revealed an unknown antigen in her blood and a dangerous sensitivity to the anesthetics they had meant to use. They put off the operation over Robin’s profane protests.
The moment she was wheeled out of the delivery room, Nick and Kyrie relaxed in their cribs and went happily to sleep, a week earlier than usual. My brother took Robin back to the Skygate Hudson under mild sedation, sobbing and cursing him and his child.
She had another month to wait, swelling enormously and quarreling venomously by phone with everyone she knew, refusing to be seen by anybody except her nurses and her doctors and the puzzled staff of exobiologists and other specialists they had called in.
Carolina believed that Nick and Kyrie were aware of her delivery when at last it came. They wanted to be together and they cooed and trilled excitedly, sometimes with expectant attention, large heads lifted as if they were listening. Whatever they perceived, it did not alarm them.
Robin’s delivery was normal—in fact easier than the obstetricians had expected—but her child was not. A lax, shapeless, sluglike thing, it weighed thirteen pounds. It was all body, the head grotesquely broad and flat. The limbs were undeveloped flippers, with the barest hint of human form. Short dark fur covered it all over.
The obstetricians failed to start it breathing. They found no pulse or any other sign of life. Its temperature was sinking fast. Helplessly they surrendered it to the jostling specialists, who looked for brain waves and blood-reactions and autonomic reflexes. No test revealed anything. An empty bag of unnameable flesh, the creature hung inert and monstrous in their hands.
They declared it dead.
V
CAROLINA asked to see Robin’s baby. Relieved to wash their hands of the inexplicable, the doctors let her take it. She bathed it and held it in her arms all night. Its falling temperature steadied at eighty and finally began to rise. By noon next day it was awake.
The specialists had it carried to Robin’s room, urging her to nurse it, because they were afraid to risk bottle feeding. Though they had warned her the child was exceptional, she hid her eyes after one glance and shrieked until her physician ordered heavy sedation.
My brother hinted that the creature should simply be allowed to die. Merely as a biological specimen, however, it was far too valuable to be abandoned. Many of us, besides, had caught a warmer personal interest in it from Nick and Kyrie. Since neither. parent wanted to see it again, Marko and Carolina took it home until the nursery was finished.
That nursery was actually a special laboratory, designed by. Colonel Petrov himself for the observation of these unique guinea pigs. A low-roofed ranch-style building, it looked deceptively homelike, but there were offices and instrument rooms and a record vault as well as space for all three children and their custodians. One-way mirrors and a network of sensors were built into the walls.
Robin’s baby was moved there as soon as a room was ready, a week ahead of Nick and Kyrie. To Carolina’s surprise, they seemed to miss it painfully, even though it was nearly always asleep. Allowed at last to explore their own new quarters there, they squealed with glee when they discovered that child would be with them again. Though most of the nurses shrank from its shapeless strangeness, they clamored to be near it, their great eyes glowing as if it were beautiful to them.
By that time Carolina had decided that it was going to be male. She named it Guy, after the way she heard the shouts with which Nick and Kyrie greeted it. Its soft flippers had begun to look more like hands and feet and it sometimes twitched and blinked when the other babies were near, though for several months it made no sound at all.
Robin tried peyote for her jangled nerves and yoga to restore her precious figure. She returned to the Bengal Hudson with her guru and married him before the year was up, promising a gossip columnist that she would never bear another child.
Divorce had done no apparent damage to the curious tie between my brother and Howard Hudson. Tom left his Skygate job as soon as Colonel Petrov would release him and I heard that he was joining Hudson in a venture to exploit the astonishing discoveries on Mercury, where the seekers had begun to chart wide craters walled with piled nodules of alloyed iridium and gold—one exobiologist made the bizarre suggestion that those rich nuggets were excreted waste from the unknown creatures that had dug those iron-walled tunnels.
In spite of those rich finds, and stranger ones reported on the moons of Jupiter, COSMOS had begun to fall apart. The rumors and suspicions that grew from the riddle of the moon grit raised new tensions between its uneasy partners. Maxim Petrov resigned in the wake of a scandal that linked him with a Sino-Soviet spy ring. Washington threatened to cancel the lease on the mesa and reclaim all the Skygate installations. Erik Thorsen became the new director of the Center through a precarious compromise and was soon accused of setting up his own spy apparatus for the United States.
NAIVELY, as we sat one morning over coffee in the nursery kitchen, I asked Marko what those spies were after. After all, COSMOS was neutral and international. Our research reports went out to every member. I could understand Howard Hudson’s interest in the seeker surveys, but we had no iridium boulder fields here at Skygate.
“We have something else that might surprise you.” Marko gave me an owlish blink. “Thorsen questioned me the other day and finally warned me against his rival spies. What they want is information about the three fathers—him and Tom and me. About our sex lives.”
“Why?”
“The children are the most exciting results of space research up to now—and a deeper mystery than the nature of whatever dug those tunnels into Mercury. A lot of scientists and several governments want to know whether there’ll be more.”
He stirred his coffee moodily.
“Carolina wanted another,” he added at last. “But the lab says my semen’s sterile now, Thorsen didn’t exactly say, but I think he’s impotent—and distressed about it. Which leaves your brother.”
I thought that over. In the divorce action Robin’s lawyers had named a hotel manicurist, a nurse in the space hospital and a typist in the records section. Had some of them been secret agents?
“Tom’s gone,” I said. “He may be back in space—we don’t keep in touch. But who would want another creature like his son?”
“Don’t look down your nose at Guy.” Marko seemed almost hurt. “Nick and Kyrie idolize him. My wife has learned to love him, too. She keeps quoting proverbs. She says you can’t see the oak in the acorn.”
That image of the acorn stuck in my mind, apt for all three children. The mystery of life showed special shapes in them. Delicately new, they kept unfolding unexpected strength and startling surprise.
Marko was in charge of the nursery now, with Suzie and Carolina as official assistants. They nurtured those seedling beings with love and wonder and frequent alarm. Guy Hood slept most of the time for his first few years, but Nick and Kyrie kept everybody busy recording the data Thorsen demanded.
Though they looked more human than Guy, their bodies were equally strange. All three possessed temperature regulators that baffled the biologists. When snow fell they wanted to play in it naked. The hottest desert sun gave them only a temporary tan. Nudists by nature, they had no use for clothing. We learned to let them go without it.
MARKO tried to run intelligence tests. Even when he was awake, however, Guy Hood had no mind that anyone could measure. Though Nick and Kyrie seemed happily cooperative, their erratic responses were a puzzle until Carolina discovered that they were making a gay little game of observing their observers.
When Suzie taught Kyrie to wink her varicolored eyes, she started winking at everybody who tried to spy on her through the oneway mirrors, no matter how silently. Thorsen wanted to know how she sensed us, but—nobody could find the answer.
Nick discovered arithmetic before he could talk. Two months old, he began playing counting games with Carolina, pushing beads on a toy abacus to add and subtract integers up to ten. A month older, using a larger counting frame Marko made for him, he learned division and invented a system of his own for extracting roots.
