Short Fiction by Poul Anderson (free ebook novel .txt) 📕

found more and more within himself, an unfolding inward richness which none of the short-lived would ever appreciate or even comprehend. He had less need of other men to prop him up. Or perhaps it was simply that the wisdom, the fullness which came with immortality, made a little of the other colonists’ company go a long ways.

There was no denying it, Eileen’s twenty-three years of life could not compare with Langdon’s two hundred or more. She was like a child, thoughtless, mentally and physically timid, ignorant, essentially shallow.

But I love her. And I can afford to wait. In fifty or a hundred years she’ll begin to grow up. In two hundred or so we’ll begin to understand each other. As our ages increase, the absolute difference between them will become proportionately insignificant.

An immortal learns patience. I can wait⁠—and meanwhile I love her very dearly.

“What do you have to see him about?” asked Eileen.

“Us,” he answered bluntly. “Our situation. It isn’t good.”

“No,” she whispered.

“Can’t you learn that there’s nothing to fear on Tanith?” he asked. “Death itself, the greatest dread of all, is gone. We’ve eliminated all actually dangerous life in the neighborhood of our settlements. There are things that can be annoying⁠—the sword-plants, the psyche-feeders, the static discharges⁠—but it’s no trick to learn how to avoid them. Nothing here can hurt you, Eileen.”

“I know,” she said hopelessly. “But I’m still afraid. Day and night, I’m afraid. There are worse things than death. Joe.”

“But afraid of what?”

“I don’t know. Fear itself, maybe. How do I know something won’t suddenly be deadly? But I’m not afraid of death. Even with the baby, I wouldn’t be afraid of wild beasts or plague or⁠—anything that I could understand.” She shook her shining head, slowly. “That’s just it, Joe. I don’t understand this planet. Nobody does. You don’t.⁠ ⁠… You admit it yourself.”

“Someday I’ll know it.”

“When? A thousand years from now? A thousand years of horror.⁠ ⁠… Joe, some of those things are so hideous I think I’ll go mad when they appear.”

“A deep-sea fish on Terra is hideous.”

“Not this way. These things aren’t right. They can’t exist, but still there they are, and I can’t forget them, and I never know when they’ll appear next or what they’ll be this time⁠—” She checked herself, gulping.

“This is a very beautiful world,” he said stubbornly. “The colors, the forms, the sounds⁠—”

“None of them are right. Grass may look just as well when it’s red or blue or yellow⁠—but it shouldn’t be all of them at different times. The sky is wrong, the trees are wrong. Those hideous lakes of life and the things in them, obscene⁠—those voices singing out in the mists, nobody knows what they are⁠—those images of things a hundred million years dead⁠—and the faces, and the whisperings, and there’s always something watching and waiting and moving just a little outside the corner of your eye.⁠ ⁠… Oh, Joe, Joe, this planet is haunted!”

She sobbed in his arms with a rising note of hysteria that she couldn’t quite suppress. He looked grimly over her shoulder. A swirling, chiming mist of color formed on one corner of the room, amorphous stirrings within it, a sudden shining birth that laughed and jeered and slipped out through the wall.

He remembered that he had been frightened and repelled when he first came here. But not to this degree, and he soon got over it. Now, even while Eileen wept, he admired the shifting pulse of colors and his heart quickened to the elfin bells. Terran music sounded wrong to him after two hundred years of the sounds of Tanith.

He thought that all those voices and whisperings and singings, sliding up and down an inhuman scale, and the dreams and the visions, had a pattern, an overall immensity which some day he would grasp. And that would be a moment of revelation, he would see and know the wholeness of Tanith and there would be meaning in it. Not the chaotic jumble of random events which made up the rest of the universe⁠—death-doomed universe tumbling blindly toward a wreck of level entropy and ashen suns⁠—but a glimpse of that ultimate purposefulness which some men called God.

Briefly, a temporal mirage showed beyond the window, a fragmentary glimpse of a tower reaching for the sky. And it was no work of man, nor could it ever be, but it was of a heartbreaking loveliness.

He wondered about the ancient natives. Had they simply become extinct, reached a point of declining evolutionary efficiency such as seemed fated for all species and gone into limbo some millions of years previously? Or had they, perhaps, finally seen the allness of the world and gone⁠—elsewhere? Privately, Langdon rather thought it was the latter. World without end⁠—

But Eileen was crying in his arms.

He kissed her, and tasted salt on her lips that trembled under his. Poor kid, poor kid, and with a baby on the way.⁠ ⁠…

Something of the magic of their first days together came back to him. It was a disappointment in love which had sent him to Tanith in the first place, and for all his time here he had lived without that sort of affection. The women of the town served the casual needs of sex, which seemed to become less and less frequently manifest as his own undying personality grew in fullness and self-sufficiency, and that was all.

Still, a single man was incomplete. And a year ago one of the few colony ships landed, and Eileen had been aboard, and a forgotten springtime stirred within him.

Now⁠ ⁠… well.⁠ ⁠…

She released herself, smiling with unsteady lips. “I’ll be all right now, dear,” she said. “Let’s go.”

I have to talk this matter over privately with Chang. His wife can take care of Eileen. Certainly I can’t leave her here alone.

But sooner or later he would have to. It wasn’t only that he had to go out and oversee some of the fields on which grew the native plants whose secretions, needed by Terran chemistry, gave them their livelihood. Solitude