Clans of the Alphane Moon Read online

  And, in response, all at once he felt icy, carefully-reasoned Pare hatred for her.

  Annette, simulating obliviousness, continued to devour the remnants of her bag of candy.

  The Skitz delegate to the biannual get-together at Adolfville, Omar Diamond, gazed over the landscape of the world and saw, beneath it and upon it, the twin dragons, red and white, of death and life; the dragons, locked in battle, made the plain tremble, and, overhead, the sky split and a wizened decaying gray sun cast little if any comfort in a world fast losing its meager store of the vital.

  “Halt,” Omar said, raising his hand and addressing the dragons.

  A man and wavy-haired girl, walking along the sidewalk of Adolfville’s downtown district toward him, halted. The girl said, “What’s the matter with him? He’s doing something.” Repugnance.

  “Just a Skitz,” the man said, amused. “Lost in visions.”

  Omar said, “The eternal war has broken out afresh. The powers of life are on the wane. Can no man make the fatal decision, renounce his own life in an act of sacrifice to restore them?”

  The man, with a wink at his wife, said, “You know, sometimes you can ask these fellows a question and get an interesting answer. Go ahead, ask him something—make it big and general, like, ‘What is the meaning of existence?’ Not, ‘Where’s the scissors I lost yesterday?’” He urged her forward.

  With caution the woman addressed Omar. “Excuse me, but I’ve always wondered—is there life after death?”

  Omar said, “There is no death.” He was amazed at the question; it was based on enormous ignorance. “What you see that you call ‘death’ is only the stage of germination in which the new life form lies dormant, awaiting the call to assume its next incarnation.” He lifted his arms, pointing. “See? The dragon of life cannot be slain; even as his blood runs red in the meadow, new versions of him spring up at all sides. The seed buried in the earth rises again.” He passed on, then, leaving the man and woman behind.

  I must go to the six-story stone building, Omar said to himself. They wait there, the council. Howard Straw the barbarian. Miss Hibbler the crabbed one, beset by numbers. Annette Golding, the embodiment of life itself, plunging into everything that lets her become. Gabriel Baines, the one who is compelled to think up ways of defending himself against that which does not attack. The simple one with the broom who is nearer to God than any of us. And the sad one who never looks up, the man even without a name. What shall I call him? Perhaps Otto. No, I think I’ll make it Dino. Dino Watters. He awaits death, not knowing that he lives in anticipation of an empty phantom; even death cannot protect him from his own self.

  Standing at the base of the great six-story building, the largest in the Pare settlement Adolfville, he levitated; he bobbed against the proper window, scratched at the glass with his fingernail until at last a person within came to open it for him.

  “Mr. Manfreti isn’t coming?” Annette asked.

  “He cannot be reached this year,” Omar explained. “He has passed into another realm and simply sits; he must be force-fed through the nose.”

  “Ugh,” Annette said, and shuddered. “Catatonia.”

  “Kill him,” Straw said harshly, “and be done with it. Those cat-Skitzes are worse than useless; they’re a drain on Joan d’Arc’s resources. No wonder your settlement’s so poor.”

  “Poor materially,” Omar agreed, “but rich in eternal values.”

  He kept far away from Straw; he did not care for him at all. Straw, despite his name, was a breaker. He enjoyed smashing and grinding; he was cruel for the love of it, not the need of it. Evil was gratuitous with Straw.

  On the other hand, there sat Gabe Baines. Baines, like all Pares, could be cruel, too, but he was compelled to, in his own defense; he was so committed to protecting himself from harm that he naturally did wrong. One could not castigate him, as one could Straw.

  Taking his seat Omar said, “Bless this assembly. And let’s hear news of life-giving properties, rather than of the activities of the dragon of harm.” He turned to Straw. “What is the information, Howard?”

  “An armed ship,” Straw said, with a wide, leering grim smile; he was enjoying their collective anxiety. “Not a trader from Alpha II but from another system entirely; we used a teep to pick up their thoughts. Not on any sort of trading mission but here to—” He broke off, deliberately not finishing his sentence. He wanted to see them squirm.

  “We’ll have to defend ourselves,” Baines said. Miss Hibbler nodded and so, with reluctance, did Annette. Even the Heeb had ceased to giggle and now looked uneasy. “We at Adolfville,” Baines said, “will of course organize the defense. We’ll look to your people, Straw, for the technological devices; we expect a lot from you. This is one time we expect you to throw in your lot for the common good.”

  “The ‘common good,’” Straw mimicked. “You mean for our good.”

  “My god,” Annette said, “do you always have to be so irresponsible, Straw? Can’t you take note of the consequences for once? At least think of our children. We must protect them, if not ourselves.”

  To himself, Omar Diamond prayed. “Let the forces of life rise up and triumph on the plain of battle. Let the white dragon escape the red stain of seeming death; let the womb of protection descend on this small land and guard it from those who stand in the camp of the unholy.” And, all at once, he remembered a sight he had seen on his trip here, by foot, a harbinger of the arrival of the enemy. A stream of water had turned to blood as he stepped over it. Now he knew what the sign meant. War and death, and perhaps the destruction of the Seven Clans and their seven cities—six, if you did not count the garbage dump which was the living space of the Heebs.

  Dino Watters, the Dep, muttered hoarsely, “We’re doomed.”

  Everyone glared at him, even Jacob Simion the Heeb. How like a Dep.

  “Forgive him,” Omar whispered. And somewhere, in the invisible empery, the spirit of life heard, responded, forgave the half-dying creature who was Dino Watters of the Dep settlement, Cotton Mather Estates.

  TWO

  With scarcely a glance around the old conapt with its cracked sheet-rock walls, recessed lighting that probably no longer worked, archaic picture window and shabby, out-of-date pre-Korean War tile floors, Chuck Rittersdorf said, “It’ll do.” He got out his checkbook, wincing at the sight of the central wrought-iron fireplace; he had not seen one of these since 1970, since his childhood.

  The owner of this deteriorating building, however, frowned in suspicion as she received Chuck’s identification papers. “According to this you’re married, Mr. Rittersdorf, and you have children. You’re not going to bring in a wife and children to this conapt; this was listed in the homeopape ad as ‘for bachelor, employed, nondrinker,’ and—”

  Wearily Chuck said, “That’s the point.” The fat, middle-aged landlady in her Venusian whistle-cricket hide dress and wubfur slippers repelled him; already this had become a grim experience. “I’ve separated from my wife. She’s keeping the children. That’s why I need this conapt.”

  “But they’ll be visiting.” Her purple tinted eyebrows rose.

  Chuck said, “You don’t know my wife.”

  “Oh they will; I know these new Federal divorce laws. Not like the old days of state divorces. Been to court, yet? Got your first papers?”

  “No,” he admitted. It was just beginning for him. Late last night he had gone to a hotel and the night before that—it had been his final night of struggling to achieve the impossible, to keep on living with Mary.

  He gave the landlady the check; she returned his ID form and departed; at once he shut the door, walked to the window of the conapt and gazed out at the street below, the wheels, jet-hoppers, ramps and runnels of footers. Soon he would have to call his attorney, Nat Wilder. Very soon.

  The irony of their marital breakup was too much. For his wife’s profession—and she was good at it—was marriage counseling. In fact she had a reputation here in Marin Co
unty, California, where she maintained her office, as being the best. God knew how many fracturing human relationships she had healed. And yet, by a masterstroke of injustice, this very talent and skill on her part had helped drive him to this dismal conapt. Because, by being so successful in her own career, Mary could not resist feeling contempt, which had grown over the years, for him.

  The fact was—and he had to face it—that in his career he had not been nearly as successful as Mary.

  His job, and he personally enjoyed it very much, was the programming of simulacra from the Cheyenne government’s intelligence agency for its unending propaganda programs, its agitation against the ring of Communist states which surrounded the USA. He personally believed deeply in his work, but by no rationalization could it be called either a high-paying calling or a noble one; the programming which he concocted—to say the least—was infantile, spurious and biased. The main appeal was to school children both in the USA and in the neighboring Communist states, and to the great masses of adults of low educational background. He was, in fact, a hack. And Mary had pointed this out many, many times.

  Hack or not, he continued in this job, although others had been offered him during the six-year course of his marriage. Perhaps it was because he enjoyed hearing his words uttered by the human-like simulacra; perhaps it was because he felt the overall cause was vital: the US was on the defensive, politically and economically, and had to protect itself. It needed persons to work for the government at admittedly low salaries, and at jobs lacking heroic or splendid qualities. Someone had to program the propaganda simulacra, who were deposited all over the world to do their job as reps of the Counter Intelligence Authority, to agitate, convince, influence. But—

  Three years ago the crisis had come. One of Mary’s clients—who had been involved in incredibly complex marital difficulties including three mistresses at once—was a TV producer; Gerald Feld had produced the famous, the one and only Bunny Hentman TV show, and owned a major piece of the popular TV comic. In a little side-dealing Mary had passed onto Feld several of the programming scripts which Chuck had written for the CIA’s local branch in San Francisco. Feld had read them with interest because these—and this explained Mary’s selection—contained a good deal of humor. That was Chuck’s talent; he programmed something other than the usual pompous, solemn stuff… it was said to be alive with wit; it sparkled. And—Feld agreed. And had asked Mary to arrange a meeting between him and Chuck.

  Now, standing at the window of the small, drab, old conapt, into which he had not moved so much as one article of clothing, gazing down at the street below, Chuck recalled the conversation with Mary which had erupted. It had been an especially vicious one, certainly classic; it had epitomized the breach between the two of them.

  To Mary the issue had been clear: here was a job possibility; it had to be poked thoroughly into. Feld would pay well and the job would carry enormous prestige; each week, at the end of the Bunny Hentman show, Chuck’s name, as one of the script writers, would appear on the screen for all the nonCom world to see. Mary would—and here was the key phrase—take pride in his work; it was conspicuously creative. And to Mary creativity was the open sesame to life; working for the CIA, programming propaganda simulacra who gabbled a message for uneducated Africans and Latin Americans and Asians, was not creative; the messages tended always to be the same and anyhow the CIA was in bad repute in the liberal, monied, sophisticated circles which Mary inhabited.

  “You’re like a—leaf-raker in a satellite park,” Mary had said, infuriated, “on some kind of civil service deal. It’s easy security; it’s the way out of having to struggle. Here you are thirty-three years old and already you’ve given up trying. Given up wanting to make something of yourself.”

  “Listen,” he said futilely. “Are you my mother or just my wife? I mean, is it your job to keep goading me on? Do I have to keep rising? Is it becoming TERPLAN President, is that what you want?” Outside of the prestige and money there was something more involved. Evidently Mary wanted him to be another person. She, the one who knew him best in all the world, was ashamed of him. If he took the job writing for Bunny Hentman he would become different—or so her logic went.

  He could not deny the logic. And yet he persisted; he did not quit his job, did not change. Something in him was just too inertial. For better or worse. There was a hysteresis to one’s essence; he did not put by that essence easily.

  Outside, on the street, a white Chevrolet deluxe wheel, a shiny new six-door model, dropped to the curb and landed. He watched idly and then he realized with a start of incredulity that—impossible but true—it was his ex-own; here was Mary. She had already found him.

  His wife, Dr. Mary Rittersdorf, was about to pay him a visit.

  He felt fright, and a sense of increased failure; he had not even been able to pull off this—find a conapt in which to live where Mary couldn’t locate him. In a few more days, Nat Wilder could arrange legal protection, but now, at this point, he was helpless; he had to admit her.

  It was easy to see how she had traced him; moderate detection devices were available and cheap. Mary had probably gone to a pry-vye, a robot detection agency, obtained use of a sniffer, presented it his cephalic pattern; it had gone to work, followed him to every place he had been since leaving her. Nowadays, finding someone was an exact science.

  So a woman determined to locate you, he reflected, can. There probably was a law governing it; perhaps he could call it Rittersdorf’s Law. In proportion to one’s desire to escape, to hide, detection devices—

  A rap sounded on the hollow-core door of the conapt.

  As he walked stiff-legged, unwillingly, to the door he thought, She will make a speech which will embody every known reasonable appeal. I, of course, will have no argument, just my feeling that we can’t go on, that her contempt for me indicates a failure between us too profound to admit any future intimacy.

  He opened the door. There she stood, dark-haired, wispy, in her expensive (her best) natural-wool coat, without makeup; a calm, competent, educated woman who was his superior in a flock of ways. “Listen, Chuck,” she said, “I won’t stand for this. I’ve arranged for a moving company to pick up all your things and put them in storage. What I’m here for is a check; I want all the money in your checking account. I need it for bills.”

  So he had been wrong; there was no speech of sweet reasonability. On the contrary; his wife was making this final. He was absolutely stunned and all he could do was gape at her.

  “I’ve talked to Bob Alfson, my attorney,” Mary said. “I’ve had him file for a quit-claim deed on the house.”

  “What?” he said. “Why?”

  “So you can sign over your share of the house to me.”

  “Why?”

  “So I can put it on the market. I’ve decided I don’t need such a large house and I can use the money. I’m putting Debby in that boarding school back East we were discussing.” Deborah was their oldest, but still only six, years too young to be sent away from home. Good grief.

  “Let me talk to Nat Wilder first,” he said feebly.

  “I want the check now.” Mary made no move to come in; she simply stood there. And he felt desperate, despairing panic, the panic of defeat and suffering; he had lost already: she could make him do anything.

  As he went to get his checkbook, Mary walked a few steps into the conapt. Her aversion for it was beyond words; she said nothing. He shrank from it, could not face it; he busied himself scratching out the check.

  “By the way,” Mary said in a conversational tone of voice, “now that you’ve left for good I’m free to accept that government offer.”

  “What government offer?”

  “They want consulting psychologists for an interplan project; I told you about it.” She did not intend to burden herself with enlightening him.

  “Oh yes.” He had a dim memory. “Charity work.” An outgrowth of the Terran-Alphane clash of ten years ago. An isolated moon in the Alphan
e system settled by Terrans which had been cut off two generations ago because of the war; a rookery of such meager enclaves existed in the Alph’ system, which had dozens of moons as well as twenty-two planets.

  She accepted the check, put it folded into her coat pocket.

  “Would you get paid?” he asked.

  “No,” Mary said, remotely.

  Then she would live—support the children as well—on his salary alone. It came to him: she expected a court settlement which would force him to do the very thing his refusal of which had pulled down their six-year marriage. She would, through her vast influence in Marin County courts, obtain such a judgment that he would have to give up his job with the San Francisco branch of the CIA and seek other work entirely.

  “How—long will you be gone?” he asked. It was obvious that she intended to make good use of this interval of reorganization of their lives; she would do all the things denied her—allegedly, anyhow—by his presence.

  “About six months. It depends. Don’t expect me to keep in touch. I’ll be represented in court by Alfson; I won’t appear.” She added, “I’ve started the suit for separate maintenance so you won’t have to do that.”

  The initiative, even there, was gone from his hands. He had as always been too slow.

  “You can have everything,” he told Mary, all at once.

  Her look said, But what you can give isn’t enough. “Everything” was merely nothing, as far as his achievements were concerned.

  “I can’t give you what I don’t have,” he said quietly.

  “Yes you can,” Mary said, without a smile. “Because the judge is going to recognize what I’ve always recognized about you. If you have to, if someone makes you, you can meet the customary standards applied to grown men with the responsibility of a wife and children.”

  He said, “But—I have to retain some kind of life of my own.”

  “Your first obligation is to us,” Mary said.