When Muskie feels that this holy place has done all it can for her son, she scratches below the waistband of her slacks and says, “All right, Dolph, you may as well say it.”
He cannot wait to get the words out, he is so impatient. “All right, I’ll say it! You’ve made a mistake, Mother Muskie. We can’t say no to Alphabase!”
“ ‘Can’t’?”
He is doggedly stubborn. Even ferocious. “Yes, that’s what I said, can’t. It’s a crime against the human race! Jem’s rotting away before your eyes, Mother Muskie. This is the best chance we’ve ever had to get things going again. They’ve got high-energy technology on Alphabase! Do you know what it means, what they’re suggesting? They’re able to put ten tons standard into the tachyon charge state — we couldn’t do that to save our lives.”
“Dear Dolph,” she begins, sweetly reasonable, “we have more pressing problems right here on Jem. Do you know how many wild flocks of Loons there are? Krips who still wallow in savagery? Creepies unreached and unbenefited. We have a duty—”
“We have a duty to humanity!” he cries.
“Yes. Certainly! And we are carrying it out. Our ancestors gave their lives to save us, and we are true to the Six Precepts. There is no tyrannical government, no coercion, no contending nationalities here. We haven’t raped Jem, we’ve wooed it. We live off renewable resources, while the Alphs are back to industry and all the evils of technology.”
“Dear God,” he shouts, “resources? The quarter-million of us don’t begin to scratch the surface of them! Do you know that fossil fuel is forming faster than we use it?”
“Good! Proper! That makes it renewable. But be reasonable, Dolph dear. Why spoil everyone’s happiness by striving for something foolish? Suppose everyone wanted to do what you say. Who would mine these fossil fuels?”
“Krips. Creeps. People. Machines! I don’t care. If they don’t want to, they should be ordered to!”
Muskrat is shaken. “You have spoiled my Christmas,” she says sorrowfully, and walks away. What a shame! A foolishly stubborn boy and an incompetent mare, and her whole holiday was ruined before it had rightly begun. Dolph is her favorite son, or often is. She admires his tiny, quick body and his bright mind. But what rot, really! What a bore! Why can’t he accept paradise like everyone else and be happy in it?
Dolph’s holiday is spoiled, too, and he sits on the creepy-stone bench so angry and frustrated that he does not even hear the carols beginning.
A’es’e fi’eles, lae’i’riumphan’es.
If only she could be made to understand! The winning of Jem had cost so much in blood and pain. Not just in that first terrible year. Over and over again, every time Kung had flared in those first decades. There had been eight flares since the days of the ancestors, and only the last two or three had been fairly painless. Plenty of warning. A frenzied rush to ionproof the domes and hustle essential perishables inside. A week of confinement while the star raged, a year or so of one or another kind of scarcity until the planet replenished itself. But that left half a dozen sieges of misery, the first worst, but all of them catastrophic. Was all that to go for nothing?
Veni’e a’oremus, ’Ominum.
A Creepie overseer darts whickering past him toward the many-tree, followed by four noisy Krinpit gardeners in their bright red and green Ring-Greeting coats of lacquer. He becomes aware of the choir belatedly.
— save us all from Sa’an’s power
When we were gone as’ray -
Hell of a season of joy this is, he thinks to himself. Season of suicide! Time of deciding to die on the vine while all the rest of the galaxy goes on to who knows what triumphs of technology and adventure! Glumness battles Christmas inside him. Gradually glumness loses. He remembers what the Creepie had been carrying — palely glowing ultraviolet strobes — and decides to stroll over to the Christmas many-tree.
The Krinpit are pushing away benches and picnic tables to make room, moaning and clattering to themselves; they finish and scuttle away. The Creepie positions his strobes and waits for orders. On the tree itself, the tethered ballonists are singing their little hearts out.
Schlaf in heilige ruhe,
Schlaf im heilige ruh’.
All around the tree young people like him are removing their clothes and slipping in between the gaily decorated trunks. “Time to start!” they cry; and the Loons begin the jolly, lively “Good King Wenceslas.”
Obediently the Creepie touches off the strobes. The Loons gasp and continue to sing and begin to emit their milt, and all under the lovely tree the couples link in the traditional Rings.
And Dolph can stand it no longer. Gloom loses. Christmas wins. He flings off his clothing and plunges into the trunks of the many-tree. Why fight Utopia? he thinks to himself. And so in that moment he completes the process of growing up. And begins the process of dying. Which is much the same thing.