Zhenya
Mama,
Zhenya again. Got more time now so I can write better.
Please, come out from under the bed. Don’t stare like that. Aren’t you happy that I’m back? I know I look scary but at least I’m strong enough for eyes and fingers. I can’t talk but I can write you letters.
I saw you got all the old letters I wrote for you. You must have been very busy at the hospital if you couldn’t answer. That’s okay. I’m glad Dr. Olga gave you rubles after all. You look stronger.
Soon I’ll be stronger too, Mama. I’ll have arms, many, many arms, and I’ll hold you, and we’ll be together. Won’t that be lovely, Mama? You always took care of me even when I was stupid and bad, and now I’ll take care of you and won’t ever, ever, ever let you go. Won’t that be great?
But we won’t have Sulyik. He died, Mama. When I started the treasure, the metal box in Dr. Olga’s room growled, and Sulyik ran out of a closet barking. Then the air stretched and broke, and out came all the bad little fast things. They flowed together and became the hungry smoke and came flying buzz buzz buzz, like many black bees.
I stopped the treasure but it was too late. The hungry smoke buzzed and wrapped around Sulyik, and he barked and barked, and then the hungry smoke ate his head and I couldn’t do anything.
I thought maybe it’s okay because there are other Sulyiks in other Moscows but it didn’t feel okay. It didn’t feel okay at all, Mama.
Then the smoke barked like Sulyik, loud and sad. It barked lots while it ate all the aunts and uncles, and Dr. Olga too. Dr. Olga screamed very long and I thought maybe she wanted another Giness record but she stopped and the smoke ate her head too.
After that the smoke gave up barking and whispered things, real soft like Dr. Olga. “Take, take, take from us! Steal from us! No, boy, no. No, no, no!” It ate my head last, because I was on the table and couldn’t run. When I heard it coming—”Boy! Boy! Boy!”—I ran to the castle but the castle got dark so I came back. I got real scared and I twisted the treasure very much and the metal box roared, and I ripped open the air between the castle and Moscow, and I came through all the way, all of me everywhere.
I tried using my body again but it didn’t work. The hungry smoke ate my head after all. It didn’t even hurt because I was everywhere at once.
Don’t worry about me, Mama. It’s okay.
Sorry about Moscow. I couldn’t help all the aunts and uncles and boys and girls and grandmas and grandpas. Sorry about the blood and the screaming. It makes me want to cry but I don’t have any tears. I don’t think crying would help anyway.
I couldn’t protect everyone but at least I protected you. The smoke won’t get into the apartment, don’t you worry, Mama. I think it’s real angry cause we tried to steal from its Moscow, and it gets smarter when it eats heads like when I read books, but you’ve got me and I’m smart too, and I’m everywhere.
I have to catch the hungry smoke now. I hope I can use Dr. Olga’s metal treasure-box and stretch the air, and send it all home. Then I’ll come for you. You just hold on.
Zhenya
Mama,
I caught much hungry smoke and sent it home. I promised we wouldn’t steal from other Moscows again but it just yelled, “Slide the curve! Blast the boy! Twisted metric!” It sounded like Uncles and Aunts and Grandpas and Grandmas and little kids too, happy and sad and angry and calm. I think maybe eating all those heads wasn’t so good for it. I think maybe it got confused.
I’m home, Mama. I sit next to you right now, here on the couch. Do you feel my fingers on your back? See the curtains move? It’s me, Mama.
Smile, Mama. Please, why won’t you smile? Once I catch the last of the smoke, we’ll be together for good. We can even go to Paris like you always wanted. I don’t think the smoke got to Paris.
But before that, can you help me? Look outside the door. I left Sulyik there. His fur is sticky and his head is gone. Can you wash him Mama? Can you bury him in the garden under the linden tree?
When everyone died I thought I was sad but I wasn’t sure. There are many Moscows and this is only one Moscow, so why is it important anyway?
But then I remembered Sulyik. There was only one Sulyik who mattered, in the end. That means there will always be only one Sulyik. I will remember him, all of I, for sure.
Sulyik taught me that. Even being qantumikal I can still know things for sure.
Zhenya (your son, all of I, for sure)
VELVET FIELDS
by Anne McCaffrey
Of course we moved into the cities of the planet we now know we must call Zobranoirundisi when Worlds Federated finally permitted a colony there. Although Survey had kept a watch on the planet for more than thirty years standard and the cities were obviously on a standby directive, the owners remained conspicuous by their absence. Since Resources and Supplies had agitated in council for another breadbasket planet in that sector of the galaxy and Zobranoirundisi was unoccupied, we were sent in, chartered to be self-sufficient in one sidereal year and to produce a surplus in two.
It would, therefore, have been a great misdirection of effort not to have inhabited the cities—we only moved into four—so patently suitable for humanoid life-forms. The murals that decorated a conspicuous wall in every dwelling unit gave only a vague idea of the physiology of our landlords, always depicted in an attitude of reverent obeisance toward a dominating Tree symbol so that only the backs, the rounded fuzz-covered craniums, and the suggestions of arms extended in front of the bodies were visible.
I suppose if we had not been so concerned with establishing the herds, generally breaking our necks to meet the colony charter requirements, we might have discovered sooner that there had been a gross error. The clues were there. For example, although we inhabited the cities, they could not be made fully “operational” despite all the efforts of Dunlapil, the metropolitan engineer. Then, too, we could find no single example of the Tree anywhere on the lush planet. But, with R&S on our backs to produce, produce, produce, we didn’t take time to delve into the perplexing anomalies.
Dunlapil, with his usual urbane contempt for the botanical, quipped to Martin Chavez, our ecologist, that the Tree was the Tree of Life and therefore mythical.
“Carry the analogy further,” he would tease Martin, “and it explains why the Tree worshipers”—that’s what we called them before we knew—” aren’t around anymore. Some dissident plucked the Apple and got ’em all kicked out of the Garden of Eden.”
Eden might well have been modeled on this planet, with its velvet fields, parklike forests, and rolling plains. Amid these sat lovely little cities constructed of pressed fibrous blocks tinted in pleasant colors during a manufacturing process whose nature frustrated Dunlapil as much as the absence of Trees perplexed Chavez.
So, suppressing our pervasive sense of trespassing, we moved into the abandoned dwellings, careful not to make any irreparable changes to accommodate our equipment. In fact, the only sophisticated nonindigenous equipment that I, as colony commissioner, permitted within any city was the plastisteel Comtower. I ordered the spaceport constructed beyond a low range of foothills on the rather scrubby plain at some distance from my headquarters city. An old riverbed proved an acceptable road for moving cargo to and from the port, and no one really objected to the distance. It would be far better not to offend our landlords with the dirt and chaos of outer-space commerce close to their pretty city.
We pastured the cattle in neatly separated velvet fields. Martin Chavez worried when close inspection disclosed that each velvet field was underpinned by its own ten-meter-thick foundation of ancient, rock-hard clay. Those same foundations housed what seemed to be a deep irrigation system.