The house was a low white-painted wooden building half-hidden by evergreens. Miss McMorrow opened the door and ushered him in. There was a cool, stale odor, the smell of a house unlived in.
The sitting room was dominated by a massive coffee table apparently carved from the cross section of a tree. In the middle of it, in a hollow space, was a stone bowl, and in the bowl, three carved bones.
“Is this native wood?” Selby asked, stooping to run his hand over the polished grain.
“Yes. Redwood, we call it, but it is nothing like the Earth tree. It is not really a tree at all. This was the first piece she carved; there are others in the workroom, through there.”
The workroom, a shed attached to the house, was cluttered with wood carvings, some taller than Selby, others small enough to be held in the palm of the hand. The larger ones were curiously tormented shapes, half human and half tree. The smaller ones were animals and children.
“We knew nothing about this,” Selby said. “Only that she had gone silent. She never explained?”
“It was her choice.”
They went into Petryk’s study. Books were in glass-fronted cases, and there were shelves of books and record cubes. A vase with sprays of cherry blossoms was on a windowsill.
“This is where she wrote?”
“Yes. Always in longhand, here, at the table. She wrote in pencil, on yellow paper. She said poems could not be made on machines.”
“And all her papers are here?”
“Yes, in these cabinets. Thirty years of work. You will want to look through them?”
“Yes. I’m very grateful.”
“Let me show you first where you will eat and sleep, then you can begin. I will come out once a day to see how you are getting on.”
In the cabinets were thousands of pages of manuscript—treasures, including ten drafts of the famous poem Walking the River. Selby went through them methodically one by one, making copious notes. He worked until he could not see the pages, and fell into bed exhausted every night.
On the third day, Miss McMorrow took him on a trip into the boonies. Dark scents were all around them. The dirt road, such as it was, ended after half a mile; then they walked. “Eleanor often came out here, camping,” she said. “Sometimes for a week or more. She liked the solitude.” In the gloom of the tall shapes that were not trees, the ground was covered with not-grass and not-ferns. The silence was deep. Faint trails ran off in both directions. “Are these animal runs?” Selby asked.
“No. She made them. They are growing back now. There are no large animals on Paradise.”
“I haven’t even seen any small ones.”
Through the undergrowth he glimpsed a mound of stone on a hill. “What is that?”
“Aborigine ruins. They are all through the boonies.”
She followed him as he climbed up to it. The cut stones formed a complex hundreds of yards across. Selby stooped to peer through a doorway. The aborigines had been a small people.
At one corner of the ruins was a toppled stone figure, thirty feet long. The weeds had grown over it, but he could see that the face had been broken away, as if by blows of a hammer.
“What they could have taught us,” Selby said.
“What could they have taught us?”
“What it is to be human, perhaps.”
“I think we have to decide that for ourselves.”
Six weeks went by. Selby was conscious that he now knew more about Eleanor Petryk than anyone on Earth, and also that he did not understand her at all. In the evenings he sometimes went into the workroom and looked at the tormented carved figures. Obviously she had turned to them because she had to do something, and because she could no longer write. But why the silence?
Toward the end, at the back of the last cabinet, Selby found a curious poem.
XC
Selby looked at it in puzzlement. It was a sonnet, of sorts, a form that had lapsed into obscurity centuries ago, and one that, to his knowledge, Petryk had never used before in her life. What was more curious was that it was an awkward poem, almost a jingle. Petryk could not possibly have been guilty of it, and yet here it was in her handwriting.
With a sudden thrill of understanding, he looked at the initial letters of the lines. The poem was an acrostic, another forgotten form. It concealed a message, and that was why the poem was awkward—deliberately so, perhaps.
He read the poem again. Its meaning was incredible but clear. They had bombed the planet—probably the other continent, the one that was said to be covered with desert. No doubt it was, now. Blast and radiation would have done for any aborigines there, and a brief nuclear winter would have taken care of the rest. And the title, “XC”—Roman numerals, another forgotten art. Ninety years.
In his anguish, there was one curious phrase that he still did not understand—“Hear the rings rustle,” where the expected word was “leaves.” Why rings?
Suddenly he thought he knew. He went into the other room and looked at the coffee table. In the hollow, the stone bowl with its carved bones. Around it, the rings. There was a scar where the tree had been cut into, hollowed out; but it had been a big tree even then. He counted the rings outside the scar: the first one was narrow, almost invisible, but it was there. Altogether there were ninety.
The natives had buried their dead in chambers cut from the wood of living trees. Petryk must have found this one on one of her expeditions. And she had left the evidence here, where anyone could see it.
That night Selby thought of Eleanor Petryk, lying sleepless in this house. What could one do with such knowledge? Her answer had been silence, ten years of silence, until she died. But she had left the message behind her, because she could not bear the silence. He cursed her for her frailty; had she never guessed what a burden she had laid on the man who was to read her message, the man who by sheer perverse bad fortune was himself?
In the morning he called Miss McMorrow and told her he was ready to leave. She said good-bye to him at the tube, and he rode back to the city, looking out with bitter hatred at the scars the aborigines had left in the valleys.
He made the rounds to say good-bye to the people he had met. At the genetics laboratory, a pleasant young man told him that Miss Reynolds was not in. “She may have left for the weekend, but I’m not sure. If you’ll wait here a few minutes, I’ll see if I can find out.”
It was a fine day, and the back door was open. Outside stood an impulse-powered pickup, empty.
Selby looked at the rabbits in their cages. He was thinking of something he had run across in one of Eleanor Petryk’s old books, a work on mathematics. “Fibonacci numbers were invented by the thirteenth-century Italian mathematician to furnish a model of population growth in rabbits. His assumptions were: 1) it takes rabbits one month from birth to reach maturity; 2) one month after reaching maturity, and every month thereafter, each pair of rabbits will produce another pair of rabbits; and 3) rabbits never die.”