Shadows stretched across the valley towards the buildings of the Settlement. In shadows the fields and woods were black; in the light they were brown, purplish, and dark red. Dirty colors, the colors you got when you scrubbed your watercolors too much and the teacher came by and said, You’d better use some fresh water, Mimi, it’s getting muddy. Because the teacher had been too kind to say to a ten-year-old, That picture’s a total loss, Mimi, throw it away and start fresh.
She had thought of that before—she had thought all her thoughts before, standing at this window—but this time it reminded her of Genya, because of the painting, and she turned to see how he was doing. The shock symptoms were almost gone, his face was no longer so pale and his pulse had steadied. While she held his wrist he sighed a bit and opened his eyes. Lovely eyes he had, grey in the thin face. He had never been much but eyes, poor Genya. Her oldest patient. Twenty-four years he had been her patient, right from the moment of his birth, five pounds, purplish-blue like a fetal rat, a month premature and half dead of cyanosis: the fifth child born on New Zion, the first in Ararat Settlement. A native. A feeble and unpromising native. He hadn’t even had the strength, or the sense, to cry at his first breath of this alien air. Sofia’s other children had been full-term and healthy, two girls, both married and mothers now, and fat Leon who could hoist a seventy-kilo sack of grain when he was fifteen. Good young colonists, strong stock. But Miriam had always loved Genya, and all the more after her own years of miscarriages and stillbirths, and the last birth, the girl who had lived two hours, whose eyes had been clear grey like Genya’s. Babies never have grey eyes, the eyes of the newborn are blue, that was all sentimental rubbish. But how could you ever make sure of what color things were under this damned warty-orange sun? Nothing ever looked right. “So there you are, Gennady Borisovich,” she said, “back home, eh?” It had been their joke when he was a child; he had spent so much time in the infirmary that whenever he came in with one of his fevers or fainting spells or gasping asthma he would say, “Here I am, back home, Auntie Doctor ”
“What happened?” he asked.
“You collapsed. Hoeing down in the South Field. Aaron and Tina brought you up here on the tractor. Touch of sunstroke, maybe? You’ve been doing all right, haven’t you?”
He shrugged and nodded.
“Dizzy? Short of breath?”
“On and off.”
“Why didn’t you come to the clinic?”
“It’s no good, Miriam.”
Since he was grown he had called her Miriam. She missed “Auntie Doctor.” He had grown away from her, these last few years, withdrawn from her into his painting. He had always sketched and painted, but now, all his free time and whatever energy he had left when his Settlement duties were done, he spent in the loft of the generator building where he’d made a kind of studio, grinding colors from rocks and mixing dyes from native plants, making brushes by begging pigtail ends off little girls, and painting—painting on scraps from the lumber mill, on bits of rag, on precious scraps of paper, on smooth slabs of slate from the quarry on Ararat if nothing better was at hand. Painting portraits, scenes of Settlement life, buildings, machinery, still-lifes, plants, landscapes, inner visions. Painting anything, everything. His portraits had been much in demand—people were always kind to Genya and the other sicklies—but lately he had not done any portraits; he had gone in for queer muddy jumbles of forms and lines all in a dark haze, like worlds half created. Nobody liked those paintings, but nobody ever told Genya he was wasting his time. He was a sickly; he was an artist; O.K. Healthy people had no time to be artists. There was too much work to do. But it was good to have an artist. It was human. It was like Earth. Wasn’t it?
They were kind to Toby, too, whose stomach troubles were so bad that at sixteen he weighed eighty-four pounds; kind to little Shura, who was just learning to talk at six, and whose eyes wept and wept all day long, even when she was smiling; kind to all their sicklies, the ones whose bodies could not adjust to this alien world, whose stomachs could not digest the native proteins even with the help of the metabolising pills which every colonist must take twice a day every day of his life on New Zion. Hard as life was in the Twenty Settlements, much as they needed every hand to work, they were gentle with their useless ones, their afflicted. In affliction the hand of God is visible. They remembered the words civilisation, humanity. They remembered Jerusalem.
“Genya, my dear, what do you mean, it’s no good?” His quiet voice had frightened her. “It’s no good,” he had said, smiling. And the grey eyes not clear but veiled, hazy.
“Medicine,” he said, “Pills. Cures.”
“Of course you know more about medicine than I do,” Miriam said. “You’re a much better doctor than I am. Or are you giving up? Is that it, Genya? Giving up?” Anger had come upon her so suddenly, from so deep within, from anxiety so long and deeply hidden, that it shook her body and cracked her voice.
“I’m giving up one thing. The metas.”
“Metas? Giving them up? What are you talking about?”
“I haven’t taken any for two weeks.”
The despairing rage swelled in her. She felt her face go hot, so that it felt twice its normal size. “Two weeks! And so, and so, and so you’re here! Where did you think you’d end up, you terrible fool? Lucky you’re not dead!”
“I haven’t been any worse since I stopped taking them, Miriam. Better, this whole last week. Until today. It can’t be that. It must have been heatstroke. I forgot to wear a hat…” He too flushed faintly, in the eagerness of his pleading, or with shame. It was stupid to work in the fields bareheaded; for all its dull look NSC 641 could hit the unsheltered human head quite as hard as fiery Sol, and Genya was apologetic for his carelessness. “You see,I was feeling fine this morning, really good, I kept right up with the others hoeing. Then I felt a bit dizzy, but I didn’t want to stop, it was so good to be able to work right with the others, I never thought about heatstroke.”
Miriam found that there were tears in her eyes, and this made her so ultimately and absolutely angry that she couldn’t speak at all. She got up off Genya’s bed and strode down the ward between the rows of beds, four on one side, four on the other. She strode back and stood staring out the window at the mud-colored shapeless ugly world.
Genya was saying something—“Miriam, honestly, couldn’t it be that the metas are worse for me than the native proteins are?”—but she did not listen; the grief and wrath and fear swelled in her and swelled in her, and broke, and she cried out, “Oh, Genya, Genya, how could you? Not you, to give up now, after fighting so long—I can’t bear it! I can’t bear it!” But she did not cry it out aloud. Not one word of it. Never. She cried out in her mind, and some tears came out and ran down her cheeks, but her back was turned to the patient. She looked through distorting tears at the flat valley and the dull sun and said to them, silent, “I hate you.” Then after a while she could turn around and say aloud, “Lie down,”—for he had sat up, distressed by her long silence—“lie down, be quiet. You’ll take two metas before dinner. If you need anything, Geza’s in the nurse’s station.” And she walked out.