Why did I not understand all this before? Easy—because Carl was giving me a drug.
Why do I understand it now? Easy—because David destroyed the current batch of the drug.
Why was Carl giving me the drug? I’m not sure. Could it be that… ?
Dumbo tried to pull back from the mental precipice, but she was too late.
Why the eyes in plastic boxes? In the river?
She dragged the bedclothes up over her face and lay without moving until the sun had risen and the boys were marauding noisily through the house, naked and shouting for breakfast. While she was cooking it she heard Carl begin to move around behind his door. Dumbo tensed up as he came into the kitchen but he, at least, had not changed. She watched him move about the new, drab world, half-expecting him to look right through her at any moment and reach for the hypo gun. But his pale blue eyes, behind their flakes of glass, remained disinterested and impersonal. Dumbo was relieved and somehow disappointed. After all, she was a woman—his wife. There ought to be more to it than this. They lived together and she had given him children. Mysteries and horrors did not cancel out that sort of relationship.
She set the table for breakfast, really seeing things for the first time, testing her new powers. The chairs were all of sleek weightless metal—that was because the star ship would have had chairs and they were easily portable; but the big kitchen table and cupboards were wooden and home-made. The range on which she cooked with a log fire had been fashioned from some kind of heavy machine casing, but the cups and dishes were beautifully styled in brilliant, glass-smooth plastic. In a way she did not mind the changes, except for the fact that outside the window was a garden full of dark green things. She was going to miss the roses.
“I’ve made your favourite this morning,” she said, carrying a smoking tray to the table. “Griddle cakes.”
Carl stared down at them, pressing the back of his hand to his forehead. “That’s great. That’s really great. My favourite breakfast every day—every God-damned day in life. You’re some cook, Dumbo.”
The older boys giggled appreciatively.
Dumbo opened her mouth to hit back, then realised it would have been a mistake. Carl always spoke to her like that and she never answered back. That’s why she was called Dumbo instead of … her memory baulked … could it be Victoria? Anyway, the point was that Carl acted as though he hated her, and this made the mystery of their past even deeper. Suppose the star ship had made a forced descent on an empty world, with no hope of ever being found. Further suppose she had been the only woman on board, perhaps married to one of the crew, and Carl had murdered all the others so that he could have her. It might account for the use of the memory-killing, euphoria-producing drug—but it explained nothing else.
The day was hot, sunny and uneventful.
Carl spent most of the time working in his fields. Surveying her surroundings from the front of the house Dumbo noted that the sloping grain fields had not been part of the fantasy world. She wondered if the crop was indigenous to the planet or if star ships normally carried seed as part of a survival kit. Assuming the ship had been lost, they had been lucky to alight on this perfect pastoral world—but perhaps it had not been that way at all. Carl might have abducted her and brought her here purposely, to escape from something.
Dumbo contented herself with the task of caring for the children and the house. It was, after all, woman’s work. She could lie low for another day or two and, provided the drug had had no permanent effect, simply wait for all answers to emerge from her memory. And perhaps the explanation would be sane and reasonable, and things would be wonderful again. Dumbo began to feel hopeful.
During the night she remembered her brother.
Crossing the river in daytime had been easy, but by starlight the flat stones of the ford were mere water-borne shadows of uncertain shape and position.
Dumbo slipped once and went knee-deep in water with a splash. The noise frightened her. She stared about her in the darkness, suddenly aware that this was an alien world where at night even the vegetation might be hostile. The tree’s not a tree, she remembered a stray line, when there’s nobody there on the heath.
Shivering unhappily, she stepped on to the bank and moved up the hill in the direction of the star ship.
The mental pictures of her brother had appeared abruptly. At first she had thought they might be of a husband—this tall, rangy, fair-haired youngster with the intelligent eyes—but the emotional response was wrong. She knew the way a woman felt about her man, the way she felt about Carl. There was an immediate affection and warmth here, but an indefinable sexual blankness, the drawing of a line which meant womb-sharing. The same flesh and blood. At that point the need to know more had become too urgent to resist.
From the crest of the hill the star ship was almost invisible in the darkness. As she walked down to it, dress slapping wetly on her shins, the ship’s outlines refused to be defined. It seemed to crawl on the ground, dissolve, shake like jelly, reach gleeful hands into the sky. Dumbo watched her own feet and kept walking until she was close enought for her eyes to map the hull’s contours. She had trouble finding the door but once the handle was in her hand instinct took over. The lever clicked sideways easily and the door opened towards her.
There was light inside.
Dumbo tensed to run but there was a cold stillness to the light which suggested that it always shone, even when there was nobody there to notice. She went up a narrow metal stair into a corridor which curved away for a short distance on each side, ending in featureless metal doors. The light came from a tube which ran the full length of the corridor ceiling. Two sections of it were fainter than the others, and a third had dulled to a cloudy amber.
Dumbo hesitated, then went to the right. Cold air puffed out around her as she opened the door. The large room beyond it was dimly lit and filled with rack after rack of transparent plastic boxes. Dumbo slammed the door shut but not before she had glimpsed the rows of nameless organs—glistening brown, pale blue, red-veined.
She pressed both hands to her lifting stomach and breathed deeply for a moment, snatching air.
The other door opened into a shorter transverse corridor which led to several doorways at her level and, by way of an open metal stair and catwalk, to a similar set of rooms above. Some of the doors were closed, others lay open. Dumbo looked into the nearest room—it was tiny and contained a number of long metallic objects on a stand. Rifles, she thought, feeling the vivid stains of memory flow into yet another compartment of her mind. She opened two lockers and found pistols and grenades. She touched the luminous dials of the grenades’ time fuses, frowning thoughtfully—it appeared that not all her regained memories would be pleasant.
The second room along the corridor was larger and much brighter lit than the others. In the centre of it was a long white table supported on a single, complicated pedestal. Around the walls were gleaming, incomprehensible machines and instruments, the sight of which failed to evoke any responsive wash of memory. I was a stranger here, she thought, even then. She closed the door.
None of the other rooms on the bottom level was of interest, except the one which had obviously been a combined galley and mess. The chairs were all gone—they were back at the house—but one of the cupboards still contained cups and dishes. The sight of the familiar glowing utensils in the alien surroundings gave Dumbo a vague emotional wrench.
On the upper level she chose the central room first.