The Genocides

THIRTEEN Cuckoo, Jug-jug, Pu-we, To-witta-wo!

There are people who cannot scream even when the occasion calls emphatically for screaming. Any drill sergeant can tell you of men, good soldiers every other way, who, when they must run forward to plant a bayonet in the guts of a sawdust dummy, cannot let loose with any sort of battle cry—or at best can manage some bloodless imitation, a half-hearted Kill Kill Kill! It is not that these men lack the primordial emotions of hatred and bloodlust; they have just become too civilized, too bound in, to experience a pure berserker rage. Perhaps a real battle will bring it out of them; perhaps nothing will.

There are emotions more primordial, more basic to survival, than hatred and bloodlust; but it is the same with them too—they can be stilled, covered over with civilized form and secondary modes of feeling. Only extreme circumstances can release them.

Jeremiah Orville was a very civilized man. The last seven years had liberated him in many ways, but they had not effaced his civilization until very lately, when events had taught him to desire the consummation of his revenge above his own happiness and safety. It was a beginning.

But as he stood beside Blossom, the axe in his hand unseen, himself unseen, hearing these heartrending cries that fear wrenched from her throat, now the more primordial emotion of love overcame him, shattered the civilized Jeremiah, and, dropping the weapon, he fell to his knees and began kissing the young body that was now the most important and beautiful thing in the world.

“Blossom!” he cried with joy. “O Blossom! Blossom!” and continued senselessly to repeat her name.

“Jeremiah! You! My God, I thought it was him!”

And he, in the same instance: “How could I have loved her, a ghost, bodiless, when all this while—Forgive me! Can you ever forgive me?”

She could not understand him. “Forgive you!” She laughed and cried, and they said many things to each other then without thinking, without caring to understand any more than the as-yet-unassimilable fact that they were in love.

Passion’s highest flights tend to be, if not completely innocent, slow. Orville and Blossom could not enjoy the happiness of gazing hours-long into each other’s eyes, but the darkness permitted as much as it denied. They dallied; they delayed. They called each other by the simple, affectionate names of schoolgirl romances (names that had never passed between Orville and Jackie Whythe, who had been given, when Orville’s hands moved over her, to cruder expressions—a certain sign of sophistication), and these sweethearts, these darlings and my very owns, seemed to express philosophies of love exact as arithmetic and subtle as music.

Eventually, as they must, a few words of common sense disturbed the perfect solitude of their love, like pebbles thrown in a still pond. “The others must be looking for me,” she said. “I have to tell them about something.”

“Yes, I know—I was listening up above as Alice spoke to you.”

“Then you know that Daddy wanted this. He was going to say so when—”

“Yes, I know.”

“And Neil—”

“I know that too. But you needn’t worry about him now.” He kissed the soft, drooping lobe of her ear. “Let’s not speak of it though. Later, we’ll do what we have to do.”

She pushed Orville away from her. “No, Jeremiah. Listen—let’s go away somewhere. Away from them and all their hating and jealousy. Somewhere where they’ll never find us. We can be like Adam and Eve and think of new names for all the animals. There’s the whole world—” She did not say any more, for she realized that there was the whole world. She stretched out a hand to draw Orville back to her—and to push the world aside for a little longer—but instead of Orville’s living flesh her hand encountered Alice’s fractured hip.

A voice, not Orville’s, called her name. “Not yet,” she whispered. “It can’t end now.”

“It won’t end,” he promised, helping her to her feet. “We have our whole life ahead of us. A lifetime lasts forever. At my age, I should know.”

She laughed. Then, for the whole world to hear, she shouted: “We’re down here. Go away, whoever you are. We’ll find our way back by ourselves.”

But Buddy had already found them, entering the tuber by a side passage. “Who’s that with you?” he asked. “Orville, is it you? I should knock your block off for pulling a stunt like this. Don’t you know the old man is dead? What a hell of a time to elope!”

“No, Buddy, you don’t understand. It’s all right—Orville and I are in love.”

“Yeah, I understand that all right. He and I’ll have a talk about that—in private. I only hope I got here before he could put your love to the test. For Christ’s sake, Orville—this girl is only fourteen! She’s young enough to be your daughter. The way you’re going at it, she’s young enough to be your granddaughter.”

“Buddy! It’s not like that at all,” Blossom protested. “It’s what father wanted for us. He said to Alice and then—”

Buddy, moving forward with their voices as a guide, stumbled over the nurse’s dead body. “What in hell!”

“That’s Alice. If you’d only listen—” Blossom broke into tears in which frustration mingled with sorrow.

“Sit down,” Orville said, “and shut up for a minute. You’ve been jumping to the wrong conclusions, and there are a lot of things you don’t know. No—don’t argue, man, listen!”

“The question, then, is not what should be done in Neil’s case, but who’s to do it,” Orville concluded. “I don’t think I should have to bear that responsibility, nor that you should either. Personally, I’ve never liked your father’s high-handed way of being judge, jury, and law all by himself. It’s an honor to have been nominated as his successor, but an honor I’d rather decline. This is a matter for the community to act on.”

“Agreed. I know that if I did… what has to be done, they’d say it was for personal reasons. And it just wouldn’t be true. I don’t want anything he’s got. Not any more. In fact, the only thing I want right now is to go back and see Maryann and my son again.”

“Then the thing to do is to set about finding the others. Blossom and I can stay out of the way until the matter has been settled. Neil can be king for a day, but he’ll have to sleep sometime, and that will be time enough to depose him.”

“Fine. We’ll go now—but not back along my rope. It would be too easy to run into Neil that way. If we climb up the vines of the root that you came down, there’ll be no danger of our crossing his path.”

“If Blossom’s up to it, I’m agreeable.”

“Jeremiah, you strange old man, I can climb up those things twice as fast as any thirty-five-year-old, two-hundred pound grandfather.”

Buddy heard what he supposed was a kiss and pursed his lips in disapproval. Though he agreed in theory with all that Orville had said in his own and Blossom’s defense—that times had changed, that early marriage was now positively to be preferred to the old way, that Orville (this had been Blossom’s argument) was certainly the most eligible of the survivors, and that they had Anderson’s posthumous blessing on their union—despite all these cogent reasons, Buddy could not help feeling a certain distaste for the whole thing. She’s still a child, he told himself, and against this, to him, incontrovertible fact all their reasonings seemed as specious as the proofs that Achilles can never pass the tortoise in their endless footrace.

But he swallowed his distaste, as a child swallows some loathed vegetable in order to go outside and do something more important. “Let’s shove off,” he said.

To return to the primary root down which Blossom and Orville had dropped it was necessary to detour back along the way Buddy had come and then angle up along a branch root so narrow that even crawling through it was arduous.

But this was only a foretaste of the difficulties they faced in climbing the vertical root. The vines by which they hoped to ascend were covered over with a thin film of slime; the hand could not grip them firmly enough to keep from slipping. Only at the nodal points, where the vines fed into each other, forming a sort of stirrup (like the system of roots, these vines were forever joining and rejoining), could one purchase a secure hold, and there was not always certain to be another such nodal intersection of vines within grasping distance overhead. They had continually to backtrack and reascend along a different network of vines. Even more frustrating was that their feet (though bare, they were not prehensile) were constantly slipping out of these makeshift stirrups. It was like trying to climb a greased rope ladder with rungs missing.

“What’s to be gained killing ourselves?” Buddy asked rhetorically, after having come within one slippery fingerhold of doing exactly this for himself. “I don’t know where this slop is coming from, but it doesn’t seem to be letting up. The higher we go, the more likely we are to break our necks if we fall. Why not go back along my rope after all? It’s not that likely we’ll run into Neil, and if we do, we don’t have to let on that we know anything he wouldn’t want us to. I’d rather risk five, ten minutes with him than another hundred yards up this greased chimney.”

This seemed a sensible course, and they returned to the tuber. The descent was easy as sliding down a firepole.

Following Buddy’s line up a mild slope, they noticed that here too the vines were slimed and slippery beneath their bare feet. Feeling down beneath the layer of vines, Orville discovered that a little rivulet of the slime was flowing down the slope.

“What is it, do you suppose?” Buddy wondered.

“I think the springtime has come at last,” Orville replied.

“And this is the sap—of course! I recognize the feel of it now—and the smell—oh, don’t I know that smell!”

“Springtime!” Blossom said. “We’ll be able to return to the surface!”

Happiness is contagious (and wasn’t there every reason for a young man newly in love to be happy in any case?), and Orville quoted part of a poem he remembered:

“What a lovely poem!” she said, catching hold of his hand and squeezing.

“What a lot of nonsense!” Buddy said. “Cuckoo, jugjug, pu-we, to-witta-wo!”

The three of them laughed gaily. The sun seemed to be shining on them already, and nothing was needed to make them laugh again but that one of them repeat the silly old Elizabethan words.

Some two thousand feet above their heads, the reviving land basked under the bright influence of the sun, which had indeed passed the equinox. Even before the last patches of snow had melted from the southern sides of boulders, the leaves of the great Plants unfurled to receive the light and began without further ado to set about their work as though October were only yesterday.

Except for the noise of the leaves snapping open (and that was over in a day), it was a silent spring. There were no birds to sing.

The leaves spoke hungrily to the stems, drained dry to last out the freezing northern winter, and the stems spoke to the roots, where the solute-bearing sap, which the leaves needed to make new food, began to boil up through myriad capillaries. Where these capillaries had been broken by the passage of man, the sap oozed forth and spread over the vines that lined the hollows of the roots. As more and more sap poured through the arteries of the awakening Plant, the thin sap formed little rivulets, which, merging with other rivulets, became little streams, and these streams ran down to flood the lowest depths of the roots. When they flowed into hollows in which the capillaries were still intact, they were reabsorbed, but elsewhere the levels of these streams rose higher and higher, flooding the roots, like sewers in a sudden March thaw.

Now the tubers of the fruit, which had been forming for years, took on a fine, autumnal richness. The airy floss at their cores, receiving their final supplies of food from the leaves above, thickened to the consistency of whipped egg white.

In both hemispheres, the Plant was coming to the end of a long season, and now, at regular intervals over the green earth, there descended from the spring skies gleaming spheres so immense that each one, landing, crushed several of the Plants under its ponderous bulk. Viewed from the proper distance, the landscape would have resembled a bed of clover overspread with gray basketballs.

These gray basketballs basked a few hours in the sun, then extruded, from apertures at their bases, hundreds of exploratory cilia, each of which moved toward a nearby Plant and with tidy, effective little drill bits, began to bore down through the woody stem into the hollow of the root below. When a satisfactory passage had been opened, the cilium was drawn back into the gray basketball.

The harvest was being prepared.

Neil had gone three times about the circle of rope he had fashioned to trap Buddy, and he was beginning, dully, to sense that he had been caught in his own snare (though how it had happened he did not yet understand). Then, as he had feared, Buddy could be heard returning along the root. Blossom and Orvifie were with him, all of them laughing! At him? He had to hide, but there was nowhere to hide, and he didn’t want to hide from Blossom anyhow. So he said, “Uh, hi.” They stopped laughing.

“What are you doing here?” Buddy asked.

“Well, you see, uh…. This rope here, it keeps… No, that’s not it, either.” The more he talked, the more confused he became, and the more impatient Buddy.

“Oh, never mind then. Come along. I’ve found Blossom. And Orville too. Let’s round up the others now. It’s spring. Haven’t you noticed the slime—Hey—what’s this?” He had found the point where the end of his own rope was knotted to its own middle. “This surely isn’t the intersection where we left each other. I’d remember if I’d gone down any root as small as this.”

Neil didn’t know what to do. He wanted to hit his snoopy brother over the head, that’s what he wanted to do, and shoot Orville, just blast his brains out. But he sensed that this had better be done away from Blossom, who might not understand. Then too, when you’re lost the most important thing is to get home safe. When you’re home safe, things won’t seem so muddled as when you’re lost.

A whispered conversation was going on among Buddy, Orville and Blossom. Then Buddy said: “Neil, did you—”

“No! I don’t know how… it just must of happened! It’s not my fault!”

“Well, you dumb clod!” Buddy began to laugh. “Why, if you had to saw a limb off a tree, I swear you’d sit on the wrong side to do it. You’ve tied my line in a circle, haven’t you?”

“No, Buddy, honest to God! Like I said, I don’t know how—”

“And you didn’t bring your own line along so you could get back. Oh, Neil, how do you do it? How do you always find a way?”

Orville and Blossom joined Buddy’s laughter. “Oh, Neil!” Blossom cried out. “Oh, Neil!”

That made Neil feel good, to hear Blossom say his name like that, and he began to laugh along with everybody else. The joke was on him!

Surprisingly, it seemed that Buddy and Orville weren’t going to make a big stink. Maybe they knew what was good for them!

“It seems we’ll have to find our way back as best we can,” Orville said with a sigh, when they were all done laughing. “Neil, would you like to lead the way?”

“No,” Neil said, somber again and touching the Python in his holster for assurance. “No, I’ll be the leader, but I’ll bring up the rear.”

An hour later they had come up against a dead end, and they knew they were thoroughly lost. It was no longer possible to shatter the capillaries with a wave of one’s arm. They were swollen with sap and resilient. It would have been no more difficult to crawl through a honeycomb than through the unopened hollows. They were compelled therefore to stay strictly within the bounds of paths already blazed. Thanks to Anderson’s explorations, there were quite enough of these. Quite too many.

Orville summed up their situation. “It’s back to the subbasement, my dears. We’ll have to take another elevator to get to the ground floor.”

“Wha’d you say?” Neil asked.

“I said—”

“I heard what you said! And I don’t want you to use that word again, understand? You remember who’s leader here, huh?”

“What word, Neil?” Blossom asked.

“My dears!” Neil screamed. Neil had always been able to scream when he felt the occasion called for it. He was not overcivilized, and the primordial was very close to the surface of his mind. It seemed to grow closer all the time.