Still Forms On Foxfield Read online

  DEFIANCE FROM FOXFIELD

  Two System satellites had vanished from orbit around Foxfield. Now the One Organism—central will and intelligence of the Commensals—claimed that their disappearance had been “practice” for Her coming destruction of the United Nations Interplanetary station.

  A hoax? UNI Adjustor Maio didn’t think so. “But the alternative explanation is worse yet,” she said. “That these creatures appear to threaten UNI with no technology at all. And we cannot meet the One’s demands. To be perceived as backing down before some nonhuman power—the Board cannot accept that.”

  “Well, what can you accept?” Clifford asked ironically. “Thermolyse the planet—wipe out the whole biosphere?”

  A pause lengthened in the room.

  “We hope to avoid that…”

  Other Avon Books by

  Joan Slonczewski

  A DOOR INTO OCEAN

  Avon Books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchases for sales promotions, premiums, fund raising or educational use. Special books, or book excerpts, can also be created to fit specific needs.

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  AVON BOOKS

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  New York, New York 10016

  Copyright © 1980 by Joan Slonczewski

  Front cover illustration by Shusei

  Published by arrangement with the author

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 88-91950

  ISBN 0-380-75328-6

  All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law. For information address Valerie Smith Literary Agency, P.O. Box 398, Milford, Pennsylvania 18337.

  First Avon Books Printing: December 1988

  AVON TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND IN OTHER COUNTRIES, MARCA REGISTRADA, HECHO EN U.S.A.

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  K-R 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Acknowledgments and Dedication

  This book owes its existence to my educational and spiritual growth in the Bryn Mawr-Haverford College community and in the New Haven Friends Meeting. For invaluable criticism I thank members of the New Haven Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop, especially Kevin O’Donnell, Jr., who also helped me survive the initiation rites of publication.

  Finally I dedicate this book to Stacy Jackson, whose example inspired me to write, and to my husband Michael for his infinite patience and faith.

  Contents

  Foxfield

  The Meeting

  Those Who Survived

  Gateway

  Belshazzar’s Feast

  Answer the Light

  Informal Education

  All the Kingdoms of the World

  Aurora

  Commensal Watch

  A Midsummer Night’s Dream

  The House Divided

  The Lamps of Science

  Crisis in Babel

  Silence Multiplied

  Still Forms on Foxfield

  I. Foxfield

  The wind thrust against her back and whipped out her shirttails as she grappled with the radio telescope on the narrow platform.

  Allison Thorne clung to the rail and paused for breath. Above her the immense silver dish reflected the brilliance of Wheelwright’s Sun as it tilted skyward like a hand cupped behind a lost ear. At her left, the roof slanted below in sheets of glassy solar panels. The opposite side dropped directly down the face of the Technical Services Center to the factory modules which clustered on the hilltop.

  Beyond the hill lay the houses of Georgeville, the First Settlement, surrounded by farmlands carved from the moss fields. When Allison squinted, she could just make out the form of a human farmer driving a tractor across the Crain land. Farmers would get little rest throughout the sowing season, even on Sunday. Their “commensal” companions, on the other hand, did not know such concepts as “work” or “rest.”

  Allison inhaled the fresh air with its scents of growth. Her blunt hand shoved aside wisps of hair which had strayed from the tie in back, and she faced the radio telescope once more.

  Something had gone wrong with it, somewhere. It had happened last week, actually, during the hailstorm, but she had not had time to fix it until Sunday after Meeting when the workload was minimal and Dave could be left to tend the communications array. The radio telescope simply refused to send data downstairs in its usual punctual manner. It was nothing mind-shaking, she told herself; just another reminder of entropy’s inexorable march through this universe.

  She strained to loosen a weatherbeaten amplifier connection. A screw shot forth, glanced off the rail and struck out on its own in the world below.

  The programmer’s face darkened. “Why the hell did I ever dream up this project?” she demanded of the wind.

  A clang came from the hatch door. Allison turned to see a sturdy youth braced against the rail. “Look out you don’t fall, Dave,” she warned, her words half lost in the rush of air.

  The boy looked downward and grinned. “At least you haven’t blown away yet.”

  “Thanks a lot. What gives in the pits?”

  “Aw—” He shrugged. “Most radio bands are back in.”

  “Good; ion storm’s subsiding.” The planet’s magnetic field was a hundredfold stronger than that of Earth, and frequent ionospheric disturbances played havoc with communications.

  “Think you’ll get that up by antinight?” Dave asked.

  Allison wrinkled her nose. “Chances now infinitesimal-to-zero. In other words,” she added, joining the wind’s scream, “prognosis sucks!”

  Dave nodded sagely. “Yeah, that thing’s a fossil.” True enough, the instrument was vintage Earth hardware, salvaged from the UNS Plowshare before a meteor had knocked the colony ship out of commission.

  “I’ll fix the godforsaken thing yet,” she vowed, returning to her task.

  “Fifth Query, Mother,” Dave replied sweetly as he watched.

  “So,” she muttered, “you’ve learned something in Sunday school after all.”

  “By the way,” he said with deliberate nonchalance, “there’s a message for you.”

  “What’s that?” she grimaced as a blast of air scraped her face.

  “Message,” he hand-signaled in Transac.

  “Who from?”

  The wind abated.

  “Don’t know for sure.” The boy dug his free hand in a pocket of his overalls. “It’s someone that I never heard of. Except in the Records, maybe.”

  “Frequency?”

  “Band Yod.”

  “Can’t be right, that’s the space monitor.”

  He shrugged. “Suit yourself. It says something about ‘United Nations.’”

  “What?”

  “I told you, Mom; it’s like history class.”

  Allison looked her son over; his hair tossed, and his features seemed innocent. Dear Dave, she thought, just turned twelve, on the brink of “that age,” and showing signs of impatience with this life. A father might have helped…She brushed aside the thought.

  “David, is this a joke of some kind?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A sick joke. You know the United Nations ended in holocaust a century ago.”

  “It is not a joke, Mom.” Dave pouted and turned away. The hatch door banged after him.

  Allison sighed. She raised herself with care and stretched her limbs, which were short yet thick-boned from the planet’s strong gravity. She followed him downstairs, absent
ly leaving the open tool kit to fend for itself on the roof top.

  Allison’s spirits lifted as she entered the computer room with its familiar hum of machines. She had worked here for over a decade now, ever since the Sixth Settlement disaster. The flood had taken her folks, and Joshua, too, but she had brought her young son back to Georgeville and her programming skills to the Tech Center. Within a year she had found herself running the operation.

  It was not a bad job, really—keeping the modules going, maintaining the switchboard, refining weather forecasts. On occasion the Meeting even granted one of her requests to fix up odd bits of equipment like the radio telescope and the long-range reflector. Some had grumbled, for what use was it to waste precious time on astronomy when nobody was out there? She recalled convincing them that it might be a good idea to watch regularly for impending meteors. That they could understand in light of the derelict Plowshare, still in lonely orbit about Foxfield.

  “Okay, Dave, let’s see what you’ve got.” She passed by her desk top, an organized chaos of papers and Bloch units, and approached the cheerfully blue-paneled Deltron videoscan. Delphis Electronics, with the arched dolphin trademark, was a remnant of the turn-of-the-millennium “small technologies” movement. She knew what dolphins were and what an ocean was; but she had never even traveled to a Foxfield ocean.

  Dave pointed to the screen.

  TO ALLISON AND ALL FRIENDS OF FOXFIELD: GREETINGS FROM ADJUSTOR SILVA MAIO OF THE SHIP UNIS-11. WE CITIZENS OF UNITED NATIONS INTERPLANETARY REJOICE IN THE SUCCESSFUL SETTLEMENT OF YOUR PEOPLE. WE HOPE TO RESUME CONTACT ACCORDING TO UN CHARTER 61A. WE AWAIT YOUR REPLY.

  For a moment Allison’s scalp prickled, then she laughed. “That’s not half bad, Dave. It’s a shame we can’t yet afford real artists.”

  “But Mom, I didn’t, I tell you.”

  He certainly looked serious and perhaps a bit scared.

  “Well, I wonder who did, then,” she said. “Darn good job, I must admit. Imagine them from Earth, congratulating our survival. They would, too.”

  She tapped a command and letters spewed out across the screen. “What the devil? Sender coordinates…a new ‘meteor.’ Someone went to a lot of trouble here. Noreen could have set it up, though only Seth knows about my—”

  “Naw,” Dave rejoined, “Seth’s too straight. Besides, he knows less about Deltron than Ghareshl does.”

  “Dave, that’s not true. And you shouldn’t say that about Ghareshl—she’s the best nonhuman friend we have.”

  “So what good is a commensal Fraction for a friend? She’ll conjoin this year anyhow, and muddle up so she forgets.”

  “How do you know?” said Allison. “All five of them remembered us one year.” She stared abstractedly past the purring console. “All right,” she said, “it should be bright enough to show up in daytime.”

  “On the telescope? Oh, wow!” He dashed out of the room.

  Minutes later they stood under the small observatory dome and took turns peering at the undeniable image of some sort of space vehicle.

  “It looks like a squashed doughnut,” said Dave.

  “Toroid.”

  “Yeah, like a doughnut. What are all those funny black crisscrosses, do you think? China letters?”

  Through Allison’s mind swept memories of Earth Records like a video reel. Earth, the planet her ancestors had left four generations before, in the year of the Lord 2022. What was Earth? Giant cities and empty deserts. Exotic jungles and poisoned oceans. Monuments modern and ancient, beautiful and grotesque.

  “What’s wrong, Mom?” Dave’s voice was muffled by the eyepiece. “It’s just what you dreamed of, remember? Earth people…Maybe they broke the light-speed barrier. Hey, then we can all go back to Earth again!”

  What had happened, then? Why had the home contact signals failed to resume by the time the Plowshare had decelerated from relativistic velocity? Had there been no holocaust?

  Earth people. Light-boned strangers who spoke the tongues of Babel…who worshiped many Gods or none. What were they like now, she wondered—and what would they want with the community of Friends on Foxfield?

  The Friends were Quakers, descended from the Philadelphian branch of the Religious Society of Friends. They conducted all manner of affairs by communal Meetings—the spiritual, in Meeting for Worship, and the temporal, in Monthly Meeting held every four “weeks” of the fifteen “month” year. The matter at hand, Allison reasoned, included components of both. And, by chance or by design, the visitors had called just in time for Georgeville’s Monthly Meeting Nine, set today as usual for seventeen hours east.

  There was little time for supper, so Allison telephoned the clerk from the kitchen of her cottage just down the hill. A warm soup aroma filled the room. Dave was cracking eggs into the sizzling pan.

  “I know, Lowell, but how else do you explain it?” She held the receiver in a tense grip. “Sure, I double-checked and triple-checked. Twenty years in the business, you know.” The connection was bad today, and she made a mental note to look into it as she tried to block out the kitchen noises.

  “Coo, c-coo, coo,” called the pet wurraburra sprawled over the radio as it languidly stretched an eyefoot. Dave had christened the beast Rufus Jones out of vengeance against a particularly dry history lesson.

  “No,” Allison replied, “I sent no response; I think that’s up to the Meeting…What do you mean, ‘discourteous’? Whatever would I say?”

  Rufus’s tone rose insistently. “Coo, c-c-coo, oo.”

  Dave tossed a bit of bean cheese toward the radio. It promptly disappeared.

  “All right, Low…I’ll be there.” The receiver slammed. Allison sniffed. “Do I chemisense oxidized albumin?”

  “Fried eggs, Mom. You’d make a good commensal.” He flipped them expertly onto two dishes.

  “Real hen eggs? What’s wrong with soup?”

  “Aw, Mom, I’m sick of all that commensal stuff.”

  “Now, David, where would we be today without the Fractions helping us all to grow things?”

  “But this is a special occasion. Just think, Mom, some day you’ll be telling your great-grandchildren, ‘Oh, young Friends, I was just a spring chicken of thirty-six years the day the Earth folks came back!’”

  Allison frowned at this wicked imitation of Celia Blyden, sole surviving member of the Plowshare crew and grandmother to half the community. “Speaking of chickens, don’t forget to bring them in before antinight.” She sat down at the table and gulped her soup. “Also keep a good eye on the board until Noreen gets in. Never know when Lanesbridge will have another power shortage or run out of drill bits.”

  “On Sunday evening?”

  “Smart aleck.” She crumpled her napkin, briefly pressed Dave’s shoulder and headed for the door.

  “Mom, you’ll never reach a hundred that way. Ulcers will get you before the Earth folks do.”

  Her fingers shot back a Transac syllable.

  “Fifth Query, Mother,” Dave warbled after her.

  The wurraburra waved all five eyefeet in excitement as Dave set the leftover soup down before it on the tiled floor.

  II. The Meeting

  Allison walked briskly down the road. Georgeville proper was less than a kilometer distant from the Tech Center hill, so she reserved the electrojeep for inter-settlement trips unless heavy equipment was involved. She took care as she walked to avoid stumbling into pavement cracks caused by extreme swings in temperature.

  Rustling sounds and odors of awakening emanated from the fields of ground moss. The air already steamed from approaching rainclouds. At least they would afford some protection from the sun in its antinight glory.

  The star, Tau Ceti, was commonly named after the astronomer Wheelwright, who first observed its planets from Earth and proposed their colonization. Allison had once asked Doctor Poyser why their forbears had not chosen one of Wheelwright’s thirty-odd planets with a twenty-hour day instead of a roughly Earth-sized year. The detailed explanation s
he had given her boiled down, essentially, to—that’s the best the Lord gave us, so be thankful. Not that a forty-two-hour period was unlivable; the commensals seemed to love it. Humans simply divided it, alternated east-days and west-days, and slept through the sun’s hottest hours.

  Commensals were active at this time of day and she came upon three of them now, pale green forms like cucumbers half her height, who swayed and fluttered leafy appendages. By their size she judged them to be four or five years old, perhaps ready for first conjoining. One she knew by name.

  “Yshrin. Enjoy warm sun.” Allison signaled in Transac, but they failed to respond. Scent or chemisense was their own natural idiom, and Allison could tell that they were using it. She approached with care as the spurts of odor intensified, one more pungent than the last, as though in contest.

  Burning, sulphurous fumes abruptly hit her face. She coughed and her eyes streamed.

  The creatures straightened, and one turned her eye toward Allison. “You smell distressed, Plant-spike,” signaled Yshrin with her inner corollar tendrils.

  “Hurts. Please stop,” Allison signaled.

  The substance dissipated. As soon as Allison had caught her breath, she hurried on to Georgeville.

  The weathered gray Meeting House was the largest structure built by humans on Foxfield. Other towns had their own Meeting Houses, but everyone still gathered at the First Settlement at year’s end.

  “Allison!”

  Her brother Clifford hailed her from the doorstep.

  “I’m so glad to see you,” she said with relief. The Fullers were practically “elders” now, she figured.

  Clifford beamed and the creases deepened in his bald scalp. Like most Foxfielders, he stood less than one and a half meters tall. Martha Fuller’s gray eyes fixed Allison keenly, yet with warmth, and Allison guessed that she had heard from Lowell.