Best SF: 1971 by Anthology

Author:Anthology [Anthology]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

At eight o’clock, Yale was sitting in his cabin talking to his daughter when the machines outside cut off. The automatic units took a sixty-five-minute break when they returned to their service unit for maintenance, after which they would continue unceasingly throughout the night.

“I’ll have to go to eat with Nike now, Myrtle,” Yale said into the cube.

“I’m worried, Father. You sound so wretched.” She stood about six inches high, wearing a bright red foil-wrap, walking about over his desk top. Tonight, as often, she had chosen to broadcast from outside, so that Yale could see the Martian landscape at the back of her and David’s house. Perhaps she hoped to make him homesick.

“I’ll be okay, old girl. Like I said, I got a clout over the side of the head. I’ll get myself mediscanned if I don’t feel better after supper. We eat well here—Amelegla is still alive with wild life, as yet.”

“You’re worrying about things. I can tell.”

He straightened his shoulders, trying to take a more positive stance, seeing the tiny facsimile of himself that Myrtle had stood on the heat pump in her yard. “I got to sort things out with Nike, then things will be okay. And with the natives . . .”

“Life’s too complicated with all those different races on Earth, Dad. Come on back to Mars and live with David and me. You know you can go out hunting in the hills as you used to.”

He had been watching their camels in the background, moving slowly as David herded them in. They were gama-camels-Genetically Auto-Manipulated and Adapted strains—which could survive in the harsh hinterlands of the colony planet: which harsh hinterlands were now studded with gama-plants of all kinds, from the gama-cacti at the poles to the gama-wheatlands of the equator, the wheat ripening by satellite reflector systems.

Certainly Yale had lived there, had hunted wild gama-pig in the uplands of Eridania. That was after Rosie was killed. He had been glad enough of the break in life. But it was not for him. Both Myrtle and David were gamas; their genetic constitution had been shaped before birth, fitting them for the colony world; neither could tolerate life on Earth—this phantom walk in effigy on his desk top marked the extent of Myrtle’s terrestrial adaptation. He had been glad to come back to Earth, despite the war. Although the grand obnubilated silences of Mars still haunted him, he knew he could never return to them.

“We’ll let you live the way you want to.”

That was another thing. Here on Amelegla—not that he would be allowed to stay on Amelegla forever—he could have a girl from the village every evening. Seyilli was her name, a nice little girl, clean and affectionate. On Mars, there were no Seyillis, no spare women, and a chilly puritanical code that accorded with the external climate.

Besides, Myrtle would never have understood or approved. She lived back in the past, and expected him to do so too.

But the past, with all its innocence and simplicity, was gone, as extinct as diesel trains .

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