Memories of the Future (9 page)

Promised Planet

The European Project was a noble undertaking. It was the result of the efforts of a group of noble men who were acquainted with the tragic histories of countries like Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Romania, and Poland—countries whose juxtaposition to an aggressive totalitarian nation had robbed them of the right to evolve naturally. The European Project returned that right to them by giving them the stars. A distant planet was set aside for each downtrodden nation, and spaceships blasted off for New Czechoslovakia, New Lithuania, New Romania, and New Poland, bearing land-hungry, God-fearing peasants. And this time the immigrants found still waters and green pastures awaiting them instead of the methane-ridden coal mines which their countrymen had found centuries ago in another promised land.

There was only one mishap in the entire operation: The spaceship carrying the colonists for New Poland never reached its destination . . .

—RETROSPECT;

Vol. 16,
The Earth Years

(Galactic History Files)

* * *

T
HE SNOW WAS FALLING SOFTLY
and through it Reston could see the yellow squares of light that were the windows of the community hall. He could hear the piano accordion picking up the strains of “
O Moja Dziewczyna Myje Nogi
.” “My Girl Is Washing Her Feet,” he thought, unconsciously reverting to his half-forgotten native tongue; washing them here on
Nowa Polska
the way she washed them long ago on Earth.

There was warmth in the thought, and Reston turned contentedly away from his study window and walked across the little room to the simple pleasures of his chair and his pipe. Soon, he knew, one of the children would come running across the snow and knock on his door, bearing the choicest viands of the wedding feast—
kielbasa
, perhaps, and
golabki
and
pierogi
and
kiszki
. And after that, much later in the evening, the groom himself would come round with the
wódka
, his bride at his side, and he and Reston would have a drink together in the warm room, the snow white and all-encompassing without, perhaps still falling, and, if not still falling, the stars bright and pulsing in the
Nowa Polska
sky.

It was a good life, hard sometimes, but unfailing in its finer moments. In his old age Reston had everything he wanted, and above all he had the simple things which are all any man wants in the final analysis; and if he occasionally needed to apply a slightly different connotation to a familiar word or two in order to alleviate a recurrent sadness, he harmed no one, and he did himself much good. At sixty, he was a contented if not a happy man.

But contentment had not come to him overnight. It was a product of the years, an indirect result of his acceptance of a way of life which circumstance and society had forced upon him. . . .

Abruptly he got up from his chair and walked over to the window again. There was a quality about the moment that he did not want to lose: the reassuring yellow squares of the community-hall windows were part of it, the lilting cadence of the piano accordion, the softly falling snow—

* * *

It had been snowing, too, on that night forty years ago when Reston had landed the emigration ship—not snowing softly, but with cold fury, the flakes hard and sharp and coming in on a strong north wind, biting and stinging the faces of the little group of immigrants huddled in the lee of the slowly disintegrating ship, biting and stinging Reston’s face, too, though he had hardly noticed. He had been too busy to notice—

Busy rounding up the rest of his passengers, then hurrying the women out of the danger area and setting the men to work unloading the supplies and equipment from the hold, using signs and gestures instead of words because he could not speak their language. As soon as the hold was empty, he directed the rearing of a temporary shelter behind the protective shoulder of a hill; then he climbed to the top of the hill and stood there in the bitter wind and the insanely swirling snow, watching his ship die, wondering what it was going to be like to spend the rest of his life in a foreign colony that consisted entirely of young, newly married couples.

For a moment his bitterness overwhelmed him. Why should
his
ship have been the one to develop reactor trouble in mid-run? Why should the appalling burden of finding a suitable planet for a group of people he had never seen before have fallen upon
his
shoulders? He felt like shaking his fist at God, but he didn’t. It would have been a theatrical gesture, devoid of any true meaning. For it is impossible to execrate God without first having accepted Him, and in all his wild young life the only deity that Reston had ever worshiped was the Faster-Than-Light-Drive that made skipping stones of stars.

Presently he turned away and walked back down the hill. He found an empty corner in the makeshift shelter and he spread his blankets for the first lonely night.

In the morning there were improvised services for the single casualty of the forced landing. Then, on leaden feet, the immigrants began their new life.

Hard work kept Reston occupied that first winter. The original village had been transported from Earth, and it was assembled in a small mountain-encompassed valley. A river running through the valley solved the water problem for the time being, though chopping through its ice was a dreaded morning chore; and an adjacent forest afforded plenty of wood to burn till more suitable fuel could be obtained, though cutting it into cords and dragging the cords into the village on crude sleds was a task that none of the men looked forward to. There was a mild flu epidemic along toward spring, but thanks to the efficiency of the youthful doctor, who of course had been included as part of the basic structure of the new society, everybody pulled through nicely.

After the spring rains the first crops were planted. The soil of
Nowa Polska
turned out to be a rich dark loam, a gratifying circumstance to Reston, who had bled his ship of its last drop of energy in order to find the planet. It was already inhabited, of course—traces of the nomadic pilgrimages of the indigenes were apparent in several parts of the valley. At first Reston had some hope in that direction—until several of the natives walked into the village one morning, smiling hugely with their multiple mouths and pirouetting grotesquely on their multiple legs.

But at least they were friendly and, as it later developed, convenient to have around.

He helped with the planting that first spring. That was when he became aware that he was even less an integral part of the new culture than he had thought. Many times he found himself working alone while the immigrants worked in groups of twos and threes. He could not help thinking that he was being avoided. And several times he caught his fellow workers looking at him with unmistakable disapproval in their eyes. On such occasions he shrugged his shoulders. They could disapprove of him all they wanted to, but like him or not, they were stuck with him.

He loafed the summer away, fishing and hunting in the idyllic foothills of the mountains, sleeping in the open sometimes, under the stars. Often he lay half the summer night through, thinking—thinking of many things: of the sweet taste of Earth air after a run, of scintillating Earth cities spread out like gigantic pinball machines just waiting to be played, of bright lights and lithe legs, and chilled wine being poured into tall iridescent glasses; but most of all thinking of his neighbors’ wives.

In the fall he helped with the harvest. The indigenes’ penchant for farm work was still an unknown factor and consequently had not yet been exploited. Again he saw disapproval in the immigrants’ eyes. He could not understand it. If he knew the peasant mind at all, these people should have approved of his willingness to work, not disapproved of it. But again he shrugged his shoulders. They could go to hell as far as he was concerned, the whole self-righteous, God-fearing lot of them.

It was a bountiful harvest. To the immigrants, accustomed as they were to the scrawny yields of Old Country soil, it was unbelievable. Reston heard them talking enthusiastically about the fine
kapusta
, the enormous
ziemniaki
, the golden
pszenica
. He could understand most of what they said by then, and he could even make himself understood, though the thick
CZ
s and
SZ
s still bothered him.

But the language was the least of his troubles in the winter that followed.

After the way the immigrants had acted toward him in the fields, Reston had anticipated a winter of enforced isolation. But it was not so. There was scarcely an evening when he wasn’t invited to the Andruliewiczs’ or the Pyzykiewiczs’ or the Sadowskis’ to share a flavorful meal and to join in the discussion of whatever subject happened to be of most concern to the community at the moment—the fodder for the newly domesticated livestock, the shortcomings of the village’s only generator, the proposed site for the church. Yet all the while he ate and talked with them he was conscious of an undercurrent of uneasiness, of an unnatural formality of speech. It was as though they could not relax in his presence, could not be themselves.

Gradually, as the winter progressed, he stayed home more and more often, brooding in his wifeless kitchen and retiring early to his wifeless bed, tossing restlessly in the lonely darkness while the wind gamboled round the house and sent the snow spraying against the eaves.

* * *

In a way, the babies had been the hardest thing of all to take. They began arriving late that second winter. By spring there was a whole crop of them.

There was one shining hope in Reston’s mind, and that hope alone kept his loneliness from turning into bitterness—the hope that his SOS had been intercepted and that a rescue ship was already beamed on the coordinates he had scattered to the stars during the taut moments that had preceded planetfall. In a way it was a desperate hope, for if his SOS had
not
been intercepted it would be at least ninety years before the coordinates reached the nearest inhabited planet, and ninety years, even when you were twenty-one and believed that with half a chance you could live forever, was an unpleasant reality to contend with.

As the long somber days dragged on, Reston began to read. There was utterly nothing else for him to do. He had finally reached a point where he could no longer stand to visit the burgeoning young families and listen to the lusty squalling of youthful lungs; or endure another pitiful baptism, with the father stumbling through the ritual, embarrassed, humble, a little frightened, splashing water with clumsy hands on the new infant’s wizened face.

All of the available books were in Polish, of course, and most of them, as is invariably the case with peasant literature, dealt with religious themes. A good eighty percent of them were identical copies of the Polish Bible itself, and, finally annoyed by its omnipresence whenever he asked his neighbors for something to read, Reston borrowed a copy and browsed his way through it. He could read Polish easily by then, and he could speak it fluently, with far more clarity and with far more expression than the immigrants could themselves.

He found the Old Testament God naïve. Genesis amused him, and once, to alleviate a dull evening—and to prove to himself that he was still contemptuous of religious credos regardless of his situation—he rewrote it the way he thought the ancient Hebrews might have conceived of it had they possessed a more mature comprehension of the universe. At first he was rather proud of his new version, but after rereading it several times he came to the conclusion that except for the postulates that God had
not
created Earth first and had created a far greater multitude of stars than the ancient Hebrews had given Him credit for, it wasn’t particularly original.

After reading the New Testament he felt more at peace than he had for a long time. But his peace was short-lived. Spring devastated it when it came. Meadow flowers were hauntingly beautiful that year and Reston had never seen bluer skies—not even on Earth. When the rains were over and gone he made daily treks into the foothills, taking the Bible with him sometimes, losing himself in intricate green cathedrals, coming sometimes into sudden sight of the high white breasts of the mountains and wondering why he didn’t climb them, pass over them into another land and leave this lonely land behind, and all the while knowing, deep in his heart, the reason why he stayed.

It wasn’t until early in summer, when he was returning from one of his treks, that he finally saw Helena alone.

There had been a flu epidemic that second winter, too, but it had not been quite as mild as the first one had been. There had been one death.

Helena Kuprewicz was the first
Nowa Polska
widow.

In spite of himself, Reston had thought about her constantly ever since the funeral, and he had wondered frequently about the mores of the new culture as they applied to the interval of time that had to elapse before a bereaved wife could look at another man without becoming a social outcast.

Helena was still wearing black when he came upon her in one of the meadows that flanked the village. But she was very fair, and black became the milk-whiteness of her oval face and matched the lustrous darkness of her hair. Helena was a beautiful woman, and Reston would have looked at her twice under
any
circumstances.

She was gathering greens. She stood up when she saw him approaching. “
Jak sie masz, Pan
Reston,” she said shyly.

Her formality disconcerted him, though it shouldn’t have. None of the immigrants had ever addressed him by his first name. He smiled at her. He tried to smile warmly, but he knew his smile was cold. It had been so long since he had smiled at a pretty girl. “
Jak sie macie, Pani
Kuprewicz.”

They discussed the weather first, and then the crops, and after that there didn’t seem to be anything left to discuss, and Reston accompanied her back to the village. He lingered by her doorstep, reluctant to leave. “Helena,” he said suddenly, “I would like to see you again.”