DORIS PITKIN BUCK

The Giberel

DORIS PITKIN BUCK was born in New York City on January 3, 1898. She remembers an incident of childhood as providing her first impulse toward creativity: “… someone showed me a piece of alabaster that let light through. I was fascinated. Later that same day I saw an old, old woman with the pale skin of extreme age. But she was beautiful. Like a glow of light. I stared a long time, gaping, before I told myself: alabaster!”

She received her A.B. degree from Bryn Mawr College in 1920, her M.A. degree from Columbia University in 1925. Her first professional writing, in the 1930s, consisted of newspaper articles on wine and wine etiquette, and these brought her, in the way of readers’ response, an avalanche of such questions as: “What is the correct wine to accompany graham crackers and milk?” Much later she began writing science fiction, both poetry and short stories. Her first published fiction was a short story in a 1952 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. She attended the Milford Conferences and became a charter member of Science Fiction Writers of America.

Now three times a grandmother, she lives in North Carolina, practices hobbies ranging from little theater to gardening to cooking, pursues literary interests “… from Anatole France to Ellery Queen, from Beowulf and the Mabinogion to Steve Canyon-with special roses for Blake and Emily Dickinson,” and continues to exercise her impeccable craftsmanship in adding to a modest literary corpus of powerful short stories such as “The Giberel,” which envisions a future of man so remote that it seems to touch his past.

Aramere fell asleep, small flexible fingers closed about her new

toy, the wheel. Wheels could spin. Usually when told to rest she

lay in half dreams in her temple cubicle with all her fingers close

together as if they were stiff and could hardly move. Now she used

them recklessly. Her wheel spun.

She was so happy that the Star Priests’ talk, drifting in fragmented, left her unworried, as a deep voice spoke, “I spit upon the Bomb.”

One answered, “Why so? Perchance it made us evolve … something better than the forefathers of our forefathers.”

“We do not know what men were like before. Even their bones have crumbled.”

“Could be they had no thumbs in those days. No thumbs at all.”

Aramere knew the routine that would follow. The nearly rigid first joints of the priests’ fingers would stroke the hard spurs sticking out above their wrists. As she dozed, worn out from play, she touched her own, proudly. Her thumb was like everyone else’s.

She laid the wheel against her cheek and told it maybe what the priests said had no meaning, even for them. Or maybe they had meaning for she repeated to herself-for toad folk. Somebody had told her such people were hardly human though they dared think they had forms and hands finer than anyone in all the rest of the world. Her breath came in a little gulp at the idea. For weren’t they shorter, sometimes a whole head shorter, than her people, giberels? Didn’t they work by day, those toad folk?

Aramere’s thoughts veered off. Tonight: her third birthday. She could almost see toys that would be hers in a new home, for the

temple foundling had been wooed by a foster mother as in some lands maids are wooed to gain their consent to a marriage. Her hand still clutched a cake. As she waited for her mother’s return, her mouth knew unfamiliar tastes, sweet and spicy.

She waked in the dark. She felt a hand over her mouth. She tried to bite it.

The bite did her little good. Fists shoved at her jaw. Palms pressed down against her head. She wanted to scratch, but her nails were still soft, as they would be till she was seven.

Through the night’s blackness she was half pushed, half carried outside. Wind hit her face. Her body, sweaty from attempts to twist and turn, chilled. Her mouth felt dry. Her jaws were held firmly or her teeth would have chattered.

The strangers carried Aramere a long way, then set her down in a field. She was too sick with fright to notice the planted rows that stretched indistinct in the starlight, almost out of sight.

“The girl seems the right size for a giberel. She’s like to us,” several voices argued in her behalf.

They brought a stick, straight, smooth, polished, and held her against it, so frightened she would have slumped in a heap on the ground without support.

“Sixty measures.”

“As giberels should be.”

“She may be fit to adopt.”

“But this foundling’s a she-freak though she is not dwarfish. We watched her in the House Where Stars Are Worshiped. Her fingers on both hands move easily, as with toadfolk, when she thinks no one watches.”

Voices said together, “We could lose our own humanity if we opened our clans to a neither-which-nor-t’other.”

“Were she to marry some true giberel-who knows-the offspring might be like toadfolk working in the soil all day, as worms do.” They murmured, assenting.

“Were she dead, her life blood could water our depleted earth-“

“Depleted for century on century.” The giberels chanted it like a ritual.

“Her body could nourish plants which we and the mud-fingered toadfolk are forced to share.”

“It would be better so,” a chilly voice reasoned, “since she could never be certain of breeding true.”

Aramere’s large eyes opened wider. She caught a glimpse of a boy a year or two older on the fringes of the crowd. He tried to gesture reassurance, but he was too little to help.

They peered at her in the obscurity. “Who in all the centuries of humanity has had such eyes?” She felt hostility, like a fall into chilly water that would close over her head. She had fallen so once on a December day.

A softer voicer “When she closes her eyes; she has the giberel beauty. Perhaps she was a found child.”

“No! Those hands betray her.”

“Then why let the toadling live on? Why wait?” It was the chilly water voice.

Aramere began to wriggle desperately. She pressed her toes into the soft earth of the field, trying to jump forward. Starlight helped her to see. Orange starlight. Cold starlight. Starlight like the reddest rose. The stars were friends, she was sure. She took a deep breath, ready to run if once the stiff hands that pressed so hard let her go, even a little.

“Why wait?” the chilly voice asked again.

Hands pressed her tighter yet.

“How shall we kill?” It was the cold voice.

“Break the neck and leave the body?”

“Bury. Then she will nourish what grows here.” In a rush: “Bury her alive.”

“Show hands. Show hands for the manner of this child’s death. A broken neck?” Silence fell. In the stillness Aramere saw three hands go into a slow clench and lift over slim bodies. Harm! Harm to you! the fists screamed. She wanted to put her hands over her large eyes to shut out the screaming of the fists. She crouched

frozen now with terror. She could have done nothing even if she were body-free.

,`A live burial?” Fists shot up. Many. Many.

What was burial?

Hands still held her. But. now some who surrounded her bent over, their spade like hands scooping up earth and patting it into pellets. They placed these at the rim of a depression they made. The giberels hummed small sad music.

The cold voice said over it, “Much treachery lurks in mother love. A barren woman craved this death-morsel. Her craving drew her to the House Where Stars Are Worshiped.”

Another added, “Malformed plasma, evilly begotten, is brought there. They hold it for adoption, for sacrifice, for whatever they sense to be the Will of the Stars. A barren giberel found this girl-child-‘

A shriek tore the night. The pressure on Aramere’s body loosened a little. Warm arms wrapped themselves about her-her new mother. Aramere began to sob. I lot tears came to wash all the coldness into the blackest part of the night.

“You cannot kill my foundling, true giberel or no.” Then, almost taunting, “And what is a giberel? No one even knows the meaning of the word.”

Someone shouted, “That’s one of the many meanings lost when the Bomb fell.” But most of them tried to hiss her into silence.

Aramere’s mother cried over the noise, “I tell you all, she has value.”

“What value, demented woman?” Once more the cold started to slap like water against Aramere.

Her mother’s arms wrapped her more intensely. More warmly.

“She has crop-magic. The power of which we have legends. Take your hands off her. We shall yet eat our fill.”

“How know you this, woman’.”’

“I watched her. I saw a marvel. Certainty is in me, as it was that you gathered to do her harm. I knew.”

Several voices demanded, “So you came running?”

“So I came running.”

“For nothing you winded yourself. We have passed a doom upon . this child who, though she is tall and fair like a maple tree, is no purebred creature. She is a menace to be destroyed.”

“It is so.” The giberels began to hum again.

“This is no ritual. It is murder.”

“Justice.”

“You lie in your throat of ice, Cold Tone. Proceed with this and I shall have you arraigned.”

“And I shall stop your proceedings, easily, as I have stopped this false adoption.”

“You have not heard me out. Crop-magic lives in this child. My q words are true. I have seen a marvel-as I said.” ‘

They stopped their humming to ask, “What marvel?”

“When she passes a food plant, it bends its head. Very little, for . she is still young. But it bends.”

“It does,” Aramere piped.

“Throw her in the grave,” Cold Tone ordered.

Many voices babbled, “We have our legends of miracles, of abundance long past or to come. If she has a body of magic, per- . haps a new plant will grow from her grave. A plant with fruits twenty times larger than all the fruits we know.”

Suddenly Aramere shrilled, still clinging to her new parent, “I .. know what I can do, though I have never done it all the way.”

“Yes? Yes?” With a rising inflection: “What can you do?”

“I can look at the stars.”

For a moment they were silent. Then: “She mocks us.”

“No. She gives a message. Aramere, whisper it to me.”

“When I watch stars, I draw their light into my reflecting eyes. Afterward, if I look at a plant it will grow. Grow taller than in the . light of the one star that shines from daybreak till evening.” They all heard.

“She mocks. Heap earth over her slowly.”

“Slowly.”

As in an antiphonal chant: “Slowly.”

Aramere gulped, choked, “I have not done it yet. But I can.” Frigid laughter answered. Hands as cold started to push her toward the shallow pit.

She screamed, “I can. I can.”

With all her strength she reached toward a bushy plant in the nearest row. She could almost touch it. She looked beyond it, and up. Stars were all the colors she had ever seen. Her eyes drank them as mouths drink water.

She was jostled this way and that, pulled from the plant in the row.

And suddenly the plant reached for her, long boughs creeping toward the brightness of her eyes like moths seeking flame.

“Fools!” Aramere’s mother chided. “Every moonless night do we not stand in fields the toadfolk mess with by day? Do we not reach toward the night-heaven with our bodies, with our heron necks? And the shining particles in our giberel eyes catch and mirror the far turbulence of stars that in the old times, the wise times before the Bomb, were known to increase growth. We move blindly now, yet we understand that. Without the night-stars and the day-star there would be little new, by sowing, by harvest.”

A second plant stretched toward Aramere.

In sudden revulsion the giberels cried, “We have been given our miracle. See one plant here. Another. And another. Forget her toadfolk hands with supple fingers. Forget. Remember only her potent eyes. Honor to Aramere!” They danced away under Aramere’s stars into the night.

Aramere rested exhausted against her mother. She failed-to understand murmured heresies. “Who knows what the stars hold in store for us? Change. Change. Mayhap they try to give back what the Bomb destroyed.” Then the woman forgot stars and their mysteries as she kissed Aramere from silken hair to knees, from spur like thumb to the quick-moving fingers no giberel had ever known.

Aramere’s eyes focused starlight canto the crops that in endless rhythm toadfolk tended with their hands by day and giberels with their eyes by night. Each year as the harvest was gathered under sun or counted in moonlight, the yield was greater, though some said the earth never forgot, never forgave its old scars. Others whispered that if perhaps a savior arose-There for lack of imagination the whispers died.

To Aramere that was a vast indifference. She did her work. She was revered, almost a goddess to the peoples whose hunger she lessened. Even toadfolk made her a home with lintels carved and painted to resemble fruits and edible pods. They and the giberels roofed it with overlapping thatch, thickness on thickness. At the doorway her own spring gushed, surrrounded with a stone rim, green like early spring because she was a virgin.

She was accustomed to receive offerings and, artifacts. But those who brought them stayed only to genuflect and lay out their gifts in patterns. They never waited like the giberel who stood before her now. I He lingered to sing cadences repeating the sounds of her name. Recklessly he gathered peach branches that would fruit. He set these in bowls beside her door. Later he floated apple blossoms, each resting singly on clear water. She had been taught letters by her parent and spelled out Ara mere between little gasps at anyone so rash as to pluck his apple blooms to make them say her name in color and perfume.

“How many nights of stars,” at last he asked her, “until we lie in each other’s arms? How many, Aramere? The sacred circle, the great woman symbol,” he bowed at the word as all giberel lovers did, “should be formed to dance our marriage.”

“I shall never marry,” she told him at dawn, when giberels fell the coming of sleep. “Never marry,” she said clearly at twilight, looking into the dusk.

At first he thought this the shyness of a maiden. At last the man required of her, but gently, “Give your reason for nay-saying.”

She shook her head. “Dear love, leave me.”

“When you call me your love?”,

“Leave me.”

“Never.”

“Harm might conic from my surrender.”

“How so?”

“Dreads press her down like weights. I have felt them since I was a child and they took me out, ready to bury me. An old man said then I could never breed true and were better dead.”

“From such desire as mine, only good can come. Our child will be truest giberel of them all. I will prove you can breed true.”

“But if I should fail you?”

“If we laugh in the fullness of delight, you cannot fail.”

She looked at him mutely, trembling.

“Did your courage fail when you were a child and they called you toadling, she-freak, death-morsel?”

“Then it was I alone. Never could I be brave for myself and for a child too.” She wept in his arms. “This cannot be. Cannot. II-” But she clung tightly. “Comfort me,” she cried.

“Who is true will breed true,” he said, and worshiped her with his eyes. “And now,” his voice grew in power, “now our minds chime, I shall go to bespeak our wedding circle.”

Aramere turned her head toward the Easer of Labor, the deft fingered toadwife, the one strange-race who ever touched a giberel and then only at childbirth. “He said that from happiness such as ours, only good could come. But I have given birth to a monster.”

“Sleep. Sleep for now.”

“Take away our son. Tell my husband when he comes back from hunting-” Aramere broke off.

“Nah. Nah. Tell your husband this son of his will shoot better arrows than the best hunter.”

“He will hate his child. So sure he was it would be a wonder.”

“Say then, with plenty of tears and some sobs, mind, how you were forced in the forest by a Thing come from the stars to look ‘into your long, large eyes. Who knows those eyes of yours didn’t call something?” She winked.

“A lie. I would have killed myself.” Aramere pulled her babe’s cover up to its chin and held it there.

“Rest. Every mother rests after a birthing.”

“But his father …”

“Tish posh. Face that when he comes.”

Aramere sat up straight in her bed, for all her weakness. “He will aver believe in me again,” she said in a voice of winter. Then words died in her throat.

The Easer pushed her back on the pillow. “Drink this. Brewed from the best.”

Aramere turned her head away. “Nothing can ease me.” She pulled the baby’s sheet tighter round its chin. “Nothing.” But the midwife forced some of the drink into her mouth.

After Aramere slept, the Easer turned the baby’s sheet down. “Giberel,” she muttered, “except the hand. Except the hand,” she repeated several times. She squinted. The thumb was like nothing on any child she’d seen. It could twist around. The child flexed it. It met any finger neatly. It even doubled up in the palm.

“Could be no calamity at all,” the woman told the baby. “With a thumb like yours, what couldn’t I do?” She glanced at her own hand as her fingers patted the newly born.

Must everyone stay the same, she wondered, going against everything she’d ever heard. She pressed her lips so tight together her mouth was no more than a line across her face, for such a thought must stay unvoiced. She’d been in the world long enough to know when people stoned old women. “Firmest grip ever I met. Could hold the whole earth with that.” But she did not say it aloud.