The Problem of Pain

Poul Anderson

Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction

February, 1973

Maybe only a Christian can understand this story. In that case I don’t qualify. But I do take an interest in religion, as part of being an amateur psychologist, and—for the grandeur of its language if nothing else—a Bible is among the reels that accompany me wherever I go. This was one reason Peter Berg told me what had happened in his past.

He desperately needed to make sense of it, and no priest he’d talked to had quite laid his questions to rest. There was an outside chance that an outside viewpoint like mine would see what a man within the faith couldn’t.

His other reason was simple loneliness. We were on Lucifer, as part of a study corporation. That world is well named. It will never be a real colony for any beings whose ancestors evolved amidst clean greenery. But it might be marginally habitable, and if so, its mineral wealth would be worth exploiting. Our job was to determine whether that was true. The gentlest-looking environment holds a thousand death traps until you have learned what the difficulties are and how to grip them. (Earth is no exception.) Sometimes you find problems which can’t be solved economically, or can’t be solved at all. Then you write off the area or the entire planet, and look for another.

We’d contracted to work three standard years on Lucifer. The pay munificent, but presently we realized that no bank account could buy back one day we might have spent beneath a kindlier sun. It was a knowledge we carefully avoided discussing with teammates. About midway through, Peter Berg and I were assigned to do an in-depth investigation of a unique cycle in the ecology of the northern middle latitudes. This meant that we settled down for weeks—which ran into months—in a sample region, well away from everybody else to minimize human disturbances. An occasional supply flitter gave us our only real contact; electronics were no proper substitute, especially when that hell-violent star was forever disrupting them.

Under such circumstances, you come to know your partner maybe better than you know yourself. Pete and I got along well. He’s a big, sandy-haired, freckle-faced young man, altogether dependable, with enough kindliness, courtesy, and dignity that he need not make a show of them. Soft-spoken, he’s a bit short in the humor department.

Otherwise I recommend him as a companion.

He has a lot to tell from his own wanderings, yet he’ll listen with genuine interest to your memories and brags; he’s well read too, and a good cook when his turn comes; he plays chess at just about my level of skill. I already knew he wasn’t from Earth, had in fact never been there, but from Aeneas, nearly 200 light-years distant, more than 300

from Lucifer. And, while he’d gotten an education at the new little university in Nova Roma, he was raised in the outback. Besides, that town is only a faroff colonial capital. It helped explain his utter commitment to belief in a God who became flesh and died for love of man. Not that I scoff. When he said his prayers, night and morning in our one-room shelterdome, trustingly as a child, I didn’t rag him nor he reproach me. Of course, over the weeks, we came more and more to talk about such matters.

At last he told me of that which haunted him.

We’d been out through the whole of one of Lucifer’s long, long days; we’d toiled, we’d sweated, we’d itched and stunk and gotten grimy and staggered from weariness, we’d come near death once: and we’d found the uranium-concentrating root which was the key to the whole weirdness around us. We came back to base as day’s fury was dying in the usual twilight gale; we washed, ate something, went to sleep with the hiss of storm-blown dust for a lullaby. Ten or twelve hours later we awoke and saw, through the vitryl panels, stars cold and crystalline beyond this thin air, auroras aflame, landscape hoar, and the twisted things we called trees all sheathed in glittering ice.

“Nothing we can do now till dawn,” I said, “and we’ve earned a celebration.” So we prepared a large meal, elaborate as possible, breakfast or supper, what relevance had that here? We drank wine in the course of it, and afterward much brandy while we sat, side by side in our loungers, watching the march of constellations which Earth or Aeneas never saw. And we talked. Finally we talked of God.

“—maybe you can give me an idea,” Pete said. In the dim light, his face bore a struggle. He stared before him and knotted his fingers.

“M-m, I dunno,” I said carefully. “To be honest, no offense meant, theological conundrums strike me as silly.”

He gave me a direct blue look. His tone was soft: “That is, you feel the paradoxes don’t arise if we don’t insist on believing?”

“Yes. I respect your faith, Pete, but it’s not mine. And if I did suppose a, well, a spiritual principle or something is behind the universe—” I gestured at the high and terrible sky—”in the name of reason, can we confine, can we understand whatever made that, in the bounds of one little dogma?”

“No. Agreed. How could finite minds grasp the infinite? We can see parts of it, though, that’ve been revealed to us.” He drew breath. “‘Way back before space travel, the Church decided Jesus had come only to Earth, to man. If other intelligent races need salvation—and obviously a lot of them do!—God will have made His suitable arrangements for them. Sure. However, this does not mean Christianity is not true, or that certain different beliefs are not false.”

“Like, say, polytheism, wherever you find it?”

“I think so. Besides, religions evolve. The primitive faiths see God, or the gods, as power; the higher ones see Him as justice; the highest see Him as love.” Abruptly he fell silent. I saw his fist clench, until he grabbed up his glass and drained it and refilled it in nearly a single savage motion.

“I must believe that,” he whispered.

I waited a few seconds, in Lucifer’s crackling night stillness, before saying: “An experience made you wonder?”

“Made me…disturbed. Mind if I tell you?”

“Certainly not.” I saw he was about to open himself; and I may be an unbeliever, but I know what is sacred.

“Happened about five years ago. I was on my first real job. So was the—” his voice stumbled the least bit—”the wife I had then. We were fresh out of school and apprenticeship, fresh into marriage.” In an effort at detachment: “Our employers weren’t human. They were Ythrians. Ever heard of them?”

I sought through my head. The worlds, races, beings are unknowably many, in this tiny corner of this one dust-mote galaxy which we have begun to explore a little.

“Ythrians, Ythrians…wait. Do they fly?”

“Yes. Surely one of the most glorious sights in creation. Your Ythrian isn’t as heavy as a man, of course; adults mass around twenty-five or thirty kilos—but his wingspan goes up to six meters, and when he soars with those feathers shining gold-brown in the light, or stoops in a crack of thunder and whistle of wind—”

“Hold on,” I said. “I take it Ythri’s a terrestroid planet?”

“Pretty much. Somewhat smaller and drier than Earth, somewhat thinner atmosphere—about like Aeneas, in fact, which it’s not too far from as interstellar spaces go. You can live there without special protection. The biochemistry’s quite similar to ours.”

“Then how the devil can those creatures be that size? The wing loading’s impossible, when you have only cell tissue to oxidize for power. They’d never get off the ground.”

“Ah, but they have antlibranchs as well.” Pete smiled, though it didn’t go deep.

“Those look like three gills, sort of, on either side, below the wings. They’re actually more like bellows, pumped by the wing muscles. Extra oxygen is forced directly into the bloodstream during flight. A biological supercharger system.”

“Well, I’ll be a…never mind what.” I considered, in delight, this new facet of nature’s inventiveness. “Um-m-m…if they spend energy at that rate, they’ve got to have appetites to match.”

“Right. They’re carnivores. A number of them are still hunters. The advanced societies are based on ranching. In either case, obviously, it takes a lot of meat animals, a lot of square kilometers, to support one Ythrian. So they’re fiercely territorial. They live in small groups—single families or extended households—which attack, with intent to kill, any uninvited outsider who doesn’t obey an order to leave.”

“And still they’re civilized enough to hire humans for space exploration?”

“Uh-huh. Remember, being flyers, they’ve never needed to huddle in cities in order to have ready communication. They do keep a few towns, mining or manufacturing centers, but those are inhabited mostly by wing-clipped slaves. I’m glad to say that institution’s dying out as they get modern machinery.”

“By trade?” I guessed.

“Yes,” Pete replied. “When the first Grand Survey discovered them, their most advanced culture was at an Iron Age level of technology; no industrial revolution, but plenty of sophisticated minds around, and subtle philosophies.” He paused. “That’s important to my question—that the Ythrians, at least of the Planha speaking chotlis, are not barbarians and have not been for many centuries. They’ve had their equivalents of Socrates, Aristotle, Confucius, Galileo, yes, and their prophets and seers.”

After another mute moment: “They realized early what the visitors from Earth implied, and set about attracting traders and teachers. Once they had some funds, they sent their promising young folk offplanet to study. I met several at my own university, which is why I got my job offer. By now they have a few spacecraft and native crews. But you’ll understand, their technical people are spread thin, and in several branches of knowledge they have no experts. So they employ humans.”

He went on to describe the typical Ythrian: warm-blooded, feathered like a golden eagle (though more intricately) save for a crest on the head, and yet not a bird. Instead of a beak, a blunt muzzle full of fangs juts before two great eyes. The female bears her young alive. While she does not nurse them, they have lips to suck the juices of meat and fruits, wherefore their speech is not hopelessly unlike man’s, what were formerly the legs have evolved into arms bearing three taloned fingers, flanked by two thumbs, on each hand. Aground, the huge wings fold downward and, with the help of claws at the angles, give locomotion. That is slow and awkward—but aloft, ah!

“They become more alive, flying, than we ever do,” Pete murmured. His gaze had lost itself in the shuddering auroras overhead. “They must: the metabolic rate they have then, and the space around them, speed, sky, a hundred winds to ride on and be kissed by…That’s what made me think Enherrian, in particular, believed more keenly than I could hope to. I saw him and others dancing, high, high in the air, swoops, glides, hoverings, sunshine molten on their plumes; I asked what they did, and was told they were honoring God. He sighed. “Or that’s how I translated the Planha phrase, rightly or wrongly,” he went on. “Olga and I had taken a cram course, and our Ythrian teammates all knew Anglic; but nobody’s command of the foreign tongue was perfect. It couldn’t be.

Multiple billion years of separate existence, evolution, history—what a miracle that we could think as alike as we did!

“However, you could call Enherrian religious, same as you could call me that, and not be too grotesquely off the mark. The rest varied, just like humans. Some were also devout, some less, some agnostics or atheists; two were pagans, following the bloody rites of what was called the Old Faith. For that matter, my Olga—” the knuckles stood forth where he grasped his tumbler of brandy—”had tried, for my sake, to believe as I did, and couldn’t.

“Well. The New Faith interested me more. It was new only by comparison—at least half as ancient as mine. I hoped for a chance to study it, to ask questions and compare ideas. I really knew nothing except that it was monotheistic, had sacraments and a theology though no official priesthood, upheld a high ethical and moral standard—for Ythrians, I mean. You can’t expect a race which can only live by killing animals, and has an oestrous cycle, and is incapable by instinct of maintaining what we’d recognize as a true nation or government, and on and on—you can’t expect them to resemble Christians much. God has given them a different message. I wished to know what. Surely we could learn from it.” Again he paused. “After all…being a faith with a long tradition…and not static but a seeking, a history of prophets and saints and believers…I thought it must know God is love. Now what form would God’s love take to an Ythrian?”

He drank. I did too, before asking cautiously: “Uh, where was this expedition?”

Pete stirred in his lounger. “To a system about eighty light-years from Ythri’s,” he answered. “The original Survey crew had discovered a terrestroid planet there. They didn’t bother to name it. Prospective colonists would choose their own name anyway.

Those could be human or Ythrian, conceivably both—if the environment proved out.

“Offhand, the world—our group called it, unofficially, Gray, after that old captain—the world looked brilliantly promising. It’s intermediate in size between Earth and Ythri, surface gravity 0.8 terrestrial; slightly more irradiation, from a somewhat yellower sun, than Earth gets, which simply makes it a little warmer; axial tilt, therefore seasonal variations, a bit less than terrestrial; length of year about three-quarters of ours, length of day a bit under half; one small, close-in, bright moon; biochemistry similar to ours—we could eat most native things, though we’d require imported crops and livestock to supplement the diet. All in all, seemingly well-nigh perfect.”

“Rather remote to attract Earthlings at this early date,” I remarked. “And from your description, the Ythrians won’t be able to settle it for quite a while either.”

“They think ahead,” Pete responded. “Besides, they have scientific curiosity and, yes, in them perhaps even more than in the humans who went along, a spirit of adventure. Oh, it was a wonderful thing to be young in that band!”

He had not yet reached thirty, but somehow his cry was not funny. He shook himself. “Well, we had to make sure,” he said. “Besides planetology, ecology, chemistry, oceanography, meteorology, a million and a million mysteries to unravel for their own sakes—we must scout out the death traps, whatever those might be.

“At first everything went like Mary’s smile on Christmas morning. The spaceship set us off—it couldn’t be spared to linger in orbit—and we established base on the largest continent. Soon our hundred-odd dispersed across the globe, investigating this or that.

Olga and I made part of a group on the southern shore, where a great gulf swarmed with life. A strong current ran eastward from there, eventually striking an archipelago which deflected it north. Flying over those waters, we spied immense, I mean immense, patches—no, floating islands—of vegetation, densely interwoven, grazed on by monstrous marine creatures, no doubt supporting any number of lesser plant and animal species.

“We wanted a close look. Our camp’s sole aircraft wasn’t good for that. Anyhow, it was already in demand for a dozen jobs. We had boats, though, and launched one. Our crew was Enherrian, his wife Whell, their grown children Rusa and Arrach, my beautiful new bride Olga, and me. We’d take three or four Gray days to reach the nearest atlantis weed, as Olga dubbed it. Then we’d be at least a week exploring before we turned back—a vacation, a lark, a joy.” He tossed off his drink and reached for the bottle. “You ran into grief,” I prompted.

“No.” He bent his lips upward, stiffly. “It ran into us. A hurricane. Unpredicted; we knew very little about that planet. Given the higher solar energy input and, especially, the rapid rotation, the storm was more violent than would’ve been possible on Earth. We could only run before it and pray.

“At least, I prayed, and imagined that Enherrian did.”

Wind shrieked, hooted, yammered, hit flesh with fists and cold knives. Waves rumbled in that driven air, black and green and fang-white, fading from view as the sun sank behind the cloud-roil which hid it. Often a monster among them loomed castlelike over the gunwale. The boat slipped by, spilled into the troughs, rocked onto the crests and down again. Spindrift, icy, stinging, bitter on lips and tongue, made a fog across her length.

“We’ll live if we can keep sea room,” Enherrian had said when the fury first broke.

“She’s well-found. The engine capacitors have ample kilowatt-hours in them. Keep her bow on and we’ll live.”

But the currents had them now, where the mighty gulfstream met the outermost islands and its waters churned, recoiled, spun about and fought. Minute by minute, the riptides grew wilder. They made her yaw till she was broadside on and surges roared over her deck; they shocked her onto her beam ends, and the hull became a toning bell.

Pete, Olga, and Whell were in the cabin, trying to rest before their next watch. That was no longer possible. The Ythrian female locked hands and wing-claws around the net-covered framework wherein she had slept, hung on, and uttered nothing. In the wan glow of a single overhead fluoro, among thick restless shadows, her eyes gleamed topaz. They did not seem to look at the crampedness around—at what, then?

The humans had secured themselves by a line onto a lower bunk. They embraced, helping each other fight the leaps and swings which tried to smash them against the sides. Her fair hair on his shoulder was the last brightness in his cosmos. “I love you,”

she said, over and over, through hammerblows and groans. “Whatever happens, I love you, Pete, I thank you for what you’ve given me.”

“And you,” he would answer. And You, he would think. Though You won’t take her, not yet, will You? Me, yes, if that’s Your will. But not Olga. It’d leave Your creation too dark.

A wing smote the cabin door. Barely to be heard through the storm, an Ythrian voice—high, whistly, but reasonant out of full lungs—shouted: “Come topside!”

Whell obeyed at once, the Bergs as fast as they could slip on life jackets. Having taken no personal grav units along, they couldn’t fly free if they went overboard. Dusk raved around them. Pete could just see Rusa and Arrach in the stern, fighting the tiller.

Enherrian stood before him and pointed forward. “Look,” the captain said. Pete, who had no nictitating membranes, must shield eyes with fingers to peer athwart the hurricane. He saw a deeper darkness hump up from a wall of white; he heard surf crash.

“We can’t pull free,” Enherrian told him. “Between wind and current—too little power. We’ll likely be wrecked. Make ready.” Olga’s hand went briefly to her mouth.

She huddled against Pete and might have whispered, “Oh, no.” Then she straightened, swung back down into the cabin, braced herself as best she could and started assembling the most vital things stored there. He saw that he loved her still more than he had known.

The same calm descended on him. Nobody had time to be afraid. He got busy too.

The Ythrians could carry a limited weight of equipment and supplies, but sharply limited under these conditions. The humans, buoyed by their jackets, must carry most.

They strapped it to their bodies.

When they re-emerged, the boat was in the shoals. Enherrian ordered them to take the rudder. His wife, son, and daughter stood around—on hands which clutched the rails with prey-snatching strength—and spread their wings to give a bit of shelter. The captain clung to the cabin top as lookout. His yelled commands reached the Bergs dim, tattered.

“Hard right!” Upward cataracts burst on a skerry to port. It glided past, was lost in murk. “Two points starboard-steady!” The hull slipped between a pair of rocks. Ahead was a narrow opening in the island’s sheer black face. To a lagoon, to safety? Surf raged on either side of that gate, and everywhere else.

The passage was impossible. The boat struck, threw Olga off her feet and Arrach off her perch. Full reverse engine could not break loose. The deck canted. A billow and a billow smashed across. Pete was in the water. It grabbed him, pulled him under, dragged him over a sharp bottom. He thought: Into Your hands, God. Spare Olga, please, please—and the sea spewed him back up for one gulp of air.

Wallowing in blindness, he tried to gauge how the breakers were acting, what he should do. If he could somehow belly-surf in, he might make it, he barely might…He was on the neck of a rushing giant, it climbed and climbed, it shoved him forward at what he knew was lunatic speed. He saw the reef on which it was about to smash him and knew he was dead.

Talons closed on his jacket. Air brawled beneath wings. The Ythrian could not raise him, but could draw him aside…the bare distance needed, and Pete went past the rock whereon his bones were to have been crushed, down into the smother and chaos beyond. The Ythrian didn’t get free in time. He glimpsed the plumes go under, as he himself did. They never rose.

He beat on, and on, without end.

He floated in water merely choppy, swart palisades to right and left, a slope of beach ahead. He peered into the clamorous dark and found nothing. “Olga,” he croaked.

“Olga. Olga.”

Wings shadowed him among the shadows. “Get ashore before an undertow eats you!” Enherrian whooped, and beat his way off in search.

Pete crawled to gritty sand, fell, and let annihilation have him. He wasn’t unconscious long. When he revived, Rusa and Whell were beside him. Enherrian was further inland. The captain hauled on a line he had snubbed around a tree. Olga floated at the other end. She had no strength left, but he had passed a bight beneath her arms and she was alive.

At wolf-gray dawn the wind had fallen to gale force or maybe less, and the cliffs shielded lagoon and strand from it. Overhead it shrilled, and outside the breakers cannonaded, their rage aquiver through the island. Pete and Olga huddled together, a shared cloak across their shoulders. Enherrian busied himself checking the salvaged material. Whell sat on the hindbones of her wings and stared seaward. Moisture gleamed on her grizzled feathers like tears.

Rusa flew in from the reefs and landed. “No trace,” he said. His voice was emptied by exhaustion. “Neither the boat nor Arrach.” Through the rust in his own brain, Pete noticed the order of those words.

Nevertheless—He leaned toward the parents and brother of Arrach, who had been beautiful and merry and had sung to them by moonlight. “How can we say—?” he began, realized he didn’t have Planha words, and tried in Anglic: “How can we say how sorry we both are?”

“No necessity,” Rusa answered.

“She died saving me!”

“And what you were carrying, which we needed badly.” Some energy returned to Rusa. He lifted his head and its crest. “She had deathpride, our lass.”

Afterward Pete, in his search for meaning, would learn about that Ythrian concept.

“Courage” is too simple and weak a translation. Certain Old Japanese words come closer, though they don’t really bear the same value either.

Whell turned her hawk gaze full upon him. “Did you see anything of what happened in the water?” she asked. He was too unfamiliar with her folk to interpret the tone: today he thinks it was loving. He did know that, being creatures of seasonal rut, Ythrians are less sexually motivated than man is, but probably treasure their young even more. The strongest bond between male and female is children, who are what life is all about.

“No, I…I fear not,” he stammered.

Enherrian reached out to lay claws, very gently and briefly, on his wife’s back. “Be sure she fought well,” he said. “She gave God honor.” (Glory? Praise? Adoration? His due?)

Does he mean she prayed, made her confession, while she drowned? The question dragged itself through Pete’s weariness and caused him to murmur: “She’s in heaven now.” Again he was forced to use Anglic words.

Enherrian gave him a look which he could have sworn was startled. “What do you say? Arrach is dead.”

“Why, her…her spirit—”

“Will be remembered in pride.” Enherrian resumed his work. Olga said it for Pete:

“So you don’t believe the spirit outlives the body?”

“How could it?” Enherrian snapped. “Why should it?” His motions, his posture, the set of his plumage added: Leave me alone. Pete thought: Well, many faiths, including high ones, including some sects which call themselves Christian, deny immortality. How sorry I feel for these my friends, who don’t know they will meet their beloved afresh! They will, regardless. It makes no sense that God, Who created what is because in His goodness he wished to share existence, would shape a soul only to break it and throw it away.

Never mind. The job on hand is to keep Olga alive, in her dear body. “Can I help?”

“Yes, check our medical kit,” Enherrian said.

It had come through undamaged in its box. The items for human use—stimulants, sedatives, anesthetics, antitoxins, antibiotics, coagulants, healing promoters, et standard cetera—naturally outnumbered those for Ythrians. There hasn’t been time to develop a large scientific pharmacopoeia for the latter species. True, certain materials work on both, as does the surgical and monitoring equipment. Pete distributed pills which took the pain out of bruises and scrapes, the heaviness out of muscles. Meanwhile Rusa collected wood, Whell started and tended a fire, Olga made breakfast. They had considerable food, mostly freeze-dried, gear to cook it, tools like knives and a hatchet, cord, cloth, flashbeams, two blasters and abundant recharges: what they required for survival.

“It may be insufficient,” Enherrian said. “The portable radio transceiver went down with Arrach. The boat’s transmitter couldn’t punch a call through that storm, and now the boat’s on the bottom—nothing to see from the air, scant metal to register on a detector.”

“Oh, they’ll check on us when the weather slacks off,” Olga said. She caught Pete’s hand in hers. He felt the warmth.

“If their flitter survived the hurricane, which I doubt,” Enherrian stated. “I’m convinced the camp was also struck. We had built no shelter for the flitter, our people will have been too busy saving themselves to secure it, and I think that thin shell was tumbled about and broken. If I’m right, they’ll have to call for an aircraft from elsewhere, which may not be available at once. In either case, we could be anywhere in a huge territory; and the expedition has no time or personnel for an indefinite search. They will seek us, aye; however, if we are not found before an arbitrary date—” A ripple passed over the feathers of face and neck; a human would have shrugged.

“What…can we do?” the girl asked.

“Clear a sizeable area in a plainly artificial pattern, or heap fuel for beacon fires should a flitter pass within sight—whichever is practicable. If nothing comes of that, we should consider building a raft or the like.”

“Or modify a life jacket for me,” Rusa suggested, “and I can try to fly to the mainland.”

Enherrian nodded. “We must investigate the possibilities. First let’s get a real rest.”

The Ythrians were quickly asleep, squatted on their locked wing joints like idols of a forgotten people. Pete and Olga felt more excited and wandered a distance off, hand in hand.

Above the crag-enclosed beach, the island rose toward a crest which he estimated as three kilometers away. If it was in the middle, this was no large piece of real estate. Nor did he see adequate shelter. A mat of mossy, intensely green plants squeezed out any possibility of forest. A few trees stood isolated. Their branches tossed in the wind. He noticed particularly one atop a great outcrop nearby, gaunt brown trunk and thin leaf-fringed boughs that whipped insanely about. Blossoms, torn from vines, blew past, and they were gorgeous; but there would be naught to live on here, and he wasn’t hopeful about learning, in time, how to catch Gray’s equivalent of fish.

“Strange about them, isn’t it?” Olga murmured.

“Eh?” He came, startled, out of his preoccupations.

She gestured at the Ythrians. “Them. The way they took poor Arrach’s death.”

“Well, you can’t judge them by our standards. Maybe they feel grief less than we would, or maybe their culture demands stoicism.” He looked at her and did not look away again. “To be frank, darling, I can’t really mourn either. I’m too happy to have you back.”

“And I you—oh, Pete, Pete, my only—”

They found a secret spot and made love. He saw nothing wrong in that. Do you ever in this life come closer to the wonder which is God?

Afterward they returned to their companions. Thus the clash of wings awoke them, hours later. They scrambled from their bedrolls and saw the Ythrians swing aloft.

The wind was strong and loud as yet, though easing off in fickleness, flaws, downdrafts, whirls, and eddies. Clouds were mostly gone. Those which remained raced gold and hot orange before a sun low in the west, across blue serenity. The lagoon glittered purple, the greensward lay aglow. It had warmed up till rich odors of growth, of flowers, blended with the sea-salt.

And splendid in the sky danced Enherdan, Whell, and Rusa. They wheeled, soared, pounced, and rushed back into light which ran molten off their pinions. They chanted, and fragments blew down to the humans: “High flew your spirit on many winds…be always remembered…”

“What is that?” Olga breathed.

“Why, they—they—” The knowledge broke upon Pete. “They’re holding a service for Arrach.”

He knelt and said a prayer for her soul’s repose. But he wondered if she, who had belonged to the air, would truly want rest. And his eyes could not leave her kindred.

Enherrian screamed a hunter’s challenge and rushed down at the earth. He flung himself meteoric past the stone outcrop Pete had seen; for an instant the man gasped, believing he would be shattered; then he rose, triumphant.

He passed by the lean tree of thin branches. Gusts flailed them about. A nearly razor edge took off his left wing. Blood spurted; Ythrian blood is royal purple. Somehow Enherrian slewed around and made a crash landing on the bluff top, just beyond range of what has since been named the surgeon tree.

Pete yanked the medikit to him and ran. Olga wailed, briefly, and followed. When they reached the scene, they found that Whell and Rusa had pulled feathers from their breasts to try staunching the wound.

Evening, night, day, evening, night.

Enherrian sat before a campfire. Its light wavered, picked him red out of shadow and let him half-vanish again, save for the unblinking yellow eyes. His wife and son supported him. Stim, cell-freeze, and plasma surrogate had done their work, and he could speak in a weak roughness. The bandages on his stump were a nearly glaring white. Around crowded shrubs which, by day, showed low and russet-leaved. They filled a hollow on the far side of the island, to which Enherrian had been carried on an improvised litter. Their odor was rank, in an atmosphere once more subtropically hot, and they clutched at feet with raking twigs. But this was the most sheltered spot his companions could find, and he might die in a new storm on the open beach.

He looked through smoke, at the Bergs, who sat as close together as they were able.

He said—the surf growled faintly beneath his words, while never a leaf rustled in the breathless dark—”I have read that your people can make a lost part grow forth afresh.”

Pete couldn’t answer. He tried but couldn’t. It was Olga who had the courage to say, “We can do it for ourselves. None except ourselves.” She laid her head on her man’s breast and wept.

Well, you need a lot of research to unravel a genetic code, a lot of development to make the molecules of heredity repeat what they did in the womb. Science hasn’t had time yet for other races. It never will for all. They are too many.

“As I thought,” Enherrian said. “Nor can a proper prosthesis be engineered in my lifetime. I have few years left; an Ythrian who cannot fly soon becomes sickly.”

“Grav units—” Pete faltered.

The scorn in those eyes was like a blow. Dead metal to raise you, who have had wings?

Fierce and haughty though the Ythrian is, his quill-clipped slaves have never rebelled: for they are only half-alive. Imagine yourself, human male, castrated. Enherrian might flap his remaining wing and the stump to fill his blood with air; but he would have nothing he could do with that extra energy, it would turn inward and corrode his body, perhaps at last his mind.

For a second, Whell laid an arm around him.

“You will devise a signal tomorrow,” Enherrian said, “and start work on it. Too much time has already been wasted.”

Before they slept, Pete managed to draw Whell aside. “He needs constant care, you know,” he whispered to her in the acrid booming gloom. “The drugs got him over the shock, but he can’t tolerate more and he’ll be very weak.”

True, she said with feathers rather than voice. Aloud: “Olga shall nurse him. She cannot get around as easily as Rusa or me, and lacks your physical strength. Besides, she can prepare meals and the like for us.”

Pete nodded absently. He had a dread to explain. “Uh…uh…do you think—well, I mean in your ethic, in the New Faith—might Enherrian put an end to himself?” And he wondered if God would really blame the captain.

Her wings and tail spread, her crest erected, she glared. “You say that of him?” she shrilled. Seeing his concern, she eased, even made a noise which might answer to a chuckle. “No, no, he has his deathpride. He would never rob God of honor.”

After survey and experiment, the decision was to hack a giant cross in the island turf. That growth couldn’t be ignited, and what wood was burnable—deadfall—was too scant and stingy of smoke for a beacon.

The party had no spades; the vegetable mat was thick and tough; the toil became brutal. Pete, like Whell and Rusa, would return to camp and topple into sleep. He wouldn’t rouse till morning, to gulp his food and plod off to labor. He grew gaunt, bearded, filthy, numb-brained, sore in every cell.

Thus he did not notice how Olga was waning. Enherrian was mending, somewhat, under her care. She did her jobs, which were comparatively light, and would have been ashamed to complain of headaches, giddiness, diarrhea, and nausea. Doubtless she imagined she suffered merely from reaction to disaster, plus a sketchy and ill-balanced diet, plus heat and brilliant sun and—she’d cope.

The days were too short for work, the nights too short for sleep. Pete’s terror was that he would see a flitter pass and vanish over the horizon before the Ythrians could hail it. Then they might try sending Rusa for help. But that was a long, tricky flight; and the gulf coast camp was due to be struck rather soon anyway.

Sometimes he wondered dimly how he and Olga might do if marooned on Gray. He kept enough wits to dismiss his fantasy for what it was. Take the simple fact that native life appeared to lack certain vitamins.

Then one darkness, perhaps a terrestrial week after the shipwreck, he was roused by her crying his name. He struggled to wakefulness. She lay beside him. Gray’s moon was up, nearly full, swifter and brighter than Luna. Its glow drowned most of the stars, frosted the encroaching bushes, fell without pity to show him her fallen cheeks and rolling eyes. She shuddered in his arms; he heard her teeth clapping. “I’m cold, darling, I’m cold,” she said in the subtropical summer night. She vomited over him, and presently she was delirious.

The Ythrians gave what help they could, he what medicines he could. By sunrise (an outrageousness of rose and gold and silver-blue, crossed by the jubilant wings of waterfowl) he knew she was dying.

He examined his own physical state, using a robot he discovered he had in his skull: yes, his wretchedness was due to more than overwork, he saw that now; he too had had the upset stomach and the occasional shivers, nothing like the disintegration which possessed Olga, nevertheless the same kind of thing. Yet the Ythrians stayed healthy.

Did a local germ attack humans while finding the other race undevourable?

The rescuers, who came on the island two Gray days later, already had the answer.

That genus of bushes is widespread on the planet. A party elsewhere, after getting sick and getting into safety suits, analyzed its vapors. They are a cumulative poison to man; they scarcely harm an Ythrian. The analysts named it the hell shrub. Unfortunately, their report wasn’t broadcast until after the boat left. Meanwhile Pete had been out in the field every day, while Olga spent her whole time in the hollow, over which the sun regularly created an inversion layer.

Whell and Rusa went grimly back to work. Pete had to get away. He wasn’t sure of the reason, but he had to be alone when he screamed at heaven, “Why did You do this to her, why did You do it?” Enherrian could look after Olga, who had brought him back to a life he no longer wanted. Pete had stopped her babblings, writhings, and sawtoothed sounds of pain with a shot. She ought to sleep peacefully into that death which the monitor instruments said was, in the absence of hospital facilities, ineluctable.

He stumbled off to the heights. The sea reached calm, in a thousand hues of azure and green, around the living island, beneath the gentle sky. He knelt in all that emptiness and put his question. After an hour he could say, “Your will be done” and return to camp.

Olga lay awake. “Pete, Pete!” she cried. Anguish distorted her voice till he couldn’t recognize it; nor could he really see her in the yellowed sweating skin and lank hair drawn over a skeleton, or find her in the stench and the nails which flayed him as they clutched. “Where were you, hold me close, it hurts, how it hurts—”

He gave her a second injection, to small effect.

He knelt again, beside her.

He has not told me what he said, or how.

At last she grew quiet, gripped him hard and waited for the pain to end.

When she died, he says, it was like seeing a light blown out. He laid her down, closed eyes and jaw, folded her hands. On mechanical feet he went to the pup tent which had been rigged for Enherrian. The cripple calmly awaited him. “She is fallen?” he asked. Pete nodded.

“That is well,” Enherrian said.

“It is not,” Pete heard himself reply, harsh and remote. “She shouldn’t have aroused.

The drug should’ve—Did you give her a stim shot? Did you bring her back to suffer?”

“What else?” said Enherrian, though he was unarmed and a blaster lay nearby for Pete to seize. Not that I’ll ease him out of his fate! went through the man in a spasm. “I saw that you, distraught, had misgauged. You were gone and I unable to follow you.

She might well die before your return.”

Out of his void, Pete gaped into those eyes. “You mean,” rattled from him, “you mean…she…mustn’t?”

Enherrian crawled forth—he could only crawl, on his single wing—to take Pete’s hands. “My friend,” he said, his tone immeasurably compassionate, “I honored you both too much to deny her her deathpride.”

Pete’s chief awareness was of the cool sharp talons.

“Have I misunderstood?” asked Enherrian anxiously. “Did you not wish her to give God a battle?”

Even on Lucifer, the nights finally end. Dawn blazed on the tors when Pete finished his story.

I emptied the last few cc. into our glasses. We’d get no work done today.

“Yeh,” I said. “Cross-cultural semantics. Given the best will in the universe, two beings from different planets—or just different countries, often—take for granted they think alike; and the outcome can be tragic.”

“I assumed that at first,” Pete said. “I didn’t need to forgive Enherrian—how could he know? For his part, he was puzzled when I buried my darling. On Ythri they cast them from a great height into wilderness. But neither race wants to watch the rotting of what was loved, so he did his lame best to help me.”

He drank, looked as near the cruel bluish sun as he was able, and mumbled: “What I couldn’t do was forgive God.”

“The problem of evil,” I said.

“Oh, no. I’ve studied these matters, these past years: read theology, argued with priests, the whole route. Why does God, if He is a loving and personal God, allow evil?

Well, there’s a perfectly good Christian answer to that. Man—intelligence everywhere—must have free will. Otherwise we’re puppets and have no reason to exist.

Free will necessarily includes the capability of doing wrong. We’re here, in this cosmos during our lives, to learn how to be good of our unforced choice.”

“I spoke illiterately,” I apologized. “All that brandy. No, sure, your logic is right, regardless of whether I accept your premises or not. What I meant was: the problem of pain. Why does a merciful God permit undeserved agony? If He’s omnipotent, He isn’t compelled to.

“I’m not talking about the sensation which warns you to take your hand from the fire, anything useful like that. No, the random accident which wipes out a life…or a mind—” I drank.

“What happened to Arrach, yes, and to Enherrian, and Olga, and you, and Whell.

What happens when a disease hits, or those catastrophes we label acts of God. Or the slow decay of us if we grow very old. Every such horror. Never mind if science has licked some of them; we have enough left, and then there were our ancestors who endured them all.

“Why? What possible end is served? It’s not adequate to declare we’ll receive an unbounded reward after we die and therefore it makes no difference whether a life was gusty or grisly. That’s no explanation.

“Is this the problem you’re grappling with, Pete?”

“In a way.” He nodded, cautiously, as if he were already his father’s age. “At least, it’s the start of the problem.

“You see, there I was, isolated among Ythrians. My fellow humans sympathized, but they had nothing to say that I didn’t know already. The New Faith, however…Mind you, I wasn’t about to convert. What I did hope for was an insight, a freshness, that’d help me make Christian sense of our losses. Enherrian was so sure, so learned, in his beliefs.

“We talked, and talked, and talked, while I was regaining my strength. He was as caught as me. Not that he couldn’t fit our troubles into his scheme of things. That was easy. But it turned out that the New Faith has no satisfactory answer to the problem of evil. It says God allows wickedness so we may win honor by fighting for the right.

Really, when you stop to think, that’s weak, especially in carnivore Ythrian terms. Don’t you agree?”

“You know them, I don’t,” I sighed. “You imply they have a better answer to the riddle of pain than your own religion does.”

“It seems better.” Desperation edged his slightly blurred tone: “They’re hunters, or were until lately. They see God like that, as the Hunter. Not the Torturer—you absolutely must understand this point—no, He rejoices in our happiness the way we might rejoice to see a game animal gamboling. Yet at last He comes after us. Our noblest moment is when we, knowing He is irresistible, give Him a good chase, a good fight.

“Then He wins honor. And some infinite end is furthered.” (The same one as when my God is given praise? How can I tell?)

“We’re dead, struck down, lingering at most a few years in the memories of those who escaped this time. And that’s what we’re here for. That’s why God created the universe.”

“And this belief is old,” I said. “It doesn’t belong just to a few cranks. No, it’s been held for centuries by millions of sensitive, intelligent, educated beings. You can live by it, you can die by it. If it doesn’t solve every paradox, it solves some that your faith won’t, quite. This is your dilemma, true?”

He nodded again. “The priests have told me to deny a false creed and to acknowledge a mystery. Neither instruction feels right. Or am I asking too much?”

“I’m sorry, Pete,” I said, altogether honestly. It hurt. “But how should I know? I looked into the abyss once, and saw nothing, and haven’t looked since. You keep looking. Which of us is the braver?

“Maybe you can find a text in Job. I don’t know, I tell you, I don’t know.”

The sun lifted higher above the burning horizon.

2008.04.27 7,750 wordsp>

Collected in:

The Earth Book of Stormgate

Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year (1974 Del Rey) Time of Passagep>

Going for Infinity

Notes: This needs a good check against a printed version or scan. Italics added where I thought appropriate but the original from which this was proofed contained none.

Paragraphs were badly formatted in the original as well so the above is a best guess about how it might actually be.

In any case, this version contains a considerable number of corrections and improvements. As near as I can tell, this represents the first time the story has been released separately in electronic format.

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