Robert Silverberg - Waiting for the Earthquake

VIP免费

2024-11-23 1 0 39.37KB 14 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

======================

Waiting for the Earthquake

by Robert Silverberg

======================

Originally published in Medea, ed. Harlan Ellison, 1980

Fictionwise Contemporary

Science Fiction

---------------------------------

NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the

purchaser. If you did not purchase this ebook directly from Fictionwise.com

then you are in violation of copyright law and are subject to severe fines.

Please visit www.fictionwise.com to purchase a legal copy. Fictionwise.com

offers a reward for information leading to the conviction of copyright

violators of Fictionwise ebooks.

---------------------------------

It was eleven weeks and two days and three hours -- plus or minus a

little -- until the earthquake that was going to devastate the planet, and

suddenly Morrissey found himself doubting that the earthquake was going to

happen at all. The strange notion stopped him in his tracks. He was out

strolling the shore of the Ring Ocean, half a dozen kilometers from his cabin,

when the idea came to him. He turned to his companion, an old fux called

Dinoov who was just entering his postsexual phase, and said in a peculiar

tone, "What if the ground doesn't shake, you know?"

"But it will," the aborigine said calmly.

"What if the predictions are _wrong_?"

The fux was a small elegant blue-furred creature, sleek and compact,

with the cool all-accepting demeanor that comes from having passed safely

through all the storms and metamorphoses of a fux's reproductive odyssey. It

raised its hind legs, the only pair that remained to it now, and said, "You

should cover your head when you walk in the sunlight at flare time, friend

Morrissey. The brightness damages the soul."

"You think I'm crazy, Dinoov?"

"I think you are under great stress."

Morrissey nodded vaguely. He looked away and stared westward across the

shining blood-hued ocean, narrowing his eyes as though trying to see the

frosty crystalline shores of Farside beyond the curve of the horizon. Perhaps

half a kilometer out to sea he detected glistening patches of bright green on

the surface of the water -- the spawning bloom of the balloons. High above

those dazzling streaks a dozen or so brilliant iridescent gasbag-creatures

hovered, going through the early sarabandes of their mating dance. The quake

would not matter at all to the balloons. When the surface of Medea heaved and

buckled and crumpled, they would be drifting far overhead, dreaming their

transcendental dreams and paying no attention.

But maybe there will be no quake, Morrissey told himself.

He played with the thought. He had waited all his life for the vast

apocalyptic event that was supposed to put an end to the thousand-year-long

human occupation of Medea, and now, very close to earthquake time, he found a

savage perverse pleasure in denying the truth of what he knew to be coming. No

earthquake! No earthquake! Life will go on and on and on! The thought gave him

a chilling prickling feeling. There was an odd sensation in the soles of his

feet, as if he were standing with both his feet off the ground.

Morrissey imagined himself sending out a joyful message to all those

who had fled the doomed world: _Come back, all is well, it didn't happen! Come

live on Medea again!_ And he saw the fleet of great gleaming ships swinging

around, heading back, moving like mighty dolphins across the void, shimmering

like needles in the purple sky, dropping down by the hundred to unload the

vanished settlers at Chong and Enrique and Pellucidar and Port Medea and

Madagozar. Swarms of people rushing forth, tears, hugs, raucous laughter, old

friends reunited, the cities coming alive again! Morrissey trembled. He closed

his eyes and wrapped his arms tight around himself. The fantasy had almost

hallucinatory power. It made him giddy, and his skin, bleached and leathery

from a lifetime under the ultraviolet flares of the twin suns, grew hot and

moist. _Come home, come home, come home! The earthquake's been canceled!_

He savored that. And then he let go of it and allowed the bright glow

of it to fade from his mind.

He said to the fux, "There's eleven weeks left. And then everything on

Medea is going to be destroyed. Why are you so calm, Dinoov?"

"Why not?"

"Don't you _care?_"

"Do you?"

"I love this place," Morrissey said. "I can't bear to see it all

smashed apart."

"Then why didn't you go home to Earth with the others?"

"Home? Home? This is my home. I have Medean genes in my body. My people

have lived here for a thousand years. My great-grandparents were born on Medea

and so were _their_ great-grandparents."

"The others could say the same thing. Yet when earthquake time drew

near, they went home. Why have you stayed?"

Morrissey, towering over the slender little being, was silent a moment.

Then he laughed harshly and said, "I didn't evacuate for the same reason that

you don't give a damn that a killer quake is coming. We're both done for

anyway, right? I don't know anything about Earth. It's not my world. I'm too

old to start over there. And you? You're on your last legs, aren't you? Both

your wombs are gone, your male itch is gone, you're in that nice quiet

burned-out place, eh, Dinoov?" Morrissey chuckled. "We deserve each other.

Waiting for the end together, two old hulks."

The fux studied Morrissey with glinting, unfathomable, mischievous

eyes. Then he pointed downwind, toward a headland maybe three hundred meters

away, a sandy rise thickly furred with bladdermoss and scrubby yellow-leaved

anglepod bushes. Right at the tip of the cape, outlined sharply against the

glowing sky, were a couple of fuxes. One was female, six-legged, yet to bear

her first litter. Behind her, gripping her haunches and readying himself to

mount, was a bipedal male, and even at this distance Morrissey could see his

frantic, almost desperate movements.

"What are they doing?" Dinoov asked.

Morrissey shrugged. "Mating."

"Yes. And when will she drop her young?"

"In fifteen weeks."

"Are they burned out?" the fux asked. "Are they done for? Why do they

make young if destruction is coming?"

"Because they can't help -- "

Dinoov silenced Morrissey with an upraised hand. "I meant the question

not to be answered. Not yet, not until you understand things better. Yes?

Please?"

"I don't -- "

" -- understand. Exactly." The fux smiled a fuxy smile. "This walk has

tired you. Come now: I'll go with you to your cabin."

* * * *

They scrambled briskly up the path from the long crescent of pale blue sand

that was the beach to the top of the bluff, and then walked more slowly down

the road, past the abandoned holiday cabins toward Morrissey's place. Once

this had been Argoview Dunes, a bustling shoreside community, but that was

long ago. Morrissey in these latter days would have preferred to live in some

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Robert Silverberg - Waiting for the Earthquake.pdf

共14页,预览2页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Robert Silverberg - Waiting for the Earthquake

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: