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Read Ebook: The First Day of Spring by Wolf Mari Emshwiller Ed Illustrator
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Ebook has 271 lines and 10804 words, and 6 pages
Bernard sighed. "We didn't want to wait," he said. "We wanted to get back here, to tell you."
Max Cramer tightened his grip on Trina's hand. "The fools," he said. "Talking and talking, and all the time this world drifts farther and farther away."
"It takes so much power to change course," Trina said. "And besides, you feel it. It makes you heavy."
She remembered the stories her father used to tell, about his own youth, when he and Curt Elias had turned the world to go to a planet the spaceman found. A planet with people--people who lived under glass domes, or deep below the formaldehyde poisoned surface.
"You could be there in two weeks, easily, even at your world's speed," Captain Bernard said.
"And then we'd have to go out," Elias said. "Into space."
The worldmen nodded. The women looked at each other and nodded too. One of the spacemen swore, graphically, and there was an embarrassed silence as Trina's people pretended not to have heard.
"Oh, let's get out of here." The spaceman who had sworn swore again, just as descriptively, and then grinned at the councilmen and their aloof, blank faces. "They don't want our planet. All right. Maybe New Chile...."
"Wait!" Trina said it without thinking, without intending to. She stood speechless when the others turned to face her. All the others. Her people and Max's. Curt Elias, leaning forward again, smiling at her.
"Yes, Trina?" the councilman said.
"Why don't we at least look at it? Maybe it is--what they say."
Expression came back to their faces then. They nodded at each other and looked from her to Max Cramer and back again at her, and they smiled. Festival time, their eyes said. Summer evenings, summer foolishness.
And festival time long behind them, but soon to come again.
"Your father went to space," Elias said. "We saw one of those worlds the spacemen talk of."
"I know."
"He didn't like it."
"I know that too," she said, remembering his bitter words and the nightmare times when her mother had had so much trouble comforting him, and the winter evenings when he didn't want even to go outside and see the familiar, Earth encircling stars.
He was dead now. Her mother was dead now. They were not here, to disapprove, to join with Elias and the others.
They would have hated for her to go out there.
She faltered, the excitement Max had aroused in her dying away, and then she thought of their argument, as old as their desire. She knew that if she wanted him it would have to be away from the worlds.
"At least we could look," she said. "And the spacemen could bring up samples. And maybe even some of the people for us to talk to."
Elias nodded. "It would be interesting," he said slowly, "to talk to some new people. It's been so long."
"And we wouldn't even have to land," Aaron Gomez said, "if it didn't look right."
The people turned to each other again and smiled happily. She knew that they were thinking of the men and women they would see, and all the new things to talk about.
"We might even invite some of them up for the festival," Elias said slowly. "Providing they're--courteous." He frowned at the young spaceman who had done the swearing, and then he looked back at Captain Bernard. "And providing, of course, that we're not too far away by then."
"I don't think you will be," Bernard said. "I think you'll stay."
"I think so too," Max Cramer said, moving closer to Trina. "I hope so."
Elias stood up slowly and signalled that the council was dismissed. The other people stood up also and moved toward the doors.
"We'd better see about changing the world's course," Aaron Gomez said.
No one objected. It was going to be done. Trina looked up at Max Cramer and knew that she loved him. And wondered why she was afraid.
It was ten days later that the world, New America, came into the gravitational influence of the planet's solar system. The automatic deflectors swung into functioning position, ready to change course, slowly and imperceptibly, but enough to take the world around the system and out into the freedom of space where it could wander on its random course. But this time men shunted aside the automatic controls. Men guided their homeland in, slowly now, toward the second planet from the sun, the one that the spacemen had said was so like Earth.
"We'll see it tomorrow," Trina said. "They'll shut off part of the light tower system then."
"Why don't they now?" Max Cramer asked her. It was just past sunset, and the stars of a dozen generations ago were just beginning to wink into view. He saw Venus, low on the horizon, and his lips tightened, and then he looked up to where he knew the new sun must be.
There was only the crescent of Earth's moon.
"Now?" Trina said. "Why should they turn the screens off now? We're still so far away. We wouldn't see anything."
"You'd see the sun," Max said. "It's quite bright, even from here. And from close up, from where the planet is, it looks just about like Earth's."
Trina nodded. "That's good," she said, looking over at the rose tints of the afterglow. "It wouldn't seem right if it didn't."
A cow lowed in the distance, and nearer, the laughing voices of children rode the evening breeze. Somewhere a dog barked. Somewhere else a woman called her family home to supper. Old sounds. Older, literally, than this world.
"What are the people like, out there?"
He gestured, vaguely, at the farmhouse lights ahead of them, at the slow walking figures of the young couples out enjoying the warm spring evening, at the old farmer leading his plow horse home along the path.
"They live in villages, not too different, from yours. And in cities. And on farms."
"And yet, you like it there, don't you?" she said.
He nodded. "Yes, I like it there."
"But you don't like it here. Why?"
"If you don't understand by now, Trina, I can't explain."
They walked on. Night came swiftly, crowding the rose and purple tints out of the western sky, closing in dark and cool and sweet smelling about them. Ahead, a footbridge loomed up out of the shadows. There was the sound of running water, and, on the bank not far from the bridge, the low murmuring of a couple of late lingering fishermen.
"The people live out in the open, like this?" Trina said.
"Yes."
"Not underground? Not under a dome?"
"I've told you before that it's like Earth, Trina. About the same size, even."
"Not really. It only looks that way."
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