As she left the infirmary she saw Tina climbing up the back path from the fields, coming to see how Genya was, no doubt. For all his wheezes and fevers Genya had never wanted for girl friends. Tina, and Shoshanna, and Bella, and Rachel, he could have had his pick. But last year when he and Rachel were living together, they had got contraceptives from the clinic regularly, and then they had separated; they hadn’t married, though by his age, twenty-four, Settlement kids were married and parents. He hadn’t married Rachel, and Miriam knew why. Moral genetics. Bad genes. Shouldn’t pass them on to the next generation. Weed out the sicklies. No procreation for him, and therefore no marriage; he couldn’t ask Rachel to live barren for the love of him. What the Settlements needed was children, plenty of healthy young natives who, with the help of the meta pills, could survive on this planet.
Rachel hadn’t taken up with anybody else. But she was only eighteen. She’d get over it. Marry a boy from another Settlement, most likely, and move away, away from Genya’s big grey eyes. It would be best for her. And for him.
No wonder Genya was suicidal! Miriam thought, and put the thought away from her fiercely, wearily. She was very weary. She had meant to go to her room and wash, change her clothes, change her mood, before dinner; but the room was so lonesome with Leonid away at Salem Settlement and not due back for at least another month, she couldn’t stand it. She went straight across the dusty central square of the Settlement to the refectory building, and into the Living Room. To get away, clear away, from the windless haze and the grey sky and the ugly sun.
Nobody was in the Living Room but Commander Marca, fast asleep on one of the padded wooden couches, and Reine, reading. The two oldest members of the Settlement. Commander Marca was in fact the oldest person in the world. He had been forty-four when he piloted the Exile Fleet from Old Earth to New Zion; he was seventy now, and very frail. People didn’t wear well here. They aged early, died at fifty, sixty. Reine, the biochemist, was forty-five now but looked twenty years older. It’s a damned geriatric club, Miriam thought sourly; and it was true that the young, the Zionborn, seldom used the Living Room. They came there to read, as it held the Settlement’s library of books and tapes and microfilm, but not many of them read much, or had much time to read. And maybe the April light and the pictures made them a little uneasy. They were such moral, severe, serious young people; there was no leisure in their lives, no beauty in their world; how could they approve of this luxury their elders needed, this one haven, this one place like home…The Living Room had no windows. Avram, a wizard with anything electrical, had done the indirect lighting, deliberately reproducing the color and quality of sunlight—not NSC 641 light, but sunlight—so that to enter the Living Room was to enter a room in a house on Earth on a warm sunny day of April or early May, to see all things in that clear, clean, lovely light. Avram and several others had worked on the pictures, enlarging colored photos to a meter or so square: scenes of Earth, photographs and paintings brought by the colonists—Venice, the Negev, the domes of the Kremlin, a farm in Portugal, the Dead Sea, Hampstead Heath, a beach in Oregon, a meadow in Poland, cities, forests, mountains, Van Gogh’s cypresses, Bierstadt’s Rocky Mountains, Monet’s water-lilies, Leonardo’s blue mysterious caves. Every wall of the room was covered with pictures, dozens of pictures, all the beauty of the Earth. So that the Earthborn could see and remember, so that the Zionborn could see and know.
There had been some discussion about the pictures, twenty years ago when Avram had started putting them up: Was it really wise? Should we look back? And so on. But then Commander Marca had come by on a visit, seen the Living Room of Ararat Settlement, and said, “This is where I’ll stay.” With every Settlement vying to have him, he had chosen Ararat. Because of the pictures of Earth, because of the light of Earth in that room, shining on the green fields, the snowy peaks, the golden forests of autumn, the flight of gulls above the sea, the white and red and rose of waterlilies on blue pools—clear colors, true, pure, the colors of the Earth.
He slept there now, a handsome old man. Outside, in the hard, dull, orange daylight, he would look sick and old, his cheeks veined and muddy. Here you could see what he looked like.
Miriam sat down near him, facing her favorite picture, a quiet landscape by Corot, trees over a silvery stream. She was so tired that for once she was willing to just sit, in a mild stupor. Through the stupor, faintly, idly, words came floating. Couldn’t it be… honestly, couldn’t it be that the metas are worse… Miriam, honestly, couldn’t it be…
“Do you think I never thought of that?” she retorted in silence. “Idiot! Do you think I don’t know the metas are hard on your guts? Didn’t I try fifty different combinations while you were a kid, trying to get rid of the side effects? But it’s not as bad as being allergic to the whole damn planet! You know better than the doctor, do you? Don’t give me that. You’re trying to—” But she broke off the silent dialogue abruptly. Genya was not trying to kill himself. He was not. He would not. He had courage, that one. And brains.
“All right,” she said to the quiet young man in her mind. “All right! If you’ll stay in the infirmary, under observation—for two weeks, and do exactly what I say—all right, I’ll try it!”
Because, said another, even quieter voice deep in her, it doesn’t really matter. Whatever you do or don’t do, he will die. This year; next year. Two hours; twenty-four years. The sicklies can’t adjust to this world. And neither can we, neither can we. We weren’t meant to live here, Genya my dear. We weren’t made for this world, nor it for us. We were made of Earth, by Earth, to live on Earth, under the blue sky and the golden sun.
The dinner gong began to ring. Going into the refectory she met little Shura. The child carried a bunch of the repulsive blackish-purple native weeds, as a child at home would carry a bunch of white daisies, red poppies picked in the fields. Shura’s eyes were teary as usual, but she smiled up at Auntie Doctor. Her lips looked pallid in the red-orange light of sunset through the windows. Everybody’s lips looked pallid. Everybody’s face looked tired, set, stoical, after the long day’s work, as they went into the Settlement dining hall, all together, the three hundred exiles of Ararat on Zion, the eleventh lost tribe.
He was doing very well. She had to admit it. “You’re doing well,” she said, and he, with his grin, “I told you so!”
“It could be because you’re not doing anything else,” she said, “smart ass.”
“Not doing anything? I filed health records for Geza all morning, I played games with Rosie and Moishe for two hours, I’ve been grinding colors all afternoon—say, I need more mineral oil, can I have another litre? It’s a much better pigment vehicle than the vegetable oil.”
“Sure. But listen. I have something for you better than that. Little Tel Aviv has got their pulp mill going full time. They sent a truck over yesterday with paper—”
“Paper?”
“Half a ton of it! I took two hundred sheets for you. It’s in the office.” He was off like a shot, and was into the bundle of paper before she even got there. “Oh, God,” he said, holding up a sheet, “beautiful, it’s beautiful!” And she thought how often she had heard him say that, “beautiful!” of one drab useful thing or another. He didn’t know what beauty was; he’d never seen any. The paper was thick, substantial, greyish, in big sheets, intended to be cut small and used sparingly, of course; but let him have it for his painting. There was little enough else she could give him.
“When you let me out of here,” Genya said, hugging the unwieldy bundle with both arms, “I’ll go over to Tel Aviv and paint their pulp mill, I’ll immortalise their pulp mill!”