Every Man's Fantasy Ch. 04

Though Ezra was slightly peckish, there had been no lunch and it occurred to him that yesterday's extra meal was in his honour and not the usual practise of the Woodlanders.

The afternoon drifted on, getting warmer and lazier. Pepi became bored and began to fidget but it was too hot and she was in too much awe of Ezra to be much of a nuisance. The camp descended into a long silence that lasted until the foragers returned with their baskets of vegetables and seeds. Then there was plenty of bustle to entertain Pepi.

The foragers deposited their gleanings in the storage hut and, though it was still early afternoon, conveyed themselves to the bathing place to prepare for another special feast that night. All except Annela, who quickly checked that Ezra needed nothing and then made her way to seek out Mirselene and find an answer to at least one of her perplexing questions.

Mirselene was in her hut, avoiding the heat of the afternoon sun, when Annela scratched at the door post and was admitted.

"Good afternoon, Annela," Mirselene said. "I'm glad you're back. Was it a successful forage."

"Yes, Madam, very."

"I see you left Ezra to fend for himself."

"He was comfortable and there was no one to pester him because we were all occupied with chores."

"I see, though I expressly relieved you of all your duties so you could tend to Ezra full time."

"I know. I'm sorry I disobeyed but I really think Ezra can look after himself now."

"He can, of course, but that was not my purpose."

"No, Madam, I see it wasn't. Parvinder hinted as much this morning. Please will you tell me what you want me to do?"

Mirselene never liked to use a direct approach. Perhaps she ought to have revealed her plan from the beginning but she always preferred to lay the groundwork first. Even now that it seemed necessary to level with Annela, Mirselene would not be direct, wanting instead for Annela to reach the conclusion for herself.

"You understand why we are all interested in Ezra, don't you?" she asked, "That there is something behind the attention we give him, other than interest in an exotic visitor from space?"

"Yes, Madam. It's sex."

"Good girl. Tell me more."

"Well, we are all trying to, er, attract him, ... that is, to make him desire us sexually, even to fall in love with us."

"Quite right, Annela. There is an old Earth word for it we don't use much: 'seduce'."

"I understand. We are all trying to 'seduce' Ezra. We all bathed yesterday and some of us took the long way to the river just to parade naked in front of him. We sit at his feet and ask endless probing questions, hoping for an emotional response. We offer him food from our platters; put on our best clothes; and put flowers in our hair."

Mirselene nonchalantly checked her hair was still tied up out of the way, thereby secreting in her hand the small ring of daises she had laced into the grey bun that morning.

"Doubtless we are doing everything wrong by Earth standards," Annela continued, pretending not to notice the petals in her chief's plump hand. "How would a Samothean know what was sexually alluring to an Earthman?"

"I have no fear on that score, Annela," Mirselene said, crumpling the daisies with a smile, "because nature will surely take its course. My question is what we should do about it?"

"I don't know. I suppose Ezra will prefer one or another of us and want her as his bedmate. If she is willing, then the matter is settled and the rest of us will have to respect his decision."

"Hmm." Mirselene self-consciously fiddled with the top-button of her tunic. "Annela, I expect more ambition from you regarding your tribe and more insight regarding your sisters."

"What do you mean, Madam?"

"I mean, why can't all the Woodlanders be his bedmates? As you say, we all want to be. Think of the benefit to the tribe. Instead of a child every eight years, purchased from the greedy Cloners at great expense of produce and effort, we could all have children by this time next year - supposing him capable of the deed."

"I am sure Ezra is capable," Annela assured her chief. "I've seen his penis swell. It was what I talked to Parvinder about. But I have to wonder ..."

"Yes, Annela?"

"... what if he doesn't want us all? What if he doesn't want any of us?"

"As regards Ezra wanting us all, Annela. ... Well, I've read more than you," Mirselene replied, as someone who spent many months in the Cloner City conceiving and bearing a daughter, where there were dozens of books, including a fictional romance. "I believe it's a man's nature to mate with as many women as he can."

"Really, Mirselene?" Annela was appalled. "Why would he want to?"

Annela knew women from the inside, as it were, and lived in a society of women: she could not see anything so admirable in a woman that a man would ever want to be with more than one, if any at all.

"Are you sure?" Annela asked.

"I think so, but we can ask him."

"How, Madam?"

"How what?"

"How do we ask him? Despite what he's told us, we know little about the sexual morality of Earth. All we know is that his need for privacy is much greater than ours and his sense of decorum much more pronounced. At the feast last night, he resisted saying anything about sex, beyond the social side of marriage and family, and you are keen that we don't offend or discourage him."

"Quite right, hence this conversation."

"You want me to speak to him?"

"Yes, and more."

Annela waited.

"In that romance I read," Mirselene explained, "an injured man fell in love with his nurse despite already loving another woman. He also fell for his secretary ..."

"His secretary?"

"... a women who worked for him in an inferior capacity," Mirselene explained, leaving Annela just as bewildered. "Anyway, it all ended happily because, although the man appeared to act dishonourably, he was really honest all along."

Annela looked blank.

Rather impatiently Mirselene concluded: "The point is that all it took to make the man fall in love with three different women was a pretty face, an elegant figure and some kindness. You have all those virtues, Annela, very much so."

Despite her good sense and twenty-four years, Annela blushed at the compliment.

"You want Ezra to fall in love with me?" she asked.

"I want him to fall in love with us all. I want you to be his guide and take the lead, find out exactly what his views on sex are and tell me how amenable he will be to the agreement I will put to him."

"What agreement?"

"We are a poor tribe, as you know, and have few children. We have saved eight years for another clone and if we need to save even more in the future, then we will surely decline and die out, which would be a disaster for Samothea as much as for the Woodlanders. Who else knows about herbs, weaving or wood-carving like us? But the Cloners cannot see this, though I put it to them many times. They want their luxuries...."

Annela had heard all this before: it was Mirselene's constant refrain, that her tribe was diminishing while the Cloners were getting rich on Woodlander produce. The same increase in the cost of clones had an effect on inter-tribal trade, making the Herders more arrogant and putting up the cost of everything the Mariners sold.

"But the agreement with Ezra?" Annela prompted.

"The agreement is simple: Ezra mates with us all or with none of us, and stays long enough to see that he has impregnated all who can conceive."

Annela thought silently for a minute, then she asked:

"How can we ensure Ezra will keep the agreement if he tires of us and wants to leave?"

"If I am right about male nature, then he won't tire of us so long as we still want him sexually; but even if I am wrong, then nothing is lost and we will possibly get some children from him. Also, he might be like that man in the story, with a sense of honour that can be appealed to."

"I really don't understand, Mirselene, but I will do what you ask. I admit, I would be very happy if it's true that injured men fall in love with their nurses. I like Ezra."

"Good girl. Maybe all it will take is your pretty face - but don't forget to find out his views on mating with us all."

"All?" asked Annela with a smile.

"Well, not me or anyone else who is too old, of course, but all the tribe older than eighteen who still bleed. If Ezra agrees, then they will be his bedmates in turn."

"And if we don't want to be his bedmates?"

"Come now, Annela, be serious! There is only one man on Samothea and every woman on the planet wants children. Besides, which of us would be so unnatural as to want her tribe to diminish when she could simply open her legs for Ezra - especially if her chief tells her to do so?"

Annela had her orders and plenty to think about. She went to undress in her hut and visit the river to bathe. On her way, she met the pigeon-hunters, returning with a dozen birds. Wildchild's grin could not have been wider: she had bagged two of the pigeons herself and was convinced she could have bagged more if she had an adult bow to use. The successful hunters also went to the bathing place and the excitement grew leading up to that night's feast.

There was good humour and good appetites at the feast and many compliments on the roasted pigeon but there was also a feeling of expectation that subdued the usual boisterous chatter. The Woodlanders were going to tell Ezra their story.

It was night and the flickering camp-fire projected merrily-dancing shadows onto the surrounding huts. The platters were cleaned up and though it was still warm, some women went and fetched blankets to wrap themselves up. Pepi fell asleep on her mother's lap and the hubbub died down as Mirselene stood to announce it was time to tell 'The Story of Samothea' to Ezra.

'The Story of Samothea' was a chant with a rhythm and a tune which told how the Founders, the three-hundred scientists and engineers who first landed on Samothea to finish the terraforming process, became the ancestors of the current population of Samothea. The Herders clearly had a slightly different tradition from the Woodlanders because Wildchild and Tamar stood to perform actions along with the chant. The tune, however, was the same. It began:

"In the year 2450 of ancestral Earth, on day fifty-one, the Founders landed on Samothea. One-hundred and seventy-two men and one-hundred and twenty women came from Earth to build a new world. They filled the oceans with fish and the forests and plains with animals and birds. They made houses and roads, digging and building with machines powered by the sun. They travelled long distances in cars and aeroplanes and talked to one another across the globe with radios."

"In the year 2455, on day one-hundred and twenty-nine, the northern star Sothis erupted. We gazed in wonder as the night sky lit up bright like the day."

"In the year 2455, on day one-hundred and thirty-seven, storms blasted the settlements of Samothea. Every machine stopped working. Hail lashed the forest and plain. Ribbons of light whipped across the night sky. A tidal-wave washed our boats up the beach and smothered our houses with sand."

"On day one-hundred and seventy, the storms ceased and calm weather returned but the rain now came at night and was freezing cold."

Wildchild and Tamar, doing the actions, hugged themselves and shivered.

The chant continued, describing how the Founders were cut-off from Earth and the rest of mankind, but bravely organised themselves to survive, until rescue should come or the machines be repaired. But more disasters followed: the women were barren; the men were sterile.

Ezra pieced together a consistent story. It seemed that a nearby star, the one the Samotheans named 'Sothis', was swallowed into a black hole, emitting x-rays followed by a harsh solar wind of cosmic particles. The wave-front from the black hole no doubt caused the violent storms, auroras and ice-cold rain. X-rays or solar wind also fried the circuits in every computer, book-reader, communicator, car, boat, aeroplane, tractor, digger, laser drill and plasma cutter on the planet. In one day, the Founders were thrown back into the stone-age.

Pulses of radiation can interfere with hyperspace pathways. Doubtless they crippled all the robot scouts sent from Earth to investigate the fate of Samothea. Though much weaker now, the same radiation must have frazzled Ezra's navi-comms system and crippled his hyperspace engines, sending him dangerously close to Samothea in his last hyperspace jump.

Snatches of the chant intruded on Ezra's thoughts. Unable to communicate with their orbiting space-ship or with any nearby planet, the Founders devised a plan to survive. They split themselves into six groups, the Tribes, with about fifty members each. They specialised in exploiting particular habitats: sea, plain, river-valley, forest and mountain; plus a group of scientists in what is now the Cloner City, whose task was to try to save or recreate Earth's technology.

Some Founder couples were already married: others paired up with the intention of having children; but they found they were all sterile. Not only people but every mammal was afflicted. Plants and egg-laying animals (fish, insects, reptiles, birds and amphibians) could reproduce normally but all mammals were barren.

The cloning laboratories first set up to populate Samothea with every kind of animal were now employed in cloning only horses, sheep, cattle and people. They soon found that males could not be cloned. The male engineers were the first and only generation of men on Samothea. It must have been an unbearably sad time for the women of Samothea to see their menfolk die off, leaving them to face the future alone.

Another cause of sadness was that life-expectancy plummeted. Under the harsh conditions of Samothea after the catastrophe, the first generation of Earth-born Founders died in their seventies or eighties. The last of the founders had died about fifty years ago. Their clones lived only into their fifties and sixties. A clone will begin life with the burden of years her mother had endured at the time of cloning, so the clone of a twenty-year-old woman will have twenty years cut from end of her life.

At this point, silence interrupted Ezra's thoughts. The chant had finished and Ezra was sorry he had become distracted by his own ideas and not listened as closely as he should have to the more recent parts of the story, which told how the different tribes had fared in the last one-hundred years. But Ezra was thinking about something else: How could he tell the Woodlanders about the first settlement ship?

The women looked expectantly at Ezra. It was his turn to speak.

"Ladies," he began, "the Story of Samothea is beautiful and moving. I can add some details to the story but I fear that, sad as the Story of Samothea is, what I will say will be even sadder."

There was murmuring as the women discussed among themselves, then Mirselene spoke up:

"We Woodlanders are tough people, Ezra, we can bear any amount of bad news. Do not fear to tell us everything you know."

Ezra began with his theory about the nearby black hole and the effects of its radiation. He briefly surveyed the difficult subject of the life-spans of clones. Then he paused again to order his thoughts and continued:

"Five years after the Founders landed on Samothea, the first settlement ship was sent from Earth. It carried five-thousand people. The last anyone ever heard of that settler ship was just before it took its final hyperspace jump to Samothea."

There were a few catches of breath and then silence.

"On board the ship were the farmers, builders, teachers and craftsmen who left Earth with a pioneer's courage, hoping to build a new life beyond the stars. The Settler Company on Earth keeps a list of their names because their property claims are valid for one-hundred years. They were mostly young singles and couples but some were families with children. Some were relatives of those Founders who chose to stay on Samothea, even their wives or husbands, bringing children to join their spouses."

"What happened to the ship?" Mirselene asked.

"I don't know," Ezra admitted, "though the same disrupted hyperspace pathways that steered me into a collision course with Samothea probably deflected the settler ship out of its path as well."

"If they were lucky, they fell straight into a star. They would have felt nothing. If they were unlucky, their ship became stranded somewhere between the stars. Without power, communications or life-support ..."

Ezra trailed off. Death by asphyxiation or freezing in the lonely vacuum of space was too horrible to contemplate. He did not mention a third possibility, that the ship crash-landed on a rocky planet somewhere, even on Samothea itself, and was now a rusting hulk, filled with five-thousand slowly-decaying corpses.

There was horror and sadness at Ezra's words. The women around the camp-fire hugged each other and wept as the enormity of their loss sank in. Their silent tears affected Ezra deeply. His own eyes were moist when he looked up to see Mirselene gathering her dignity, preparing to bring the feast to an end.

"Ladies, the night-rain is almost on us. As you go to sleep tonight, I hope you will think about the poor settlers (no doubt some of them our relatives) and regret their passing; but I hope you will not dwell too much on the sadness of their fate. Rather, we should remember their courage and optimism. Every day we must be strong and brave to survive on our world. We should remember the spirit of those settlers, who took ship to fly across the galaxy, courting unknown dangers and unfortunately succumbing. I feel certain that, if asked 'Would you have taken the risk anyway?' they would all have replied 'Yes! The goal is worth the danger!"

Buoyed up by their chief, the women quietly dispersed to their huts but Mirselene kept Ezra back for a minute. When there was no one in ear-shot, she put her question to him.

"If I understand correctly, Ezra, you came all the way from Earth on your own and were lucky to find us. But if one lone adventurer can make it, is it not possible that others can too?"

"Yes, it is possible but very unlikely."

"But you found your way here, is it really so unlikely that others will follow?"

"Yes, it is Mirselene," Ezra replied. "I took the risk because no one had tried for fifty years. When I do not return and no distress call is received, it will discourage other prospectors. Anyone else who tries to come here either has a very powerful motive or is an idiot."

Mirselene looked relieved for some reason. It puzzled Ezra. Surely the inhabitants of Samothea would want more adventurers to visit, in the hope that permanent contact with Earth might be established and the original plan for the settlement of the planet would resume.

As he went to bed, Ezra thought about the prospect of being rescued. He thought of his little sister, Danielle, an astrophysicist back in England. The problem of navigating along hyperspace pathways disrupted by black holes and exotic matter was bread and butter to her. He got no further than imagining her working on the problem when sleep overcame him. He remained conscious long enough to mumble "good night" to Annela before all went dark.

*******

Back on Earth, Danielle wasn't working on the problem herself but it was being worked on, and successfully. One morning a week, she taught a class of select undergraduates on hyperspace navigation at Trinity College, Cambridge. She was proud of the class, especially of her two top students, Rosa Silverstein and Li Qu Yuan, who always surpassed her expectations.

This week, Danielle asked her students to plot the quickest route through hyperspace from Earth to Samothea. This was normally done by computers because it consisted only of huge number-crunching calculations; but Danielle wanted her students to go back to basics and re-think all the shortcuts they usually allowed the computer to perform for them. She also wanted to reassure herself that Ezra had not taken too great a risk, thinking that five minds were better than one at looking for an anomaly that might turn an otherwise routine hyperspace jump into a fatal disaster.