So he was executed. His last words to Mara were: “Now my burden of duty falls upon you. See that your mother never goes hungry—I charge you.”
But mother was always hungry. It was her natural state. Mara earned and gave her twice as much food as anyone else in the Fami received, but she always wanted more. Mara began to suspect that her father had allowed himself to be caught on purpose.
So when in the evening the neighbors ceremoniously placed the naked (cloth was short in Fami) body of her mother on the edge of the glacier, and equally ceremoniously gave it a push, she was not sad when she saw it slide down and become a fast-moving speck which the mist swallowed. She went home and worked on the big, cloth-stuffed mattress she was fashioning from her spoils. (She was one of the reasons for cloth being scarce.) She finished it late at night, then dragged it through the sleeping village to the glacier. She balanced it on the hallowed spot, lay on it, pushed hard. She worked the ponderous thing away from the edge…
Then suddenly she was riding it at gathering speed down through the complete darkness.
She was following Leep’s advice—and her mother—literally. She was a simple girl, and something of a fatalist. What no other inhabitant of Fami had dared do even in daylight, she was doing casually at night—for no other reason than that this happened to be the time when her carrier was completed. She lay spread-eagled on the lumpy thing at an acute angle, the air rushing over her like an upward gale. She had no idea of what might lie only an arm’s length ahead of her.
This swift glissading went on for a long time. She’d adjusted herself to it and was even beginning to doze, when the mattress began to slow with a series of jerks.
It stopped. She knelt, and groped around with an exploratory hand. Her fingers dabbled in cold water in most directions. She knifed the mattress up the middle and snuggled down inside it. Soon she was warmly asleep. The main object was accomplished: she’d escaped from Fami. She was content to await the morning to discover where she’d escaped to.
She awakened some time after dawn and found her bed poised on a narrowing spit of hard snow. Several longer tongues of the glacier reached out into the shallows of the wide lake formed by its melting. She found four shrunken but fairly well preserved bodies lying along the margin of the lake and recognized them as people of Fami who’d died in the last few years. Her mother was not among them, and she surmised that the greater weight of that gross body had carried it far into the lake. The bones of her ancestors and many old friends must lie around here, beneath the ice-snow or the water.
Beyond the leaden level of the lake were hills. She skirted the lake to reach them, passing through valleys which wound ever downwards until she emerged, toward evening, on a wide plain where the air was warm, even oppressive. She slept there in a hollow. Next morning she ate the last of her loogo stalks, and set out across the plain.
She heard spasmodic rumblings and bangings in the far distance, and once the heavy drone of unseen aircraft passed overhead. But these were sounds one often heard from Fami. They’d never hurt anyone during her lifetime, and so she wasn’t afraid of them.
She still wasn’t afraid when she saw two strange birds fight briefly high in the sky and one fall dead to the ground. But she was curious when she saw a man floating down from the heavens swinging beneath what looked like a big white sheet. The man might have some food with him—and that sheet looked like a nice piece of cloth. So she started making for the spot where she judged he’d come to earth.
Presently, she came upon the abandoned parachute, and was rapturous about the thin, smooth, incredibly clean silk. She gathered it, tied it in a bundle with its own cords. She could see the man in the distance walking toward the broken body of the fallen bird. She balanced the bundle on her head and walked after him.
George delved in the wreckage of the helicopter. He found the box of provisions and helped himself to a food bar. He bit off a sizeable chunk, laid the remainder on the splintered fuselage while he investiated the state of the Teleos. They seemed okay. He reached for the residue of food bar. It was gone. He looked on the ground. It hadn’t fallen there. But nearby was his parachute, bundled up like a cushion. Sitting on it, watching him and eating the last of the bar, was a young girl with a solemn but beautiful pale face. She was wearing only a very tattered frock. Her arms and legs were bare, her hair jet black, her eyes brown and expressionless.
“Well, hello there,” he said, very surprised and very interested. She continued to sit and chew and watch him.
“Hungry?” He tossed her another food bar. She caught it neatly and eyed the provision box speculatively.
In his turn, he inspected the first live Venusian any Earthling had seen. If they’re all like this one, he thought, it’s going to be all right. She not only had a head, but a nice head; and all of her other members were not only in the right places, but most pleasingly arranged there.
He got out a couple of the Teleos, and went into an elaborate miming routine to convey what they were for and to assure her that the apparatus wouldn’t harm her. She sat there finishing the second bar calmly, her gaze wandering away from him and back to the provision box. Indifferent, she let him adjust the cap over her raven hair.
With practice, this thought projection became as automatic as speech, and could be described as speech.
“What’s your name?” asked George.
“Mara,” she said, exhibiting no surprise to find a voice other than her own speaking in her mind.
