The Genocides

when all this while—Forgive me! Can you ever forgive me?”

She could not understand him. “Forgive you!” She laughed and cried, and they said many things to each other then without thinking, without caring to understand any more than the as-yet- unassimilable fact that they were in love.

Passion’s highest flights tend to be, if not completely innocent, slow. Orville and Blossom could not enjoy the happiness of gazing hours-long into each other’s eyes, but the darkness permitted as much as it denied. They dallied; they delayed. They called each other by the simple, affectionate names of schoolgirl romances (names that had never passed between Orville and Jackie Whythe, who had been given, when Orville’s hands moved over her, to cruder expressions—a certain sign of sophistication), and these sweethearts, these darlings and my very owns, seemed to express philosophies of love exact as arithmetic and subtle as music.

Eventually, as they must, a few words of common sense disturbed the perfect solitude of their love, like pebbles thrown in a still pond. “The others must be looking for me,” she said. “I have to tell them about something.”

“Yes, I know—I was listening up above as Alice spoke to you.”

“Then you know that Daddy wanted this. He was going to say so when—”

“Yes, I know.”

“And Neil—”

“I know that too. But you needn’t worry about him now.” He kissed the soft, drooping lobe of her ear. “Let’s not speak of it though. Later, we’ll do what we have to do.”

She pushed Orville away from her. “No, Jeremiah. Listen—let’s go away somewhere. Away from them and all their hating and jealousy. Somewhere where they’ll never find us. We can be like Adam and Eve and think of new names for all the animals. There’s the whole world—” She did not say any more, for she realized that there was the whole world. She stretched out a hand to draw Orville back to her—and to push the world aside for a little longer—but instead of Orville’s living flesh her hand encountered Alice’s fractured hip.

A voice, not Orville’s, called her name. “Not yet,” she whispered. “It can’t end now.”

“It won’t end,” he promised, helping her to her feet. “We have our whole life ahead of us. A lifetime lasts forever. At my age, I should know.”

She laughed. Then, for the whole world to hear, she shouted: “We’re down here. Go away, whoever you are. We’ll find our way back by ourselves.”

But Buddy had already found them, entering the tuber by a side passage. “Who’s that with you?” he asked. “Orville, is it you? I should knock your block off for pulling a stunt like this. Don’t you know the old man is dead? What a hell of a time to elope!”

“No, Buddy, you don’t understand. It’s all right—Orville and I are in love.”

“Yeah, I understand that all right. He and I’ll have a talk about that—in private. I only hope I got here before he could put your love to the test. For Christ’s sake, Orville—this girl is only fourteen! She’s young enough to be your daughter. The way you’re going at it, she’s young enough to be your granddaughter.”

“Buddy! It’s not like that at all,” Blossom protested. “It’s what father wanted for us. He said to Alice and then—”

Buddy, moving forward with their voices as a guide, stumbled over the nurse’s dead body. “What in hell!”

“That’s Alice. If you’d only listen—” Blossom broke into tears in which frustration mingled with sorrow.

“Sit down,” Orville said, “and shut up for a minute. You’ve been jumping to the wrong conclusions, and there are a lot of things you don’t know. No—don’t argue, man, listen!”

“The question, then, is not what should be done in Neil’s case, but who’s to do it,” Orville concluded. “I don’t think I should have to bear that responsibility, nor that you should either. Personally, I’ve never liked your father’s high-handed way of being judge, jury, and law all by himself. It’s an honor to have been nominated as his successor, but an honor I’d rather decline. This is a matter for the community to act on.”

“Agreed. I know that if I did… what has to be done, they’d say it was for personal reasons. And it just wouldn’t be true. I don’t want anything he’s got. Not any more. In fact, the only thing I want right now is to go back and see Maryann and my son again.”

“Then the thing to do is to set about finding the others. Blossom and I can stay out of the way until the matter has been settled. Neil can be king for a day, but he’ll have to sleep sometime, and that will be time enough to depose him.”

“Fine. We’ll go now—but not back along my rope. It would be too easy to run into Neil that way. If we climb up the vines of the root that you came down, there’ll be no danger of our crossing his path.”

“If Blossom’s up to it, I’m agreeable.”

“Jeremiah, you strange old man, I can climb up those things twice as fast as any thirty-five-year-old, two- hundred pound grandfather.”

Buddy heard what he supposed was a kiss and pursed his lips in disapproval. Though he agreed in theory with all that Orville had said in his own and Blossom’s defense—that times had changed, that early marriage was now positively to be preferred to the old way, that Orville (this had been Blossom’s argument) was certainly the most eligible of the survivors, and that they had Anderson’s posthumous blessing on their union—despite all these cogent reasons, Buddy could not help feeling a certain distaste for the whole thing. She’s still a child, he told himself, and against this, to him, incontrovertible fact all their reasonings seemed as specious as the proofs that Achilles can never pass the tortoise in their endless footrace.

But he swallowed his distaste, as a child swallows some loathed vegetable in order to go outside and do something more important. “Let’s shove off,” he said.

To return to the primary root down which Blossom and Orville had dropped it was necessary to detour back along the way Buddy had come and then angle up along a branch root so narrow that even crawling through it was arduous.

But this was only a foretaste of the difficulties they faced in climbing the vertical root. The vines by which they hoped to ascend were covered over with a thin film of slime; the hand could not grip them firmly enough to keep from slipping. Only at the nodal points, where the vines fed into each other, forming a sort of stirrup (like the system of roots, these vines were forever joining and rejoining), could one purchase a secure hold, and there was not always certain to be another such nodal intersection of vines within grasping distance overhead. They had continually to backtrack and reascend along a different network of vines. Even more frustrating was that their feet (though bare, they were not prehensile) were constantly slipping out of these makeshift stirrups. It was like trying to climb a greased rope ladder with rungs missing.

“What’s to be gained killing ourselves?” Buddy asked rhetorically, after having come within one slippery fingerhold of doing exactly this for himself. “I don’t know where this slop is coming from, but it doesn’t seem to be letting up. The higher we go, the more likely we are to break our necks if we fall. Why not go back along my rope after all? It’s not that likely we’ll run into Neil, and if we do, we don’t have to let on that we know anything he wouldn’t want us to. I’d rather risk five, ten minutes with him than another hundred yards up this greased chimney.”

This seemed a sensible course, and they returned to the tuber. The descent was easy as sliding down a firepole.

Following Buddy’s line up a mild slope, they noticed that here too the vines were slimed and slippery beneath their bare feet. Feeling down beneath the layer of vines, Orville discovered that a little rivulet of the slime was flowing down the slope.

“What is it, do you suppose?” Buddy wondered.

“I think the springtime has come at last,” Orville replied.

“And this is the sap—of course! I reeognize the feel of it now—and the smell—oh, don’t I know that smell!”

“Springtime!” Blossom said. “We’ll be able to return to the surface!”