Short Fiction · The Good Seed (2/2)

Fear came home to him then. He lashed out, fighting only for the solid ground of the island and his life. His world became a place of foam and fury. He strained for air. He dug for the island. And then, suddenly, he felt himself flung upon hard rock and gasping, crawling, he emerged onto safety.

He hung there on hands and knees, battered and panting. Then the remembrance of the tree cut like a knife to the core of his fear-soaked being. He staggered up, and, looking about, saw that he was almost to the far end of the island. He turned. Above him, at the windward point, the tree itself was just now grounding, branches first, and swinging about as the long trunk, caught by the waves, pulled it around and onward.

With an inarticulate cry, he ran toward it. But the mass of water against the heavy tree trunk was already pulling the branches from their tanglings with the rock. It floated free. Taking the wind once more in its sail of leaves, it moved slowly⁠—and then more swiftly on past the far side of the island.

He scrambled up his side of the island’s crest. But when he reached its top and could see the tree again, it was already moving past and out from the island, too swiftly for him to catch it, even if he had been the swimmer he had just proved himself not to be.

He dropped on his knees, there on the island’s rocky spine, and watched it fade in the grayness of the rain, until the green of its branches was lost in a grayish blob, and this in the general welter of storm and waves. And suddenly a dark horror of death closed over him, blotting out all the scene.

A voice roused him. “That is too bad,” said the plant.

He turned his head numbly. He was kneeling less than half a dozen feet from the little hollow where the plant still sheltered. He looked at it now, dazed, as if he could not remember what it was, nor how it came to talk to him. Then his eyes cleared a little of their shock and he crept over to it on hands and knees and crouched in the shelter of the hollow.

“The water is rising more swiftly,” said the plant. “It will be not long now.”

“No!” said Calvin. The word was lost in the sound of the waves and wind, as though it had never been. Nor, the minute it was spoken, could he remember what he had meant to deny by it. It had been only a response without thought, an instinctive negation.

“You make me wonder,” said the plant, after a little, “why it hurts you so⁠—this thought of dying. Since you first became alive, you have faced ultimate death. And you have not faced it alone. All things die. This storm must die. This rock on which we lie will not exist forever. Even worlds and suns come at last to their ends, and galaxies, perhaps even the Universe.”

Calvin shook his head. He did not answer.

“You are a fighting people,” said the plant, almost as if to itself. “Well and good. Perhaps a life like mine, yielding, giving to the forces of nature, traveling before the wind, sees less than you see, of a reason for clawing hold on existence. But still it seems to me that even a fighter would be glad at last to quit the struggle, when there is no other choice.”

“Not here,” said Calvin thickly. “Not now.”

“Why not here, why not now,” said the plant, “when it has to be somewhere and sometime?”

Calvin did not answer.

“I feel sorry for you,” said the plant. “I do not like to see things suffer.”

Raising his head a little and looking around him, Calvin could see the water, risen high around them, so that waves were splashing on all sides, less than the length of his own body away.

“It wouldn’t make sense to you,” said Calvin then, raising his rain-wet face toward the plant. “You’re old by your standards. I’m young. I’ve got things to do. You don’t understand.”

“No,” the plant agreed. “I do not understand.”

Calvin crawled a little closer to the plant, into the hollow, until he could see the vibrating air-sac that produced the voice of the plant. “Don’t you see? I’ve got to do something⁠—I’ve got to feel I’ve accomplished something⁠—before I quit.”

“What something?” asked the plant.

“I don’t know!” cried Calvin. “I just know I haven’t! I feel thrown away!”

“What is living? It is feeling and thinking. It is seeding and trying to understand. It is companionship of your own people. What more is there?”

“You have to do something.”

“Do what?”

“Something important. Something to feel satisfied about.” A wave, higher than the rest, slapped the rock a bare couple of feet below them and sent spray stinging in against them. “You have to say, ‘Look, maybe it wasn’t much, but I did this.’ ”

“What kind of this?”

“How do I know?” shouted Calvin. “Something⁠—maybe something nobody else did⁠—maybe something that hasn’t been done before!”

“For yourself?” said the plant. A higher wave slapped at the very rim of their hollow, and a little water ran over and down to pool around them. Calvin felt it cold around his knees and wrists. “Or for the doing?”

“For the doing! For the doing!”

“If it is for the doing, can you take no comfort from the fact there are others of your own kind to do it?”

Another wave came in on them. Calvin moved spasmodically right up against the plant and put his arms around it, holding on.

“I have seeded ten times and done much thinking,” said the plant⁠—rather muffledly, for Calvin’s body was pressing against its air-sac. “I have not thought of anything really new, or startling, or great, but I am satisfied.” It paused a moment as a new wave drenched them and receded. They were half awash in the hollow now, and the waves came regularly. “I do not see how this is so different from what you have done. But I am content.” Another and stronger wave rocked them. The plant made a sound that might have been of pain at its roots tearing. “Have you seeded?”

“No,” said Calvin, and all at once, like light breaking at last into the dark cave of his being, in this twelfth hour, it came to him⁠—all of what he had robbed himself in his search for a victory. Choking on a wave, he clung to the plant with frenzied strength. “Nothing!” The word came torn from him as if by some ruthless hand. “I’ve got nothing!”

“Then I understand at last,” said the plant. “For of all things, the most terrible is to die unfruitful. It is no good to say we will not be beaten, because there is always waiting, somewhere, that which can beat us. And then a life that is seedless goes down to defeat finally and forever. But when one has seeded, there is no ending of the battle, and life mounts on life until the light is reached by those far generations in which we have had our own small but necessary part. Then our personal defeat has been nothing, for though we died, we are still living, and though we fell, we conquered.”

But Calvin, clinging to the plant with both arms, saw only the water closing over him.

“Too late⁠—” he choked. “Too late⁠—too late⁠—”

“No,” bubbled the plant. “Not too late yet. This changes things. For I have seeded ten times and passed on my life. But you⁠—I did not understand. I did not realize your need.”

The flood, cresting, ran clear and strong, the waves breaking heavily on the drowned shore by the river mouth. The rescue spinner, two hours out of Base and descending once again through the fleeting murk, checked at the sight of a begrimed human figure, staggering along the slick margin of the shore, carrying something large and limp under one arm, and with the other arm poking at the ground with a stick.

The spinner came down almost on top of him, and the two men in it reached to catch Calvin. He could hardly stand, let alone stumble forward, but stumble he did.

“Cal!” said the pilot. “Hold up! It’s us.”

“Let go,” said Calvin thickly. He pulled loose, dug with his stick, dropped something from the limp thing into the hole he had made, and moved on.

“You out of your head, Cal?” cried the copilot. “Come on, we’ve got to get you back to the hospital.”

“No,” said Calvin, pulling away again.

“What’re you doing?” demanded the pilot. “What’ve you got there?”

“Think-plant. Dead,” said Calvin, continuing his work. “Let go!” He fought weakly, but so fiercely that they did turn him loose again. “You don’t understand. Saved my life.”

“Saved your life?” The pilot followed him. “How?”

“I was on an island. In the river. Flood coming up.” Calvin dug a fresh hole in the ground. “It could have lived a little longer. It let me pull it ahead of time⁠—so I’d have something to float to shore on.” He turned exhaustion-bleared eyes on them. “Saved my life.”

The pilot and the copilot looked at each other as two men look at each other over the head of a child, or a madman.

“All right, Cal,” said the pilot. “So it saved your life. But how come you’ve got to do this? And what are you doing, anyhow?”

“What am I doing?” Calvin paused entirely and turned to face them. “What am I doing?” he repeated on a rising note of wonder. “Why, you damn fools, I’m doing the first real thing I ever did in my life! I’m saving the lives of these seeds!”