The Giberel - Doris Pitkin Buck, ebook, CALIBRE SFF 1970s, Temp 2
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DORIS PITKIN BUCKThe GiberelDORIS PITKIN BUCK was born in New York City on January 3, 1898. She remembers an incident of childhood as providing her first impulse toward creativity: ". . . someone showed me a piece of alabaster that let light through. I was fascinated. Later that same day I saw an old, old woman with the pale skin of extreme age. But she was beautiful. Like a glow of light. I stared a long time, gaping, before I told myself: alabaster!"She received her A.B. degree from Bryn Mawr College in 1920, her M.A. degree from Columbia University in 1925. Her first professional writing, in the 1930s, consisted of newspaper articles on wine and wine etiquette, and these brought her, in the way of readers' response, an avalanche of such questions as: "What is the correct wine to accompany graham crackers and milk?" Much later she began writing science fiction, both poetry and short stories. Her first published fiction was a short story in a 1952 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. She attended the Milford Conferences and became a charter member of Science Fiction Writers of America.Now three times a grandmother, she lives in North Carolina, practices hobbies ranging from little theater to gardening to cooking, pursues literary interests ". . . from Anatole France to Ellery Queen, from Beowulf and the Mabinogion to Steve Canyon-with special roses for Blake and Emily Dickinson," and continues to exercise her impeccable craftsmanship in adding to a modest literary corpus of powerful short stories such as "The Giberel," which envisions a future of man so remote that it seems to touch his past.Aramere fell asleep, small flexible fingers closed about her newtoy, the wheel. Wheels could spin. Usually when told to rest shelay in half dreams in her temple cubicle with all her fingers closetogether as if they were stiff and could hardly move. Now she usedthem recklessly. Her wheel spun.She was so happy that the Star Priests' talk, drifting in fragmented, left her unworried, as a deep voice spoke, "I spit upon the Bomb."One answered, "Why so? Perchance it made us evolve . . . something better than the forefathers of our forefathers.""We do not know what men were like before. Even their bones have crumbled.""Could be they had no thumbs in those days. No thumbs at all."Aramere knew the routine that would follow. The nearly rigid first joints of the priests' fingers would stroke the hard spurs sticking out above their wrists. As she dozed, worn out from play, she touched her own, proudly. Her thumb was like everyone else's.She laid the wheel against her cheek and told it maybe what the priests said had no meaning, even for them. Or maybe they had meaning for she repeated to herself-for toad folk. Somebody had told her such people were hardly human though they dared think they had forms and hands finer than anyone in all the rest of the world. Her breath came in a little gulp at the idea. For weren't they shorter, sometimes a whole head shorter, than her people, giberels? Didn't they work by day, those toad folk?Aramere's thoughts veered off. Tonight: her third birthday. She could almost see toys that would be hers in a new home, for thetemple foundling had been wooed by a foster mother as in some lands maids are wooed to gain their consent to a marriage. Her hand still clutched a cake. As she waited for her mother's return, her mouth knew unfamiliar tastes, sweet and spicy.She waked in the dark. She felt a hand over her mouth. She tried to bite it.The bite did her little good. Fists shoved at her jaw. Palms pressed down against her head. She wanted to scratch, but her nails were still soft, as they would be till she was seven.Through the night's blackness she was half pushed, half carried outside. Wind hit her face. Her body, sweaty from attempts to twist and turn, chilled. Her mouth felt dry. Her jaws were held firmly or her teeth would have chattered.The strangers carried Aramere a long way, then set her down in a field. She was too sick with fright to notice the planted rows that stretched indistinct in the starlight, almost out of sight."The girl seems the right size for a giberel. She's like to us," several voices argued in her behalf.They brought a stick, straight, smooth, polished, and held her against it, so frightened she would have slumped in a heap on the ground without support."Sixty measures.""As giberels should be.""She may be fit to adopt.""But this foundling's a she-freak though she is not dwarfish. We watched her in the House Where Stars Are Worshiped. Her fingers on both hands move easily, as with toadfolk, when she thinks no one watches."Voices said together, "We could lose our own humanity if we opened our clans to a neither-which-nor-t'other.""Were she to marry some true giberel-who knows-the offspring might be like toadfolk working in the soil all day, as worms do." They murmured, assenting."Were she dead, her life blood could water our depleted earth-""Depleted for century on century." The giberels chanted it like a ritual."Her body could nourish plants which we and the mud-fingered toadfolk are forced to share.""It would be better so," a chilly voice reasoned, "since she could never be certain of breeding true."Aramere's large eyes opened wider. She caught a glimpse of a boy a year or two older on the fringes of the crowd. He tried to gesture reassurance, but he was too little to help.They peered at her in the obscurity. "Who in all the centuries of humanity has had such eyes?" She felt hostility, like a fall into chilly water that would close over her head. She had fallen so once on a December day.A softer voicer "When she closes her eyes; she has the giberel beauty. Perhaps she was a found child.""No! Those hands betray her.""Then why let the toadling live on? Why wait?" It was the chilly water voice.Aramere began to wriggle desperately. She pressed her toes into the soft earth of the field, trying to jump forward. Starlight helped her to see. Orange starlight. Cold starlight. Starlight like the reddest rose. The stars were friends, she was sure. She took a deep breath, ready to run if once the stiff hands that pressed so hard let her go, even a little."Why wait?" the chilly voice asked again.Hands pressed her tighter yet."How shall we kill?" It was the cold voice."Break the neck and leave the body?""Bury. Then she will nourish what grows here." In a rush: "Bury her alive.""Show hands. Show hands for the manner of this child's death. A broken neck?" Silence fell. In the stillness Aramere saw three hands go into a slow clench and lift over slim bodies. Harm! Harm to you! the fists screamed. She wanted to put her hands over her large eyes to shut out the screaming of the fists. She crouchedfrozen now with terror. She could have done nothing even if she were body-free.,`A live burial?" Fists shot up. Many. Many.What was burial?Hands still held her. But. now some who surrounded her bent over, their spade like hands scooping up earth and patting it into pellets. They placed these at the rim of a depression they made. The giberels hummed small sad music.The cold voice said over it, "Much treachery lurks in mother love. A barren woman craved this death-morsel. Her craving drew her to the House Where Stars Are Worshiped."Another added, "Malformed plasma, evilly begotten, is brought there. They hold it for adoption, for sacrifice, for whatever they sense to be the Will of the Stars. A barren giberel found this girl-child-'A shriek tore the night. The pressure on Aramere's body loosened a little. Warm arms wrapped themselves about her-her new mother. Aramere began to sob. I lot tears came to wash all the coldness into the blackest part of the night."You cannot kill my foundling, true giberel or no." Then, almost taunting, "And what is a giberel? No one even knows the meaning of the word."Someone shouted, "That's one of the many meanings lost when the Bomb fell." But most of them tried to hiss her into silence.Aramere's mother cried over the noise, "I tell you all, she has value.""What value, demented woman?" Once more the cold started to slap like water against Aramere.Her mother's arms wrapped her more intensely. More warmly."She has crop-magic. The power of which we have legends. Take your hands off her. We shall yet eat our fill.""How know you this, woman'."'"I watched her. I saw a marvel. Certainty is in me, as it was that you gathered to do her harm. I knew."Several voices demanded, "So you came running?""So I came running.""For nothing you winded yourself. We have passed a doom upon . this child who, though she is tall and fair like a maple tree, is no purebred creature. She is a menace to be destroyed.""It is so." The giberels began to hum again."This is no ritual. It is murder.""Justice.""You lie in your throat of ice, Cold Tone. Proceed with this and I shall have you arraigned.""And I shall stop your proceedings, easily, as I have stopped this false adoption.""You have not heard me out. Crop-magic lives in this child. My q words are true. I have seen a marvel-as I said." 'They stopped their humming to ask, "What marvel?""When she passes a food plant, it bends its head. Very little, for . she is still young. But it bends.""It does," Aramere piped."Throw her in the grave," Cold Tone ordered.Many voices babbled, "We have our legends of miracles, of abundance long past or to come. If she has a body of magic, per- . haps a new plant will grow from her grave. A plant with fruits twenty times larger than all the fruits we know."Suddenly Aramere shrilled, still clinging to her new parent, "I .. know what I can do, though I have never done it all the way.""Yes? Yes?" With a rising in...
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