The View from Endless Scarp - Marta Randall, ebook, CALIBRE SFF 1970s, Temp 2
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The View from Endless
Scarp
by Marta Randall
The last ship nosed up through the thin clouds. It was still in sight when
Markowitz sprinted from the boulders and leaped about the landing field,
throwing her arms in the air, screaming, weeping, begging the ship to
return. By the time it disappeared she lay exhausted on the hot black
setdown, fingers scrabbling, muttering to herself. The departure hadn't
gone as she'd planned but the results were the same, and Markowitz,
wretched in the dirt, remained perhaps the only human being on planet.
A Peri scuttled down the hill. It stopped at the edge of the field,
hesitated, and flung a rock at her. She cursed but didn't move. The Peri
lifted its narrow snout and produced the irritating whine that was the Peri
giggle; the others tumbled past her down the hill and poured through the
abandoned settlement, grabbing and screaming and fighting over what
remained of the colony. Within an hour the town had disappeared, save
for the shattered foundations of the houses. These, too, would find their
way to the Peri villages. Markowitz didn't care. After a while the Peri left,
dragging the last of their loot behind them.
The sun moved overhead. She turned her face from it and remembered
Thompson. That absurd hysteria on the landing field: she was no better
than the rest of them. She turned her head again, both ashamed and
relieved, and stood amid a burned landscape in which nothing moved
except her shadow across the cracked earth. She foraged a meal of unripe
berries and bitter roots; the Peri hadn't dismantled the well pump, so she
sat beside it, sipping gritty water and gnawing at the roots. She filled her
wooden canteen. In mid-afternoon she left the ruins and walked to the
brink of Endless Scarp, where she sat under a dead tree, her feet dangling
over the immense drop, and waited for night to fall.
The view from Endless Scarp had once, briefly, been a view of paradise.
The Terrans had engineered rain in a place of drought, had made rivers
and lakes, had caused the earth to flower and bear fruit. Within a Peri
 generation they changed the face of the world, and the Peri had changed
with it. No need to move with the migrating game, now that game stayed
year-long on the plateau, held by the abundance of food. No need to store
grains or beans, which flourished in the broad valley. No need to sow even
the minimal crops the Peri had planted during their migrations, seeding
the slapdash fields one season and returning to harvest crops the next.
Fat clouds slipped eastward from the sea, up the high slopes of the
continent, to drop rain on the angles of the Scarp and into the wide plain.
Rivers widened and deepened, the desert turned green. The small, slender
Peri added weight under their silvery coats. Terrans went to the new Peri
villages and cured the sick, set up schools, listened to Peri music and
made music of their own. The Peri laughed and capered and accepted
Terran teachings, and the Terrans smiled, knowing that in two
generations, or perhaps four, the Peri would become small, alien versions
of their benefactors. The Terrans had been given a desert world to colonize
and succeeded in making a piece of it green. They were fruitful and
multiplied. They benefited the natives. They prospered. They were very
proud of themselves.
The sky deepened from blue to rose, and the shadow of the Scarp cast
long, red fingers across the scorched plain. Not even meka trees grew
there now; they had died of prosperity and had not returned with the
return of drought. Markowitz stared into the increasing darkness, hoping
as always for a distant glimmer of light. Day fell into night and no fires
glowed; if Thompson built a signal fire, he built it beyond the curve of the
horizon. She felt a sudden, powerful longing, not for the safety of the
departed ships, but for the circle of Thompson's arms. She shook her head
and looked across the desert. The rose tints of the plain darkened to
purple. The air chilled.
She put on her jacket and her reed hat and walked from cave to cave,
prying up boulders and extracting the things she had hidden. Some of the
Peri followed at a distance, curious, but didn't approach her. She ignored
them. They would not steal her belongings as long as she carried them.
She built a fire in front of the last cave, for warmth and as a signal
across the dark, for Thompson. In its flickering light she loaded her
supplies into the carrying pack, strapped the knives to her belt, and ate a
handful of berries. She wet her lips from the canteen, and, after stringing
vines and gourds across the cave's entrance as an alarm, she lay with her
head on the pack and stared at the patch of night behind the rocks.
Eventually she slept.
 ***
Twenty years of prosperity; then the engines of change broke down. An
arctic storm jammed the unjammable metering station at the pole:
Hohbach, their chief of science, thought that a defective casing on the
self-repair devices cracked and the equipment froze. The wrong circuit
activated the wrong relay in the delicate sensing and transmitting
mechanism in the monitors' cores. The wrong signal beamed up to the
great engines that had nudged the moon into a new course, and the
engines exploded. The moon, its path so cautiously modified to modify the
tides of air and water, twisted in the sky and stabilized into a new orbit;
the earth heaved and groaned; the winds shrieked. Hundreds of Terrans
and thousands of Peri died. The ocean currents changed, and the rains fell
far out to sea. Within a season the broad, ripe plain withered; the rivers
and lakes shrank to mud and baked away in the fierce sunlight.
The northern and western oceans were unnavigable, and the southern
desert extended as far as scouts could walk and canteens last. The Peri
spoke of a verdant land they said lay to the east, but few of them left. In
the second year, the springs failed. For a short time the colony depended
on the distilling stations along the boulder-strewn ocean shore, as they
had done during the initial terraforming years. They carted water across
the coastal hills to the village on the Scarp and the fertile land around it,
but the stations broke down, or were vandalized by the Peri, or taken in
storms, and the supply of brackish water stopped. Their generators
cracked and stopped. They expended the last of their dwindling power to
drill the well deeper, rationed water at a cup a day, and in the fifth year
they sent out calls for help.
Help came four years after that. The colony had dwindled from five
thousand to less than four hundred. They died of lack of water, lack of
food, lack of hope. The Peri, too, died, in numbers so great the parched
Terrans could not reckon them. The Peri sowed neither the new seeds of
rains nor the old seeds of drought; they lived in their villages until the
houses rotted around them, then moved on to others less decayed. Rituals
fell away from them: of marriage, of death, of the seasons, of life. Instead,
they laughed, sitting starving in the harsh daylight; laughed and shuffled
in terrible parody of their dances and watched each other and the Terrans
die with high good humor, cackling and rocking and plucking vermin
 from their dull, unhealthy coats. Their children disappeared. The colonists
noticed, and looked at one another uneasily, and turned away.
"We did better than the Peri" Markowitz said in her dream. The words
woke her. The Peri had lost everything: their food, their water, their
culture, even their desire to help each other, their sense of themselves as
fellows of the same creation. They stole food and water from the dying;
they played practical jokes of fatal consequence. They gathered at the
outskirts of the Terran settlement and giggled as their erstwhile
benefactors struggled to survive, apportioning food and water, aiding the
ill, whispering words of encouragement in the dense sunlight or the cold
night. Markowitz's mother moved from house to house, bringing rations of
food and water, talking of the rescue ships that would arrive at any hour
now, any day. She pleaded, humored, and bullied people to live, and when
she died, most of them died with her. She died because, alone one blazing
afternoon, she fell and broke her leg and could not crawl to safety. The
Peri thought her death quite funny. By the time Markowitz found her, it
was too late.
Markowitz hissed in the blackness of the cave and flung a rock. It
clattered and banged against the gourds. Outside, Peri voices laughed and
shouted. Markowitz cursed and turned toward sleep again.
She woke to the pale dawn. The Peri were still laughing. She shouldered
her pack and climbed down the face of Endless Scarp. About a dozen Peri
walked with her. Most of them dropped away during the morning, but
one, hardier than the others, continued tailing her. When she reached the
plain and stopped to rest out the hottest part of the day, he dropped to a
squat beside her in the shelter of an outcrop.
"Give me food," he said without much hope. When she refused, he
remained beside her, staring across the baking plain. After a time he
stood and ambled away, returning as she began to walk again.
"Where are you going?" he said as he fell into step beside her.
"East."
"There is nothing to the east," he said. She lengthened her step. He
scurried to keep up; although he was soon panting, he did not fall behind.
She slowed through fatigue, not sympathy. Their shadows stretched across
the hardpan before them, gaunt and sharp-edged in the late sunlight.
Beyond the bobbing rim of her broad hat, the plain's horizon disappeared
into suspended dust. A few dying trees and stumps broke the flatness. The
silence was absolute.
After a long time, "My name is Kre'e," the Peri said.
 "Kre'e," she replied with automatic politeness. He grinned. "Kre'e, go
home. I don't want your company."
"I'm only walking in the same direction, " he said, insulted.
"Walk on a different path."
"There's only one path going east."
She looked over the unbroken plain, on which any route would serve. He
followed her glance and giggled again, and dropped a pace behind but did
not leave. They walked in silence into the night.
She made camp that evening on the bank of a dead river, and while she
dug through the mud in search of water, Kre'e found some shriveled roots.
He ate them all and came to her where she built her signal fire. The air
chilled rapidly.
"Give me water."
"Get your own," she said.
"You have extra water in your pouch; you have enough for both of us."
"I have just enough for me. I'll need it tomorrow. Get your own water."
"Why are you saving it? Let's drink it now; there will be more water
tomorrow."
"Where?"
"Oh, there is always water."
"But you don't know," she said. "You would rather be lazy today and
thirst tomorrow."
"Today's work is tomorrow's bounty," he said, parroting the lessons
taught at Peri schools in paradise. She stared at him. "We must share in
all things," he said.
"Find your own."
He shrugged, snickered, and ambled down the bed of the river. She
watched him in the light of the fire. He was just entering his prime,
perhaps seven or eight years old. Old enough to have attended and
remembered the colony's native schools, to have lived through the months
of terror and change. To know what it was like to be civilized. She looked
away from him, wrapped her arms around her knees, and stared into the
fire.
Kre'e returned and hunched so close to the fire that she demanded he
move back. He sat just beyond the scorching point and tucked his small,
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