Selected Stories by Theodore Sturgeon Page B

April, the day we landed? Remember—” he made a gesture that took in a quadrant of sky—“Remember how we all felt … good?”
    “Yes,” she murmured. “It was like a sort of compliment, and a reassurance. How could I forget?”
    “Yes. Well …” He spoke with difficulty but his smile stayed. “I have a thought, and it makes me feel like that. But I can’t get it into words,” After a thoughtful pause, he added, “Yet.”
    She shifted the baby. “He’s getting so heavy.”
    “I’ll take him.” He took the squirming bundle with the deep-set, almost humorous eyes. When he looked up from them, he caught an expression on April’s face which he hadn’t seen in years. “What is it, Ape?”
    “You— like him.”
    “Well, sure.”
    “I was afraid. I was afraid for a long time that you. … he’s ours, but he isn’t exactly a pretty baby.”
    “I’m not exactly a pretty father.”
    “You know how precious you are to me?” she whispered.
    He knew, for this was an old intimacy between them. He laughed and followed the ritual: “How precious?”
    She cupped her hands and brought them together, to make of them an ivory box. She raised the hands and peeped into them, between the thumbs, as if at a rare jewel, then clasped the magic tight and hugged it to her breast, raising tear-filled eyes to him. “That precious,” she breathed.
    He looked at the sky, seeing somewhere in it the many peak moments of their happiness when she had made that gesture, feeling how each one, meticulously chosen, brought all the others back. “I used to hate this place,” he said. “I guess it’s changed.”
    “You’ve changed.”
    Changed how? he wondered. He felt the same, even though he knew he looked older. …
    The years passed, and the children grew. When Sol was fifteen Earth-years old, short, heavy-shouldered, powerful, he married Carl’s daughter Libra. Teague, turning to parchment, had returned to his hermitage from the temporary stimulation of his researches on what they still called “the mushroom.” More and more the colony lived off the land and out of the jungle, not because there was any less to be synthesized from their compact machines, but out of preference; it was easier to catch napping frogs or umbrella-birds and cook them than to bother with machine settings and check-analyses, and, somehow, a lot more fun to eat them, too.
    It seemed to them safer, year by year. Felodon, unquestionably the highest form of life on Viridis, was growing scarce, being replaced by a smaller, more timid carnivore April called Vulpidus (once, for it seemed not to matter much any more about keeping records) and everyone ultimately called “fox,” for all the fact that it was a reptile. Pterodon was disappearing too, as were all the larger forms. More and more they strayed after food, not famine-driven, but purely for variety; more and more they found themselves welcome and comfortable away from the compound. Once Carl and Moira drifted off for nearly a year. When they came back they had another child—a silent, laughing little thing with oddly long arms and heavy teeth.
    The warm days and the glowing nights passed comfortably and the stars no longer called. Tod became a grandfather and was proud. The child, a girl, was albino like April, and had exactly April’s deep red eyes. Sol and Libra named her Emerald, a green name and a ground-term rather than a sky-term, as if in open expression of the slow spell worked on them all by Viridis. She was mute—but so were almost all the new children, and it seemed not to matter. They were healthy and happy.
    Tod went to tell Teague, thinking it might cheer the old one up a little. He found him lying in what had once been his laboratory, thin and placid and disinterested, absently staring down at one of the arthropodal flying creatures that had once startled them so by zooming into the Coffin chamber. This one had happened to land on Teague’s hand, and Teague was laxly