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Cathadonian Odyssey
Michael Bishop
Cathay. Caledonia. Put the words together: Cathadonia. That was what
the namer of the planet, a murderer with the sensitivity of a poet, had
done. He had put the two exotic words together— Cathay and
Caledonia—so that the place they designated might have a name worthy of
its own bewitching beauty. Cathadonia. Exotic, far-off, bewitching,
incomprehensible. A world of numberless pools. A world of bizarrely
constituted "orchards," a world with one great, gong-tormented sea.
Cathadonia.
And the first thing that men had done there, down on the surface, was
kill as many of the exotic little tripodal natives as their laser pistols could
dispatch.
Squiddles
, the men off the merchantship had called them. They called
them other fanciful names, too, perhaps inspired by the sensitive
murderer who had coined the planet's name.
Treefish. Porpurls. Pintails.
Willowpusses. Tridderlings. Devil apes
.
The names didn't matter. The men killed the creatures wantonly,
brutally, laughingly. For sport. For nothing but sport. They were off the
merchantship
Golden
heading homeward from a colonized region of the
galactic arm. They made planetfall because no one had really noticed
Cathadonia before and because they were ready for a rest. Down on the
surface, for relaxation's sake, they killed the ridiculous-looking squiddles.
Or treefish. Or porpurls. Or willowpusses. Take your choice of names. The
names didn't matter.
Once home, the captain of the
Golden
reported a new planet to the
authorities. He used the name Cathadonia, the murderer's coinage, and
Cathadonia was the name that went into the books. The captain said
nothing about his crewmen's sanguinary recreation on the planet. How
could he? Instead, he gave coordinates, reported that the air was
breathable, and volunteered the information that Cathadonia was
 beautiful. "Just beautiful, really just beautiful."
The men of the
Golden
, after all, were not savages. Hadn't one of them
let the word Cathadonia roll off his lips in a moment of slaughterous
ecstasy? Didn't the universe forgive its poets, its namegivers?
Later, Earth sent the survey probeship
Nobel
, on its way to the virgin
milkiness of the Magellanic Clouds, in the direction of Cathadonia. The
Nobel
, in passing, dropped a descentcraft toward the planet's great ocean.
The three scientists aboard that descent-craft were to establish a floating
station whose purpose would be to determine the likelihood of
encountering life on Cathadonia. The captain of the
Golden
had not
mentioned life. The scientists did not know it existed there. Preliminary
sensor scans from the
Nobel
suggested the presence of botanicals and the
possibility of some sort of inchoate aquatic life. Nothing sentient, surely.
Whatever the situation down there, the scientists aboard the floating
station would unravel it.
Unfortunately, something happened to the descentcraft on its way
down, something that never happened to survey descentcraft and
therefore something the
Nobel's
crew had made no provision for. In fact,
the
Nobel
, as was usual in these cases, went on without confirming
touchdown; it went on toward the Magellanic Clouds. And some odd,
anomalous force wrenched the controls of the descentcraft out of the
hands of its pilots and hurled it planetward thousands of kilometers from
the great ocean.
It fell to the surface beside a sentinel willow on the banks of one of
Cathadonia's multitudinous pools. There it crumpled, sighed, ticked with
alien heat.
This, then, becomes the story of a survivor—the story of Maria Jill Ian,
a woman downed on an out-of-the-way world with no hope of immediate
rescue, with no companions to share her agony, with no goal but the
irrational desire to reach Cathadonia's ocean. A woman who did not
wholly understand what had happened to her. A woman betrayed by her
own kind and ambivalently championed by a creature carrying out a
larger betrayal.
—For Cathadonia.
 I am standing on Cathadonia, first planet from an ugly little star that
Arthur called Ogre's Heart. I am writing in a logbook that is all I have
left of the materials in our descentcraft. God knows why I am writing
.
Arthur is dead. Fischelson is dead. The
Nobel
is on its way to the
Magellanic Clouds. It will be back in three months. Small comfort. I will
be dead, too. Why am I not dead now
?
The "landscape" about me is dotted with a thousand small pools. Over
each pool a single willowlike tree droops its head. The pools are clear, I
have drunk from them. And the long slender leaves of the willows

or at
least of this willow

contain a kind of pulp that I have eaten. Trees at
nearby pools appear to bear fruit
.
But drinking and eating are painful exercises now, and I don't know
why I do it. Arthur and Fischelson are dead.
The light from Ogre's Heart sits on the faces of a thousand pools as if
they were mirrors. Mirrors. Mirrors wherein I might drown and
rediscover the painlessness of who I was before…
Maria Jill Ian did not die. She slept by the wreck of the descentcraft.
She slept two of Cathadonia's days, then part of a third. The silver lacery
of the pulpwillow shaded her during the day, kept off the rains at night.
When she finally woke and began to live again, she "buried" Arthur and
Fischelson by tying pieces of the descentcraft's wreckage to their mangled
bodies and dragging them to the edge of the pool. Then she waded into the
mirror surface and felt the slick pool weeds insinuate themselves between
her toes. A strong woman well into middle age, she sank first Fischelson's
body and then that of Arthur, her husband. She held the men under and
maneuvered the weights on their corpses so that neither of them would
float up again. She was oblivious to the smell of their decaying bodies; she
knew only that it would be very easy to tie a weight about her own waist
and then walk deeper into the pool.
The day after accomplishing these burials, Maria Jill Ian looked away
to the western horizon and began walking toward the pools that
glimmered there. Just as she had not known why she bothered to eat and
drink, she did not now understand why the horizon should draw her
implacably toward the twilight baths of Ogre's Heart.
 Later she would rediscover her reasons, but now she simply did what
she must.
Today I walked a distance I can't accurately determine. My feet fell on
the pliant verges of at least a hundred ponds.
A small thing has happened to keep me going.
The trees over the pools have begun to change. Although their long
branches still waterfall to the pools' surfaces, not all these trees are the
pulpwillows that stand sentinel in the region where Arthur, Fischelson,
and I crashed. Some have brilliant scarlet blossoms; some have trunks
that grow in gnarled configurations right out of the pools' centers; some
are heavy with globular fruit; some are naked of all adornment and trail
their boughs in the water like skeletal hands.
But I've eaten of the trees that bear fruit, and this fruit has been sweet
and bursting with flavor, invariably. It's strange that I don't really care
for any of it. Still, it's nourishment.
The sky turns first blazing white at twilight, then yellow like lemons,
then a brutal pink. And at night the trees stand in stark tableaux that
hail me onward.
I still hurt. I still hurt terribly, from the crash, from my loss—but I'm
beginning to heal. After sleeping, I'll continue to walk away from Arthur
and Fischelson

in the direction of falling, ever-falling Ogre's Heart

One morning Maria Jill Ian came to a pond beside which grew a huge
umbrellalike tree of gold and scarlet. The tree bore a kind of large
thick-shelled mahogany-colored nut rather than the commonplace
varieties of fruit she had been living on for the past two or three days.
She decided to stop and eat.
The nuts, however, hung high in the branches of the tree. Its twisted
bole looked as if it might allow her to climb to the higher entanglements
where she could gather food as she liked. Her simple foil jumpsuit did not
impede her climbing. Leaves rustled and flashed. She gained a place where
she could rest, and stopped.
 All about her the pools of Cathadonia lay brilliant and blinding beneath
their long-fingered sentinel trees.
Ogre's Heart was moving up the sky.
Maria Jill Ian turned her head to follow the sun's squat ascent. In the
whiteness cascading through the branches overhead, she saw a shape—a
shape at least as large as a small man, a form swaying over her, eclipsing
the falling light, a thing more frightening than the realization that she was
light-years from Earth, stranded.
Not thinking, merely reacting, she stepped to the branch below her and
then swung out from the willow. She landed on the marshy ground beside
the pond, caught herself up, and scrabbled away.
Something vaguely tentacular plunged from the scarlet-and-gold
umbrella of the tree and disappeared noiselessly into the pool.
Maria Jill Ian began to run. She ran westward, inevitably toward
another pool, struggling in ground that squelched around her boots,
looking back now and again in an effort to see the thing that had plunged.
She saw the silver water pearl-up, part, and stream down the creature's
narrow head. It was going to pursue her, she knew. Although it came on
comically, it flailed with a deftness that demolished the impulse to laugh.
Maria Jill Ian did not look back again.
All of Cathadonia breathed with her as, desperately, she ran.
I call him Eracero. It's a joke. He has no arms; he swims like the
much-maligned "wetbacks" of another time. I don't know what sort of
creature he is.
A description?
Very well. To begin: Eracero has no arms, but in other respects he
resembles a man-sized spider monkey—except his body is absolutely
hairless, smooth as the hide of a porpoise, a whitish-blue like the surfaces
of Cathadonia's pools.
To continue: He is arboreal and aquatic at once. He uses his feet and
his sleek prehensile tail to climb to the uppermost branches of any
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