The Edgar Pangborn Megapack Page 16

  They had fought it out for two hours in the misery of bush and brier and purple vine outside the village ditch, while the jungle world steamed in the growth of mid-morning. Paul’s horizon had narrowed to the knot of fighters who stayed with him—Nisana, Brodaa, Elis, an unknown black-skirted soldier who fell at his feet with a bleeding mouth. Somewhere in that hell he had lost his rifle. It was Brodaa (this must be true, for it was Elis who told him of it)—Brodaa who had guided them out of the trap, regrouped the remnant of the rear guard north of Samiraa’s village while the Vestoians paused to set that village afire and rejoice over its dying.

  Paul could remember that regrouping: black Elis had set him on his feet, supporting him till he could walk. There were many twittering, mad-eyed bowmen among the survivors. Brodaa had sent runners to give the other three villages a final warning; she herself decided against trying to reach them with this fragment of an army numbering less than three hundred. The only way to save anything at all was to flee north, join Wright’s group, hope that the remaining villages would delay the conquerors and that at least some of their non-combatants could scatter before Lantis, Queen of the World, took them for slaves, meat, and sacrifice.

  The rest of the day had been a running, a harsh drive into country unknown even to Elis. There had been, for Paul and Elis at least, a breath of second wind when they found the tracks of the olifants. They had caught up with Wright’s refugees in the early afternoon, but there could be no pause, even though it was quiet here at the edge of forest and western meadow and the sound of screaming in the villages was an hour behind them.…

  Paul noticed that he was naked except for ammunition belt and an empty holster. Perhaps his present clarity of mind was the true madness, the earlier fog of pain and anger the mind’s more natural climate. But one might as well reason and take stock. He remembered the map. Was it saved? No matter: a copy had been flown to the island with Dorothy and the baby.

  I have a woman who loves me; I have a daughter. I have my life.

  On his left, just visible in twilight beyond a meadow turning brilliant with blue fireflies, there were the low western hills, the hills rotten with the burrows of kaksmas, and they were nearer, much nearer than he had ever seen them except from the lifeboat. (But Ed Spearman went there; he walked in the hills alone and found iron ore, and now he is— Never mind where he is. If the charlesite was giving out he did right to fly to the island and abandon us. What else could he do?) Well, it was right too that the hills should be nearer: the edge of the forest slanted northwest, narrowing the meadow. And this far north the hills were smaller, more broken up. Yet it would not do to approach them closely: even the least of the hills (so pygmy and giant tradition said) could be the dwelling place of day-blind ratlike killers numerous enough to destroy this entire party and still be hungry. The retreat must struggle north until the hills were well behind, shut away by level jungle—where the kaksmas still might come, to be sure, but only to the distance of half a night’s journey from their burrows. “Doc—can you estimate what distance we’ve made since we caught up with you?”

  “Maybe twenty miles,” the old man said. “In more time than Argo once needed to travel twenty million miles. What is man?”

  “Man? A mathematical absurdity.… Aren’t you tired? I could carry Pakriaa a while.”

  “No, I’m not tired, son. I like to have her.…”

  Rifles—in the beginning there had been only five, and one shotgun. The shotgun had been taken to the island. Dorothy and Ann had their pistols there, too. Paul’s rifle was lost. Lisson’s had been lost when she died. That should leave three. Wright had one slung at his back. Peering up ahead, Paul saw another in the red-brown hand of the young giantess Elron. Sears must have lost his. So two at least remained. And one automatic—Wright’s. “Those two new recruits Mijok brought—I’m in a fog—I only just remembered—”

  “Lost,” said Wright, staring ahead. “The boy didn’t understand. He ran into the mess on the beach like a horse running into a fire. That was before you got back from the south. The other had more sense. Saw the pygmies spilling out of the boats and ran for the woods. Naturally we didn’t try to hold him. Perhaps he’s reached his home territory. I hope so.”

  Behind him Elis spoke softly: “It was not very far, Doc. When we reach the island and start the new settlement—”

  “Oh, Elis—”

  “When that has been done I’ll come back and find him, give him the words—him and many others. I promise you that. Let me believe it.”

  “Believe it, Elis. But the boy Danik is dead. He was bright, curious. He should have lived 150 years.”

  “We overtake mystery,” Elis said, “and leave it behind.”

  “Men have never overtaken the mystery of untimely death.”

  “There is chaos,” said Elis. “Chance. Mystery is great jungle around a small clearing. I accept that. We make a wider clearing.”

  Paul felt Nisana’s finger hook over his. Pakriaa groaned, perhaps in sleep. The darkness had blotted away the hills; even the small shape of Nisana was growing too dim. Elis said, “You’re limping, Paul. Abroshin Nisana is tired. There are still three of the animals without riders. You and Doc—”

  “Yes,” Wright said. “We might make better time.” Nisana trilled an order to Abara, who rode the colossal bulk of Mister Johnson at the head of the line. The animals halted without sound. “We must go on all night, Paul—right? What became of your—prisoner?”

  “My—” the mental clarity must be a fraud, Paul thought, if new memories could flash into it so abruptly. At some time—it must have been after Elis had carried him clear of the nightmare at Samiraa’s village—he had stumbled on a Vestoian soldier unconscious from a head wound and loss of blood but not dead. He had still been carrying her when they caught up with Wright. With this, the memory of that reunion became whole—the wordless suffering on the shield that Mijok carried, the improvised stretchers, the bewilderment and exhaustion in the red faces, the very smell of defeat—with this also a picture of the horribly fat witch from Pakriaa’s village carried on a litter by two spearwomen, and one other witch, a lank skeleton with white and purple lines emphasizing the prominence of his ribs, striding beside his colleague and shooting glances of wrath from left to right and back. Someone had gently taken the unconscious soldier. “She’s safe, Doc. Tejron took her—still has her, I’m sure.”

  “Good.” Wright added with a harshness canceling humor: “Now if only friend Lantis will initial a copy of the Geneva Convention.…” He was fumbling in the twilight before one of the white beasts, uncertain what to do.

  The old cow olifant Susie, carrying Sears, fretted at the delay, sampling the air and rumbling. Paul petted her trunk to soothe her; Sears’ voice came down to him: “Paul? Take this, will you?” He was reaching down the case that held his microscope, safe somehow out of the inferno of the day. “My grip’s not too good, got nothing to tie it to—bare’s a baby’s bottom, like you. We look like the last days of a Turkish bath, hey?”

  “How d’you feel?” Nisana tore shreds from what remained of her purple skirt; she looped them about the case, fastened it to Paul’s ammunition belt.

  “Feel good,” Sears said. Each word was a thick struggle for normal speech. “Arrowhead came off; Chris got it out. Manicure scissors for forceps; you may slice me cross-ways and call me ham and eggs if it ain’t so. Right, Chris? You there?”

  “I’m here, Jocko,” Wright said, and under his breath to Paul: “Medical kit lost. I don’t think the spleen is injured, but—” Aloud he said, “Of course, with your gut what I needed was a hook and line. Paul, how do you make one of these ten-foot roller coasters kneel down?”

  “Let me—that’s Miss Ponsonby—she knows me.” At Paul’s order, tons of gentleness knelt on the earth; Paul held Pakriaa while Wright struggled into the hollow between hump and h
ead, and Pakriaa was either asleep or not caring.… “Abro Brodaa?”

  “Here, Commander.”

  “Form your people in three lines with linked hands. The giant women Karison and Elron, and Elis, will guide them at the head, because their night vision is better than yours and mine. Mijok and Tejron will walk beside us. We must travel all night. I think the Vestoians will not.”

  “They will not,” the princess Brodaa said. He wished he could see truly what was happening in her little face. “They will not because they have no giants or Charins to help them.” It carried no hint of the obsequious.

  “Thank you, Abro Brodaa. Wait here a moment.” He patted Millie’s trunk—she was a young beast, nervous but fond of him—and made her kneel. “Help Nisana climb up to me.… Abro Brodaa—the people of your village—”

  “Most of them lost.” It might have been the oncoming night itself speaking temperately. “These remaining are a few from all the villages. I think they will follow me. And I will go with you.…”

  In the rest of the night—a silence and a drifting, on the surge and thrust of the great animal under him—it was possible to reach a kind of sleep, knowing his body would not relax enough to fall or to weaken his hold on Nisana, who trusted him. She was deeply asleep in the first part of the night, occasionally snoring, a comic noise like a puppy’s whine. All day she had never been out of his sight; she had fought like a hellcat, but singlemindedly, saving her strength to deal with those who threatened him.

  It would have been possible to abandon these people; at one time, Paul remembered, he had almost favored it himself, and Ed Spearman had very nearly hinted that it might be better to join forces with the tyranny in the south.… Life seemed cheap to Pakriaa’s tribe—others’ life. Devil-worshipping cannibals, capable of every cruelty, committed for thousands of years to all the superstitions that ever crippled intelligence. You had to look beyond that, said Christopher Wright the theorist, the doctor, the anthropologist, the impractical daydreamer. Anyway I saved a Vestoian—if she lives. One balanced against how many that I destroyed…? No answer.… Unless you can see a world where the ways of destruction become obsolete under a government of laws. With the devils of human nature—the vanities, the greeds, the follies and needless resentments, the fear of self-knowledge, dread of the unfamiliar, the power lust of the morally blind, the passion for easy solutions, scapegoats, panaceas—how do you see such a world…? You say, Christopher Wright, that no one is expendable. I believe you. But—when I must choose between the life of myself or my friends and the life of the one whom the stream of history has tossed against me as my enemy—

  When I do that, I only discover once more that I am caught in the same net with the rest of my kind and cannot escape until all of them escape—escape into a region of living where men do not set traps for each other and the blind do not lead.

  Therefore—

  “Are you awake, Nisana?” Her even breathing quickened. It seemed to Paul that there was faint color in his glimpses of sky; he remembered the silver moon that had appeared over the jungle with first-light so long ago—yesterday morning. The passage of the red moon around Lucifer was swift: tonight it would be rising two hours before first-light and would be something broader than the gory scimitar he had seen from the knoll.

  “I am awake.”

  “I think the red moon has come back.”

  “Yes.” She pointed over his shoulder; he glimpsed it through a gap in the leaves. “A good moon. Begins the Moon of Little Rains. The small rains make no harm, make the ground sweet. Is better than the moon past—that we call the Moon of Beginnings.” She moved restlessly against him. “This country—all forest? How long have I sleep?”

  “Most of the night. We’re past the open land.”

  She whispered, “No one has ever come here. We have think always there are bad—what word?—tev—tevils in the north.”

  “Tomorrow—rather, today—we turn west and then south on the other side of the hills, to the island.”

  “Ah, the island.… I cannot see this island.”

  “You’ll like it, Nisana. You’ll be happy there.”

  “Happy?” And he remembered that the old pygmy language had no word for happiness.

  Wright’s voice came thinly in the dark: “Abara, stop them! Sears—”

  Millie halted and knelt without an order: Nisana jumped down. Paul saw the shapes of Elis and Sears suddenly bright under Wright’s flashlight—the only radion light left. “Easy,” Elis said. “I have you.” And he lowered the man’s bulk to the ground as Susie moaned and shifted her feet. Sears had said nothing, but he was smiling, his face red and vague above the disorder of the black beard.

  “Paul, hold the light for me.” Wright removed the stained bandage. There was a wide area of inflammation; the lips of the arrow wound were purple. “Pakriaa! You said once you never heard of poison on the arrows—”

  Pakriaa gaped, rubbing her eyes. It was Brodaa who answered: “Our people never had it on the arrows. But in the war with Lantis last year some of our soldiers had wounds like this.”

  “And what happened?”

  “Ismar—” Pakriaa stumbled forward. “Ismar took—”

  “My sister,” said Brodaa, “be quiet, my sister.”

  “Elis,” Paul whispered, “have Tejron and the other women keep watch—we must stay here a while. Where is Mijok?”

  “Here.” Mijok spoke behind him. “I have put my shield—over there.” His voice became a whisper for Paul: “There are only three on it now. One little man, two women. They might live. Paul—is it happening, Paul?”

  “I can’t say it. I don’t know.…” Sears was talking, ramblingly, very far from this patch of earth. One could only listen till he was silent. Then Paul said, “I think so, Mijok. He needs to speak; we need to remember.”

  “What is this—Tel Aviv—”

  “The place on the other planet where he was born.”

  “And there were the vineyards, oh my, yes—the little white and tan goats—” Sears could see it, Paul thought, that small country, a quiet corner of the Federation, where every grain of sand might remember blood spilled in the follies of hatred, where a teacher of mercy had been crucified. But now for Sears it was not a place of history: he saw gardens defying wasteland, the homes and farms, centers of music and learning where he moved, thoroughly at home, discovering the country of his own science, himself a citizen of no one place except the universe. Later he was recalling the hot white streets of Rio, the genial clutter of London, Baltimore, the majestic contradictions of New York.

  “Why, yes, Doctor,” he said—and he did not mean Christopher Wright, but some friend or instructor whose image might be standing in front of the shadows of Lucifer, “yes, Doctor, you could say I’ve traveled a great deal, in my sort of blundering fashion. And I would not exactly say that people are the same everywhere, but you’ll have noticed yourself—the many common denominators are much more interesting than the seeming-great differences, aren’t they, hey…? What? Sorry, Doctor, I’ve got no damned use for your abstraction Man, and why? Because he doesn’t exist, except as a device in a brain that wants to prove something—which may or may not be useful. In any case it’s not my dish. There are only men and women. They get born and love and suffer and work and grow old and die; or sometimes, Doctor, they die young. Men and women I can love and touch; sometimes I can even teach them the few things I know. You may take Man to the library; feed him back into your electronic brain and don’t bother me with the results so long as I’m alive to see a child discovering his own body—or for that matter a bird coming out of the egg, a minnow in a spot of sunlight, a blade of grass.”

  Pakriaa wailed: “What is he saying? He is not here.” She squirmed past Wright, dropped to the ground, her cheek pressed on Sears’ tangled hair, her free arm wandering over
his face and shoulder as if she wanted to cover him like a shield. “He talked to me once. Sears, you said—you said—”

  He was back among them, gazing around in sane bewilderment. “I should be riding.… Pakriaa—why Pak, I’m all right.” Paul moved the torch here and there to pick out his own face, Wright’s, Mijok’s, the white bulk of Susie looming close by, the pouting ugly mask of Abara, who had stolen up close, his underlip wobbling in an effort to speak. “I fell asleep—took a tumble?”

  “Almost,” Wright muttered. “Just lucky chance I saw you tottering. You need to rest a bit.”

  “Oh no.” Sears frowned. “Can’t stop.” He smiled at Pakriaa, who had lifted herself to watch him pleadingly. “What’s the matter, Pakriaa? What’s the time?”

  “First-light before long,” Paul said. “We made good distance, Jocko. The Vestoians won’t have traveled in the dark. Plenty of time and we all need rest. Take it easy a while.”

  But Pakriaa could not hide her knowledge that he was dying; Sears touched her cheek with a curious wandering finger. “You liked looking in the microscope, didn’t you?” She nodded. “Remember—must be sure you’ve got the best focus you can before you make up your mind about anything. But this is more serious, Pak—because I think you love me and you have trouble. I tell you again, you must go to the island with the others. You must live. Now I expect to go there too, but—”

  Abara moved away. Paul glimpsed him striding back and forth, striking the air with little fists. When he returned, Paul made way for him.

  “—for a teaching is a gift, Pakriaa, not to be thrown away—”

  Abara stammered. “You have talk to me too, Sears—”