The Edgar Pangborn Megapack Page 17

  “Why, to all of you. Certainly to you, Abara.… What’s the profit of any effort if the result is thrown away in a time of weakness? You discard only if what you have is proven false. We haven’t much—we never have much. Some things appear to be empirically certain. Not many … You know, I believe I’ve given a few people—call it a wakening of curiosity. I think that’s good. Curiosity and patience. Good as far as it goes. I’m not ashamed.” He was trying to see Wright’s gaunt face. “You picked a tougher subject, didn’t you, Chris? Don’t worry—give you an A for something more than effort.… Now look, this hanging around here won’t do.” He caught Paul’s hand and heaved himself upright. “I remember—map—damn it. Need another whole day before we pass the hills. Susie—down, Susie—”

  But Susie, fumbling at him with her trunk, would not kneel. Paul heard Mijok’s agonized whisper: “She knows.”

  Sears laughed. “All right, make the old man climb.” And before anyone could stop him he had tottered a few steps and burned out the last of his strength in a heaving jump toward her neck, which barely lifted him from the ground and dropped him at Paul’s feet. Groping for him, Paul saw that he was dead, saw also, above the arching of the trees, a lucid cruelty of morning.

  CHAPTER 7

  Twice that day Elis dropped far behind to listen and reported there was no pursuit. It was hard to judge their distance from the foothills of the western range, for now there was no open ground—only Wright’s compass, the memory of the map, and treetop surveys that Mijok made from time to time. Abara rode Mister Johnson in the lead, making the beasts travel slowly since the pygmies were faint with weariness. Susie trailed forlornly; she had not been willing to abandon the grave till the others went on without her.

  The pygmies carried only half a dozen makeshift stretchers; the number of unwounded had diminished too. “They slip away,” Brodaa said to Paul. He saw three men carrying children too small to walk; no old women. The fat witch rode his litter, unconcerned at the fatigue of its bearers; the other old man, smeared with white and purple paint, stalked beside him. Brodaa said, “My sister Tamisraa ended life with the white-stone dagger. While Elis and Mijok made the—what word?—grave. We left her body looking north to help the spirit journey. There are many lost who will have no prayers—bad—they may follow us. What is this—burial, Paul-Mason?”

  “A Charin custom. Most of us believe the spirit dies with the body: different parts of the same thing.”

  “Ah?” She did not seem shocked. “Maybe true for your people.”

  “We live in others,” Paul said. “Sears lives so long as we remember him. That will be always.…” It seemed to Paul there were scarcely a hundred in this worn line. “We mustn’t try to hold them if they want to go. If you, Brodaa, or any others want to leave us, you know you are free.”

  Her answer was firm and considered: “I will not leave you.…”

  Wright had not spoken since the burial, nor had Pakriaa. They kept together; Paul was with them sometimes. Behind them Mijok carried his shield. It was Elis who heard the bleat of asonis and stole off to bring back meat for an afternoon meal. It was Elis, before that, who said, “We have done what we could, Paul. We could not have made these people retreat in time to save themselves. If we had abandoned them Lantis would have left no more than a fire leaves in the Red-Moon-of-Dry-Days. Pakriaa is too sick to understand that, yet. She carries a grief like a little one swelling in the womb: it must grow greater before she is delivered of it.”

  In the afternoon halt, it was Elis who tried to make Wright eat something and sleep, but Wright could do neither.

  The giant women Elron and Karison also refused the meat. They sat apart with stout brown Tejron. She was eating, keeping close to her the still unconscious Vestoian, whom the pygmies had given no more than disgusted glares. Tejron might be listening to Karison’s undertone—it was in the monosyllables of the old language. The girl Elron held her eyes downcast, fondling the rifle. She and Karison had been much together in a peculiar loneliness since the children were flown to the island: Karison was old, her children grown and gone away before the Charins came; Elron was too young to have given birth. Three of the children at the island were Tejron’s; the others were children of Muson and Samis and of a mother who had died in the old life. Tejron wiped her lips and grunted impatiently; she took up her charge in careful arms and left the two. Paul sensed what was to come when Elron set her cherished rifle at his feet. Karison approached Wright, humble but determined: “We must leave you.”

  Before Wright could speak, Mijok answered her with a sullen anger Paul had never heard from him: “I brought you from the jungle with empty heads. We gave you the words, the beginning of the laws we must make together. You lived like the uskaran, furtive and cruel—”

  “No,” Wright said. “Mijok, no.…” Karison had winced, but she repeated: “We must go. The old way—we need it.”

  “Then you must go,” Wright said, his spread fingers white-nailed on the ground. “And remember always that you go with our good will.”

  “That is so.” She was torn two ways. “But the old life—”

  Elis rumbled: “Elron, come here.” The girl would not. “I hoped that in the next Red-Moon-before-the-Rains—”

  She muttered, “When the change comes you will return to us—”

  Elis laughed, roaring at her, “You’re a fool, a child!” The harshness, Paul knew, was calculated, in the hope of changing her mind by shaming her. “You think the old life was a freedom. Freedom to live like an animal without an animal’s peace, Elron, because of the thing in you that struggles for knowledge—oh yes, in spite of yourself, and always. Freedom to hunt all day or else sleep on an empty stomach, jump with fear at every creaking branch. Freedom to cram yourself with moss root and slugs from the streams—never enough—in the bad moons when the asonis go north. Freedom to kill the pygmies and be hunted by them, never an end to it—that’s your freedom without the laws, without the words. No, so long as you’re a fool I don’t want you.” She turned away, speechless; he shouted after her in a different voice, “He said you go with our good will. That is true. You can’t forget us, Elron. You’re not the wild thing Mijok brought out of the woods. You’ll feel us pulling you back—you feel it now—and you will come back.” But she was gone in the shadows, Karison following her, and Elis rubbed his broad forehead on his arms.

  Wright whispered, “If they wanted it—it had to be so.”

  Elis waited for his angry breathing to calm. “Mijok, do you remember? In the old days I couldn’t even have been your friend. Remember how angry I was—only a year ago? You stepping over the border of my territory, telling me—I’ve wondered how you did it with our few stumbling words—telling me every being should be free to go as he pleased anywhere in the world? You were in danger, Mijok. I am older, bigger, heavier—I nearly went for your throat. Long ago. So—don’t be angry with these two.”

  Tejron sat by Wright, holding the Vestoian like a nursing baby. “Maybe,” she said, “maybe they will take some of what you teach us to others. Maybe it will be like the thing you showed us, how a little seed no bigger than the eye of illuama can become a tree.…”

  Pakriaa had watched indifferently; Paul hoped he was right, that her face was not quite so tightly set in lines of rejection and despair. Wright came stiffly to his feet, a hand on Tejron’s shoulder, the other wandering into his gray beard. “Abro Brodaa, interpret for me—some of them have no English. Tell them we turn west soon, then south through bad country—swamp, heat, uskaran, marsh reptiles maybe, maybe the kaksmas swarm on the west side of the hills. Tell them we go through that. When we reach a river we have seen from the air—it has no falls and flows southwest—we shall make boats.”

  Brodaa put it into the high music of the pygmy tongue. Paul could see no change in the saddened faces; by rumor, most of them would already kno
w this much. But the thin witch was muttering to his gross colleague, and some soldier faces turned to overhear that instead of attending to Brodaa.

  “Tell them, Brodaa, this river will take us to Big-Water. We go south along the coast, to the island where our friends are, where we believe Spearman has gone in the winged boat. Tell them, on this island there are no kaksmas, the omasha never come, nor the lake boats of Lantis. There is game, good ground, room for all. Tell them—No, wait.… Oh, Brodaa, tell them in your own way that we hope to live there in peace.”

  The lean witch interrupted Brodaa’s translation with a wailing diatribe, twitching his twigs of arms, lashing the battered soldiers with his oratory. Brodaa turned to Wright in misery: “He says—he saw Ismar change Spearman back to a marsh lizard and the boat to an omasha.”

  Mijok laughed savagely. “When did he see that? Ask him.”

  Brodaa did, on a thin shout. The scarecrow flashed her a glare of resentment and a snapping answer.… “He says he saw it in sleep picture.”

  Paul snarled, “Yes, a dream’s as near as he came to a battlefield.”

  Brodaa was shocked, but Nisana laughed. The fat witch on the litter was fuming. Coming from Pakriaa’s village, he probably had enough English to understand it; he leaned forward, embracing his hideous belly, croaking at the soldiers. Nisana translated in swift whispers: “Says—you Charins all marsh lizards, changed by Inkar-Goddess-of-Kaksmas.… Says we lose to Vestoians because image was broke; Ismar punishes.… Will I kill him, Paul-Mason?”

  Brodaa choked: “You cannot touch Amisura. Your spear will turn—”

  “My spear is lost,” said Nisana, loudly enough for all to hear. “But Aksona, Amana, two other men of magic—those I saw killed at Abro Samiraa’s village. Vestoian spears was not turn in the hand—I saw.” She stepped forward, fingering her white-stone knife, and the fat Amisura cringed, squeaking.

  Wright cried, “I forbid it, Nisana. Let them go. Brodaa!”

  Brodaa said quickly, “He asks sacrifice—you, Paul, Pakriaa—”

  Nisana laughed again. She dropped her white-stone dagger on the ground and slapped the thin witch in the face. The crowd gasped and shrank back. Such a man, Paul knew, was altogether holy, never to be touched; one must not even look him in the eye. But Nisana slapped him again and shoved him sprawling. She caught a pole of Amisura’s litter, heaved at it, and he tumbled like a red melon. “Now let them choose!” She came back to Paul with grin and swagger, patting her scarred chest. “I am little Spearman. I break images too.”

  And the pygmies were choosing, not as she or the witches had hoped—choosing headlong retreat from this sacrilege, dissolving away into the forest with sick-eyed backward looks. Paul saw Amisura weeping, humping pitiably back to his litter on all fours, and heard Pakriaa laugh. The two soldiers who had carried Amisura brought the litter nearer, not daring to touch him; when he flopped on it they bore him away. The other witch had run blindly, covering his insulted face, and Wright said like a machine, “Let them go—let them—”

  Sardonically, Pakriaa had watched the whole incident without rising; now she seemed to want to catch Wright’s eye, lifting a skinny shoulder as if to say: “What can you do with fools?”

  When the panic was over, thirty followers remained.…

  In the early evening Mijok reported, after another treetop survey, that the last of the kaksma hills was about three miles southwest. West of them the jungle was level; it was time to turn. Elis had slipped away and returned with two heavy carcasses like wild boars. Sears had named these stodgy animals pigmors. The mor suffix, he had insisted, was an intensely scientific shorthand for “more or less, damn it.” The meat was high-flavored and coarse but safe.… Hearing Mijok’s news, Brodaa sighed, thinking perhaps of the long history of her people, the groping for a narrow path of survival among endless perils. “We say the great uskaran hears a leaf fall to earth from a thousand paces away but the kaksma hears the leaf divide the air as it falls. Oh—three of your Charin miles, that is great length. Maybe enough.”

  The tremendous sheer spires of the coastal range, Mijok said, were visible in the southwest though nearly a hundred miles off; it would be a clear sweet night, he thought, with no clouds and many stars. They should go at least fifteen miles due west; then the course would be southwest rather than south, to miss the hills.…

  In the crowding darkness Mister Johnson’s leading was again a thing of wisdom; his lifted trunk and sensitive eyes avoided dense growth and drooping vines that could endanger the riders. From each necessary detour he came back willingly to the course, under guidance of Abara’s sense of compass direction, and the other four followed him as the arm follows the hand. Tonight Paul rode old Susie—she seemed to feel happier for it—carrying Nisana again; Wright was on Miss Ponsonby, with Pakriaa. Tejron, unfamiliar with the beasts but ready to learn, had climbed on Millie’s back and kept her balance without trouble, holding the wounded Vestoian, who stirred and whimpered but was not truly conscious. Behind Paul was the more nervous bull Mister Smith without a rider, and Elis and Mijok walked beside him, Mijok with his shield, Elis holding Brodaa’s hand. The thirty who had dared to choose the forbidden unknown trailed behind Brodaa with linked fingers, nine bowmen among them; there were few weapons, no wounded except on Mijok’s shield, and this held only two, for one of the women had died. The wounded archer was yellow-faced with loss of blood from a hip injury, but that was clean and closed; he was free from the signs of fear, almost cheerful. The woman was a sturdy black-skirted soldier of the ranks, gashed in the face and with a leg torn from knee to ankle.

  Another night of silence and of drifting—for a while. Wright’s voice floated back: “I am thinking of Dorothy and Ann, and your daughter.”

  “And not of Ed Spearman?”

  “Oh.… The fuel must have been getting low, Paul. Nothing the boat could do for us after we were back in the woods. He must be at the island.”

  Paul could only say, “I hope so.” The thing Spearman had almost said when his anger and disappointment were high, the hint at joining forces with Lantis in abandonment of everything thus far achieved—nothing could be gained by speaking of that now. But some of Spearman’s words murmured on in darkness: “Lantis—terrific organization…monetary system…whole world for the taking…pretty idealism that never worked even on Earth.…”

  There had always been strain and mutual exasperation in argument with Ed Spearman—long ago, on the ship Argo. The Collectivist Party, surviving as an innocuous political group after the horrors of the Civil War of 2010-13, lived strongly in Spearman’s mind, not only because his father had fought for it. Lacking the frenzied dogmatism of the antique communism it resembled, it was nevertheless communism’s natural heir, a party of iron doctrines simplified for minds that resented analysis and magnified Man out of a dislike for men. Like communism, it needed to imagine a class war and felt that it had a tight vested monopoly of the underdog. The C.P., said one of its late twentieth-century prophets as humorless as his predecessors, “believed in Man.” You could always fluster a collectivist by asking for a logical breakdown of that—and make an enemy: they were usually good haters and made a virtue of it. The years following the Civil War had been troubled though materially prosperous, darkened by the build-up of yet another monolithic state under Jenga the Mongol, who had inherited the desolation of the Russo-Chinese war of 1970-76; in those years the Collectivist Party in the Federation, unsupported by any conveniently foreign deity, had become not much more than a serio-comic decayed socialism with a dash of bitters. But it was alive; at the time Argo left the spaceport it had had ten senators and a larger handful of delegates in the Federation Congress. It was respectable, no longer subversive, and owned a small hard core of the aggressively sincere.… Not Wright nor Sears nor anyone had ever been able to convince Edmund Spearman that evil means breed a further evil, which swallows up an
y good that may have been imagined in the beginning. Spearman could admit that (himself in no way an evil man) he would not do evil—if he could help it. But in the region of theory Spearman held quite simply that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, and that settled it.…

  “They should be safe,” Wright said. “You and Jocko saw the island.”

  “It’s beautiful. I know they’re all right.”

  “Yes.… Would you say it was a place where Ann might—oh, how shall I say it?—might attain tranquillity? Not cry too much for the moon?”

  “If there is any such place in the Galaxy.”

  “Time,” Elis said. “Little Black-Hair needs time. She is like grass I have seen growing in too much shade. She is not like our Mashana Dorothy who will make sunshine if the other sun is clouded.”

  “Listen!” Brodaa’s voice. “Listen…”

  Paul heard nothing, at first. Up ahead Abara sputtered: “Mister Johnson—hoo-hee—be quiet. Is nothing—be quiet—”

  Nisana came broad awake in Paul’s arms. Wright’s mount halted, as did Susie, but Susie was trembling, raising and swinging her head in a way to make balance difficult; Paul saw the white writhing of her trunk lifted to explore for a scent.… He heard it then: a long rustling, like a repeated tearing of paper behind a closed door; nothing else.… A wet howl from Mister Johnson sent a spasm through Susie’s mass; her muscles bunched; Abara’s voice wailed back: “Mister Joh—I cannot hold him—kaksmas!”

  Transition from realization to stampede was a flash like the pain of a blow. Paul heard Mijok: “My shield—it will hold more.” Elis cried something to Brodaa. Then Susie had plunged ahead, uncontrollable; Paul could only bend low above the clinging of Nisana, hold on with hands and knees, hope that no trailing vine or branch would sweep them off into death. Mister Johnson could make no careful choice of a trail now—he would be parting the jungle like a six-ton bullet. “Don’t be afraid, Nisana—we can outrun them—”