The Edgar Pangborn Megapack Read online

  The tree-frog voice, with no sternness, but a hint of friendliness: “Tor-o-thee…?” She imitated Dorothy’s motions. “Abro Pakriaa—”

  “Pakriaa.”

  “Abro Pakriaa.” There was sternness again in that correction.

  “Abro Pakriaa.…”

  Wright muttered, “Royalty, I believe. Don’t dare do any coaching. Trust Dot’s instinct. Ah, here we go—”

  The pygmy woman had taken off her shell necklace. She crushed the dainty blue and yellow against her upper right breast; she set it for a moment on her shining hairless skull, and then offered it. Wright sighed, shaken, “It had to work—exchange of gifts—a universal—”

  When Dorothy dropped on one knee to take it, the mask relaxed for the first time in a wintry smile. Over the proud bald head went the chain of the locket, and Abro Pakriaa watched Dorothy put the necklace on—fortunately it was long, even drooping a little below Dorothy’s throat. A flutter of red hands seemed to mean that Dorothy was to stand back; another motion brought forward the woman who carried the hide, her face a chip of red stone. The hide was unrolled, and the bones placed on it. There was more intricate speech, with touching of the locket and graceful, apparently kindly waving of thin arms. Dorothy responded: “Four score and seven years ago.…” She went on to the end without mirth or hesitation, fondling the shell necklace, giving the words the power of music that belongs to them even apart from knowledge of their meaning. When she was silent, Abro Pakriaa motioned the woman with the hide to go and held up her two hands clasped together, the Chinese salutation. She waited till Dorothy had done the same and strode away, recovering her spear without a backward look, vanishing under the trees.

  Dorothy collapsed in the shadow of the barrier. Tentatively she groaned: “How’m I doing?”

  Wright snarled; “Suppose you know that damn bowman had an arrow trained on you the whole time?”

  She glanced at him, lips quivering. “I was kind of aware of it.”

  “Can I,” said Paul, “touch the hand that touched the hand—”

  “Oh no. I ain’ gonna ’sociate with no common scum no mo’.”

  Mijok stared in wonder at their sudden paroxysms of hysterical laughter. He rumbled in doubt. Then the contagion caught him. Whatever his own interpretation might be, he was bellowing, hammering his chest, rolling over on the moss and scattering handfuls of it while he roared.

  He did not sober until he saw Wright drawing pictures on the earth—three stylized but obvious human figures, one small, one medium-sized, one large. Only the middle one had five fingers. Wright gouged a circle around all three. He said, “C’m’on, Mijok—language lesson.”

  CHAPTER 7

  The trail was obvious only to the pygmies, through a border region of meadow and forest that was full of dappled light, a warm hurry of life feeding, struggling, wandering. Aware of his own power and readiness, able now to enjoy the shifting scents and noises of this new trail, Paul watched Ann’s quick slenderness and the swing of Spearman’s solid shoulders. They, and Sears Oliphant, had emerged unharmed from the illness. During a week unmeasurably long in retrospect, all six of the party had found the ease and sureness of physical acclimation. Their bodies rejoiced in the hot clean air of day and the moist moderate nights; the only rebel was the Earth-born brain—grudging, frightened, trailing, making endless reservations and timid of shadows. In Sears Oliphant it was an almost open battle between a brave and curious mind and flesh that could not hide its wincing from pain and danger. His “Oh my, yes” had a tremor which angered himself and oppressed his natural garrulity.

  When Ann Bryan had drifted out of the sleep of illness, Ed Spearman was petting her hands, sponging her forehead. Paul had seen something happen in Ann at that moment, like an innocent putting forth of leaves when winter is not surely gone. Ann had never taken a lover. On the ship, not so much unawakened as unwilling, she had rejected all that; Spearman, making no secret of wanting her, had not been insistent. Nor had he seemed outwardly much distressed, but (at a time when Earth-harbored youth of his nature would have been in their liveliest and most demanding prime) he had buried himself in Argo’s technical library to the point of red-eyed exhaustion, a desperation of unceasing study in the technologies that Captain Jensen would have helped him explore if Jensen had lived. Ann had read other matters after the violin strings were gone, read and daydreamed. If she’d wept (and Paul thought she had) she had done it alone, in that pocket of a room sacred to herself. To the others, she was a passionately silent adolescent turning into a tiredly silent woman, who made too much point of doing her own work and asking for nothing.

  Yes, Ann was different now. The thin beauty of her face, vivid white under heavy black hair, was still too quiet, but with a troubled radiance. During this long week she had talked much with Dorothy—talk superficially inconsequential, but Paul assumed it had a meaning below words, as if Ann had only just realized, probably without envy, that the brown girl was a thousand years older in heart and mind.

  Beyond Ann and Spearman were the six bowmen of the escort, bodies bright with a sour-smelling oil, grouped around Abro Pakriaa at a deferential distance. The princess wore Dorothy’s locket. “Abro,” Paul had learned, was best translated as “princess” or “queen.” A flame-red flower behind her ear caught sunlight from the early afternoon. Five others were following Paul—women, with skirts of every tint but Pakriaa’s blue, taller than the men, carrying spears with blades of a white stone resembling quartz. The men were unvaryingly soft, rounded in contour, lacking the women’s tough-sinewed vigor. It was plain, merely from the manner of Abro Pakriaa and her spear bearers, that among this people to be a woman was to be a leader and soldier, no doubt a hunter and head of the household by virtue of size and strength. In muscular power, a male pygmy was to a female as the weakest of Earth’s women was to the toughest male athlete. These of the bodyguard were soldiers of a sort: the bows were small, the arrows only big darts. The bowmen never spoke except meekly in response to some patronizing word of the princess. Pakriaa’s height topped forty inches; none of the bowmen was quite three feet tall. Paul’s fingers itched for brush and palette. They were available in the lifeboat. The fact that he had not even unpacked them he blamed on a preoccupation with the daily work needed for mere survival, but there was a deeper reason: perhaps a fear of finding his moderate ability vanished if he should once try to hint with oil at the welling profusion of color and line that was Lucifer. Now he found himself trying to measure the quality of Pakriaa’s rich copper against the softness of leaves that were burnt umber, malachite green, saffron, purple, and he thought: I must be recovering. Wake up, ego, and look around.

  Spearman was carrying rifle and automatic; Paul had preferred to leave his rifle behind; Ann, hating firearms, had only her knife.

  Abro Pakriaa had entered the camp at noon, her fourth visit in the week. Her gloomy majesty unchanging, she had indicated that she wished them to come to her village. But Dorothy had turned her ankle the evening before and it still pained her. Wright, no doubt hungering more than any of the others for a sight of Pakriaa’s way of living, had fretted and bumbled and elected to remain with Dorothy and Sears, urging Paul needlessly to remember his anthropology. Sears, sweating out a microsection of a water insect from Lake Argo, had flapped a fat hand and boomed: “You be sure ’n’ telephone, damn it, if you’re staying for dinner, hey?”

  Remaining uneasily close to Wright, as he did whenever the pygmies appeared, Mijok had said carefully, “Telephone?”

  “Word without meaning,” said Wright gently, patting the huge arm. “Noise word for fun.”

  The attitude of Pakriaa’s people to Mijok suggested the studious ignoring of an indecency. They would not harm the ugly animal, their manner said, so long as he was the property of the important sky people.…

  Life was generously abundant in this thinner forest
. Things buzzed and flew; Paul noticed a few webs cunningly extended before burrows in the humus. Ann’s ocean-gray eyes glanced back, brave and uncertain. “Those girls are too quiet. Paul, how much do they know of our language?”

  “Not much.” He moved up to walk on her other side. “Doc and I have made only those two efforts to swap languages. A lot of that time had to be wasted on theirs, a dead end for us.”

  Spearman grunted, “Why? They’ve got a civilization, as Doc says.”

  “Our voices are wrong. Pitch effects meaning for them. You’ve noticed there’s no pitch difference between their male and female voices. Their language is tied to one section of the scale; a full octave of it is above the range of even Ann’s voice. They can shape our words though, if they’re willing. Basic English may appeal to the princess when she condescends to take it seriously.”

  “They could have picked up more than we suspect. They could have been eavesdropping outside the camp.”

  “No, Ed. Mijok would have known and told us.”

  “Yeah—Fido. Can hardly speak freely in front of him now.”

  “Don’t think anything you wouldn’t want him to hear.”

  “Paul, I swear, sometimes you’re worse than Doc.” But Spearman wanted to cancel the ill temper of the remark, and added: “You know, I thought I knew something about Basic English—we all had drill enough in it. Beats me, the things Doc can do with it—the man’s a wizard.”

  Paul was silent with unappeased annoyance. It was true: Mijok appeared to be a natural student too, already far beyond Basic English in a week of keen listening. “Nan,” Paul said, “how did you like Mijok’s humming when you were singing for us yesterday evening?”

  “Good.” She flashed him an almost cheerful smile. But when Ann spoke of her singing—and in the singing itself—there was, in spite of her, an aching wordless reminder of the violin gone silent. Her voice was sweet but without strength or resonance, and she took no ardent pleasure in using it. Her love was the violin—covered as well as might be in the comparative safety of the lifeboat, waiting for a distant day. If the day ever came (Sears had already dissected out, dried, and oiled some long leg-tendon fibers of a deerlike animal in a humble experiment aimed chiefly at Ann’s morale)—if the day came, there would still be no piano, no answering of other strings, no splendid cry of brass. Crude wood winds, perhaps, sometime.… “Yes, he was good,” said Ann, smiling. “Organ point in the tonic, and right in our own scale. Once he even upped to the dominant. Instinct, huh? Sounded good, Paul, even with you trying to fill in the middle.”

  “Hell, I didn’t think you heard me,” Spearman snorted.

  “You kind of stood out,” she said, “because Mijok was much better on pitch, my good man. It did sound hollow without something to fill in. He was on A-flat below the bass clef and no fooling.… Why haven’t we seen other giants?”

  “We got something on that this morning. I guess it was while you were in swimming. Each giant male has an inviolate hunting territory, and they don’t trespass. Definite breeding season: the month before the rains. That was five or maybe six red-moon changes ago. Mijok wasn’t too clear on the count—doesn’t like mathematics much better than I do. The women go where they please, in small groups, with the children who still need care, but I gather the males are expected to stay in their own private grounds until the Red-Moon-before-the-Rains.”

  Spearman wondered: “Will the pygmies have a season too?”

  “Doubt it. Probably like us—except that women are the bosses. The clothes suggest a continuing sex consciousness.”

  The pygmy leaders halted. A murmuring explained itself as the music of a stream. Paul consulted his memory of the map made from orbit photographs and of his one solo exploration flight in the lifeboat. There could be few such flights: the charlesite, even with the surplus salvaged from the wrecked boat, must be hoarded. Ann and Ed had flown over the lake on the day after their recovery, searching for any sign of Argo. Returning, Ed’s face had been a leather mask of grief, and neither had wanted to talk of it. Later they explained: the lake was a profundity of secret blue; a shelf of sand or possibly white stone ran out some yards offshore, under water marvelously clear, and ended abruptly. Beyond it, where Argo must have fallen, no bottom could even be guessed at; the lifeboat’s camera confirmed the presence of an abyss that would have thwarted the most complex twenty-first-century machinery.

  This stream, Paul knew, came from the western hills, flowing east and slightly north until it entered the lake northeast of the clearing called home. Another creek joined it east of the spot where they now stood, and Pakriaa’s village—if the parallel lines did represent its location—was not far upstream from that junction.

  Worn boulders rose above noisy water. The stream was twenty yards wide, sluggish even here in the shallows. A steppingstone crossing.

  Nearly all the rivers on the map passed through jungle for most of their length; numberless smaller streams would be hidden from the sky. There was grassland for fifteen to twenty miles on the eastern side of every range of hills. The prevailing winds were from the west; perhaps a dryness in the lee of the hills favored the grass. The broadest stretch of such open land lay east of a rugged coastal range seventy miles to the southwest; some of the mountains in that seacoast formation were mighty enough to hold a blur of snow at their summits. The base of the coastal range was narrow—hardly more than twenty miles. From this the peaks shot up with incredible sheerness to great heights of bare rock that glittered in morning sun like black and red glass. This grandeur, like nothing known on Earth, was clearly visible from the camp above the near hills, especially at midday, when the mists were gone.

  And ten miles offshore from that dizzy range, Paul remembered a mountainous island. On his solo exploration two days ago, with the lifeboat’s panoramic camera and a head full of puzzled dreams, he had soared above it, noting a peninsular strip of red sand at its southern end, sheltered mountain valleys—one framing a jewel of lake. In the north was a white beach where landing should be easy, and this was protected by a low headland of red cliffs running out to the very tip of the island. Surely a place to carry in the mind, it seemed to invite human living as did no other near region in this continent of Lucifer. Wright thought so: he listened to Paul’s description and named the island Adelphi.…

  North of the camp, the range of low western hills dwindled to rolling land and was lost in a tremendous expanse of unbroken jungle, which ended only at the shore of one of the great lakes four hundred miles away—an inland sea fourteen hundred miles long. Sixty-odd miles to the south there was that large cluster of parallel lines in jungle, and beyond it the forest gave way to more open ground, prairie, red desert, and bare mountains.

  Abro Pakriaa dipped her spear in the water; she lifted a handful, letting it trickle away while she spoke a rippling invocation; then she was lithely crossing on the stones after the bowmen. The bottom was pale sand with varicolored pebbles.

  Beyond the stream, Pakriaa followed a path a short way and pressed into undergrowth. Spearman grumbled, “Good path for once, and we have to—”

  “Path’s probably booby-trapped. She expects us to know that.”

  “Hell.…” It was difficult passage, stooping on a trail meant for little folk; it ended at a ditch six feet wide and five deep. The ditch made a right angle, both lines stretching away straightly as far as the eye could go; the inner side of the ditch was heaped with dry sticks and bundles of grass. Pakriaa trilled orders to an old black-skirted woman with a whip, in charge of a gang of four women and three men, all totally naked. They were struggling to shove a movable bridge into place across the ditch—two logs bearing a mat of vines and bark. It was grunting work for them, and when the end of the bridge was in reach, Pakriaa’s escort made no motion to help. Spearman started to; Paul interfered. “We’d lose face. Those are slaves. Women tied tog
ether at the ankles—one of the men a eunuch. Look at the brands on their cheeks. Nan, you’re the dominant sex—try to look more like the president of a women’s club.”

  Her finely modeled face had dignity enough, he thought, if she could keep the worry out of it.… The old woman in the black skirt bowed arrogantly to Pakriaa; the slaves cringed, with the hating stare of the trapped. All were scarred and young except for the eunuch, who was wrinkled and flabby. One female had a recent chest wound; the effort at the bridge had made it bleed, but she ignored it. Paul saw Spearman’s face settle into lines of poker blankness and thought: Good. And if, to patience and courage, he could add (I hear you, Doc) charity and self-knowledge—Oh, be quiet, critic, be quiet.…

  Trees had been felled—some time ago, for the stumps were rotted—and the spacing was such that the tops of the trees left standing provided a gap twenty feet wide, the entire length of the village. There would be two other such gaps, visible from the sky as parallel lines, admitting full midday sunlight but shutting out the omasha. “Nan—let’s try to learn something about that big settlement in the south—the other parallel lines.”