The Edgar Pangborn Megapack Page 9

  “Better to murder in groups of a thousand at long distance? Just listen to it, Ann.…”

  It was music, becoming after a time the only thing existing under the red moon and the delicate unceasing dance of blue fireflies. It was the music they had heard on the first night in the jungle, a pouring forth of lamentation, wonder, supplication, whatever the spirit may feel in the contemplation of death and its troubling counterpart. A music that was meant to go on unchanging as the song of tree frogs for the thirteen hours of a night of Lucifer.… Pakriaa took no vocal part in the ritual, but sat alone, guarding the relics of the fallen. From time to time small man shapes carried new fuel to the fire. And there were stern sidelong glances from the princess: she had not forgotten her guests. Once or twice Paul caught himself dozing off, dragged into a partial hypnosis by the endless lamentation.…

  “Paul?”

  “Yes, Nan. I’m awake.” He saw Spearman’s head jerk upright.

  “Doc asked me yesterday—if I would bear him a child.”

  Spearman’s arm sought for her gently. “Why bring that up now? Can’t think with all this damn caterwauling.”

  “I—did get to thinking.… Everything we used to live by—it’s so far away. Paul, you’re close to Doc. You understand him, I guess.”

  Two troubled faces were turned to Paul in the mystery of firelight. A glance from Pakriaa conveyed annoyance at the sound of voices. “Dorothy told me she wants Sears to be the father of her second. It won’t take her away from me. Not natural perhaps, but right under the circumstances. Some of the most important laws and customs can’t be started by us. They’ll be established by our grandchildren, if we can have them.”

  “I know.” But her upward look at Spearman’s worried, half-angry face said that her decision would be made by him, no other.

  “He mustn’t talk. The queen no like.…”

  It might have been an hour later that Paul saw Spearman’s head sag down on his chest. Ann leaned against him, but his arm around her had gone slack. Paul searched for the cause of a sense of danger that prickled his skin. Not the witches: they were grouped as before, chanting a faint counterpoint to the soldiers’ wailing. No—it was Ed Spearman himself, and Paul came broad awake in a certainty of what would happen. Too late. Spearman’s head twitched, and his unconscious throat let loose a resonant, uncompromising snore, a snore that had been famous on the great ship Argo. Sears Oliphant had always claimed that if only Ed could be harnessed in sleep to the reaction chamber … But this was not going to be funny.…

  Pakriaa leaped up and shrieked a raging order. The wailing ceased. The soldiers were staggering upright, grabbing spears, forming a circle of violence around the guests before Spearman could even rise. He gasped, “Wha’s matter?” and ten pygmy women were hauling him away by wrists and ankles, clear of the ground.

  Paul shouted. “Don’t fight ’em, Ed! Keep quiet!” Two soldiers were clinging to each of his own arms, there was a ring of shivering spears around him, and others had dragged Ann out of sight, but she was screaming as if they could understand: “Don’t hurt him! He didn’t do anything! Let him go!”

  Without twitching his hampered arms, Paul moved slowly against the circle of spears. They had no quarrel with him, he sensed, but only meant to restrain him: it was at least the only action worth a gamble. The spearwomen stepped backward away from him. The whole circle moved in slow motion, following where Spearman had been carried—through the tree shelter, on across the next clearing, and into the space before the looming god.

  Ed had not been able to snatch his rifle; he still had his holstered automatic. Paul could not see Ann, nor Pakriaa. He could see Spearman’s face, a concentration of craft and fighting fury. The pygmy women lifted him and flung him on the table before the idol. He was ready. He bounced like a great cat, gained his feet, and twitched out the pistol, which banged once—at the huge blade of the idol’s spear. The stone blade crumbled; the crash of the little gun made his captors wince back in shocked reaction. Then Ed Spearman stooped, grasped the reaching wrist of the idol, and heaved upward with the whole of his strength.

  The god swayed, groaned like a thing of life, and toppled over, squashing one of the howling witches—a blind one—like a red bug.

  The village dropped into total silence. Paul could see Ann now. The pygmies had let her go. The whiteness of her face had more than terror in it: it had exultation, a glory of excitement and wrath. Paul’s own captors had lurched away; his automatic had slipped into his hand without conscious effort; he searched in desperation for something that might restore his friends to steadier sanity. “Walk,” he said. “Walk, don’t run, to the nearest exit.…”

  The pygmies allowed it. The god had fallen. They even stood back, too profoundly dazed for any thought or protest.… At the edge of the village Spearman jumped in the ditch, reached for Ann, swung her up on the other side. “Did anyone bring a flashlight?”

  “Oh, I—I did,” said Ann, and began to cry. “Brought flashlight—’stead of gun.…”

  Paul stayed in the rear. “They won’t follow, I think. Not for a while.”

  The stooping passageway was hard to find. But when they won clear of it there was the guiding sound of the stream. Paul held the flashlight on the line of stepping stones until the others had crossed. Ann was still weeping in reaction. “We’ll never win. It’s all madness—the ship, everything. All human beings are crazy, crazy—”

  “Hush, dear,” Spearman said. “We got out, didn’t we?”

  Now, where was the trail? A madness of groping, blundering, where there was no path, no guidance, and even their little thread of light a mockery and confusion.

  Abruptly, ahead of them, there were other lights, then voices—Mijok’s soft rumbling, Wright’s clear outcry: “There they are! All three, Mijok—”

  Paul ran to him. “The others—Dorothy? Sears?”

  “Right as rain, son,” Wright mumbled. “Except Dot’s been frantic about you since we heard the shot. We left Sears practically sitting on her—well, figuratively. Women are odd, you know: they don’t like shots in the night when the best boy friend is out on the tiles.”

  “Had a little trouble. They may come after us—don’t know…”

  Ann was quiet. Paul saw her white hands starfished on the gray of Mijok’s chest. She said, “Mijok, I’m tired and sick. Will you carry me?”

  Spearman groaned: “Ann, what—Use your head.…”

  But Mijok knelt at once to make a cradle of his arms, and Christopher Wright said, “Why not? Why shouldn’t we need each other?” Mijok went ahead with her on the blind trail.

  Paul heard Spearman choke: “I would have carried her.” It was not meant to be heard. Paul looked away, hearing also the deep precision of the giant’s voice exploring the mystery of words: “You are my people. I will not ever be much time far from you.”

  PART TWO: THE YEAR ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  “This island is Eden.” Sears Oliphant spoke drowsily. Toy bat wings flickered from the woods crowning the hillside, hovered over a pond: illuama. In a scant year of Lucifer time (seventeen months of the calendar of Earth) native names had become natural, mostly Mijok’s names.

  Two red-moon changes ago, in the final jading month of the rains, the pygmy word “kaksma” had been only a symbol. Now it woke the image of a village desolate, bones scraped and scarred. The mind’s eye winced in pity—a sentry careless, a bridge left in place after dark; thousands of ratty bodies rustling down from the wet hills, over open ground, swimming swollen streams, finding the bridge before oil on the rain water in the ditch could be ignited. Small bodies, not swift, leaping or humping along like furry worms, sniffing, squeaking, their stabbing teeth dark with the blood of any flesh that moved. The northernmost of the villages allied with Pakriaa’s had already returned to jungle.

 
But here, ten miles offshore from the coastal range, no kaksmas lived; Sears and Paul, in two days of study on this second visit, had established that. No wide wings lurked in the sky. The hilly island had no large meadows where omasha could hunt. Three giants had been flown to the island a month ago—the girl Arek, her mother Muson, and old Rak. They said it was a place of calm. Their soft talk could be heard up the slope, where a log building was growing. Paul stretched, lean and comfortable, on the grass, glad to be alone for a while with this least demanding of his friends.

  Sears was fatter, but hardened, a round block of man, with a coarse black beard, kindness of brown eyes unaltered. Christopher Wright, waiting at the “fortress” by Lake Argo and no doubt frantic for word of this exploration, had let his beard grow too, sandy gray. Spearman and Paul had stayed clean-shaven, with soap made from fat and wood ashes. “The others must come here, Paul. I suppose Chris won’t consent till Pakriaa agrees—damn, you’d think she could see it. She knows her enemies fear the ocean as she does. Lantis’ two-by-four army would never chase after us in their lake boats.”

  “Wait a minute, Jocko. Lantis is no two-by-four proposition.”

  “Damn pint-size Napoleon with four teats and a grass skirt.”

  “Lookee: that settlement south of Lake Argo is thirty miles long. Equivalent of two hundred villages, to Pakriaa’s six. Say twenty thousand warriors who got their pride hurt a year ago when the crash of Argo swamped their fleet and scared the pants off ’em. They’ll have replaced the fleet. They’ll come overland too. Lantis, Queen of the World.”

  “If they do”—Sears’ heavy voice had the tremor that he himself hated—“the firearms should be at least one ace in the hole.”

  “Ye—es. Ed’s pistol helped in our one bad scrape with Pakriaa herself. But it was his smashing the idol that stalled ’em, not the gun.”

  “Poor little Abro Pakriaa!” Sears spoke with tenderness. “If ever a lady was pulled seven ways from Sunday! Wants our way of life, doesn’t want it. Wants to grasp Chris’ ethics, doesn’t want to. Afraid of Ed’s strength and aggressiveness, admires ’em too, oh my, yes. Tries to believe the god Ismar died or never lived—but can’t, quite.”

  “And can’t understand why our women are gentle—Dorothy anyway—”

  “Nan’s toughening up is conscious effort, Paul. Superficial. She’s made herself hunt, shoot well, act hard, because her brain tells her she should. If we could only find something to restring her violin! I think she’s given up hope of it: nothing I’ve found so far has been any good. She doesn’t see that Dorothy does more for us by remaining the person she always was.… You know, when I go alone to Pak’s village, I just set. Even the witches have got used to me, not that they wouldn’t gut me if they could.”

  “Jocko“—Paul looked away—“you told me once you were scared all the time. When you go there alone—or when you tame the olifants for that matter—are you sort of grasping the nettle? And does it work?”

  “Don’t ask me, friend. Because I don’t exactly know. I was never a brave man.” Brown eyes misted in what was partly laughter. “Oy, the witches! There’s the big enemy in the battle for Pakriaa’s mind. Chris may claim they aren’t real witch doctors, just advisers, low-grade magicians. I’m not so sure. Priests of Ismar, and when Ed clobbered the idol Pakriaa did consider having ’em all burned alive. Point is, she didn’t do it. They gnaw away in the dark at all we try to teach her. That proposed bonfire, by the way, is gossip passed on to me in confidence by Abara.”

  “There’s a dear little man.”

  “Ain’t he though?” Smiling into late sky, Paul envisaged the wizened red midget riding the white monsters that Sears had tamed and insisted on naming olifants-with-an-f. A painting might grow out of that, he thought, squat coppery lump astride of massive white—it might, if the desire to paint should ever wake again and be as strong as it once was on Argo, when his mind’s eye could remember Earth without distortion. Abara, popeyed and potbellied, a favorite in Pakriaa’s harem, had been commissioned by her as a student and go-between at the lakeside camp; Sears had not only adopted him as an olifant trainer, but suspected him of furtively possessing a sense of humor. “Well—the giants. Lantis will always have thought of them as wild animals—”

  “Sears”—Paul rolled over and pressed his face in the grass—“can we ask or even permit the giants to tangle in a pygmy war?”

  “Ah … It’s tormenting Chris too, ever since Lantis sent that ultimatum.” He snarled in his beard, “Thirty fat meat slaves every two months! There’s politics for you. Dirtiest way she could answer Pak’s challenge to personal combat, and the automatic refusal makes an excuse to come and clean up. Sounds like home.… Mijok wants to help fight—says he does.”

  “It’s still our responsibility.” Paul sat up. His eyes kept returning to the towering courage of the trees. Brave as any cathedral spire, scarcely one was free from the clutch of the purple-leaf vine. “As for moving here to the island, Pak sees it, but the idea’s too new. You just don’t pull up stakes, venture on the Big Water, crossing forbidden kaksma country.”

  Sears chewed a grass blade. “Anyway we’ve got to bring Dorothy and the baby here, and Ann. Dorothy won’t fuss, will she, son?”

  “Since there is Helen—no, she won’t. I still dream sometimes, as I did during her first pregnancy. Things, shapes, trying to pull her away—or she’s where I can’t find her, can’t push through the leaves.”

  “She told me. It’s something else that’s made you blue lately.”

  “No.”

  Sears watched him. “Yes.… Want to start back tomorrow?”

  “Might as well. We’ve learned all we need.”

  “Mm … Second thoughts about the daddy of Dorothy’s second—”

  “No no. We settled that. She’s proud to be carrying it.”

  “Good genetics could be damn bad psychology.”

  “No, Jocko. Don’t think that. She’s close to me as ever.”

  Sears waited and spoke softly: “New York late on a rainy night, a few car lights moving, street-lamp reflections like golden fish—”

  “Orange paintbrush in New Hampshire meadows—We’d better stop.”

  “We better. I want boat whistles—floating city coming out of the fog. Call it a slow-healing wound.… And look across the channel.”

  Paul saw it presently: a cliff formation in the coastal range made a brow, nose, and chin. Below this, rounded rock could be a shoulder straining in heroic effort; then, tumbled reality of mountain-fancy must supply whatever held the figure in bondage. “Yes. He looks west. Past us, at the sun.”

  “Why, no, Paul. I think he looks west of the sun.…”

  A red-furred girl wandered down from the woods. “I got tired.” Arek had lived twenty-two years; she was seven feet tall, not yet adolescent but near it. In the next Red-Moon-before-the-Rains, ten months away, she might take adult part in the frenzy of love if her body demanded it: if not, she would go apart with the other children, whose play also became innocently erotic at that time, and help care for the youngest. Sears grinned as she sat down with them. “Tired or lazy?”

  “Both. You Charins are never lazy enough.” The name Charin, Paul thought, was almost natural now, a pygmy word for “halfway,” intended by Pakriaa merely to convey that Wright and his breed were halfway in size between her people and the giants, but Wright took sardonic satisfaction in it as a generic name. “Work and loafing are both good. Why can Ed Spearman never sit still in the sun? Or maybe I like to talk too much.”

  “Never,” Sears chuckled. “Well—his best pleasure is in action. Maybe it’s the technician in him—he must always be doing something.”

  “Like always waking, never sleeping.” She sprawled in comfort; her broad hands plucked grass, scattered it over the furry softness of her four breasts. “Green
rain.… I want to stay on this island. Will they come?”

  “We hope so. Mijok will as soon as Doc does.”

  She sighed. “Mijok is a beautiful male. I think I’ll take him for my first when I’m ready.… And soon the pretty boat will be no more good. It’s sad we can’t make another. Tell me again about Captain Jensen. He was as tall as me? He had hair on his head, red like my fur. He spoke—”

  “Like storm wind,” said Paul, supplying the wanted note in a favorite fairy tale, remembering a brother on Earth who was—perhaps—not dead.

  “Hear the ocean,” Arek whispered. Paul could hardly separate the sound from the mutter of the pond’s outlet. This ridge of high ground ended short of the island’s northern limit. A white beach, where the lifeboat was shaded from late sun, faced the mainland. West of the beach a red stone cliff ran to the tip of the island, shouldering away the sea. Wind out of the west allowed no soil to gather on it. Now and then a rainbow flashed and died above the rock, when a wave of uncommon grandeur spent itself in a tower of foam. “Hear what it says? ‘I—will—try—aga-a-ain.…’ Why must the others wait to come here?”

  “Pakriaa’s people are not ready.”

  “Oh, Sears!” Arek laughed unhappily and sat up. “I think of how my mother taught me the three terrors. She took me to the hills, beat two stones before a burrow till one blundered out maddened, afraid of nothing but the light. She crushed it, made me smell it. I was sick; then we fled. I think of how she flung an asonis carcass into meadow grass, so the omasha came. She wounded one with a stone, made me watch while the others tore it apart. Later still, when I could run fast—ah, through night to a village of the Red Bald—”

  “Please, dear—pygmies. That’s a name they accept.”

  “I’m sorry, Sears.… Yes, we hid in the dark, waited until a sentry moved—careless.… It was wrong. You’ve shown us how such things are wrong. And memory’s someone talking behind you, out of the big dark.”