Three shock-headed butchers stood by, assigned to help him. Their distaste for Cole and the job was so evident that he hurried through the gross dissection of the two dead stompers at one end of the same pen. After an hour he thought to ask, as best he could, whether the living stompers were being given food and water. When one man understood, black hatred crossed his face and he spat on Cole's shoe. The ecologist flushed, then shrugged and got on with the job.
It brought him jarring surprises culminating in a tentative conclusion late on the second day. Then the situation began to fall apart. Working alone for the moment, Cole opened the stomach of the second stomper and found in it half-digested parts of a human body. Skull and humerus size told him it was one of the giants.
First pulling a flap of mesentery over the stomach incision, Cole went into the office and phoned Dr. Rudall to come at once. Coming out, he heard angry shouts and saw two of his helpers running to join the third, who stood pointing into the carcass. Then all three seized axes, ran across the pen and began hacking at the necks of the living stompers.
The great creatures boomed and writhed, clacking their beaks and half rising on their wings, unable to defend themselves. The butchers howled curses, and the stompers broke into a mournful wailing harmonized with flesh-creeping subsonics. Cole shouted and pleaded, finally wrested an axe from one and mounted guard over the last living stomper. He stood embattled, facing a growing crowd of butchers from the plant, when Dr. Rudall arrived.
"Dr. Rudall, explain to these maniacs why I must keep this stomper alive!" he cried angrily.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Cole, they will kill it in spite of you."
"But Garth Bidgrass ordered—"
"In spite of him. There are factors you don't understand, Mr. Cole. You are yourself in great danger." The old doctor's hands trembled.
Cole thought rapidly. "All right, will they wait a day? I want tissue explants for a reason I'll explain later. If you'll help me work up the nutrient tonight—"
"Our pisky nutrient will work. We can take your samples within the hour. Let me call the hospital."
He spoke rapidly to the glowering butchers in the vernacular, then hurried into the building. An hour later the stomper was dead, and Hawkins drove Cole and the doctor back to their lab with the explants.
"I've almost got it," Cole said happily. "Several weeks and two more bits of information and I'll tell you. In spite of all odds, one man against a planet—this will found my professional reputation back on Belconti."
Once again Cole faced Garth Bidgrass across the round table in the library. This time he felt vastly different.
"The piskies are really baby stompers," he said, watching the craggy old face for its reaction. It did not change.
"I suspected it when I saw how the smaller eggs fused with the large egg, with continuous laminae," Cole went on. "There was the morphological resemblance, too. But when I dissected two mature stompers I found immature eggs. Even before entry into the oviduct what you call pisky eggs are filamented to the main body of cytoplasm."
Disappointingly, Bidgrass did not marvel. He squinted and cocked his head. Finally he said, "Do you mean the piskies lay their eggs internally in the stompers?"
"Impossible! I made a karyotype analysis of pisky and stomper tissue and they areidentical, I tell you. My working hypothesis for now is that pisky eggs are fertilized polar bodies. It's not unknown. But that the main body should be sterile and serve as an external food source—that's new, I'm sure. That will get my name in the journals all through Carina sector."
He could not help smiling happily. Bidgrass bit his lower lip and stared keenly, not speaking. Cole became nettled.
"I hope you see the logic," he said. "What threatens your stompers is harvest pressure from your own egg hunters. Stop it for a few decades, or set aside breeding areas, and you can have a whole planetful again."
The old man scowled and stood up. "We'll not stop," he said gruffly. "There are still plenty of stompers. Remember last month." He walked to the end window and back, then sat down again still looking grim.
"Don't be too sure," Cole objected. "I haven't finished my report. I made a Harvey analysis on the tissues of one stomper. It involves culturing clones, measuring growth rates and zones of migration and working out a complex set of ratios—I won't go into details. But when I fitted my figures into Harvey's formula it indicatedunmistakablythat the stompers have a critical biomass."
"What does that mean?"
"Think of a species as one great animal that never dies, of which each individual is only a part. Can you do that?"
"Yes!" the old man exploded, sitting bolt upright.
"Well, the weight of a cross-section of the greater animal at any moment in time is its biomass. Many species have a point or value of critical biomass such that, if it falls below that point, the greater animal dies. The species loses its will to live, decays, drills into extinction in spite of all efforts to save it. The stomper is such a species, no doubt whatever. Do you see how the slaughter a month ago mayalreadyhave extinguished them as a species?"
Bidgrass nodded, smiling grimly. His eyes held a curious light.
"Tell me, Mr. Cole, your Harvey formula—dohuman beingshave a critical biomass?"
"Yes, biologically," Cole said, surprised. "But in our case a varying part of the greater animal is carried in our culture, our symbol system, and is not directly dependent on biomass. A mathematical anthropologist could tell you more than I can."
Bidgrass placed his hands palm down on the table and leaned back in sudden resolution.
"Mr. Cole, you force me to tell you something I had been minded to hold back. I already know a good part of what you have just told me. Iwishto exterminate the stompers and I will do so. But I meant for you to go back to Belconti thinking it was the piskies."
Cole propped his chin on folded hands and raised his eyebrows. "I half suspected that. But I fooled you, didn't I?"
"Yes, and I admire you for it. Now let me tell you more. Stomper egg brings a very high price and I have kept it higher by storing large reserves. When it is known the stomper is extinct, the rarity value of my reserve will be enormous. It will mean an end of this harsh life for me and for my grandniece after me."
Cole's lip curled, and red mounted in the old man's face as he talked, but he went on doggedly.
"I want the pisky theory and the news of stomper extinction to be released through Belconti University. The news will spread faster and be more readily believed and I will avoid a certain moral stigma—"
"And now I've crossed you up!"
"You can still do it. I can ease your conscience with a settlement of—say—five thousand solars a year for life."
Cole leaped up and leaned across the table.
"No!" he snapped. "Old man, you don't know how ecologists feel about the greed-murder of species. What Iwilldo is work through Belconti on your government at Car Truro, warn it that you are about to destroy an important planetary resource."
Bidgrass stood up too, scowling darkly red.
"Not so fast, young fellow. I have copies of your early notes in which you call the piskies the critical limit factor in stomper extinction. Almost three hundred people were killed in that stomper attack, and you could easily have been one of them. If you had, I would naturally have reported it via the nextGorbalsto Belconti and sent along your notes to date—do you follow me?"
"Yes. A threat."
"A counter-threat. Think it over for a few days, Mr. Cole."
Cole sat glumly in his room waiting for his dinner and wondering if it would be poisoned. When old Hawkins tapped, he pulled open the door, only to find Pia instead with a service for two. She was rosy and smiling in a low-cut, off-shoulder brown dress he had not seen before.
"May I eat dinner with you tonight, Flinter?" she asked.
"Please do," he said, startled. "Am I people now, or something?"
"Uncle Garth says now that you know—" She broke off, blushing still more.
"I don't like what I know," he said somberly, "but it's not you, Pia. Here, let me."
He pulled the cart into the room and helped her set the things on his table. Piawaslovely, he decided, wanting to caress the smooth roundness of her shoulders and dimpled arms. When she sat across the small table from him he could not help responding to the swell of her round breasts barely below the neckline. But her manner seemed forced and she looked more frightened than ever.
"You look like a little rabbit that knows it's strayed too far from the woods, Pia. Whatareyou always afraid of?"
Her smile faded. "Not because I'm too far from the woods," she said. "What's a rabbit? But let's not talk about fear."
They talked of food and weather through a more than usually elaborate dinner. There was a bottle of Tristaniankreschto follow it. Cole splashed the blue wine into the two crystal goblets, gave her one and held up his own.
"Here's to the richest little girl on Tristan someday," he said, half mockingly.
Tears sprang to her eyes. "I don't want to be rich. I just want a home away from New Cornwall, just anywhere. I was born on Tristan. Oh Flinter, what you must think—" She began crying in earnest.
He patted her shoulder. "Forgive me for a fool, Pia. Tell me about Tristan. I had only one day there, waiting forGorbals'tender."
She spoke of her childhood on Tristan, and the tension eased in both. Finally she proposed a picnic for the next day, the two of them to take a sports flyer into the forest top. He agreed with pleasure and squeezed her hand in saying good night.
She squeezed back a little. But she still looked frightened.
Next day Pia wore a brief yellow playsuit, and Cole could not keep his eyes off her. When he was loading the picnic hamper into the small flyer before the main hangar, she suddenly pressed close to him. He followed her wide-eyed gaze over his right shoulder and saw Morgan bulking darkly ten feet away.
"Hello there, Mr. Morgan," Cole said into the impassive face under the black bar of eyebrow.
Morgan rumbled in vernacular and walked on. His lips did not move.
"You're afraid of Morgan," Cole said when he had the flyer aloft and heading east.
"He's a bard. He has a power," she said. "Today, let's forget him."
Cole looked back at the bulk of Lundy Peninsula, swelling lost into blue-green distance from the narrow isthmus. The straight slash of Bidgrass Station from sea to sea looked puny beside the mighty forest towering on either side. Then Pia had his arm and wanted him to land.
He grounded on a pinkish-green mass of lichen several acres in area. Pia assured him it would support the flyer, reminding him of the planet's low gravity.
The resilient surface gave off a fragrance as they walked about on it. In a sea all around their island, branches of the great forest trees thrust up, leafy and flowering and bedecked with a profusion of epiphytal plants in many shapes and colors. Bright-hued true birds darted from shadow into sunlight and back again, twittering and crying.
"It's beautiful," he said. And so was Pia, he thought, watching her on tiptoe reaching to a great white flower. The attractive firmness of her skin, the roundness and dimpling,ripeness, that was the word he wanted. And her eyes.
"Pia, you're not frightened any more!"
It was true. The long-lashed brown eyes were merry as nature meant them to be.
"It's peaceful and safe," she said. "When I come to the forest top I never want to go back to Bidgrass Station."
"Too bad we must, and let's pretend we don't," he said, pointing to a cluster of red-gold fruits. "Are those good to eat?"
"Too good. That's the trouble with New Cornwall."
"What do you mean?"
"Race you back to the flyer," she cried, and danced away, bare limbs twinkling in the sunlight. He floundered after.
The lunch was good and she had brought along the rest of the bottle ofkresch. They sipped it seated beside the flyer while she tried to teach him New Cornish folk songs. Her small, clear singing blended with that of the birds around them.
"I catch parts of it," he said. "As an undergraduate a few years ago I studied the pre-space poets. I can read Old English, but it is strange to my ear."
"I could teach you."
"I love one wry-witted ancient named Robert Graves. How does it go:If strange things happen where she is—no, I can't recall it now."
"I could write the songs out for you."
"The beauty is in you and your voice. Just sing."
She sang, something about a king with light streaming from his hair, coming naked out of the forest to bring love into his kingdom. Small white clouds drifted in the blue sky, and blue Annis slept just above the rustling branches that guarded the secret of their island. He listened and watched her.
She was softly rounded as the clouds, and her clustered brown curls made an island of the vivid face expressing the song she sang so bird-like and naturally. She was vital, compact, self closed, perfect—like one of the great flowers nodding in the breeze along the island shore—and his heart yearned across to her.
"Pia," he said, breaking into the song, "do you really want to get away from New Cornwall?"
She nodded, eyes suddenly wide, lips still parted.
"Come with me to Belconti then. Right now. We'll cross to Car Truro and wait there forGorbals."
The light dimmed in her face. "Why Car Truro?"
"Pia, it's hard to tell you. I'm afraid of your great-uncle.... I want to contact the planetary government."
"It's no good at Car Truro, Flinter. Can't you just come back to Bidgrass Station and ... and ... do what Uncle Garth wants?"
He could barely hear the last. The fear was back in her eyes.
"Do you know what he wants?"
"Yes." The brown curls drooped.
Cole stood up. "Sothat'sthe reason—well, I'll not do it, do you hear? Garth Bidgrass is an evil, greedy old man and maybe it runs in the blood."
She jumped up, eyes more angry now than fearful. "He is not! He's trying to save you! He's good and noble and ... andgreat! If you only knew the truth—Morwenna forgive me!" She clapped her hand to her mouth.
"Tellme the truth then, since I'm still being made a Belconti fool of. Whatisthe truth?"
"I've said too much. Now I'll have to tell Uncle Garth—" She began crying.
"Tell him what? That I know he's a liar? That you failed as a—" He could not quite say the word.
"It's true I was supposed to make you love me and I tried and I can't because ... because ..." she ended in incoherent sobbing.
Cole stroked her hair and comforted her. "I've been hasty again," he apologized. "I'm still running in the dark, and that makes for stumbles. Let's go back, and I'll talk to your great-uncle again."
In the morning Garth Bidgrass, looking tired and stern, invited Cole to breakfast with the family. Cole had never been in the large, wood-panelled room overlooking the south garden through broad windows. Pia was subdued, Mrs. Vignoli strangely cheerful. The meal, served by a giant maid, was the customary plain porridge and fried meat.
The women left when the maid cleared the table. Bidgrass poured more coffee, then leaned back and looked across at Cole.
"Mr. Cole, I did you a wrong in having you sent here. I kept you in the dark for your own protection. Can you believe that?"
"I can believe that you believe it."
"You came too soon. You were too curious, too smart. I have had to compound that wrong with others to Pia and my own good name."
Cole smiled. "I know I'm curious. But why can't I know—"
"You can, lad. You've nosed through to it and I'll tell you if you insist. But it will endanger you even more and I wish you would forego it."
Cole shook his head. "I'm an ecologist. If I have the big picture, maybe I can help."
"I thought you'd say that. Well, history first, and settle yourself because itisa big picture and not a pretty one. This planet was settled directly from Earth in the year 145 After Space, almost eight hundred years ago. It seemed ideal—native protein was actually superior to Earth protein in human metabolism. Easy climate, geophysically stable, no diseases—but planetology was not much of a science in those days.
"The colony won political independence in 202 A.S. It had a thriving trade in luxury foods, mostly stomper egg concentrates—freight was dear then. Settlements radiated out from Car Truro across the plains. Food was to be had for the taking in the mild climate and it was a kind of paradise.Paradise!"
The old man's voice rang hard on the last word and Cole stiffened. Bidgrass went on.
"Early in the third century our social scientists began to worry about the unnatural way the culture graded from the complexity of Car Truro to a simple pattern of mud huts and food gathering along the frontiers. Children of successive generations were taller than their parents and much less willing or able to use symbols. By the time a minority decided the trend should be reversed, the majority of the people could not be roused to see a danger."
"Earth life is normally resistant to low-grav gigantism," Cole said. "I wonder—"
"It was all the native foods they ate, but mainly stomper egg. There are more powerful and quicker-acting substances in the forest fungi, but then the population was all in the eastern grasslands, where the stompers ranged."
"I read they were a plains animal."
"Yes, and harmless too, except for their eggs. Well, the minority set up a dictatorship and began cultivating Earth plants and animals. They passed laws limiting the mechanical simplicity of households and regulating diets. They took children from subnormal parents and educated and fed them in camps. But the normals were too few and the trend continued.
"Shortly after mid-century the population reached the edge of the southern forest, and there many were completely wild. They drifted along the forest edge naked, without tools or fire or language or even family groupings. Their average stature was nearly eight feet. The normals knew they were losing. Can you imagine how theyfelt, lad?"
Cole relaxed a little. "Ah ... yes, I can ... I imagine the fight was inside them, too."
Bidgrass nodded. "Yes, they were all tainted. But they fought. They asked Earth for help and learned that Earth regarded them as tyrants oppressing a simple, natural folk. The economy broke down and more had to be imported. The only way to pay was in stomper egg exports. In spite of that, in about the year 300, they decided to restrict the stompers to the western part of the grasslands, thousands of miles beyond the human range.
"The egg hunters began killing piskies and grown stompers. They killed off the great, stupid herds of darv cattle on which the stompers fed. The stompers that survived became wary and hostile, good at hiding and fierce to attack. But killing off the eastern darv herds broke them and in a generation they vanished from the eastern plains. Things seemed to improve and they thought the tide was turned. Then, in the year 374, came what our bards now call the Black Learning."
"Bards?" Cole said. He drained his coffee cup.
"Morgan could sing you this history to shiver the flesh on your bones," the old man said, pouring more coffee. "What I am telling you is nowhere written down, but it is engraved in thousands of hearts. Well, to go on.
"We knew some of the stompers had gone into the southern forest—you see, they have to incubate their eggs in direct sunlight and we kept finding them along the forest edge. But we had assumed they were eating the snakes and slugs and fungi native to the forest floor. Now we learned that a large population of wild humans had grown up unknown to us in the deep forest—and the stompers were eating them.
"You have seen our forests from a distance, lad. Do you realize how impossible it is to patrol them? We hadn't the men, money or machines for it. We appealed, and learned we would get no help from any planet in Carina sector except for pay. But the egg market fell off, and our income with it. Ships did come, however, small ones in stealth, to ground along the forest edge and capture the young women of the wild people."
Cole struck the table. "How rotten!..." His voice failed.
Bidgrass nodded. "We call that the Lesser Shame. The young women were without personality or language, yet tractable and responsive to affection. They were flawless in health and physique, and eight feet tall. They could be sold for fantastic prices on loosely organized frontier planets and yes, even to Earth, as we learned. Something dark in a man responds to that combination. You feel it as I speak—no, don't protest, I know. We had long had that trouble among our own people."
"Did my own people of Belconti—" Again Cole's voice failed. He brushed back his red hair angrily.
"Belconti was new then, still a colony. Well, that was thehelpwe got. We hadn't the power to fight stompers, let alone slave raiders. But the Galactic Patrol was just getting organized and the sector admiral agreed to keep a ship in orbit blockading us. We broke off all contact except with Tristan, and the Patrol let only one freight line come through to handle our off-planet trade. It was then we began to hate the other planets. We call it the Turning Away.
"Now we are forgotten, almost a myth. The Patrol ship has been gone since two hundred years ago. But we remember."
"I wish I'd known this," Cole said. "Mr. Bidgrass, things are greatly changed in Carina sector—"
Bidgrass held up his hand. "I know, lad. That's why you're here, and I'll come to it. But let me go on. Early in the fifth century we decided to exterminate the stompers altogether and in two decades killed off all the darv cattle. But the stompers went into the forests in the south and west and from there came out to raid the plains. Not to kill, but to carry off normal and semi-wild people into the forest for breeding stock. A stomper's wing is more flexible than a hand. One of them can carry half a dozen men and women and run a thousand miles in a day. Some fungi in the forest can dull a man in an hour and take his mind in a week. Few who were carried in ever came out again.
"This went on, lad, forcenturies. From our fortified towns and hunting camps we ranged along the forest edge like wolves. The stompersmustlay their eggs in direct sunlight. That forced them out where we could get at them, into clearings and uplands and along the forest edge. We killed all we could.
"We found rhythms in their life pattern keyed to our four moons. When the three lady moons form a tall triangle, the stompers group in the open to mill and dance and sing. About every three months this happens over several days and in old times it was the peak raid season. It was also our chance to kill. The people call the configuration the House of the Maidens."
Cole nodded vigorously. "I remember that. Strange how lunar periodicity is bionative in every planet having a moon."
"It saved us here, praise Morwenna, but once almost destroyed us. There is a longer, sixty-two year cycle called the Nights of Hoggy Darn. Then the red moon passes through the House of the Maidens and the stompers go completely berserk. The first one after the war was joined fully, in 434, caught us unprepared and cost us more than three-fourths of our normal population in the week that we remember as the Great Taking. We were thrown back into Car Truro for decades and the stompers came back on the plains. They snatched people from the streets of Car Truro itself. That we call the Dark Time."
The old man's craggy face shadowed with sorrow and he sighed, leaning back. Cole opened his mouth but Bidgrass leaned forward again, new, fierce energy in his voice.
"We rallied and came back. We fought from the air and killed them in large numbers when we caught them in the open on Maiden nights. We drove them back off the plains and harried them along the forest edges and in the upland clearings where they came to lay eggs. We gathered all the eggs we could find. They defended their eggs and caused us steady losses. But we fought.
"We built our strategy on the Maidens and in time we drove the enemy out of the southern forest and into the west. Then we crowded him into Lundy Peninsula, made it a sanctuary for a hundred years to draw him in. When I was your age we fought out the last Nights of Hoggy Darn a few miles east of here. Ten years later we finished Bidgrass Station and the barrier and the continent was free of stompers."
Cole shifted his chair to get the sun off his neck. "I hardly know what to say," he began, but Bidgrass raised his hand.
"I've more to tell you, that you must know. By the late seventh century things were normal around Car Truro as regards regression. We began a pilot program of reclamation. The egg hunters captured wild people along the forest edge, still do. But some are beyond saving, and those they kill. We have to pen them like animals at first, but they can be trained to work in the fields, and for a long time now we have had few machines except what we need for war. Their children, on an Earth diet, come back toward normal in size and intelligence. The fourth and fifth generations are normal enough to join in the war. But war has always come first and we have never been able to spare many normals for reclamation work.
"Even so, ex-wilds make up more than half our normal population now. That's about forty thousand; there are nearly a hundred thousand on the reclamation ladder, mostly around Car Truro. The ex-wilds have a queer, poetic strain, and mainly through them we've developed a sort of religion along the way. It helps the subnormals who are so powerfully drawn to run back to the forests. It's a strange mixture of poetry and prophecy, but it's breath of life to the ex-wilds. I guess I pretty well believe it myself and even you believe some of it."
Cole looked his question, hitching his chair nearer the table.
"Yes, your notion of the greater animal, critical biomass, that you spoke of. We speak of Grandfather Stomper and we are trying to kill him. He is trying to enslave Grandfather Man. The whole purpose and meaning of human life, to an ex-wild, is to kill Grandfather Stomper and then to reclaim Grandfather Man from the forest. You would have to hear Morgan sing it to appreciate how deeply they feel that, lad."
"I feel it, a little. I understand Morgan now, I think. He's an ex-wild, isn't he?"
"Yes, and our master bard. In some ways he has more power than I."
Cole got up. "Mind if I pull a curtain? That sun is hot."
"No, go ahead. Our coffee is cold," the old man said, rising too. "I'll ask for a fresh pot."
Seated again in the shaded room, Bidgrass resumed, "There's not much more. After the barrier was up it seemed as if Grandfather Stomper knew his time was running out. Don't laugh now. Individual stompers don't have intelligence, symbol-using, that is, as far as we know. But they changed from plains to forest. They learned to practise a gruesome kind of animal husbandry—oh, I could tell you things.Somethinghad to figure it out."
"I'm not laughing," Cole said. "You're talking sound ecology. Go on."
"Well, they began laying eggs right along the barrier and didn't try to defend them. We picked up hundreds, even thousands, every day. The people said Grandfather Stomper was trying to make peace, to pay rent on Lundy Forest. And maybe he was.
"But we spat in his face. We gathered his tribute and still took all the eggs we could find in the inland clearings. We killed every stomper we saw. Then, for the first time I think, Grandfather Stomper knew it was war to the death. He began to fight as never before. Where once a stomper would carry a captured egg hunter a hundred miles into the forest and turn him loose, now it killed out of hand. They began making mass attacks on the station and they didn't come to capture, they came to kill. So it has gone for forty years now."
The old man's voice changed, less fierce, more solemn. He sat up straight.
"Lundy Forest is near eight hundred thousand square miles. No one knows how many millions of wild humans are in it or how many scores of thousands of stompers. But this I knew long before you came to tell me about critical biomass: Grandfather Stomper is very near to death. He ruled this planet for a million years and he fought me for near a thousand, but his time is come.
"Don't laugh, lad, at what I am about to say now. Mass belief, blind faith over centuries of people like our ex-wilds and semi-wilds, can do strange things. To them and even to myself IrepresentGrandfather Man, and from them a power comes into me that is more than myself. I know in adirectway that in the Nights of Hoggy Darn to come I will at long last kill Grandfather Stomper and the war will be won. That time is only eight weeks away."
"Then I'll still be here. Grand—Mr. Bidgrass, I want to fight with you."
"You may and welcome, lad. Must, even, to redeem yourself. Because, for what you know now, your life is forfeit if the ex-wilds suspect."
"Why so? Are you notproud—" Cole half stood and Bidgrass waved him down.
"Consider, lad. For centuries across the inhabited planets people of wealth and influence have been eating stomper egg, serving it at state banquets. But nowyouknow it is human flesh at one remove. How will they feel toward us when they learn that?"
"How should they feel? Man has to be consumed at some trophic level. His substance is as much in the biogeochemical cycles as that of a pig or a chicken. I suppose wedofeel he should cap the end of a food chain and not short-cycle through himself, but I'm damned if I'm horrified—"
"Any non-ecologist would be. You know that."
The giant maid came in with a pot of coffee and clean cups. Bidgrass poured and both men sipped in silence. Then Bidgrass said slowly, "Do you know what the people here call outworlders? Cannibals! For centuries we have had the feeling that we have been selling our own flesh to the outworlds in exchange for the weapons to free Grandfather Man."
He stood up, towering over Cole, and his voice deepened.
"It has left bone-deep marks: of guilt, for making the outworlders unknowing cannibals; of hatred, because we feel the outworlds left us no choice. And shame, lad, deep, deep shame, more than a man can bear, to have been degraded to food animals here in our forests and across the opulent tables of the other planets. Morgan is only second-generation normal—his father was killed beside me, last Hoggy Darn. If Morgan knew you had learned our secret he would kill you out of hand. I could not stop him. Do you understand now why we didn't want you until nextGorbals? Do you see into the hell you have been skating over?"
Cole nodded and rubbed his chin. "Yes, I do. But I don't despise Morgan, I think I love him. On Belconti, Grandfather Man is mainly concerned to titillate his own appetites, but here, well ... how do I feel it?... I think what you have just told me makes me more proud to be a man than I have ever been before. I will carry through the deception of Belconti University with all my heart. Can't Morgan understand that?"
"Yes, and kill you anyway. Because youknow. You will not lightly be forgiven that."
Cole shook his head helplessly. "Welldammitthen—"
"Now, now, there's a way out," Bidgrass said, sitting down again. "The prophecies all foretell a change of heart after Grandfather Stomper dies. They speak of joy, love, good feeling. Morgan did agree to your coming here—he wants to hide the past as much as I do and he could see the value of my plan. In the time of good feeling I hope he will accept you."
"I hope so too," Cole said. "Morgan is a strange man. Why is Pia so afraid of him?"
"I'll tell you that, lad—maybe it will help you to appreciate your own danger. Some few of us are educated on Tristan. Twenty-three years ago my younger brother took my niece Flada there. She ran away and married a Tristanian named Ralph Vignoli. My brother persuaded them to come back and live at our installation there, and Ralph swore to keep secret the little he knew.
"The ex-wilds of New Cornwall kept wanting Ralph to come here so they could be sure of the secret. He kept refusing and finally they sent an emissary to kill him. My brother was killed protecting him. I stepped in then with a compromise, persuaded Ralph to come here for the sake of his wife and daughter. Pia was seven at the time.
"Ralph was a good man and fought well in battles, but two years later Morgan and some others came to the house in my absence and took him away. They took him to a clearing in Lundy Forest, where the stompers come to lay eggs, stripped off his clothing and left him. That was so the stompers would not take him for an egg hunter and kill him outright, but would carry him into the forest like they do with strayed wild stock. Morgan said the command came to him in a dream.
"I think Pia feels she is partly responsible for Ralph's death. I think she sometimes fears Morgan will dream about her, her Tristanian blood...."
"Poor Pia," Cole said softly. "Theseyearsof grief and fear...."
"They'll be ended come Hoggy Darn again, Morwenna grant. Don't you grieve her with your death too, lad. Stay close to the house, in the house."
Bidgrass rose and gulped the last of his coffee standing.
"I must go, I'm late," he said, more cheerfully than Cole had ever heard his voice. "I have a conference with General Arscoate, our military leader, whom you'll meet soon."
He went out. Cole went out too, thoughts wrestling with feelings, looking for Pia.
In the days that followed Cole took his meals with the family except when there were guests not in Bidgrass' confidence. The doors into the main house remained unlocked and he saw much of Pia, but she seemed unexpectedly elusive and remote. Cole, busy with his report to Belconti University, had little time to wonder about it.
He faked statistics wholesale and cited dozens of nonexistent New Cornish authorities. To his real data indicating critical biomass he added imaginary values for the parameters of climate, range, longevity, fertility period and Ruhan indices to get an estimated figure. Then he faked field census reports going back fifty years, and drew a curve dipping below critical ten years before his arrival. He made the latest field census show new biomass forty-two percent below critical and juggled figures to make the curve extrapolate to zero in twelve more years.
It pained him in his heart to leave out the curious inverse reproduction data. But it was a masterpiece of deception that should put the seal on his doctorate, and because it reported the extinction of a planetary dominant, he knew it would make the journals and the general news all through the sector.
The night he finished it, working late in the library, Pia brought him milk and cookies and sat with him as he explained what he had done.
"It's right," he defended himself to her against his scholar's conscience. "Humans on New Cornwall are a threatened species too. The secret must be hidden forever."
"Yes," she agreed soberly. "I think if all the sector knew, the ex-wilds would literally die of shame and rage. Being wild is not so bad, but—that other!" She shuddered under her gray dress.
"Pia, sometimes I feel you're still avoiding me. Surely now it's all right and genuine between us."
She smiled sadly. "I'll bring you trouble, with Morgan. Father came to New Cornwall because of me."
"But I didn't. I've been thinking I maystay, partly because of you. You've been afraid so long it's habitual."
"Strangely, Flinter, I don't feel it as fear any more. It's like bowing with sadness, my strength to run is gone. My old dreams—Morgan coming for me—I have them every night now."
"Morgan! Always Morgan!"
She shook her head and smiled faintly. "He has a dark, poetic power. He is what he is, just like the stompers. I feel ... not hate, not even fear ... a kind ofdread."
He stroked the back of her hand and she pulled it away.
"An old song runs through my head," she went on. "A prophecy that Grandfather Stomper cannot be killed while outworld blood pumps through any heart on the planet. I feel like my own enemy, like ... like your enemy. You should not have come until nextGorbals. Flinter,stay away from me!"
He talked soothingly, to little avail. When they parted he said heartily, "Forget those silly prophecies, Pia. I'll look out for you."
Privately, he wondered how.
Cole sat beside Pia and across the food-laden table from General Arscoate, a large pink-faced man in middle life.
"It's an old and proven strategy, Mr. Cole," the general explained. "When Hoggy Darn starts we will harass the enemy from the air in all but one of the fourteen sizable open spaces in Lundy Forest. That one is Emrys Upland, the largest. They will concentrate in Emrys, more each night, until the climactic night of peak frenzy. Then we come down with all the men and women we can muster and we kill. We may go on killing stragglers for years after, but Grandfather Stomper will die on that night."
"Why not kill from the air?"
"More firepower on the ground. I can only lift ninety-four flyers all told. But I will shuttle twenty thousand fighting men into Emrys in an hour or two on the big night."
"So quickly? How can you?" Cole laid down his fork.
"They will be waiting in the forest top all around the periphery, in places where we are already building weapons dumps. In the first days of harrying, we will stage in the fighters."
"Morgan will visit each group in the forest top and sing our history," Bidgrass said from the head of the table. "On the evening of the climactic night, as Hoggy Darn rises, they will take a sacramental meal of stomper egg. At no other time is it eaten on this planet."
Mrs. Vignoli looked down. "Garth!" Arscoate said.
"The lad must know, must take it with us," Bidgrass said. "Lad, the real reason for not killing from the air is that the peopleneedto kill personally, with their feet on the ground. So our poetry has always described that last, great fight. I mustpersonallykill Grandfather Stomper."
Cole toyed with his knife. "But he is only a metaphor, a totem image—"
"The people believe in an actual individual who is the stomper counterpart of Garth here," the general broke in. "You know, Mr. Cole, the stompers we kill ordinarily are all females. The males are smaller, with a white crest, and they keep to the deep forest except on Hoggy Darn nights. Maybe the frenzy then has something to do with mating—no one knows. But Garth will kill the largest male he can find. The people, and I expect Garth and I as well, are going to believe that he has killed Grandfather Stomper in person."
The general sipped water and looked sternly over his glass at Cole. Cole glanced at Pia, who seemed lost in a dream of her own, not there to them.
"I see. A symbol," he agreed.
"Not the less real," Arscoate said tartly. "Symbols both mean and are. Garth here is a symbol too and that is why, old as he is, he must be in the thick of it. He is like the ancient battle flags of romantic pre-space history. People before now have actuallyseenGrandfather Stomper. I amnota superstitious backworlder, Mr. Cole, but—"
Cole raised a placatory hand. "I know you are not, general. Forgive me if I seemed to suggest it."
"Let's have wine," Bidgrass said, pushing back his chair. "We'll take it in the parlor and Pia can sing for us."
When General Arscoate said good-night he told Cole not to worry, that he would have reliable guards at the manor gate during Garth Bidgrass' absence in Car Truro.
"I meant to tell you and Pia in the morning, lad," Bidgrass said. "Arscoate and I must go to Car Truro. There's heartburning there over who gets to fight and who must stay behind. It will be only two days."
Cole felt uneasy all day. He spent most of it writing the covering letter for his report and phrasing his resignation from the university field staff. He wrote personal letters to his uncle and a few friends. After dinner he finally signed the official letters and took the completed report to Bidgrass' desk. Then he went to bed and slept soundly.
Pia wakened him with frantic shaking.
"Dress quickly, Flinter. The guard at the gate was just changed and it's not time."
She darted out to the hall window while he struggled with clothing, then back again.
"Quickly, darling! Morgan's crossing the garden, with men. Follow me."
She led him through the kitchen and out a pantry window, then stooping along the base of a hedge to where a flowering tree overshadowed the garden wall.
"I planned this, out of sight of guard posts, when I was a little girl," she whispered. "I always knew—over, Flinter, quickly!"
Outside was rough ground, a road, a wide field of cabbages and then the barrier. Veiled Annis rode high and bluish in the clear sky. They crossed the field in soaring leaps, and shouts pursued them. The girl ran north a hundred yards behind the shadowy buttresses and squeezed through a narrow crack between two huge timber baulks. Cole barely made it, skinning his shoulders.
"I found this too when I was a little girl," Pia whispered. "I had to enlarge it when my hips grew, but only just enough. Morwenna grant they're all too big!"
"Morgan is, for sure," Cole said, rubbing his shoulder. "Pia, Ihateto run."
"We must still run. My old plan was to reach here unseen, but now they know and they'll come over the wall in flyers. We'll have to hide in the thick brush near the forest edge until Uncle Garth returns."
She pulled a basket out of the shadows.
"Food," she said. "I brought it last night."
He carried the basket and they raced across the half-mile belt to concealment among high shrubbery and enormous mounds of fungi. Flyers with floodlights came low along the wall and others quartered the clearing. Cole and Pia stole nearer to the forest edge, into its shadow. They did not sleep.
Once he asked, "How about stompers?"
"They're a chance," she whispered. "Morgan'ssure."
With daylight they saw four flyers patrolling instead of the usual one. At their backs colossal blackish-gray, deeply rugose tree trunks eighty feet in diameter rose up and up without a branch for many hundreds of feet. Then branches jutted out enormously and the colorful cascade of forest-top epiphytes came down the side and hung over their heads a thousand feet above.
Pia opened the food basket and they ate, seated on a bank. She wore her brown dress, her finest, he had learned, and she had new red shoes. She was quiet, as if tranced.
Cole remembered the picnic on the forest top, the secret island of beauty and innocence, and his heart stirred. He saw that the food basket was the same one. He did not tell her his thoughts.
They talked of trivial things or were silent for long periods. He held her hand. Once she roused herself to say, "Tomorrow, about this time, Uncle Garth will come looking for us." Shortly after, she gasped and caught his arm, pointing.
He peered, finally made a gestalt of broken outlines through the shrubbery. It was a stomper, swinging its head nervously.
"It smells us," she whispered. "Oh Flinter, forgive me darling. Take off your clothes,quickly!"
She undressed rapidly and hid her clothes. Cole undressed too, fear prickling his skin, remembering what Bidgrass had told him. The stomper moved nearer in a crackle of brush and stopped again.
Man and girl knelt trembling under a fan of red-orange fungus. The girl broke off a piece and motioned the man to do the same.
"When it comes, pretend to eat," she breathed, almost inaudibly. "Don't look up and don't say a word. Morwenna be with us now."
The stomper's shadow fell across them. The man's skin prickled and sweat sprang out. He looked at the girl and she was pale but not tense, munching on her piece of fungus. She clicked her teeth faintly and he knew it was a signal. He ate.
The stomper lifted the man by his right shoulder. It was like two fingers in a mitten holding him three times his own height off the ground. He saw the beak and the eye and his sight dimmed in anguish.
Then the right wing reached down and nipped the left shoulder of the rosy girl-body placidly crouching there. It swung her up to face the man momentarily under the great beak and the tri-corn eye, and their own eyes met.
Very faintly she smiled and her eyes tried desperately to say, "I'm sorry" and "Goodbye, Flinter." His eyes cried in agony "No! No! I will not have it so!"
Then the two-fingered mitten became a nine-fingered mitten lapping him in darkness that bounced and swayed and he knew that the stomper was running into Lundy Forest. The wing was smooth and warm but not soft, and it smelled of cinnamon and sandalwood. The odor overpowered him and the man lapsed into stupor.
The man woke into a fantastic dream. Luminous surfaces stretched up to be lost in gloom, with columns of darkness between. The spongy ground on which he lay shone with faint blue light. Luminous, slanting walls criss-crossed in front of him. Close at hand, behind and to the right, enormous bracket fungi ascended into darkness in ten-foot steps that supported a profusion of higher order fungi in many bizarre shapes.
He stood up and he was alone.
He climbed over a slanting root-buttress and saw her lying there. He called her name and she rose lightly and came to him. Radiant face, dimpled arms, round breasts, cradling hips:his woman. They embraced without shame and she cried thanks to Morwenna.
He said, "People have come out of the forest. What are the rules?"
"We must eat only the seeds of the pure white fungus—that's the least dangerous. We must walk and walk to keep our bodies so tired and hungry that they use it all. We must keep to a straight line."
"We'll live," he said. "Outside among our people, with our minds whole. We'll alternate left and right each time we round a tree, to hold our straight line. We'll come out somewhere."
"I will follow. May Morwenna go with us."