"Here, Commander."
"Form your people in three lines with linked hands. The giant women Karison and Elron, and Elis, will guide them at the head, because their night vision is better than yours and mine. Mijok and Tejron will walk beside us. We must travel all night. I think the Vestoians will not."
"They will not," the princess Brodaa said. He wished he could see truly what was happening in her little face. "They will not because they have no giants or Charins to help them." It carried no hint of the obsequious.
"Thank you, Abro Brodaa. Wait here a moment." He patted Millie's trunk—she was a young beast, nervous but fond of him—and made her kneel. "Help Nisana climb up to me.... Abro Brodaa—the people of your village——"
"Most of them lost." It might have been the oncoming night itself speaking temperately. "These remaining are a few from all the villages. I think they will follow me. And I will go with you...."
In the rest of the night—a silence and a drifting, on the surge and thrust of the great animal under him—it was possible to reach a kind of sleep, knowing his body would not relax enough to fall or to weaken his hold on Nisana, who trusted him. She was deeply asleep in the first part of the night, occasionally snoring, a comic noise like a puppy's whine. All day she had never been out of his sight; she had fought like a hellcat, but singlemindedly, saving her strength to deal with those who threatened him.
It would have been possible to abandon these people; at one time, Paul remembered, he had almost favored it himself, and Ed Spearman had very nearly hinted that it might be better to join forces with the tyranny in the south.... Life seemed cheap to Pakriaa's tribe—others' life. Devil-worshipping cannibals, capable of every cruelty, committed for thousands of years to all the superstitions that ever crippled intelligence. You had to look beyond that, said Christopher Wright the theorist, the doctor, the anthropologist, the impractical daydreamer.Anyway Isaved a Vestoian—if she lives. One balanced against how many that I destroyed...? No answer.... Unless you can see a world where the ways of destruction become obsolete under a government of laws. With the devils of human nature—the vanities, the greeds, the follies and needless resentments, the fear of self-knowledge, dread of the unfamiliar, the power lust of the morally blind, the passion for easy solutions, scapegoats, panaceas—how do you see such a world...? You say, Christopher Wright, that no one is expendable. I believe you. But—when I must choose between the life of myself or my friends and the life of the one whom the stream of history has tossed against me as my enemy——
When I do that, I only discover once more that I am caught in the same net with the rest of my kind and cannot escape until all of them escape—escape into a region of living where men do not set traps for each other and the blind do not lead.
Therefore——
"Are you awake, Nisana?" Her even breathing quickened. It seemed to Paul that there was faint color in his glimpses of sky; he remembered the silver moon that had appeared over the jungle with first-light so long ago—yesterday morning. The passage of the red moon around Lucifer was swift: tonight it would be rising two hours before first-light and would be something broader than the gory scimitar he had seen from the knoll.
"I am awake."
"I think the red moon has come back."
"Yes." She pointed over his shoulder; he glimpsed it through a gap in the leaves. "A good moon. Begins the Moon of Little Rains. The small rains make no harm, make the ground sweet. Is better than the moon past—that we call the Moon of Beginnings." She moved restlessly against him. "This country—all forest? How long have I sleep?"
"Most of the night. We're past the open land."
She whispered, "No one has ever come here. We have think always there are bad—what word?—tev—tevils in the north."
"Tomorrow—rather, today—we turn west and then south on the other side of the hills, to the island."
"Ah, the island.... I cannot see this island."
"You'll like it, Nisana. You'll be happy there."
"Happy?" And he remembered that the old pygmy language had no word for happiness.
Wright's voice came thinly in the dark: "Abara, stop them! Sears——"
Millie halted and knelt without an order: Nisana jumped down. Paul saw the shapes of Elis and Sears suddenly bright under Wright's flashlight—the only radion light left. "Easy," Elis said. "I have you." And he lowered the man's bulk to the ground as Susie moaned and shifted her feet. Sears had said nothing, but he was smiling, his face red and vague above the disorder of the black beard.
"Paul, hold the light for me." Wright removed the stained bandage. There was a wide area of inflammation; the lips of the arrow wound were purple. "Pakriaa! You said once you never heard of poison on the arrows——"
Pakriaa gaped, rubbing her eyes. It was Brodaa who answered: "Our people never had it on the arrows. But in the war with Lantis last year some of our soldiers had wounds like this."
"And what happened?"
"Ismar—" Pakriaa stumbled forward. "Ismar took——"
"My sister," said Brodaa, "be quiet, my sister."
"Elis," Paul whispered, "have Tejron and the other women keep watch—we must stay here a while. Where is Mijok?"
"Here." Mijok spoke behind him. "I have put my shield—over there." His voice became a whisper for Paul: "There are only three on it now. One little man, two women. They might live. Paul—is it happening, Paul?"
"I can't say it. I don't know...." Sears was talking, ramblingly, very far from this patch of earth. One could only listen till he was silent. Then Paul said, "I think so, Mijok. He needs to speak; we need to remember."
"What is this—Tel Aviv——"
"The place on the other planet where he was born."
"And there were the vineyards, oh my, yes—the little white and tan goats——" Sears could see it, Paul thought, that small country, a quiet corner of the Federation, where every grain of sand might remember blood spilled in the follies of hatred, where a teacher of mercy had beencrucified. But now for Sears it was not a place of history: he saw gardens defying wasteland, the homes and farms, centers of music and learning where he moved, thoroughly at home, discovering the country of his own science, himself a citizen of no one place except the universe. Later he was recalling the hot white streets of Rio, the genial clutter of London, Baltimore, the majestic contradictions of New York.
"Why, yes, Doctor," he said—and he did not mean Christopher Wright, but some friend or instructor whose image might be standing in front of the shadows of Lucifer, "yes, Doctor, you could say I've traveled a great deal, in my sort of blundering fashion. And I would not exactly say that people are the same everywhere, but you'll have noticed yourself—the many common denominators are much more interesting than the seeming-great differences, aren't they, hey...? What? Sorry, Doctor, I've got no damned use for your abstraction Man, and why? Because he doesn't exist, except as a device in a brain that wants to prove something—which may or may not be useful. In any case it's not my dish. There are only men and women. They get born and love and suffer and work and grow old and die; or sometimes, Doctor, they die young. Men and women I can love and touch; sometimes I can even teach them the few things I know. You may take Man to the library; feed him back into your electronic brain and don't bother me with the results so long as I'm alive to see a child discovering his own body—or for that matter a bird coming out of the egg, a minnow in a spot of sunlight, a blade of grass."
Pakriaa wailed: "What is he saying? He is not here." She squirmed past Wright, dropped to the ground, her cheek pressed on Sears' tangled hair, her free arm wandering over his face and shoulder as if she wanted to cover him like a shield. "He talked to me once. Sears, you said—you said——"
He was back among them, gazing around in sane bewilderment. "I should be riding.... Pakriaa—why Pak, I'm all right." Paul moved the torch here and there to pick out his own face, Wright's, Mijok's, the white bulk of Susie looming close by, the pouting ugly mask of Abara, who had stolen up close, his underlip wobbling inan effort to speak. "I fell asleep—took a tumble?"
"Almost," Wright muttered. "Just lucky chance I saw you tottering. You need to rest a bit."
"Oh no." Sears frowned. "Can't stop." He smiled at Pakriaa, who had lifted herself to watch him pleadingly. "What's the matter, Pakriaa? What's the time?"
"First-light before long," Paul said. "We made good distance, Jocko. The Vestoians won't have traveled in the dark. Plenty of time and we all need rest. Take it easy a while."
But Pakriaa could not hide her knowledge that he was dying; Sears touched her cheek with a curious wandering finger. "You liked looking in the microscope, didn't you?" She nodded. "Remember—must be sure you've got the best focus you can before you make up your mind about anything. But this is more serious, Pak—because I think you love me and you have trouble. I tell you again, you must go to the island with the others. You must live. Now I expect to go there too, but—"
Abara moved away. Paul glimpsed him striding back and forth, striking the air with little fists. When he returned, Paul made way for him.
"—for a teaching is a gift, Pakriaa, not to be thrown away—"
Abara stammered. "You have talk to me too, Sears—"
"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.
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 angryIwas—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 nursingbaby. "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 know 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 witchon 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. "Nowlet 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'seye, 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. Themorsuffix, 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 shipArgo. 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 hadbeen 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 timeArgoleft 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 any 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 Johnsonsent 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—"
"My people—"
"Elis and Mijok can outrun them too. They'll carry all they can." In spite of the agony of mere hanging on, mere straining to stay alive, he had to think:They were loyal and we got them into this....Branches slashed across his back, stinging and scraping. Once Susie stumbled and recovered as the group went splattering across some invisible mud, and Paul wondered if Mister Johnson in his terror would run them into quicksand or marsh.
That ended; there was more thick jungle whipping his back for—five minutes?—an hour...? This too ended.
Crazed or purposeful, the beasts charged out into open land through a soft roaring of torn grass. Paul could twist his head to glance upward at a field of stars. He could not win a backward look for Elis and Mijok: his neck and arm muscles were stiffened in his grasp of Susie's ears, and he dared not risk disturbing Nisana's clutch of him. But to left and right he could make out other shapes under starlight and hear a frantic thudding of hoofs—fleeing asonis, other innocent woodland cattle with a hunger to live. Once he glimpsed a long-bodied thing pass off to the left in wild leaps lifting it above the grass tops: uskaran, he thought, the huge tiger cat, no enemy but a brother in panic.
The open ground ended at water; here at last the olifants slowed to a halt, unlike the lesser desperate brutes, for Mister Johnson was still wise, considering the stream, aware of his leadership. Paul could shout to the othersnow, and they all answered. But his backward staring found only the stars, the white mass of Mister Smith, the disturbed darkness that must be meadow. "Elis! Mijok!"
No answer could have reached him above the bleating and thunder of terrorized harmless things crossing the field and hurtling blindly into the river. Mister Johnson was wading in deliberately. There was splashing at first, then silence, as cool water came up around Paul's knees and Susie's motion changed to a smooth throbbing and heaving; he saw small foam where the curve of her lifted trunk cut the water. He whispered to Nisana, "We're safe, dear. Big river. Kaksmas won't cross it...." Mister Johnson was leading them in an upstream slant, bearing well to the right while the bobbing frantic heads of other creatures let the moderate current press them away to the left. This way—whether by Mister Johnson's wisdom or Abara's guidance—they might be able to come ashore clear of the dangerous passage of the stampede.
"My people cannot go through the water. We never—"
"Elis and Mijok can swim. They'll get them across somehow. Maybe the shield will float, Nisana."
The madness behind them dwindled into the faraway. In growing quiet, Wright's voice came back, not loudly: "I am a murderer."
Paul wondered what insight made him call out words not his own: "'What's the profit of any effort if the result is thrown away in a time of weakness?'"
The even motion became a clumsiness of wading in mud. Then there was solid ground. Paul said, "Halt them here if you can, Abara." Mister Johnson must have shared the sense of safety; they all calmed, heads drooping, shaken breathing slowing to sighs. "Down, Susie...." All but Abara descended. This was still open grassland, but there was a black velvet curtain of jungle not far off. "Doc—still got your flashlight?"
"Eh? No—lost somewhere." The old man spoke vacantly; he stumbled to the edge of the water, sat with his head on his knees. "Mijok-Mijok...."
Tejron still had her Vestoian, but now the pygmy woman was panting, fully conscious in Tejron's arms and witless with fear. Tejron said, "She's trying to break away. Can't someone talk to her?"
"Pakriaa!" Paul searched for the princess. "Here—please."
Nisana whispered, "I will talk to the Vestoian—yes?"
"Not yet. If Pakriaa—"
Pakriaa said thickly, "I am here. What to say? She is nothing."
"She is nothing to you, Pakriaa? Then Sears chose a poor student. Brodaa would have spoken to her. I ask you to tell her the war is over and she is among friends."
"Friends? She is Vestoian." Pakriaa approached Wright, who did not look up. "Tocwright—I must speak to the Vestoian kaksma? I owe you my life—will obey you."
He groaned: "I do not want you to obey me. If there is nothing inside to tell you what you should do, then I have nothing to say to you."
Pakriaa flung up her arm across her eyes as if struck. Tejron muttered, "I can't restrain her much longer without hurting her." It was Nisana who gave the Vestoian the message in the pygmy tongue, a ripple of sound that must have conveyed some reassurance, for the struggling ceased.
"Look!" Paul dug his fingers in Wright's shoulder. "Over there—"
The dark spot under starlight was surely the floating shield; behind it, another purposeful splashing, rise and fall of a driving arm.
"Mijok!" Wright was on his feet. "This way! A little upstream—"
Both giants were bleeding from small double stab wounds of the kaksma teeth. There were four pygmies on Mijok's shield. Elis had carried Brodaa and another in his arms and one on his back; they had clung to his fur as he swam the river. Mijok plucked a sodden thing from his thigh; its jaws had clenched in flesh when he smashed its body. He flipped the ratty thing into the water and remarked like a Charin, "Damned if I could ever care for 'em."
"The others—"
"We tried to help them into the trees," said Elis. "Could be some safety in that if the swarm passes by. But most of them ran blindly, so—beyond that, Doc, don't ever ask us.We must forget some things. We've all done what we could, so—let's rest a while and go on."
"Oh, we go on," Wright said. "Chaos, or maybe a little bit of light from time to time. What—sixteen of us now...? Which way was the swarm going?"
"North. Our flight was west. I think this place is safe."
Abara called down: "Mister Johnson says it is safe."
Paul said, "No more travel tonight. Wait here for daylight. This is not the river we wanted, but we know it reaches the sea somehow. Let's think about that in the morning. And—if you will, Doc—I'd like to make that my last order. Let Elis be our commander till we reach the island."
"I!" Elis was shocked. "But Paul.... I am a big baby, I wonder and wonder and never find the answer to anything."
Wright laughed; it sounded like laughter. At any rate when his voice found words it was warm, relieved, more like his own than it had been at any time since the drums sounded on Lake Argo. "That doesn't matter, Elis. Paul has done all anyone could, done it well, and leadership's a wearing thing. But you can carry it."
Paul wished he could see the black face in the dark; he might learn from it, he thought, so far as a Charin was capable of learning. Elis said dazedly, "If you all wish it—"
"I wish it," said Abro Brodaa.
"Yes," Mijok said. "Let's not trouble to vote. We know you, Elis."
"I'll do my best...."
Most of the pygmies collapsed in sleep. The bites the giants had received were not numerous enough to be a danger, but both were in some pain, and wakeful; Abara also said he would prefer to watch out the night and not sleep. Paul stretched on the damp grass, aware of Nisana, sitting near him. He tried to make a mental refuge of Dorothy and the island; for a time it was possible, but twice, as he thought he was drifting into true healing sleep, the present pulled at him and the thought was not of Dorothy, but of Pakriaa, throwing up her arm across her eyes as if Wright's words had been a deeper wound thanany she had received in these days of calamity and defeat.
He woke while it was still night. The red moon had risen, changing the river to deep purple; the stampede was all ended, and stillness was everywhere, underlying the low voices of Wright and Elis. He saw the small silhouette of Nisana beside him; he could make out none of the others, but he heard the soft breathing of the olifants, and at least some of them must have gone to the jungle and returned, for there was a steady munching of coarse leaves. He thought:Sears' pets—one of his ten thousand gifts we can never live long enough to assess. His laughter was another....
Wright was talking placidly: "We suppose it must have been a similar story on this planet, Elis. The major patterns are the same. The small and simple forms must have grown to greater complexity through their millions of years, undoubtedly in the seas, the good saline medium for our kind. Then other millions of years, while the first creatures to try the land were clumsy amphibians, still needing the sea but developing ways to carry it with them, venture a little further. There's no hurry in history."
"And before the beginning of life?"
"Difficult, Elis. We think (there are other theories) that each star with planets was once two—a binary, our astronomers called it—"
Someone thin and small came near to Paul, speaking delicately, in an extremity of pain, and not to him. "Nisana," Pakriaa said. "Nisana—"
Nisana was looking up, a little afraid, uncertain. "Princess?"
"Only Pakriaa.... Nisana—I saw how you spoke to the Vestoian, how she was quiet. If you will bring her—and Tejron too? And we go and listen—Tocwright is talking about the stars—the world—I think, maybe, we tell her what he says? Will you come with me, Nisana?"
Argo IVanswered Dunin's brown hand at the tiller, sliding south under a following breeze. Her chief designer Paul Mason liked to call her a sloop, admitting that on no planet would any sloop have cared to be found dead with a pair of twelve-foot oars amidships. She was thirty-six feet fore and aft. Without a sawmill, shaping boards for her strakes had been harder than trimming and placing the single tree trunk that was her keel. Much of her joining was with wooden pegs; there was iron in her too, from the single deposit of ore on the island of Adelphi. Her building had started seventeen months ago in the Year Nine. One month ago Paul's daughter Helen had cracked across her bow an earthen flask of wine brought to maturity by Nisana andArgo IVhad slipped out of the mouth of the Whitebeach River for a maiden voyage—a forty-mile circuit of the island, including the passage of a strait where a current from open ocean ran formidably between Adelphi and a small nameless island in the south. Since then she had journeyed short distances up and down the coast, learning her own fussy ways and teaching them to her makers.
Argo IIhad been a clumsy oared raft of heroic history. Nine Lucifer years ago, roughly the equivalent of twelve Earth years,Argo IIhad not only brought fifteen survivors of a war to the island, she had also, broadened and repaired, returned to the mainland over the ten-mile channel to pick up a sixteenth survivor, Abara, and the gentle white beasts he had refused to abandon. He had guided them south, through seventy miles of unknown terrors, and ten miles further along the beach, until it came to an end at sheer cliffs; hereArgo IIfound him. One by one—probably no one but Abara could havecoaxed them aboard—Argo IIhad ferried all five of the olifants across. During the rains that came for a dark ending of Year Two, the swollen Whitebeach River had tornArgo IIfrom her moorings and she had been swept away down the channel. Now she would be driftwood scattered over the infinity of the unexplored; she was remembered.
Argo III, still in existence and more often called Betsy, was only a boxed platform with outriggers and two pairs of oars. With four giants at the oars and a favorable current she could approximate three miles an hour and carry several tons. She had been built in the Year Four and was still busily bringing slabs of building stone from the base of the coastal range. The stone was red and black or sometimes purple, heavy, already smoother than marble without polishing; unlike any common stone of Earth, it was so hard that wind and sun and water over the centuries had done little with it. Wright believed that was why the coastal range could rise to such heights from a narrow base. While the years in their millions had turned other mountains to level ground, the glassy rock remained: it could be broken for use but defied erosion like a diamond.
Argo IVwas unequivocally a ship; after her trial Paul had carved for her bow a figurehead with the dreaming face of Pakriaa.
"Maybe," Dunin said, "with a few more like this the first explorations could be around the coast instead of overland? If we had two or three more ships when Kris-Mijok is old enough to go?"
Paul knew Dorothy had winced, though her face was turned to the evening-reddened field of water. "If he still wants it, when he's old enough to go...."
Kris-Mijok Wright, her third-born child and only son, had been born in the Year Three; in Earth years he was only nine. His hunger for the long journeying might be mainly a reflection of his devotion to Dunin, herself full of visions and not yet a woman. A tentative half joke, a means of channeling a child's fantasy into patience, had somehow become a sober adult plan: that the first major explorations would begin when Kris-Mijok would have a man's strength to take part in them.
"We might have such ships by then." Paul tried to sound judicial. "Say the Year Eighteen or Nineteen. Yes, a coastal exploration might be better than trying to cross the continent. Not a circumnavigation though, at first."
Dunin's big face blossomed in a grin. "Only about thirty-six thousand miles by the old map made from the air. Open water at north and south poles, plenty of it. Could do it in less than a year."
"More like fifty thousand, allowing for deflections, tacking, pull of currents we don't know. Storms, flat calms, contrary winds, repairs, expeditions ashore for provisions. You pull your horns in just a bit, my girl. Do you remember a desert plateau the map shows in the southern hemisphere? Solid cliff rising out of the sea for over seven hundred miles, and on top of it roasting sand all the way across the continent—and that plateau is only a small part of the coastal desolation down there. From the equator to the 30th parallel I don't think you'd have a chance to go ashore—and nothing to help you if you did."
Dunin still grinned. "Just sail past it."
"Yes—well out to sea, with the equatorial sun at work on you. Very few islands in that region, some of them bare rock." And he thought:If I might go myself...! I am fifty now, in Earth years, a young fifty....
He knew also that Dorothy would not prevent him. She would not go herself: she would remain at Adelphi, faithful to the daily things, undramatic labors and loyalties that make civilization something more than a vision. She was a young thirty-eight, though she had already borne five children. If he went away, she would mind the watch fires on the beaches, as she had done nine years ago; she would work in the school, the house, the gardens, stand by Christopher Wright during the depressions that sometimes overcame him. She would grow old waiting. Therefore, Paul knew, he would never leave her. "The explorations will come in good time, Dunin," he said. "You'll have 150 years to watch and take part. I think you'll live to see the other continent too, and the great islands in the southwest. In the meantime—there's so much exploring to be done right here!" He watched the water too, aware of Dorothy's face turned to him, soberand appraising. "You know, Dunin—that island we visited today—that could hold a community of a thousand between its two little hills. And I'm remembering the one forty miles north of us.Argo IIwas swept ashore there: get Doc to tell you that story sometime. I was sick for a week and laid up in one of the limestone caves while the others repaired the raft. A round island less than five miles across. We might sail there next trip."
"The other continent," Dunin murmured, and she watched the rising blue-green mound of Adelphi in the south. "The islands of the southwest...."
Dorothy leaned against the hand-hewn rail, looking northeast, saying lightly, "There he is...." The stone figure in the coastal range grew visible as the channel current pressed them a little too far eastward. The vast features were not clear; one could find the line of shoulder. "And Sears said, 'He looks west of the sun.' Was it long ago you told me that, Paul?"
"In a way it was.... Penny for 'em, Dorothy?"
"Oh——" Her brown face crinkled in the way he hoped for. "I was climbing down off philosophy with my usual bump—wondering what hell the twins have been raising while we're away. Brodaa's patience with them passes belief. With her own three sets of twins she's had practice. I wish Pak could have had children. Twenty-nine—late middle age for her people.... Helen's going to make a better med student than ever I was—don't you think, Paul? Seems like more than just a kid's enthusiasm."
"I think so." And Sears' plump daughter Teddy (Theodora-Pakriaa) would no doubt find herself too, sometime: there was no hurry. Even Christopher Wright no longer seemed to feel that time was hounding him, though his years by the Earth calendar were sixty-five, his hair and beard were white, his wiry thinness moved deliberately to save the strength he had once been able to spend like unconsidered gold.... "Look!"
Dorothy said carefully, "But that is impossible." A column of smoke on the flank of the coastal range, above one of the beaches where building stone was found. Blue-gray against the red and black, it rose straight in untroubled air. "They weren't taking Betsy out till we got back."
"Too high anyway," Dunin said. "No need to climb so high for the stone."
Dorothy whispered, "I haveneverquite believed that Ed and Ann——"
"Oh, Dorothy! Well, we——"
"Yes, I saw the lifeboat go down on the channel. It didn't sink." She shut her eyes. "It was a misty evening, lover, more ways than one. Remember, Dunin?"
"I'll always remember."
"Paul, I know that when the open-sea current below the island took the lifeboat it must have been smashed against the cliffs—oh, of course—and for nine years the sea spiders will have used the pieces of it for their little castles and hideaways. All the same—Ed and Ann could have managed to swim ashore. Cross the range somehow or go around it."
"Nothing to eat. Barren rock straight up from the beaches, where there are any beaches, for ninety miles south of the only place where they could have landed and for twenty miles north of it."
"But no kaksmas in the coast range either; no omasha, this side. Therearebeaches here and there. They might have found—shellfish—blue seaweed."
"Nine years——"
"Itissmoke. Our people wouldn't be up there...."
"You've never wanted to talk much about that day."
"No, I—haven't. I didn't behave too well myself. Yes, there are things I've never told.... Paul, Ed Spearman was like somebody I didn't know. He did say in so many words that he planned to go to Vestoia, not to—to throw himself on the mercy of Lantis, but to 'give her civilization'—he said. We tried, Ann and I, tried to reason with him against that. I think he had some alternative plan—maybe flying south of Vestoia as far as the fuel would take him and starting a community of his own—with Ann and me, you know, and himself the old man of the tribe."
"And without us," said Dunin mildly.
"Yes, dear, I recall that. He put that in words...." In a way, Paul did not want her to go on, living it over again, but she had a need to speak of it. "I suppose his plans made a kind of sense if you accepted the premise. As I couldn't, of course. When he said you were all lost,I believed (I had to believe) that he was—not lying perhaps, but telling something he hadn't truly seen. I know that was where I let go—I raged and screamed, and when he grabbed my arm (probably just wanting to quiet me down)—well, if he's living he'll have two or three white scars down his cheek. Uh-huh: the Dope comes clean. I ever think I was trying to get hold of my pistol when Arek took it away, and took his away too. After that she forced him to give a precise account of everything that had happened, every detail. She made him tell it five or six times, watching for contradictions. She was—justice embodied. I was afraid of her myself even while I loved her for it. I knew what he told us then was the truth: the fuel was low, he'd come direct to the island with no real knowledge of what had happened to you. He was saner after the telling. He lost a—a certain look of exalted listening, as if somebody behind Arek's shoulder were telling him what to do. Arek never gave back his pistol. We were on the beach. The giants had been bringing wood all day for a beacon fire. I remember the exact shape of a big shell at my feet, the look of a bit of driftwood tossed in by the channel breakers...."
"And Ann—"
"Oh, Ann! Tom two or three ways as usual. She was very much in love with him, you know, from our first days on Lucifer. But her mind was a battleground with no armistice. I think Ed always knew that. When he pleaded with her—reasonably too—she couldn't think, she could only cry and say: 'I won't go with you—I won't go.' He stopped trying—suddenly, as if he'd knowingly turned off a light inside himself—unsteady light and the only one he had, I reckon. He said, 'So much for the human race: but I'll see what one man can do here before I'm dead without issue.' And he walked off to the lifeboat, while Arek let his pistol dangle from her finger—and, Paul, I shall always think he knew Ann would run after him. I saw her tugging, trying to pull him out of the boat—but she was pulled in and it was gone."
"And I remember," said Dunin, "what you did after we lost sight of it."
"What I did...? What was that, Dunin? I'm blank there."
"You went to the beacon fire and put on more wood."
"Well," she said vaguely, "of course. We all did.... Thatissmoke, Paul. Lantis' pygmies or the wild giants couldn't be there on the cliffs."
Dunin said, "Oh, there are no giants in that country, Dorothy. Those low hills I remember west of the first camp—those kaksma hills were an impassable boundary in the old days. The country west of them—nobody went there, ever. And south of them—Vestoia. My wild kindred are all very far north of here...."
Argo IVeased up to the wharf, where Elis and Arek handled her like a toy, making her fast with ropes of a fabric as good as linen. Wright was there with them, and Tejron, and Pakriaa and Nisana, who were inseparable. "Too far," said Wright, and handed Paul the field glasses. "Just smoke."
Elis grumbled, "What's up there to burn? No vegetation. Rock."
The smoke seemed to be thinning. "How long since our last trip over?"
"Eight days, Paul," Tejron recalled. "My impatient eldest wanted to see if he could handle Betsy's oars, remember?"
"He could, too." Paul remembered. "Sears-Danik pulled his weight, my lady. Yes, that was the last time. And we saw nothing unusual."
Only Nisana thought to ask, "Good voyage today, Paul?"
"Fine, darling. You should have come."
Wright was carefully calm. "I'll go over, with Paul, Elis—and—"
"And me," said Dorothy, not smiling.
"Well... Okay, Dope."
Pakriaa's thin wrinkled face turned to him. "Nisana and I? Miniaan—she would remember the Vestoian dialect—but she is at the city. It would need an hour to send for her, and then it would be getting dark."
"Yes, come with us...."
The site of Jensen City was not where Wright and Paul had originally dreamed of it but two miles south, where the radiance of Sears Lake hung in the hills. A gap in the west admitted ocean winds; the outlet of the lakeran for a mile to the edge of a red stone cliff and tumbled over in a waterfall five hundred feet high. There would one day be houses along that mile of river. Already, near the waterfall, there was a temple of red and black stone devoted to quiet without ritual, thought of sometimes as a memorial to Sears and to the other dead, more often simply as a place to go for the satisfactions of silence. It had no name; Paul hoped it would never have one.
Miniaan of Vestoia was an eager citizen. The old wound had left one side of her head cruelly scarred; from the other side she was beautiful, by Charin as well as pygmy standards. Younger than Pakriaa, she was the mother of four, by Kajana—the archer whom Mijok had once carried on his shield, who would never walk again nor live a day without pain, and who was more cheerful as a permanent habit of mind than any of the other pygmy survivors of that war. The fifty-four pygmy children of Jensen City were all fathered by Abara and Kajana—a fact which caused old Abara to draw dead-pan comparisons between himself and Mister Johnson and to grow darkly desperate when Kajana wistfully asked him to explain why it was a joke....
Elis shipped the oars; Paul let down the anchor, a heavy block of stone, in two fathoms of blackening water; Elis lifted the dugout over the side and held it for them. He himself swam the short distance to the beach and eased the canoe through the shallows. Even now at low tide there was barely a quarter mile of gray sand between water and cliffs. Chipping away of building stone had created a fair path a hundred feet up; beyond, natural irregularities made it possible to climb another two hundred to the first setback of the great sea wall—a ledge which ran only as far as the next patch of beach, five miles south. Sunset had been ending whenArgo IVcame home; here there was a depth of evening quiet, no sign of smoke or life, no sound but the long hiss and moaning of small waves. "We might make a fire here," Wright said. "But there's enough light. They—they?—must have seenArgo."
"There," Dorothy said, and ran up the sand.
The others watched in frozen helplessness as the woman came down the crude cliff path, gaunt, seeming tall onlybecause of the gauntness—flaring ribs, thighs fallen in, every arm bone visible. Her hair was black disorder to her waist, her body a battleground of bruises, dirt, scars old and new, and she winced away from Dorothy with protesting hands. "You mustn't touch me because I'm very dirty, but I know who you are. Besides, I had to burn the last of my clothes. My baby died. I know who you are. You see, my milk stopped. You're Dorothy Leeds. I left him on the cliff. Matron would not approve. You see——"
"Ann—Ann——"
"I have two other sons, but this one died. On the cliff. I used to know a man who called me Miss Sarasate, but that was just his way of talking—I don't happen to be in practice." Still trying to fend off Dorothy's arms, Ann fell on her face....
Pakriaa was speaking softly, in the room where Ann was sleeping—Wright's room. "She will be healed," Pakriaa said. "I can remember—and you remember it too, Paul—how my own mind refused to be my servant for a while." Since Ann had been brought to Jensen City, Pakriaa and Nisana had never left her: the little women, both now far from youth, took on the duties of nursing with a fierce protectiveness, so that there was little for even Dorothy to do. Ann had slept heavily all night and morning. At noon the stone-walled house remained cool; mild air entered at the screenless window openings, stirring the wall map of Adelphi and the three of Paul's paintings which were the only decorations Wright allowed in this ascetic shelter. There was glass-making now, but in such a climate, with no serious insect pests, it seemed a waste of effort to make windows; a long overhang of the eaves was sufficient against the rains. The house was large, U-shaped around a garden courtyard open toward Sears Lake; the walls were of black stone, the roof of a material indistinguishable from slate, carried by hardwood timbers. Wright shared this house with Mijok and Arek, Pakriaa, Nisana, Miniaan, and their children and Arek's. There were five other such communal houses overlooking the lake; a seventh was building. The children were everywhere: it was, and would be for many years, a city of the young. Rak had died in the Year Four, a matter of falling asleep without waking, but Kamon lived, sharing a housewith Tejron, Paul and Dorothy, Brodaa and Kajana. Lately Sears' daughter had taken over the task of caring for Kajana in his helplessness, lifting him to and from a wheel chair that Paul and Mijok had contrived or carrying him to a hammock slung near the waterfall, where he could watch the ocean and its changes. In middle age, Kajana had taught himself to write, and kept a journal of the colony with a sober passion for detail.
Ann had not waked when Dorothy and Nisana washed her and clipped the dreadful tangle of her hair. "She will be healed," Pakriaa insisted. "Maybe in the next waking." And when Ann's gray eyes came open an hour later, they did show a measuring sanity, recognizing Dorothy and Paul, but wincing away when Nisana smiled and touched her.
"Do not be afraid of us," Pakriaa whispered. "We are still proud. But our pride now is that no one is afraid of us.... You came to my house in the old old days, remember? My blue house, and I thinking I would be Queen of the World? I laugh at that now. Do not look at what I was, Ann."
"Pakriaa ... Paul, you haven't changed much."
"One of our other friends is about to bring a man-sized meal——"
"Why, Paul, you must be——"
"Fifty, Earth calendar——"
Dorothy said, "We measure it in Lucifer years, pretty please."
"Nicer," Paul admitted. "That way I'm around thirty-seven. Ann, you—let's see: one Earth year, one point three eight—damn mental arithmetic—let's call you half past twenty-seven."
"Imagine that." Ann achieved a smile. "And—Pakriaa?"
"Twenty-nine. See—already I am an old woman and ugly."
"Don't be absurd, Pak," Dorothy said. "And this lady——"
"You would not remember me," said Nisana.
"Oh, but I do, I do. You—voted for Paul——"
Pakriaa chuckled with unforced gaiety. "Politics," Nisana chirped. "P.S., I got the job." Paul pinched her tiny ear lobe and stepped out to the kitchen, where hefound Wright with Arek. The children were at school, with Brodaa, Mijok, and Miniaan: ordinarily Wright would have been there too. When the youngest of this house were through with lessons they would go wandering in the hills with Mijok and Muson, so that Ann might have quiet, with only distant sounds of the laughter and playing in sunlight. "She's awake," Paul said, and Wright hurried to the bedroom, but Arek lingered, filling a tray.
Arek had grown almost to Mijok's height, filling out, a red mother goddess still bemused by inner discoveries. Her fine soft-furred fingers fussed at the earthen dishes on the wooden tray. "No ambition, no achievement—nothing, I think, could be worth the price of what's happened to her. Whether she recovers completely or not. There's human right and wrong. I think sometimes, Paul, it's not necessary to do much wondering. You can look straight at a thing and say: 'This ought not to be.'"
"Granted," Paul said, watching the garden through the broad kitchen window. His eldest, Helen, must have elected to do a little work after school instead of strolling away with the others. She was weeding, her brown head sheltered from the sun by an improvised hat of leaves; but for that she was prettily naked as the day she was born, and though she was humming to herself, she restrained the sound so that Paul could hardly hear it. She saw him in the window and grinned and waved. She had most of Dorothy's warm coloring, with Paul's long-legged slimness.
Arek saw her too and smiled. "What Ann should have had too.... Paul, I told you once, we love you. All the good new things we have—your work. All the same there's a devil in—some of you. As in us too, of course. Need of the laws is obvious. If Spearman is responsible—the Vestoians too, maybe?—then I think we live in too much seclusion here." She took up the tray. "Too easy to live all the time in Paradise and—leave things undone."
"Yes. Vestoia is big, Arek—or was, when it almost destroyed us."
"True. But you tell me that over there on the beach she said, 'I have two other sons.' Living, did she mean? We must find them, and Spearman too."
"I believe she can tell us about it soon."
"Understood that I go with you when you find them."
"Yes. Yes, Arek...."
In the bedroom Arek's manner was altogether changed. "Observe: this is asonisrôti à la mode Versailles, whatever that means. All I did was roast it. These are (Paul says) lima beans Munchausen, and here we have could-be asparagus. And by the way, the cheese tastes better'n it smells."
"Cheese——"
"Asonis milk," said Wright. "They moo, too."
"Oh, you've tamed them." Pain fought with interest in the haggard face. "Yes, Ed wanted to do that, but we—somehow we never——"
"If you're good," Arek said, "and eat all that, there's cake."
"You found something for sugar?"
"Can't tell it from terrestrial," Dorothy chattered, "only it's pink. From a tree fruit sort of like a plum. We have a plantation of 'em across the lake. You boil it down to nothing and the sugar crystallizes out. We make another kind from sap, not as good as maple. Flour—that's from the same old wheat that came from Earth. Miniaan—oh, you don't know her yet—Miniaan and Paul have experimented around with the local grass grains—nothing yet that measures up to wheat." Ann picked at the food, crying weakly at the first mouthful. "Ah, don't do that," said Dorothy, looking away. "You came home, that's all."
Later she ate ravenously. "I want to tell you——"
It took a long time in telling. Once she fell asleep but woke an hour later, obsessed with a need to continue....
The lifeboat drifted south, its last remnant of fuel gone in a mad effort to leap the coastal range. Water sneaked in at the seal of the floor window, damaged in an earlier landing, and Ed Spearman talked to himself. "Fugitives from a Sunday school—we'll live." Like a hurt boy he said, "We'll show 'em...." When the current beyond the island swept them toward the cliffs, he opened the door and pulled Ann into the water, dragging her, forgetting that she was herself a strong swimmer. Later, on the beach, he was tender, trying to comfort and reassure her with a vision of the future abundantly real to him. They had no food, no way to light a fire of driftwood. They would go to Vestoia, he said, convince Lantis thatthey were friends, with something to offer her empire; they would "bring her civilization."
From this beach there seemed to be no passage north. They could have found one by climbing high into the range—Ann did so, nine years later. But Spearman found a ledge of sorts running south: it might take them the eighty-odd miles to the lower end of the range or give out at any point, trapping them. It did give out twice; both times, rather than clamber higher on the cliffs, Spearman hurled his famished body through the breakers and swam south, aided by the current until it was possible to continue along the rocks. Ann followed, not quite wishing for the death the ocean could have given easily. They kept alive with shellfish and seaweed washed ashore and small crustaceans that hid in the tide lines and in crannies of wet rock; there were pools of rain water and violent small streams plunging down the range. It took them fifty days to cover the eighty miles. ("I think I spent a hundred coming back," Ann said. "Couldn't swim, with the baby. It would have been against the current anyway. Climbed—sometimes went back miles from a dead end to try again.") In the afternoons the sun pressed on them with total fury; then they could only crawl into what shadow the rocks gave and wait for the torture to cease.
But at last there were trees. Level ground. In a few miles, a rapid friendly river. ("Are there rivers here? I've forgotten. Nothing prettier in the world. I let that one close over me. Ed pulled me out—we had to go on.")
There were five more of those bright leaping coastal streams in a journey of another fifty miles southeast through good country, where the great range thinned out into rolling jungle and meadowland. There were asonis and small game. Spearman made himself weapons. Ann could remember these days almost with pleasure. They had, she said, something the flavor of a delayed childhood, a glimpse of Eden. Spearman was for a time simply a strong and intelligent man measuring himself against nature for survival, master of a simple environment with none to question his decisions and no social complexities to warp them. ("I wished we could settle in that country, the two of us. I even begged for it. He had to go on.")
From the remembered map, Spearman knew there was an obscure pygmy settlement south of the end of the range, some fifty miles below Vestoia: merely a cluster of parallel lines that had appeared in the photographs, it might or might not be a part of the empire of Lantis. It was near the headwaters of a seventh river, which flowed, not to the coast, but eastward, into the deep, wide, violent outlet of Lake Argo. ("He never told me why he was following that river so cautiously, until we reached the villages. And history repeated itself.")
The villages were a furtive, chronically frightened community. They knew of Vestoia but believed, correctly, that the groping tentacles of empire had not yet found them. Lantis' drive was mainly to the east, where the country was easier and pygmy settlements were numerous; even her war against Pakriaa's people had been a diversion, more a matter of hurt pride than gainful conquest. Between these hidden villages and Vestoia there were meadows, dangerous with omasha, and some swampland; below the two small Vestoian lakes the current of the river Argo was too fierce for the flimsy boats of Lantis. So the villages of the seventh river, under a sly but feeble queen, waited like a rabbit in a hedge. With sharply calculated drama—but smiling this time, Ann said, like a pleased teacher at a blackboard—Ed Spearman overturned another idol and became a god.
At the end of two years, when Spearman's goddess had borne him twin sons, there was industry in the villages. There was an army of a thousand spears, bladed with iron from certain small hills in the north between Vestoia and Spearman City. These hills were dangerous with burrows, but workers of a particular kind could be made to go there. The soldiers overcame their distaste for the bow when they had watched the course of arrows properly vaned and tipped with iron or bronze. They did not need to be taught how to hate Vestoia—nevertheless they relished it when Spearman decided that political realities demanded he should tell them an epic tale, the tale of a war he and companion gods had waged against that place. Vengeance, divine or human, was a thing the pygmies had understood from the first biting and scratching of infancy.