by Anthology
There was a silence.
“You understand English, don’t you, some of you?”
“Yes. I don’t understand your question, Mr Dongh.”
“Colonel Dongh, if you please!”
“Then you’ll call me Colonel Selver, if you please.” A singing note came into Selver’s voice; he stood up, ready for the contest, tunes running in his mind like rivers.
But the old yumen just stood there, huge and heavy, angry yet not meeting the challenge. “I did not come here to be insulted by you little humanoids,” he said. But his lips trembled as he said it. He was old, and bewildered, and humiliated. All anticipation of triumph went out of Selver. There was no triumph in the world any more, only death. He sat down again. “I didn’t intend insult, Colonel Dongh,” he said resignedly. “Will you repeat your question, please?”
“I want to hear your terms, and then you’ll hear ours, that’s all there is to it.”
Selver repeated what he had said to Gosse.
Dongh listened with apparent impatience. “All right. Now you don’t realise that we’ve had a functioning radio in the prison compound for three days now.” Selver did know this, as Reswan had at once checked on the object dropped by the helicopter, lest it be a weapon; the guards reported it was a radio, and he let the yumens keep it. Selver merely nodded. “So we’ve been in contact with the three outlying camps, the two on King Land and one on New Java, right along, and if we had decided to make a break for it and escape from that prison compound then it would have been very simple for us to do that, with the helicopters to drop us weapons and covering our movements with their mounted weapons, one flamethrower could have got us out of the compound and in case of need they also have the bombs that can blow up an entire area. You haven’t seen those in action of course.”
“If you’d left the compound, where would you have gone?”
“The point is, without introducing into this any beside the point or erroneous factors, now we are certainly greatly outnumbered by your forces, but we have the four helicopters at the camps, which there’s no use you trying to disable as they are under fully armed guard at all times now, and also all the serious fire-power, so that the cold reality of the situation is we can pretty much call it a draw and speak in positions of mutual equality. This of course is a temporary situation. If necessary we are enabled to maintain a defensive police action to prevent all-out war. Moreover we have behind us the entire fire-power of the Terran Interstellar Fleet, which could blow your entire planet right out of the sky. But these ideas are pretty intangible to you, so let’s just put it as plainly and simply as I can, that we’re prepared to negotiate with you, for the present time, in terms of an equal frame of reference.”
Selver’s patience was short; he knew his ill-temper was a symptom of his deteriorated mental state, but he could no longer control it. “Go on, then!”
“Well, first I want it clearly understood that as soon as we got the radio we told the men at the other camps not to bring us weapons and not to try any airlift or rescue attempts, and reprisals were strictly out of order—”
“That was prudent. What next?”
Colonel Dongh began an angry retort, then stopped; he turned very pale. “Isn’t there anything to sit down on,” he said.
Selver went around the yumen group, up the slope, into the empty two-room bungalow, and took the folding desk-chair. Before he left the silent room he leaned down and laid his cheek on the scarred, raw wood of the desk, where Lyubov had always sat when he worked with Selver or alone; some of his papers were lying there now; Selver touched them lightly. He carried the chair out and set it in the rainwet dirt for Dongh. The old man sat down, biting his lips, his almond-shaped eyes narrow with pain.
“Mr Gosse, perhaps you can speak for the Colonel,” Selver said. “He isn’t well.”
“I’ll do the talking,” Benton said, stepping forward, but Dongh shook his head and muttered, “Gosse.”
With the Colonel as auditor rather than speaker it went more easily. The yumens were accepting Selver’s terms. With a mutual promise of peace, they would withdraw all their outposts and live in one area, the region they had forested in Middle Sornol: about 1700 square miles of rolling land, well watered. They undertook not to enter the forest; the forest people undertook not to trespass on the Cut Lands.
The four remaining airships were the cause of some argument. The yumens insisted they needed them to bring their people from the other islands to Sornol. Since the machines carried only four men and would take several hours for each trip, it appeared to Selver that the yumens could get to Eshsen rather sooner by walking, and he offered them ferry service across the straits; but it appeared that yumens never walked far. Very well, they could keep the hoppers for what they called the ‘Airlift Operation.’ After that, they were to destroy them.—Refusal. Anger. They were more protective of their machines than of their bodies. Selver gave in, saying they could keep the hoppers if they flew them only over the Cut Lands and if the weapons in them were destroyed. Over this they argued, but with one another, while Selver waited, occasionally repeating the terms of his demand, for he was not giving in on this point.
“What’s the difference, Benton,” the old Colonel said at last, furious and shaky, “can’t you see that we can’t use the damned weapons? There’s three million of these aliens all scattered out all over every damned island, all covered with trees and undergrowth, no cities, no vital network, no centralised control. You can’t disable a guerrilla type structure with bombs, it’s been proved, in fact my own part of the world where I was born proved it for about thirty years fighting off major super-powers one after the other in the twentieth century. And we’re not in a position until a ship comes to prove our superiority. Let the big stuff go, if we can hold on to the side-arms for hunting and self-defense!”
He was their Old Man, and his opinion prevailed in the end, as it might have done in a Men’s Lodge. Benton sulked. Gosse started to talk about what would happen if the truce was broken, but Selver stopped him. “These are possibilities, we aren’t yet done with certainties. Your Great Ship is to return in three years, that is three and a half years of your count. Until that time you are free here. It will not be very hard for you. Nothing more will be taken away from Centralville, except some of Lyubov’s work that I wish to keep. You still have most of your tools of tree-cutting and ground-moving; if you need more tools, the iron-mines of Peldel are in your territory. I think all this is clear. What remains to be known is this: When that ship comes, what will they seek to do with you, and with us?”
“We don’t know,” Gosse said. Dongh amplified: “If you hadn’t destroyed the ansible communicator first thing off, we might be receiving some current information on these matters, and our reports would of course influence the decisions that may be made concerning a finalised decision on the status of this planet, which we might then expect to begin to implement before the ship returns from Prestno. But due to wanton destruction due to your ignorance of your own interests, we haven’t even got a radio left that will transmit over a few hundred miles.”
“What is the ansible?” The word had come up before in this talk; it was a new one to Selver.
“ICD,” the Colonel said, morose.
“A kind of radio,” Gosse said, arrogant. “It put us in instant touch with our home-world.”
“Without the 27-year waiting?”
Gosse stared down at Selver. “Right. Quite right. You learned a great deal from Lyubov, didn’t you?”
“Didn’t he just,” said Benton. “He was Lyubov’s little green buddyboy. He picked up everything worth knowing and a bit more besides. Like all the vital points to sabotage, and where the guards would be posted, and how to get into the weapon stockpile. They must have been in touch right up to the moment the massacre started.”
Gosse looked uneasy. “Raj is dead. All that’s irrelevant now, Benton. We’ve got to establish—”
“Are you trying to infer in
some way that Captain Lyubov was involved in some activity that could be called treachery to the Colony, Benton?” said Dongh, glaring and pressing his hands against his belly. “There were no spies or treachers on my staff, it was absolutely handpicked before we ever left Terra and I know the kind of men I have to deal with.”
“I’m not inferring anything, Colonel. I’m saying straight out that it was Lyubov stirred up the creechies, and if orders hadn’t been changed on us after that Fleet ship was here, it never would have happened.”
Gosse and Dongh both started to speak at once. “You are all very ill,” Selver observed, getting up and dusting himself off, for the damp brown oak-leaves clung to his short body-fur as to silk. “I’m sorry we’ve had to hold you in the creechie-pen, it is not a good place for the mind. Please send for your men from the camps. When all are here and the large weapons have been destroyed, and the promise has been spoken by all of us, then we shall leave you alone. The gates of the compound will be opened when I leave here today. Is there more to be said?”
None of them said anything. They looked down at him. Seven big men, with tan or brown hairless skin, cloth-covered, dark-eyed, grim-faced; twelve small men, green or brownish-green, fur-covered, with the large eyes of the seminocturnal creature, with dreamy faces; between the two groups, Selver, the translator, frail, disfigured, holding all their destinies in his empty hands. Rain fell softly on the brown earth about them.
“Farewell then,” Selver said, and led his people away.
“They’re not so stupid,” said the headwoman of Berre as she accompanied Selver back to Endtor. “I thought such giants must be stupid, but they saw that you’re a god, I saw it in their faces at the end of the talking. How well you talk that gobble-gubble. Ugly they are, do you think even their children are hairless?”
“That we shall never know, I hope.”
“Ugh, think of nursing a child that wasn’t furry. Like trying to suckle a fish.”
“They are all insane,” said old Tubab, looking deeply distressed. “Lyubov wasn’t like that, when he used to come to Tuntar. He was ignorant, but sensible. But these ones, they argue, and sneer at the old man, and hate each other, like this,” and he contorted his grey-furred face to imitate the expressions of the Terrans, whose words of course he had not been able to follow. “Was that what you said to them, Selver, that they’re mad?”
“I told them that they were ill. But then, they’ve been defeated, and hurt, and locked in that stone cage. After that anyone might be ill and need healing.”
“Who’s to heal them,” said the headwoman of Berre, “their women are all dead. Too bad for them. Poor ugly things—great naked spiders they are, ugh!”
“They are men, men, like us, men,” Selver said, his voice shrill and edged like a knife.
“Oh, my dear lord god, I know it, I only meant they look like spiders,” said the old woman, caressing his cheek. “Look here, you people, Selver is worn out with this going back and forth between Endtor and Eshsen, let’s sit down and rest a bit.”
“Not here,” Selver said. They were still in the Cut Lands, among stumps and grassy slopes, under the bare sky. “When we come under the trees. . . .” He stumbled, and those who were not gods helped him to walk along the road.
7.
Davidson found a good use for Major Muhamed’s tape recorder. Somebody had to make a record of events on New Tahiti, a history of the crucifixion of the Terran Colony. So that when the ships came from Mother Earth they could learn the truth. So that future generations could learn how much treachery and cowardice and folly humans were capable of, and how much courage against all odds. During his free moments—not much more than moments since he had assumed command—he recorded the whole story of the Smith Camp Massacre, and brought the record up to date for New Java, and for King and Central also, as well as he could with the garbled hysterical stuff that was all he got by way of news from Central HQ.
Exactly what had happened there nobody would ever know, except the creechies, for the humans were trying to cover up their own betrayals and mistakes. The outlines were clear, though. An organised bunch of creechies, led by Selver, had been let into the Arsenal and the Hangars, and turned loose with dynamite, grenades, guns, and flamethrowers to totally destruct the city and slaughter the humans. It was an inside job, the fact that HQ was the first place blown up proved that. Lyubov of course had been in on it, and his little green buddies had proved just as grateful as you might expect, and cut his throat like the others. At least, Gosse and Benton claimed to have seen him dead the morning after the massacre. But could you believe any of them, actually? You could assume that any human left alive in Central after that night was more or less of a traitor. A traitor to his race.
The women were all dead, they claimed. That was bad enough, but what was worse, there was no reason to believe it. It was easy for the creechies to take prisoners in the woods, and nothing would be easier to catch than a terrified girl running out of a burning town. And wouldn’t the little green devils like to get hold of a human girl and try experiments on her? God knows how many of the women were still alive in the creechie warrens, tied down underground in one of those stinking holes, being touched and felt and crawled over and defiled by the filthy, hairy little monkeymen. It was unthinkable. But by God sometimes you have to be able to think about the unthinkable.
A hopper from King had dropped the prisoners at Central a receiver-transmitter the day after the massacre, and Muhamed had taped all his exchanges with Central starting that day. The most incredible one was a conversation between him and Colonel Dongh. The first time he played it Davidson had torn the thing right off the reel and burned it. Now he wished he had kept it, for the records, as a perfect proof of the total incompetence of the C.O.‘s at both Central and New Java. He had given in to his own hotbloodedness, destroying it. But how could he sit there and listen to the recording of the Colonel and the Major discussing total surrender to the creechies, agreeing not to try retaliation, not to defend themselves, to give up all their big weapons, to all squeeze together onto a bit of land picked out for them by the creechies, a reservation conceded to them by their generous conquerors, the little green beasts. It was incredible. Literally incredible.
Probably old Ding Dong and Moo were not actually traitors by intent. They had just gone spla, lost their nerve. It was this damned planet that did it to them. It took a very strong personality to withstand it. There was something in the air, maybe pollens from all those trees, acting as some kind of drug maybe, that made ordinary humans begin to get as stupid and out of touch with reality as the creechies were. Then, being so outnumbered, they were pushovers for the creechies to wipe out.
It was too bad Muhamed had had to be put out of the way, but he would never have agreed to accept Davidson’s plans, that was clear; he’d been too far gone. Anyone who’d heard that incredible tape would agree. So it was better he got shot before he really knew what was going on, and now no shame would attach to his name, as it would to Dongh’s and all the other officers left alive at Central.
Dongh hadn’t come on the radio lately. Usually it was Juju Sereng, in Engineering. Davidson had used to pal around a lot with Juju and had thought of him as a friend, but now you couldn’t trust anybody any more. And Juju was another asiatiform. It was really queer how many of them had survived the Centralville Massacre; of those he’d talked to, the only non-asio was Gosse. Here in Java the fifty-five loyal men remaining after the reorganization were mostly eurafs like himself, some afros and afrasians, not one pure asio. Blood tells, after all. You couldn’t be fully human without some blood in your veins from the Cradle of Man. But that wouldn’t stop him from saving those poor yellow bastards at Central, it just helped explain their moral collapse under stress.
“Can’t you realise what kind of trouble you’re making for us, Don?” Juju Sereng had demanded in his flat voice. “We’ve made a formal truce with the creechies. And we’re under direct orders from Earth not to int
erfere with the hilfs and not to retaliate. Anyhow how the hell can we retaliate? Now all the fellows from King Land and South Central are here with us we’re still less than two thousand, and what have you got there on Java, about sixty-five men isn’t it? Do you really think two thousand men can take on three million intelligent enemies, Don?”
“Juju, fifty men can do it. It’s a matter of will, skill, and weaponry.”
“Batshit! But the point is, Don, a truce has been made. And if it’s broken, we’ve had it. It’s all that keeps us afloat, now. Maybe when the ship gets back from Prestno and sees what happened, they’ll decide to wipe out the creechies. We don’t know. But it does look like the creechies intend to keep the truce, after all it was their idea, and we have got to. They can wipe us out by sheer numbers, any time, the way they did Centralville. There were thousands of them. Can’t you understand that, Don?”
“Listen, Juju, sure I understand. If you’re scared to use the three hoppers you’ve still got there, you could send ‘em over here, with a few fellows who see things like we do here. If I’m going to liberate you fellows singlehanded, I sure could use some more hoppers for the job.”
“You aren’t going to liberate us, you’re going to incinerate us, you damned fool. Get that last hopper over here to Central now: that’s the Colonel’s personal order to you as Acting C.O. Use it to fly your men here; twelve trips, you won’t need more than four local dayperiods. Now act on those orders, and get to it.” Ponk, off the air—afraid to argue with him any more.
At first he worried that they might send their three hoppers over and actually bomb or strafe New Java Camp; for he was, technically, disobeying orders, and old Dongh wasn’t tolerant of independent elements. Look how he’d taken it out on Davidson already, for that tiny reprisal-raid on Smith. Initiative got punished. What Ding Dong liked was submission, like most officers. The danger with that is that it can make the officer get submissive himself. Davidson finally realized, with a real shock, that the hoppers were no threat to him, because Dongh, Sereng, Gosse, even Benton were afraid to send them. The creechies had ordered them to keep the hoppers inside the Human Reservation: and they were obeying orders.
