Time's Last Gift

by Philip José Farmer

  Gribardsun watched the rodent with its big hairy feet bound along on top of the thin frozen crust of the snow. And then darkness exploded in him. When he awoke, he had a sharp pain in the back of his head. He was lying on his side, and his hands were tied behind him. A pair of bison-hide boots were directly in front of his eyes. He looked up along wolf-hide trousers and a spotted black and white horse-hide parka. The man had a long dark beard with red undertones, thick black eyebrows and greenish eyes. He held a reindeer antler-tipped spear.

  Gribardsun turned over slowly and saw six other strangers.

  A moment later, three more came through the snow with a fourth whose hands were tied behind him.

  ‘This is a fine mess you’ve gotten us into!’ Drummond said.

  Gribardsun might have smiled at this if his head had not hurt so much. A stone axe must have been thrown at him. That had to be so, since he was sure that not even an aboriginal woodsman could get close enough to hit him with a weapon in hand before he heard him.

  He was sure that they had not arrived after the firing had ended. They must have been burrowed down in the snow, able to see him without his seeing them. Then, when he turned his back, one had gotten up slowly and thrown his axe.

  He was surprised that he was still alive, but he was glad. While he lived, he had hope.

  A big man lifted him up and set him on his feet. Then he knocked him down again with a fist in his solar plexus.

  Gribardsun writhed around for a while, sucking in air, though he was not so badly hurt as he pretended. He had had time to tense his muscles and also to throw himself slightly backward to ride with the blow.

  The big man picked him up again, raised his fist, probably expecting Gribardsun to wince, and then lowered it at a word from a man who seemed to be the chief.

  Gribardsun and Silverstein were led away to the south with a spearman behind each to prod him if he lagged. Their snowshoes had been left behind. Either the strangers had not seen them use them, and so did not understand their use, or they were ignoring what they had seen because they did not fully comprehend it. But one man carried Drummond’s revolver in his belt. The chief carried Gribardsun’s rifle. They had gone roughly half a mile when they saw a dozen or so gray shapes drift along the side of the hill, sliding in and out between the trees. The wolves were on their way to the feast.

  After two miles of hard walking - or wading - through heavy snow that was sometimes waist-deep, they came to the camp. This was pitched against the south side of a steep hill and consisted of thirty-three wigwam-like tents. Trenches had been cut through the twenty-foot-high drifts to connect the tents. But snow was a good thermal insulation material, and as long as the tents did not collapse, they would keep the inhabitants warm. As Gribardsun was to find out, the tribesmen had dug out much of the snow immediately around the tents, leaving the top projections untouched. Thus, there was not as much weight on the tents as there seemed at first sight.

  At the moment, Gribardsun was in no position to make detailed observations. Some of the women, on hearing of the disastrous casualties, launched screams and wails to the skies and their nails at the faces of the prisoners. Both men suffered deep gashes before the men pulled the women off. Gribardsun, however, kicked three women in the stomach, knocking out two and making the third vomit. He could have killed all three but thought he would be better off if he did not.

  The big man who had hit him with his fist laughed when the women went sailing out of the pack. He slapped Gribardsun several times in the face after he had rescued him, but not in a vengeful spirit. The man was grinning gap-toothed as he hit Gribardsun, as if he enjoyed seeing the women hurt. He also enjoyed hitting the prisoner, but he wasn’t out to hurt him badly.

  The prisoners were led through a trench of snow which rose high over Gribardsun’s six-foot-three head. The central tent of the three concentric circles of tents was the largest. The chief lived in this with two adult women - his mother, apparently, and his wife - two juvenile females, a juvenile male, a six-year-old boy and a year-old girl. Wooden frames held the butchered carcasses of a deer and a quarter of a bison and other frames held spears and axes and cutting and chopping stones and sewing equipment of bone and sinew. A single fire in the center, confined in a stone hearth, sent blue smoke upward to the narrow opening in the top. It also sent much of the smoke around the tent.

  The occupants were naked except for loin strips, though the temperature was about ten degrees above zero Fahrenheit except very near the fire. The tent stank of stale sweat, saliva burning in the fire, wet furs near the fire, rotting teeth, gummy dirt, rotten meat on some bones in a corner, and excrement in two open dug-out trunks of wood used as chamber pots.

  After being out in the open, the stench was almost as bad as a fist blow. But both men had encountered this every time they had entered a winter tent of the Wota’shaimg. Gribardsun had adapted - or at least had not complained - almost immediately. Silverstein had never really become at ease in the stench.

  Three men pointed their spears at the two while the women removed the packs from their backs. All their clothes except their shorts were taken off. To get the parkas and undershirts off, their hands were untied. Gribardsun estimated his chances of breaking loose and decided against them. Even if he could get past the spears inside the tent and the mob outside, he would be naked. He still might escape freezing if he ran all the way back to camp. He did not have these people’s tolerance for cold, but he had more than most twenty-first centurians.

  However, his chances at this time were just too slim. He would wait.

  When his hands were retied, they were fastened in front of him. This was an advantage, but his ankle was tied by a tough sinew to the bottom of a tent pole. Silverstein was similarly tethered. The sinew was long enough for them to sit by the fire, which they did without objection from anyone. The chief and the big man seemed amused by the shivering of their prisoners.

  ‘What do you think is going to happen to us?’ Drummond said through chattering teeth.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Gribardsun said. ‘But since we killed so many, somewhere near half their adult males, we’ll probably be required to suffer for it.’

  ‘Torture?’

  ‘It’s not outside the realm of possibility,’ Gribardsun said.

  The men left. The prisoners were in the charge of the juvenile male and the women. The juvenile sat on a pile of furs and pointed a spear at them. The women sat or squatted near the edge of the tent and looked intently at their guests. One of the young females was quite pretty, if the dirtiness of her hair and face and the streak of mucus running from nose to lip were discounted. She looked back into Gribardsun’s eyes for a long time before dropping her gaze. She wore only a strip of wolf fur around her waist, revealing a well-rounded and full-breasted form. Her face was a modified and attractive version of her father’s. But her mother’s sagging fat figure was a sad forecast.

  Gribardsun was not that taken by her, but he did hope he could somehow use her to escape. So he gazed admiringly at her, smiled, and even winked once.

  That was a mistake. She leaped up shrieking and plunged out through the opening.

  A minute later, the angry voices of the chief and other men were at the entrance, and then the chief entered with a man whose painted face and one-eyed baton de commandement indicated the witch doctor. They were followed by the big man who had previously hit Gribardsun and several others. The juvenile male was standing up, his spear jabbing at Gribardsun. His skin was pale and his knees were shaking. The other women looked frightened. The juvenile was the only one who had seen the wink.

  Gribardsun could understand nothing of the words shouted at him, of course. But he understood after several minutes of dancing and chanting by the doctor that he should not have winked. To this tribe, that was a form of the evil eye. Gribardsun did not know what to do next. If he winked at the witch doctor, for instance, to show him that his magic was stronger, then the witch doctor might logically decide
to put Gribardsun’s eyes out.

  What followed was unexpected but not unwelcome. In this tribe, virtue, that is, white magic, that is, the tribe’s own magic, triumphed over evil, that is, black magic, that is, the magic of another tribe.

  But the magic must be put to the test, and so Gribardsun was taken outside where he and the big man entered a small arena dug out of the snow. Silverstein was taken along. The big man stripped naked, and Gribardsun’s bonds were untied and his shorts removed. The adult males then crowded around the walls of the snow pit, and juvenile males and some of the other women pressed in behind them.

  The big man was about six-foot-five and broader-shouldered, heavier-legged, and thicker-armed than Gribardsun. He had some fat but not enough to give the impression of obesity.

  Gribardsun understood without being told that this was to be trial by combat. He wondered, briefly, if this custom had actually arisen in this tribe and spread out from there. But he knew that it was doubtful that one small group would have originated the custom. In any event, no one would ever know, since study of this period was so restricted.

  He hopped up and down and flexed his legs and arms and worked his fingers to restore his circulation. His shivering, however, had stopped.

  The big man, smiling confidently, walked up to Gribardsun with his arms out and his hands open.

  Silverstein, shivering in one corner of the arena, guarded by the juvenile expected Gribardsun to win. Though the tribesman was bigger, Gribardsun knew all the philosophies and techniques of twenty-first century schools of hand-to-hand fighting. He should be able to chop his opponent down with karate or judo in short order.

  But the Englishman at first made no attempt to use anything but brute strength. He grabbed the tribesman’s hands in his and waited. The big man, grinning, pushed against his smaller opponent. Gribardsun dug his naked heels into the snow and pushed back. The two slipped back and forth and then, suddenly, Gribardsun twisted the other man’s hands, and the man dropped sideways onto the snow. The man struck heavily. The spectators grunted, or said something like’Uhunga!’

  His grin lost, the man got to his feet. Gribardsun seized his hands again and yanked downward and inward, and when the man was near enough, brought up his knee and drove it against the chin beneath the thick beard.

  This time the man had great difficulty getting to his feet.

  Gribardsun helped him up, grabbed him by the back of the neck and his thigh and lifted him above his head. He turned around and around, slowly, smiling at the awed tribespeople, and then heaved the man, who must have weighed at least 280 pounds, over their heads and against the edge of the arena. The man struck it side-on, slid down, and lay at its bottom motionless.

  The witch doctor advanced from the crowd, shaking his baton and muttering something rhythmic. He brought the end of the baton under Gribardsun’s nose, held it there, and then moved it from side to side.

  Gribardsun suddenly grabbed the baton, tore it from the doctor’s grasp, and sent it spinning far out into the snow.

  The doctor turned gray under the paint on his face and chest.

  The next step was up to the tribesmen. Silverstein hoped they would not try something simple and logical, such as launching every spear they had against the two prisoners.

  Nobody moved. Everybody stared at Gribardsun. He smiled and walked toward the exit of the arena.

  They gave way before him, and he took Silverstein’s hand and led him back to the chief’s lodge. There they sat down by the fire. Gribardsun added wood to it despite a muttered protest from the old woman who had not witnessed the combat outside.

  The witch doctor and the chief entered. Gribardsun looked at the fire and ignored them. The doctor danced around the fire, passing behind Gribardsun and shaking his baton, which he had rescued, over the Englishman’s head. He went around the fire widdershins twelve times and stopped on the other side of the fire just opposite Gribardsun. He raised the baton to his eye and looked through the hole in its end at Gribardsun.

  Gribardsun raised his eyes and stared back at the doctor, then made an O with his thumb and first finger and stared at the doctor through that.

  The witch doctor became pale.

  ‘When among the Romans, out-Roman them,’ Gribardsun said to Silverstein.

  He stood up and walked around the fire and seized the doctor by the nose and twisted it.

  The doctor yelped with pain and flung his baton across the tent.

  Gribardsun released the nose and went to the side of the tent and picked up the baton. It was of carved bone, and the hole in its end was large enough so that the shaft of a spear could be thrust through it. Originally, in the nineteenth century, the scientists had thought that the batons de commandement were for use in magical rites only. Then they had decided, in the twentieth century, that the batons were used to straighten out shafts. The truth, as the expedition had discovered, validated both theories. Some batons were used as physical tools and some as magical tools. In a sense, the magical batons were also shaft straighteners, since they were used by the witch doctors to straighten - or to bend - the invisible shafts that bound the universe together. The witch doctors kept the philosophy of the use of batons as a guild secret, transmitting the knowledge only to their successors. Gribardsun had tried to get Glamug to tell him the arcana of his trade, but Glamug had refused. However, by using a highly sensitive directional microphone, Gribardsun had eavesdropped on the school Glamug conducted for his two sons. He knew that the bone or wood or ivory baton was considered to be powerful. But a doctor who was powerful enough to use his own fingers to form the magical shaft-straightening hole was dreaded. There were very few. In fact, Glamug had never actually seen one. But the great doctor of tribal history - Simaumg - had used only his own fingers.

  Gribardsun assumed that this tribe had its equivalent of Simaumg, and that its doctor would be aware of the dangerousness of such a man. He was right. The witch doctor gave way completely. He lowered his baton and stared wide-eyed at Gribardsun. Then he reversed the baton and walked around the fire and handed it to him. The Englishman passed his finger through the hole in it several times and handed it back to the doctor.

  Silverstein had watched all this bewildered. Gribardsun explained and then told him to put on his clothes. He doubted that anyone would interfere.

  The chief and the witch doctor conferred in low tones for a while on the other side of the fire. Gribardsun got tired of waiting for them to come to a decision. He got up and put on his own clothes and resumed his place by the fire. Silverstein took out his pocket transceiver and soon got into contact with Rachel. He described as best he could their situation and location.

  ‘We were their prisoners, and I suppose we still are,’ Drummond said. ‘But, somehow, John has gotten the upper hand. I don’t know how long he can keep it, though.’

  Silverstein confined himself to reporting the situation, though Rachel tried to get him to talk about his running away. Gribardsun gestured, and Silverstein brought the transceiver to him.

  ‘Don’t come after us,’ he said to Rachel. ‘You might upset the rather delicate balance of the situation. We’ll keep in touch. I’ll report in an hour.’

  ‘And if you don’t?’ Rachel asked.

  ‘Then you can come after us. But if this tribe loses any more men, it’s going to perish.’

  That evening the chief, the doctor, the big man (subdued and somewhat banged up), and a white-haired old man ate with the two prisoners in the tent. They tried to carry on a conversation with sign language. The chief managed to get across the idea that they were not prisoners but that the tribe could use the help of the two. By then the firearms had been returned to Gribardsun, who used signs to indicate that he would use his rifle to get meat for them.

  Gribardsun also tried to find out from them what had happened to cause them to attack Silverstein, but he failed. Silverstein stuck to his story that they had jumped him, and he had been forced to shoot them. Gribardsun did not sa
y anything about his narrow escape from one of Drummond’s bullets. But he did not return the revolver to Drummond, nor did Drummond protest when Gribardsun dismantled the pistol and put the parts in his pack.

  He did object when the Englishman said they would spend the night in the tent and perhaps stay for several days.

  They’ll murder us in our beds!’ he said. ‘They must be just waiting to catch us off guard. My God, we killed almost half their men!’

  ‘But through what is, to them, magical means,’ Gribardsun said. ‘So they expect us to reimburse them somehow. We are under obligation to them. At least, that is the feeling I get. And, in a way, we are obligated.’

  ‘But we can’t support everyone we run across!’ Silverstein protested. ‘You’ve already got Dubhab’s family on your hands. In fact, the whole tribe, since they’ve come to depend more and more on you. Would you add another tribe to your entourage?’

  ‘We are intruders,’ Gribardsun said. ‘Our presence is unnatural, if anything that exists in nature can be said to be unnatural. We are here to observe and study. But our very intrusion upsets the natural order of things, so that we are not observing things as they would be if we were not here. We constitute an example of Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty, but in a social sense. We can’t but affect what we would like to see in its natural state. So our observations are necessarily distorted or qualified.’

  ‘I know that!’ Silverstein said impatiently.

  ‘Yes, but the point is that if we come to these people and bring catastrophe and ruin, then we must do something to help them. If we could be the ideal observers, invisible, unnoticed, then we would have an obligation not to interfere in the slightest. We could gather valid scientific data about them, and if they flourished or perished, were well or ill, tortured or the torturers, we would be the ideal observers, the unseen camera. But we can’t be. To make an intimate study, we have to become intimate with them. And that, to me, involves a certain amount of obligation.’