Midworld

by Alan Dean Foster

  “And you’re pretty certain they’re not.”

  “That’s right, sir,” Cohoma chipped in. “Too many similarities, an axe made of ship alloy, other things. Same language, although they’ve developed a dialect all their own, family structure is—”

  “Yes, yes,” Hansen cut him off with a casual wave. “Saved your lives too, did they? And brought you all the way back through that rooted Hades out there—how far did you say you’d come?” He cocked a querulous eye at Logan. She named a figure and the chief of station whistled. “Just the four of you then, that many kilometers through that?” He gestured over his shoulder toward the window.

  “Yes, sir—and a couple of very domesticated animals.”

  “It was a very gutsy thing for them to try, sir,” Cohoma added. “Up until this trek none of their tribe had been more than a couple of kilometers from their home village.”

  “All of which is most gratifying—and utterly implausible. How the Churchwarden did you survive?”

  “Sometimes I wonder myself,” Logan responded. “Chief, could I sit down, please. I’m a little worn.”

  Hansen shook his head dolefully. “I forget priorities. Excuse me, Kimi.” He called and Sal appeared at the door. “Salomon, bring in some chairs for everyone.”

  The chairs were brought. Born and Losting imitated, rather hesitantly, the sitting motions of their two giant companions.

  “We pulled it off with a combination of good luck and the skill of these two.” She indicated the hunters. “Born and his folk know their forest world. They live with it in the truest sense. Their village is set in a single tree. The adaptations on both sides exceed anything I’ve ever heard of. Frankly,” she said casting a speculative glance at Born, “I think the tree gets the best of the setup. Born’s people would disagree, of course.”

  Born felt no anger at her words. There was no shame in being considered inferior to one’s Home. Even after many seven-days in the forest, many long hours of patient explanation, it seemed that the giants still did not understand. From what he had overheard in this station-Home thus far, he doubted they ever would. The casualness with which “cutting” and making “clear space” were mentioned had left him with a lingering numbness. He returned his attention to the graybeard.

  “It seems that some kind of reward is in order. Something beyond our deeply felt thanks, Mr … uh, Born.” He smiled in a fatherly way. “Tell me, Born, Losting, what would you like?”

  Born looked across at his companion. The bigger hunter squirmed uncomfortably in his chair and mumbled, “The sooner we leave this cold, hard place for the Home, the better I will like it.”

  Born nodded and turned back to Hansen. “I too would like to leave. But first I would like to know more about the light weapons and electrical vines and such things.”

  Hansen leaned forward, studied the unblinking hunter. “An aborigine you’re not, Born. Oh, it’s just as well. The less primitive you’ve become, the simpler it will make negotiations. As to advanced weapons systems, well, we’ll have to think about that a little, I believe. You’ll get them when we’ve worked out some mutual assistance agreements even a priest couldn’t break in Commonwealth court.”

  “They can be very helpful, sir,” Cohoma put in. “We’ve lost so many people in the forest that—”

  “I’m aware of that, Jan.” Hansen dismissed the others from his mind to concentrate fully on Born. “What this is called, Born, is an initial survey outpost. It’s the first home for my people on this world. It’s been established at great expense and with much secrecy because there’s so much at stake here. Do you retain knowledge of what a mine is, Born, a mill, a processing plant?” Born remained blank-faced, his expression unchanged.

  “No, I can see you don’t. Let me try to explain. There are many things we can make, like the material for this station and the acrylic of this desk. There are many we cannot. This world, insofar as we’ve been able to determine, appears to be a storehouse of such valuable things. Obtaining these substances can make—let’s see—can make a better life for all, my people as well as yours. Your help in developing all this would make things much simpler for us.” He took a deep breath. “In particular, there is one substance we’ve discovered which can—”

  “Excuse me, sir.” The interruption came from the man named Sal, who had remained with them. “Do you think it’s—?”

  Hansen made a quieting gesture. “Our friend Born isn’t going to return to his tree and get on the deep space tridee to report to the nearest Commonwealth peaceforcer. Besides,” he continued, looking back at Born, “I believe in being straightforward. I want our new friends to understand the importance of all this.

  “There is a drug, Born, which can be derived from the heart of a certain burl.” Born looked blank. “A burl is a woody growth that forms on a tree to contain the spread of a foreign infection or parasitic infestation. The burl forms around this foreign material. When the pulp at the center of this particular burl is removed and properly treated, a liquid is produced which appears to have the ability of prolonging human life-span tremendously. How about you, Born? Wouldn’t you like to live twice as long?”

  “I do not know,” Born replied honestly. “To what end?”

  “What end indeed?” Hansen murmured. “Well!” He rose and slapped both palms hard on the smooth desk. “Enough philosophy for now. Would you like to see some more of the station?”

  “I’d like that very much.”

  Losting merely grunted his indifference.

  “You two,” Hansen said to Logan and Cohoma, “go back to your quarters. They’ve been cleared, but I’ll see that your personal effects are returned immediately. You’ve got twenty-four hours off-duty and, blank credit at the commissary and cafeteria. Tell Sergeant Binder you’ve got an open key for your next three meals—order anything you want.”

  “Thank you, sir,” they chorused together.

  Hansen nodded toward the dense forest encircling the station. “Don’t thank me till you’re out there again, trying to figure out what’s eating your leg off at the ankle and how to kill it. I’ll take charge of your friends.” He came around the desk, gave Logan’s shoulder a friendly squeeze. “You’ve got a full shift to enjoy yourselves and a second to relax. After that, if Medical checks you out okay, I expect you to requisition a new skimmer and be back on the job.”

  XII

  AS THEY TRAVELED THROUGH the place of wonders Born noted that all the other giants deferred to the Hansen person as one would to chief Sand or Joyla. From this he inferred that Logan’s description of him as a hunting team leader considerably understated his authority.

  Hansen showed them the living quarters inhabited by the station’s staff, the communications equipment up in the polyplexalloy dome, which kept the station in contact with the swarm of skimmers that scoured the forest world, and the receiving hangar which the skimmers returned to to disgorge their cargoes of maps, reports, and new alien material.

  “What of the skimmer out there?” Born asked, pointing through a thick window to the shuttlecraft platform. “Why is it so different in shape and so much bigger?”

  “That’s not a skimmer, Born,” Hansen explained. “That’s a shuttlecraft, for traveling from here to our supply ships out in space—a place above your Upper Hell. The big supply ships which visit individual worlds can only travel in nothingness.”

  “How can one travel in nothing?”

  “By making a little artificial world out of metal-like this station—and taking food, water, and air with it.”

  The two hunters stoically partook of the marvels of the cafeteria, where local proteins were combined with colors and flavors and then altered to produce food more familiar to the giants.

  Born’s interest perked up at this explanation. “I understand, now. What kind of local foods do you use to make yours?”

  “Oh, whatever’s available. The instrumentation is very versatile. We send out a scoop-equipped skimmer, and it brings
back the requisite number of kilos of raw material—vegetable and animal.”

  “Could I see where this wonder happens?”

  “Sure.”

  He took them through the cafeteria to the processing room, showed them the hopper where plants and animals gathered from the forest were reprocessed with expensive offplanet nutrients, vitamins, and flavorings.

  Born studied the bales of shrubs and bushes. The majority were herbaceous succulents, the woody material removed and discarded as scrap. None of those gathered were decayed, none were blighted or dying. These giants did not emfol—they took what they needed, efficiently, easily, blindly. His face remained an enthusiastic mask, despite his thoughts.

  They moved on to the recreation chamber, where even Losting was awed by the marvels devoted to idle amusement. Eventually, after this extended tour calculated to impress, Hansen conducted them to the laboratories where research on the fruits of many skimmer trips took place.

  Born and Losting were introduced to earnest teams of preoccupied men and women engaged in intense, incomprehensible tasks.

  “McKay!” Hansen called to a tall, thin woman dressed in a dark lab frock, hair tied in a thick bun.

  “Hello, Chief.” Her voice was low, her black eyes piercing. She examined the two hunters. “Interesting—something local that is exactly what it appears to be, for a change.”

  “This is Born and Losting, great hunters. Gentlemen, Gam McKay, one of our very best—what was your word, Born?—shaman, yes shaman.”

  “I heard Jan and Kimi made it back. With the help of these two?”

  “You’ll see the whole report as soon as they get around to making it out,” Hansen declared. “Right now I’d appreciate it if you’d show our friends what you and Yazid got out of that conch bulb.”

  She nodded and they followed her down a narrow walkway between benches stacked high with glittering, light-catching devices, until they reached the end of a table. To one side lay three large crates made of a transparent material like the station windows. These were filled with the branches of the chaga. The bushes from which the branches had been taken, Born noted, had been in full bloom. Each branch was heavy with red-bordered, white-throated flowers, now beginning to wilt noticeably.

  The woman McKay opened a small cabinet and carefully removed a tiny clear vial. “This is the distilled extract of about two thousand blooms.” She unscrewed the tiny cap and offered it to Hansen. With a smile, he declined. “Born, how about you?” She extended the vial toward him and instructed him to sniff at the open top. Born did so. The scent that rose from the vial was that of the chaga, but intensified many, many times. He reeled slightly, but his expression did not change.

  “I am familiar with it,” he told them. McKay looked disappointed and turned to Hansen for encouragement.

  “Familiar—is that all he can say?”

  “Remember, Gam, Born lives among such aromatic blossoms, hunts among them daily.” The chemist continued mumbling to herself as she locked the vial back in the cabinet.

  “Why is this done?” Born asked Hansen as they left for the next lab.

  “Properly thinned and blended with other enhancing and stabilizing chemicals, Born, the little container will serve as a base for a brand new fragrance—what we call perfume. It will be worth a great deal of …” Once more he tried to explain that awkward concept.

  “I still do not understand. What can such a thing be used for?”

  “Women will use it, Born, to make themselves more attractive, to make themselves seem more beautiful.”

  “They clothe themselves in the odor of death.”

  “Isn’t that putting it a little strongly, Born?” Hansen wondered, taken aback by the grimness of the hunter’s comment. He was trying to sympathize with the hunter’s natural lack of understanding. However, his explanation seemed to do little to improve Born’s understanding.

  Born was trying to see, he honestly was. So was Losting. But the further they went through this house of strangeness, the more they saw of its purpose and intents, the harder understanding became. For example, there were the three crates filled with mutilated chaga. The branches had been taken unemfoled from the mature patent plants. Thousands more would be similarly torn to make a little concentrated chaga smell. For what? To heal the sick or nourish the hungry? No, it would be done for amusement—a kind of amusement beyond the comprehension of the two hunters.

  It took Losting no longer to see these things than Born. When the bigger man finally realized, though, he was less subtle in his opinions than his companion. “This is a horrible thing you are doing!”

  Hansen had already evaluated and recovered from Born’s outburst. Now he fielded this second admonition accordingly. “I can sympathize with your position, but surely you can see the long-run advantages, can’t you?” He looked from Losting to Born. “Can’t you?”

  “It is not the taking of the chaga’s blooms and branches—it is the way of the taking and the time of taking that are bad,” Born replied slowly. “If you had emfoled the chaga—”

  “That word Logan mentioned to me. I don’t know what it means, Born.”

  The hunter shrugged. “It is not something which can be explained. You can emfol or you cannot.”

  “That doesn’t make it easy for us, does it?” Hansen said, somewhat testily.

  “If you steal the young of the chaga it will not seed, and the parent growth itself will die.”

  “But there must be lots of chaga in the forest, Born,” Hansen argued quietly, oddly quiet. “Surely a few will not be missed?”

  “Would you miss your arms and legs?”

  A look of comprehension spread across Hansen’s face. “I see. It’s the plant you’re worried about, then. I hadn’t realized you felt so strongly about such things. We’ll certainly have to see what we can do about this. Naturally we don’t want to pick the blooms if the plant’s going to suffer, do we?”

  “No,” Born concurred guardedly.

  “It’s a minor thing, not at all necessary,” Hansen continued, waving off the look of astonishment that appeared on a chemist’s face. “It’s a minor market we can do without.”

  He escorted them outside and toward the next and last lab. “There’s one more thing I’d like you to see Born. This is where some local knowledge—yours—could really be of help to us. It concerns the kind of burl that produces the life-prolonging extract.” They rounded a corner. “We’ve only been able to find two such burls so far, despite extensive searching. The tree that produces them isn’t rare; the burls themselves are. My plant experts tell me the rarity is extreme. Either the trees are extraordinarily healthy, or else burling’s not their usual way of combating infestations, infections. If you could find a plentiful supply of such burls, Born, I can promise you we’d listen very strongly to your opinions on which plants to leave alone and which to cut.” Hansen admired his own suave professionalism and the facility with which he wielded the scalpel of deception.

  They passed between two large, quiet men and entered a chamber slightly larger than the one they had just left. Like the others they had seen, this one was filled with the inexplicable devices of the giants.

  Hansen’s introduction of the dark, solemn Chittagong and the always agitated Celebes was perfunctory. “How’s the work coming, gentlemen?” he concluded.

  Celebes replied, his tone a mixture of nervous excitement and confidence. “You read our first report two days back, sir, about what we think it was that caused Wu to go over the edge?”

  “I’m in the habit of reading even the meal requests that come out of this lab. They don’t add up yet, but yes, I can see how a man with Tsing-ahn’s habits could be affected violently by an improper interpretation of the evidence—assuming his burl displayed the same anthropomorphic mimicry this new one does.”

  “We think that way also, sir. It’s back here.”

  The two white-frocked researchers led them to a broad workbench set at the back of the room. Fresh p
aint shone with false dampness in the overhead fluorescent lights.

  This burl had been cut neatly down the middle. The halves had been separated. One lay propped up against the back wall of the lab, while the other was vised firmly to the bench. A plethora of shining instruments of metal and plastic were scattered on the table and around the halved sections like a swarm of silver spiders. Portions of the burl’s interior had been excised and placed in containers of varying sizes. The scene itself conveyed the impression of a frenetic yet studious scientific activity, which had suddenly been halted.

  In cross section one could easily see the outer layer of black bark, followed by the first woody layer, which was dark like mahogany. Then it lightened to a deep umber and turned eventually as light as redwood. But after the first half-meter it became something that looked like no wood born of Earth. Weaving black lines ran through a horrid reddish-yellow pulp. Peculiar nodules of gray formed where clumps of the winding black threads joined. At the center of the burl lay several ovoid lumps of brownish-pink, like the seeds of an apple. Here the concentration of jet-colored webbing grew thickest. Most bizarre were the numerous irregular lengths and humps of some pure white substance, which lay scattered throughout the interior of the burl, seemingly at random. Some appeared hard and smooth; others on the verge of powdery dissolution.

  Born knew exactly what the burl was, though not its puzzling interior. So did Losting. “This is what you take your life-drug from?” Born asked.

  “That’s right,” Hansen admitted. “Have you seen these kinds of growths before anywhere?”

  “We have.”

  Chittagong and Celebes were immediately and simultaneously all over the hunters with their questions. “Where … How many…You mean you’ve found more than one on the same tree … How big were the ones you saw … What about the color … You’re certain they’re the same shape … The fibrosity of the bark …?”

  “Easy, easy. I’m sure our friends can find such trees for us whenever they want. Couldn’t you, Born?” Hansen broke in.