Counting Up, Counting Down

by Harry Turtledove

  “No, Mr. Griffin, we don’t.” Victoria fought down a flare of resentment—he might have spoken of her hurts before the household’s. But he was right. “I’ve been meaning to go into the Haldol village to dicker for another one, but—” She could not continue. She hated hiking to the Haldol village, not on account of the walk itself but because the village and all the Haldols in it crawled with vermin.

  “No buts,” her husband said firmly. “Tomorrow you must get a new one. Now you will excuse me, I hope. I have a great deal of work still to do this day.”

  He went out behind the cabin. Victoria heard him rummaging through the sticks piled there, then the snick-snick of his knife cutting the end of one of them to fit the shank of the hoe blade. After a while, he grunted in satisfaction. His footsteps receded down the path.

  Sighing, Victoria bundled up the two dresses she was not wearing—water from the wet, muddy one promptly soaked her breasts and belly all over again—with some of her husband’s overalls and carried them down to the stream to wash. She hadn’t planned to do the washing for another couple of days, but she hadn’t planned to fall in a puddle, either.

  Her knees clicked and complained as she knelt by the bank of the stream. She scrubbed the clothes against a wooden washboard, rasping her knuckles with every stroke. Gooey lye soap burned the raw patches and slowly, so slowly, worked dirt free from wool. In New Zion’s ever-humid air, the clothes would dry even more slowly.

  She looked upstream. It was only a quick glance, but she muttered a prayer of contrition as she averted her eyes. Upstream from New Zion, only a few miles away in distance but centuries in technology and light-years in attitude, lay the new Federation research base on Reverence—the godless Federation’s godless research base, she thought. Its gleaming metal walls, the whip and bowl antennae that linked the base to the thousands of other worlds in the Federation—all were anathema to the way of life the Holy Mission Church had worked for the past three generations to build here.

  She picked up the bundle of clean, wet clothes. By now she was so soaked herself that a little more water no longer bothered her. She made sure, though, to carry the bundle in front of her as if it were a shield, so no one in the village could see how immodestly the damp dress she was wearing clung to her.

  Once she’d spread dresses and overalls out to dry by her cabin, she went back to the stream yet again with a couple of small jars to get enough water for the night’s cooking. She had to make two trips, which left her gloomy as she began chopping turnips. Mr. Griffin was right, without a shadow of a doubt. Tomorrow, no matter how she loathed them, she would have to get a new jar from the Haldols.

  Her husband came in from the fields again not long before sunset. He spoke a long grace over supper; Victoria bent her head and prayed with him. When they were finished, she carried the dishes into the kitchen. He ignited a stick of punk at the fireplace; in their desire for a life of Biblical simplicity, those who followed the way of the Holy Mission Church eschewed electricity.

  Victoria came out, sank wearily into a chair. The hard seat was a trial to her sore backside, but she tried to will away the discomfort. The day had been long and taxing. But Mr. Griffin said, “Why are you sitting in idleness, with plates and pots yet to clean?”

  “With our jug broken, I haven’t the water here to wash them, and I am too worn to travel to the stream two or three more times to fetch it. I shall clean them tomorrow, when I have a new jug, if that is pleasing to you, Mr. Griffin.” She did her best to make her voice sweet and persuasive.

  Her husband would have been within his rights to order her into action, but he only grunted. He was tired, too. After a while, he said, “If you like, Mrs. Griffin, I will read you a passage of Scripture, that the idleness may be improved.”

  “Yes, thank you,” Victoria said eagerly, glad he had decided not to make an issue of the dishes.

  The Bible was the only book in the cabin. Her husband kissed the wooden cover that protected the precious pages from long-ago Earth. He held the volume close to the fattest candle. Twilight was already gone from the sky; night at New Zion fell with tropical swiftness. “This is the Book of Judges, the second chapter, the first verse,” he said, and paused to scratch his thick brown beard before he began: “ ‘And the angel of the Lord came up from Gilgal to Bochim. And he said . . .’ “

  Leaning a little to one side on her chair to favor her bruised hindquarter, Victoria listened to Mr. Griffin read. They had not been married long; this was only their second trip through the Holy Scriptures together. Older couples in New Zion read the sacred words twelve, fifteen, even twenty times, and always seemed to find something new and rewarding in them.

  After several chapters, Mr. Griffin caught himself in a yawn. “That’s enough for tonight, I think,” he said, shutting the Bible and setting it back on its stand on the mantel. He went around the room blowing out candles, picked up the one by whose light he’d read. “Shall we go to bed, Mrs. Griffin?”

  “As you say, Mr. Griffin.” Victoria got up and followed him into the bedroom. He set the candle in a stand on the small chest of drawers by the bed. Then he and Victoria knelt side by side and prayed the day’s last prayers.

  He turned his head and blew out the candle. The small, hot bedroom plunged into darkness. Victoria could not see her hand in front of her face as she lay down.

  Her husband joined her in bed a moment later. As they had prayed side by side, so they lay side by side. She felt the mattress shift, heard the small, soft sounds of fasteners opening as he undid part of his overalls. So, she thought, and spread her legs for him.

  He rolled onto her without a word, his weight and the heavy smell of him a familiar burden. His right hand pulled her dress up to her waist, bundled it between them. His left, for a moment, closed on her right breast. After a couple of squeezes that brought hurt and pleasure mixed, he took it away. Then, brusquely, he thrust himself into her.

  That hurt, too; she was still dry. The rough cloth of his overalls chafed against her inner thighs, and against the new bites there. She opened her legs wider. The motion, though intended as one of escape, helped ease his way. A few more thrusts and he was lodged to the hilt.

  His harsh exhalations stirred the soft down of her cheek. His passage in and out of her grew smoother. She felt herself tighten around him. Of itself, her back arched as she awaited the gathering sweetness of each new thrust.

  He grunted above her, quivered briefly, and stopped. All his weight came down on her, so she could hardly breathe. As he withdrew, she felt a pang of frustrated longing. Congress between man and wife was one of the few pleasures the Church of the Holy Mission sanctioned. To have that pleasure cut short before its peak— Victoria sighed. It usually was.

  Mr. Griffin flopped back to his side of the bed. Victoria rearranged her dress so it decently covered her once more. “May God grant us a child,” she said. They’d had a daughter a year and a half before, but she’d died inside of three months. The empty place she left still ached inside Victoria.

  Her husband did not answer. He had already started to snore. She sighed again—quietly, so she would not disturb him. She lay on her back, staring up at the blackness of the ceiling. Of itself, her hand pressed at the place where her legs joined, this time not to scratch but to finish what Mr. Griffin had begun. But the first twinge of sensation made her guiltily snatch it away. “Sinful,” she whispered, reminding herself. “Shameful.”

  After a long while, she slept.

  Breakfast was a heel of bread. The butter was going bad; in Reverence’s climate, it would not keep no matter what she did. The rancid taste lingered in Victoria’s mouth as she loaded iron tools into her basket for the trip to the Haldol village. Having to make that trip left a bad taste in her mouth, too.

  At the edge of the jungle, she turned to look back at New Zion. She felt like one of the Hebrews doomed to wander in the desert for forty years. No help for it, though. Treading carefully to keep from falling again,
she started down the narrow, winding track that led from the human settlement to that of the Haldols.

  Reverence’s jungle was far more alien to her than the long-ago desert of Sinai had been to the Hebrews. Even the green of the foliage was brighter, shinier, a touch more yellow than the honest green of the Earthly plants that fed New Zion. When she brushed into them, the leaves felt velvety against the skin of her hands and face. Smells went in swift succession from lasciviously sweet to stinks worse than any outhouse.

  Bugs were everywhere—bugs on the velvety leaves, bugs on the ground, bugs flying through the air. Victoria swatted at herself, but she might as well have been Pharaoh, trying to hold back the inrushing Red Sea. Even in New Zion, bugs were a torment. In the jungle, they were a plague. She thought again of Pharaoh as many-legged wriggling things tickled between her breasts, ran up and down her legs, tried to crawl into her ears and nostrils. By the horror they raised in her, they might have been Satan’s imps.

  The closer she drew to the Haldol village, the thicker the bugs became and the more of them were the pinhead-sized biters that particularly afflicted Reverence’s natives—and Victoria. She was all but trembling when the jungle abruptly ended and the clearing round the village began. A tall yellow Haldol spotted her and let out a high, trilling yeep that momentarily silenced the racket in the market square.

  Everyone in the square came rushing toward her, yeeping and whistling and calling out “Good day! God bless you!” in shrilly accented English. The Haldols resembled nothing so much as stick people whose ancestors had been salamanders. Their skins were hairless and as slick and moist as the inside of her cheek, their eyes huge and round and altogether black. They wore no clothes. Their genitals looked enough like those of human beings to make Victoria’s cheeks heat on seeing them.

  Worse even than those shamelessly and openly displayed genitals were the red warty patches on the sides of the males’ necks. Not only did they look creviced and diseased, but a faint odor of rotting meat came from them. The Haldols never seemed to notice it, but it twisted Victoria’s stomach and brought a flow of nauseous saliva to her mouth.

  And worst of all were the vermin. She watched them crawl blithely over the Haldols’ smooth, shiny skins, now and then pausing to feed. The Haldols paid no special attention to them, not even when they came to rest on their private parts. She squirmed, remembering her own torments of the day before.

  The vermin seemed fond of the Haldols’ privates. Why not? she thought—they were filthy creatures, and had to be naturally drawn to filthy places. They also congregated around the males’ warty, stinking neck patches. And from the Haldols, they were happy enough to crawl onto Victoria. She squirmed again, this time at the feather touch of tiny feet.

  “What you want, pisquaa?” one of the males squealed. The Haldol epithet for humans meant something like silly person wrapped up in big leaves. Haldols thought humans endlessly amusing. It wasn’t mutual, not to the serious folk who went about God’s work at New Zion.

  “I need a new water jug,” Victoria answered. She spoke no Haldol; few colonists did. The male who had asked her the question translated her reply into his own high-pitched speech.

  His companions chattered excitedly. A water jug was serious business. “I show you!” the male said. “No, I!” another one broke in. A third, one evidently without English, pointed to his own skinny chest. Victoria vowed she would never chaffer with him.

  Several more of the tall yellow natives darted into their huts, to emerge in moments with jugs to thrust into Victoria’s face. The Haldols were such excellent potters that no one at New Zion followed that trade any more. But the natives were ignorant of metalwork. They squawked in delight when Victoria displayed the assortment of nails, knife blades, and other iron tools she’d brought with her.

  She quickly waved away a couple of would-be jug sellers whose wares were obscenely decorated. The Haldols had no sense of decency; they believed anything that was right to do was also right to depict. Anyone in New Zion depraved enough to buy such wares would spend time in the stocks.

  Some of the potters were greedy. They wanted more tools than she was willing to part with. After a while, she was down to dickering with only three males. She liked all their pots. One in particular had lines of almost perfect smoothness. When she lifted it and set it against her hip, it fit as if it had grown there. But she did not want the Haldol to know she was especially fond of his pot, so she also made sure to admire the jugs the other two set before her.

  The haggling went on most of the morning. That was partly because New Zion was not rich enough in iron to waste it for no good cause, and partly because Victoria hated to get the short end of a bargain, even if accepting it would have let her sooner leave the village she loathed.

  The Haldols not directly involved in the haggling returned to their own pursuits, as unselfconsciously as if she had not been there. Some went out into the jungle to forage for the animals and fruits on which they lived. A disappointed potter, one with whom Victoria had chosen not to deal, began to shape a clay coil into a new vessel. Young Haldols scampered here and there, screaming at one another; they were even louder and shriller than their elders. A female spitted a still-writhing lizardy creature on a sharp stick and held it over the fire.

  Haldols casually relieved themselves in the open. Victoria tried not to look, lowering her eyes to the water jugs and to the metal she was offering in exchange (that last was a sensible precaution in any case, as knife blade or nails might otherwise inexplicably ascend to heaven). But the sharp, foul stink of the natives’ droppings fought against the burnt-meat smell of the roasting (and still squirming) lizard.

  She finally shook her head once too often at one of the Haldol potters. With dignity, he picked up his jug and walked away. Now she faced only two males, the one whose pot she really wanted and one whose work she would take if the other kept insisting on an exorbitant price.

  Sensing that the dicker was heating up, more Haldols strolled over to watch and to be in at the climax. Just behind her preferred potter, a male Haldol ran his hands down the flanks and over the breastless chest of the female beside him. The female’s mouth took the “O” shape that was a Haldol’s smile. She turned toward the male, reached out and took his member in her hand.

  Again, Victoria lowered her eyes to the pots—again and again. Of themselves, they kept returning to the Haldol couple, who went about coupling as nonchalantly as if they were the only souls (damned souls, surely, for their heathen lack of shame, but souls nonetheless) for miles about. She’d seen animals mate countless times, back in New Zion, but animals were only animals, and only slightly embarrassing. Haldols were people, of a sort.

  The female sank gracefully to her knees in the mud. Her mouth closed on the male’s organ. Victoria’s cheeks were incandescent. Any woman who performed such lewdness—any man base or lascivious enough to demand it—the stocks or the pillory could not be enough. They would kick their lives away on the gibbet . . . if they did not burn.

  Then the female went down on all fours. The male knelt beside her. They joined like dogs. The Haldols, used to such horrid sights, found the bargaining over the water jar more interesting than their linked fellows. Victoria’s cheeks grew hotter still as she watched the couple’s slow, deliberate movements. Unexpectedly, mortifyingly, she also knew heat in her loins, the same frustrating, incomplete warming Mr. Griffin sometimes brought her in the darkness.

  More anxious than ever to escape this cesspit of iniquity, she closed the deal with the Haldol potter she preferred faster than she might have. He beeped and squeaked his glee as she passed him nails and blades and fish hooks. The other potter glumly walked away, no doubt wishing the human would have been so generous to him.

  The copulating Haldols finished at last. They got up, pulled some green leaves off a vine to wipe the mud from their lower legs and from the female’s hands. They ignored the vermin crawling over the rest of their bodies, which would have distresse
d Victoria worse than any mud. Vermin even crept inside the female’s distended genital slit. The sight made Victoria’s stomach churn. So did the way the Haldol did nothing to drive them away, but went right on talking to the male with whom she’d just mated.

  Victoria snatched up the water jug and fled. “Goodbye, pisquaa,” the Haldol potter called after her. “God bless you.”

  At that moment, she was convinced God would bless her most if He arranged for her never to have to set foot in the Haldol village again.

  “They are dirty creatures,” Victoria said to Cornelia Baker when she walked by the next morning.

  “Who, the Haldols?” Cornelia’s mouth narrowed into a thin, disapproving line. “Of course they are, my dear. They reject the true and living God, the only true morality. Why do you think we go so seldom to their villages?” Her eyes widened in perfectly realistic sympathy. “But then you had to visit them yesterday, didn’t you? The water jug. I do hope you’re better from your fall.”

  “Yes, thank you.” Victoria ground her teeth. Somehow it seemed impossible to imagine Cornelia Baker with vermin crawling through her pubic hair, with bloodsucking vermin piercing her glazed, flawless skin—what would they find for nourishment under there? But she was not only a human being but of the flock of the Church of the Holy Mission, and Victoria’s repugnance at all she’d witnessed among the Haldols came out: “They are so vile. Public filth, public lewdness—”

  Cornelia looked at her avidly. “What did you see?”

  “I cannot even bring myself to describe it,” Victoria said. She was so full of disgust that she did not notice Cornelia’s expression change to one of disappointment. “And the Haldol vermin were everywhere. How can they live that way?”