“Who the hell are you?” I was about as skewed as I could be. I wanted to pound him out a little, delete that hateful look on his face, put him in a way so I wouldn’t have to care for him. He didn’t say a word, just kept looking at me; but the fux came inside the wickyup—first time he’d ever done that, damn his slanty eyes!—and he moved around between us, the dartfish extended.
This guy had some kind of hold over the aborigine! He didn’t say a thing, but the fux knew enough to get between us and insist I take the fish. So I did it, cursing both of them under my breath.
As I pried off the six dartfish I felt the old fux pull me into a flow with him. Stronger than I’d ever been able to do it when we’d done ekstasis. Amos the Wise let me know this was a very holy creature, this thing that had crawled out of the Icelands, and I’d better treat him pretty fine, or else. There wasn’t even a hint of a picture of what or else might be, but it was a strong flow, a strong flow.
So I took the fish and put them in the larder, and I let the fux know how grateful I was, and he didn’t pay me enough attention to mesmerize a gnat; and the flow was gone; and he was doing ekstasis with my guest lying out as nice and comfy as you please; and then he turned and slid out of the wickyup and was gone.
I sat there through most of the night watching him. One moment he was staring at me, the next he was asleep; and I went on through that first night just sitting there looking at him gonked-in like that, where I would have been sleeping if he hadn’t showed up. Even asleep he hated me. But he was too weak to stay awake and enjoy it.
So I looked at him, wondering who the hell he was, most of that night. Until I couldn’t take it anymore, and near to morning I just beat the crap out of him.
They kept bringing food. Not just fish, but plants I’d never seen before, things that grew out there in Hotlands east of us, out there where it always stank like rotting garbage. Some of the plants needed to be cooked, and some of them were delicious just eaten raw. But I knew they’d never have shown me any of that if it hadn’t been for him.
He never spoke to me, and he never told the fuxes that I’d beaten him the first night he was in camp; and his manner never changed. Oh, I knew he could talk all right, because when he slept he tossed and thrashed and shouted things in his sleep. I never understood any of it; some offworld language. But whatever it was, it made him feel sick to remember it. Even asleep he was in torment.
He was determined to stay. I knew that from the second day. I caught him pilfering stores.
No, that’s not accurate. He was doing it openly. I didn’t catch him. He was going through the stash in the transport sheds: mostly goods I wouldn’t need for a while yet; items whose functions no longer related to my needs. He had already liberated some of those items when I discovered him burrowing through the stores: the neetskin tent I’d used before building the wickyup from storm-hewn fellner trees; the spare air-mattress; a hologram projector I’d used during the first month to keep me entertained with a selection of laser beads, mostly No-h plays and conundramas. I’d grown bored with the diversions very quickly: they didn’t seem to be a part of my life of penitence. He had commandeered the projector, but not the beads. Everything had been pulled out and stacked.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I stood behind him, fists knotted, waiting for him to say something snappy.
He straightened with some difficulty, holding his ribs where I’d kicked him the night before. He turned and looked at me evenly. I was surprised: he didn’t seem to hate me as much as he’d let it show the day before. He wasn’t afraid of me, though I was larger and had already demonstrated that I could bash him if I wanted to bash him, or leave him alone if I chose to leave him alone. He just stared, waiting for me to get the message.
The message was that he was here for a while.
Like it or not.
“Just stay out of my way,” I said. “I don’t like you, and that’s not going to change. I made a mistake pulling that spillweed, but I won’t make any more mistakes. Keep out of my food stores, keep away from me, and don’t get between me and the dromids. I’ve got a job to do, and you interfere…I’ll weight you down, toss you in, and what the scuttlefish don’t chew off is going to wash up at Icebox. You got that?”
I was just shooting off my mouth. And what was worse than my indulging in the same irrational behavior that had already ruined my life, was that he knew I was just making a breeze. He looked at me, waited long enough so I couldn’t pretend to have had my dignity scarred, and he went back to searching through the junk. I went off looking for fuxes to interrogate, but they were avoiding us that day.
By that night he’d already set up his own residence.
And the next day Amos delivered two females to me, who unhinged themselves on their eight legs in a manner that was almost sitting. And the old neuter let me know these two—he used an ekstasis image that conveyed nubile—would join flow with me in an effort to explain their relationship to Maternal Grandfather. It was the first voluntary act of assistance the tribe had offered in six months.
So I knew my unwelcome guest was paying for his sparse accommodations.
And later that day I found wedged into one of the extensible struts I’d used in building the wickyup, the thorny branch of an emeraldberry bush. It was festooned with fruit. Where the aborigines had found it, out there in that shattered terrain, I don’t know. The berries were going bad, but I pulled them off greedily, nicking my hands on the thorns, and squeezed their sea-green juice into my mouth.
So I knew my unwelcome guest was paying for his sparse accommodations.
And we went on that way, with him lurking about and sitting talking to Amos and his tribe for hours on end, and me stumping about trying to play Laird of the Manor and getting almost nowhere trying to impart philosophical concepts to a race of creatures that listened attentively and then gave me the distinct impression that I was retarded because I didn’t understand Maternal Grandfather’s hungers.
Then one day he was gone. It was early in the crossover season and the hard winds were rising from off the Hotlands. I came out of the wickyup and knew I was alone. But I went to his tent and looked inside. It was empty, as I’d expected it to be. On a rise nearby, two male fuxes and an old neuter were busy patting the ground, and I strolled to them and asked where the other man was. The hunters refused to join flow with me, and continued patting the ground in some sort of ritual. The old fux scratched at his deep blue fur and told me the holy creature had gone off into the Icelands. Again.
I walked to the edge of Westspit and stared off toward the glacial wasteland. It was warmer now, but that was pure desolation out there. I could see faint trails made by his skids, but I wasn’t inclined to go after him. If he wanted to kill himself, that was his business.
I felt an irrational sense of loss.
It lasted about thirty seconds; then I smiled; and went back to the old fux and tried to start up a conversation.
Eight days later the man was back.
Now he was starting to scare me.
He’d patched the heat-envelope. It was still cracked and looked on the edge of unserviceability, but he came striding out of the distance with a strong motion, the skids on his boots carrying him boldly forward till he hit the mush. Then he bent and, almost without breaking stride, pulled them off, and kept coming. Straight in toward the base camp, up Westspit. His cowl was thrown back, and he was breathing deeply, not even exerting himself much, his long, horsey face flushed from his journey. He had nearly two weeks’ growth of beard and so help me he looked like one of those soldiers of fortune you see smoking clay pipes and swilling up boar piss in the spacer bars around Port Medea. Heroic. An adventurer.
He sloughed in through the mud and the suckholes filled with sargasso, and he walked straight past me to his tent and went inside, and I didn’t see him for the rest of the day. But that night, as I sat outside the wickyup, letting the hard wind tell me odor tales of the Hotlands close to Argo at the top
of the world, I saw Amos the Wise and two other old dromids come over the rise and go down to his tent; and I stared at them until the heroic adventurer came out and squatted with them in a circle.
They didn’t move, they didn’t gesticulate, they didn’t do a goddamned thing; they just joined flow and passed around the impressions like a vonge-coterie passing its dream-pipe.
And the next morning I was wakened by the sound of clattering, threw on my envelope and came out to see him snapping together the segments of a jerry-rigged sledge of some kind. He’d cannibalized boot skids and tray shelves from the transport sheds and every last one of those lash-up spiders the lading crews use to tighten down cargo. It was an ugly, rickety thing, but it looked as if it would slide across ice once he was out of the mush.
Then it dawned on me he was planning to take all that out there into the Icelands. “Hold it, mister,” I said. He didn’t stop working. I strode over and gave him a kick in the hip. “I said: hold it!”
With his right hand he reached out, grabbed my left ankle, and lifted. I half-turned, found myself off the ground, and when I looked up I was two meters away, the breath pulled out of me; on my back. He was still working, his back to me.
I got up and ran at him. I don’t recall seeing him look up, but he must have, otherwise how could he have gauged my trajectory?
When I stopped gasping and spitting out dirt, I tried to turn over and sit up, but there was a foot in my back. I thought it was him, but when the pressure eased and I could look over my shoulder I saw the blue-furred shape of a hunter fux standing there, a spear in his sinewy left hand. It wasn’t aimed at me, but it was held away in a direct line that led back to aiming at me. Don’t mess with the holy man, that was the message.
An hour later he pulled the sledge with three spiders wrapped around his chest and dragged it off behind him, down the land-bridge and out into the mush. He was leaning forward, straining to keep the travois from sinking into the porridge till he could hit firmer ice. He was one of those old holograms you see of a coolie in the fields, pulling a plow by straps attached to a leather band around his head.
He went away and I wasn’t stupid enough to think he was going for good and all. That was an empty sledge.
What would be on it when he came back?
• • •
It was a thick, segmented tube a meter and a half long. He’d chipped away most of the ice in which it had lain for twenty years, and I knew what it was, and where it had come from, which was more than I could say about him.
It was a core laser off the downed Daedalus power satellite whose orbit had decayed inexplicably two years after the Northcape Power District had tossed the satellite up. It had been designed to calve into bergs the glaciers that had gotten too close to coastal settlements; and then melt them. It had gone down in the Icelands of Phykos, somewhere between the East Pole and Icebox, almost exactly two decades ago. I’d flown over it when they’d hauled me in from Enrique and the bush pilot decided to give me a little scenic tour. We’d looked down on the wreckage, now part of a complex ice sculpture molded by wind and storm.
And this nameless skujge who’d invaded my privacy had gone out there, somehow chonked loose the beamer—and its power collector, if I was right about the fat package at the end of the tube—and dragged it back who knows how many kilometers…for why?
Two hours later I found him down one of the access hatches that led to the base camp’s power station, a fusion plant, deuterium source; a tank that had to be replenished every sixteen months: I didn’t have a refinery.
He was examining the power beamers that supplied heat and electricity to the camp. I couldn’t figure out what he was trying to do, but I got skewed over it and yelled at him to get his carcass out of there before we both froze to death because of his stupidity.
After a while he came up and sealed the hatch and went off to tinker with his junk laser.
I tried to stay away from him in the weeks that followed. He worked over the laser, stealing bits and pieces of anything nonessential that he could find around the camp. It became obvious that though the lacy solar-collector screens had slowed the Daedalus’s fall as they’d been burned off, not even that had saved the beamer from serious damage. I had no idea why he was tinkering with it, but I fantasized that if he could get it working he might go off and not come back.
And that would leave me right where I’d started, alone with creatures who did not paint pictures or sing songs or devise dances or make idols; to whom the concept of art was unknown; who responded to my attempts to communicate on an esthetic level with the stolid indifference of grandchildren forced to humor a batty old aunt.
It was penitence indeed.
Then one day he was finished. He loaded it all on the sledge—the laser, some kind of makeshift energy receiver package he’d mated to the original tube, my hologram projector, and spider straps and harnesses, and a strut tripod—and he crawled down into the access hatch and stayed there for an hour. When he came back out he spoke to Amos, who had arrived as if silently summoned, and when he was done talking to him he got into his coolie rig and slowly dragged it all away. I started to follow, just to see where he was going, but Amos stopped me. He stepped in front of me and he had ekstasis with me and I was advised not to annoy the holy man and not to bother the new connections that had been made in the camp’s power source.
None of that was said, of course. It was all vague feelings and imperfect images. Hunches, impressions, thin suggestions, intuitive urgings. But I got the message. I was all alone on Meditation Island, there by sufferance of the dromids. As long as I did not interfere with the holy adventurer who had come out of nowhere to fill me with the rage I’d fled across the stars to escape.
So I turned away from the Icelands, good riddance, and tried to make some sense out of the uselessness of my life. Whoever he had been, I knew he wasn’t coming back, and I hated him for making me understand what a waste of time I was.
That night I had a frustrating conversation with a turquoise fux in its female mode. The next day I shaved off my beard and thought about going back.
He came and went eleven times in the next two years. Where and how he lived out there, I never knew. And each time he came back he looked thinner, wearier, but more ecstatic. As if he had found God out there. During the first year the fuxes began making the trek: out there in the shadowed vastness of the Icelands they would travel to see him. They would be gone for days and then return to speak among themselves. I asked Amos what they did when they made their hegira, and he said, through ekstasis, “He must live, is that not so?” To which I responded, “I suppose so,” though I wanted to say, “Not necessarily.”
He returned once to obtain a new heat-envelope. I’d had supplies dropped in, and they’d sent me a latest model, so I didn’t object when he took my old suit.
He returned once for the death ceremony of Amos the Wise, and seemed to be leading the service. I stood there in the circle and said nothing, because no one asked me to contribute.
He returned once to check the fusion plant connections.
But after two years he didn’t return again.
And now the dromids were coming from what must have been far distances, to trek across Meditation Island, off the land-bridge, and into the Icelands. By the hundreds and finally thousands they came, passed me, and vanished into the eternal winterland. Until the day a group of them came to me; and their leader, whose name was Ben of the Old Times, joined with me in the flow and said, “Come with us to the holy man.” They’d always stopped me when I tried to go out there.
“Why? Why do you want me to go now? You never wanted me out there before.” I could feel the acid boiling up in my anger, the tightening of my chest muscles, the clenching of my fists. They could burn in Argo before I’d visit that lousy skujge!
Then the old fux did something that astonished me. In three years they had done nothing astonishing except bring me food at the man’s request. But now the aborig
ine extended a slim-fingered hand to his right; and one of the males, a big hunter with bright-blue fur, passed him his spear. Ben of the Old Times pointed it at the ground and, with a very few strokes, drew two figures in the caked mud at my feet.
It was a drawing of two humans standing side-by side, their hands linked. One of them had lines radiating out from his head, and above the figures the dromid drew a circle with comparable lines radiating outward.
It was the first piece of intentional art I had ever seen created by a Medean life form. The first, as far as I knew, that had ever been created by a native. And it had happened as I watched. My heart beat faster. I had done it! I had brought the concept of art to at least one of these creatures.
“I’ll come with you to see him,” I said.
Perhaps my time in purgatory was coming to an end. It was possible I’d bought some measure of redemption.
• • •
I checked the fusion plant that beamed energy to my heat-envelope, to keep me from freezing; and I got out my boot skids and Ba’al ice-claw; and I racked the ration dispenser in my pack full of silvr wrap; and I followed them out there. Where I had not been permitted to venture, lest I interfere with their holy man. Well, we’d see who was the more important of us two: a nameless intruder who came and went without ever a thank you, or William Ronald Pogue, the man who brought art to the Medeans!
For the first time in many years I felt light, airy, worthy. I’d sprayed fixative on that pictograph in the mud. It might be the most valuable exhibit in the Pogue Museum of Native Art. I chuckled at my foolishness, and followed the small band of fuxes deeper into the Icelands.
It was close on crossback season, and the winds were getting harder, the storms were getting nastier. Not as impossible as it would be a month hence, but bad enough.
The Top of the Volcano: The Award-Winning Stories of Harlan Ellison Page 33
