The Red Dust

by Murray Leinster

  CHAPTER V

  Out of Bondage

  The mist was heavy and thick, and through it the flying creatures dartedupon their innumerable businesses, visible for an instant in all theircolorful beauty, then melting slowly into indefiniteness as they spedaway. The tribefolk on the clustered rafts watched them as they dartedoverhead, and for hours the little squadron of fungoid vessels floatedslowly through the central channel of the marsh.

  The river had split into innumerable currents which meanderedpurposelessly through the glistening black mud of the swamp, but after along time they seemed to reassemble, and Burl could see what had causedthe vast morass.

  Hills appeared on either side of the stream, which grew higher andsteeper, as if the foothills of a mountain chain. Then Burl turned andpeered before him.

  Rising straight from the low hills, a wall of high mountains rose towardthe sky, and the low-hanging clouds met their rugged flanks but half-waytoward the peaks. To right and left the mountains melted into thetenuous haze, but ahead they were firm and stalwart, rising and losingtheir heights in the cloud-banks.

  They formed a rampart which might have guarded the edge of the world,and the river flowed more and more rapidly in a deeper and narrowercurrent toward a cleft between two rugged giants that promised toswallow the water and all that might swim in its depths or float uponits surface.

  Tall, steep hills rose from either side of the swift current, theirsides covered with flaking molds of an exotic shade of rose-pink,mingled here and there with lavender and purple. Rocks, not hiddenbeneath a coating of fungus, protruded their angular heads from thehillsides. The river valley became a gorge, and then little more than acanon, with beetling sides that frowned down upon the swift currentrunning beneath them.

  The small flotilla passed beneath an overhanging cliff, and then shotout to where the cliffsides drew apart and formed a deep amphitheater,whose top was hidden in the clouds.

  And across this open space, on cables all of five hundred feet long, abanded spider had flung its web. It was a monster of its tribe. Itsbelly was swollen to a diameter of no less than two yards, and itsoutstretched legs would have touched eight points of a ten-yard circle.

  It was hanging motionless in the center of the colossal snare as thelittle group of tribefolk passed underneath, and they saw the broadbands of yellow and black and silver upon its abdomen. They shivered astheir little crafts were swept below.

  Then they came to a little valley, where yellow sand bordered the riverand there was a level space of a hundred yards on either side before thesteep sides of the mountains began their rise. Here the cluster ofmushroom rafts were caught in a little eddy and drawn out of the swiftlyflowing current. Soon there was a soft and yielding jar. The rafts hadgrounded.

  Led by Burl, the tribesmen waded ashore, wonderment and excitement intheir hearts. Burl searched all about with his eyes. Toadstools andmushrooms, rusts and molds, even giant puff-balls grew in the littlevalley, but of the deadly red mushrooms he saw none.

  A single bee was buzzing slowly over the tangled thickets of fungoids,and the loud voice of a cricket came in a deafening burst of sound,reechoed from the hillsides, but save for the far-flung web of thebanded spider a mile or more away, there was no sign of the deadlycreatures that preyed upon men.

  Burl began to climb the hillside with his tribefolk after him. For anhour they toiled upward, through confused masses of fungus of almostevery species. Twice they stopped to seize upon edible fungi and breakthem into masses they could carry, and once they paused and made a widedetour around a thicket from which there came a stealthy rustling.

  Burl believed that the rustling was merely the sound of a moth orbutterfly emerging from its chrysalis, but was unwilling to take anychances. He and his people circled the mushroom thicket and mountedhigher.

  And at last, perhaps six or seven hundred feet above the level of theriver, they came upon a little plateau, going back into a small pocketin the mountainside. Here they found many of the edible fungoids, and noless than a dozen of the giant cabbages, on whose broad leaves manyfurry grubs were feeding steadily in placid contentment with themselvesand all the world.

  A small stream bubbled up from a tiny basin and ran swiftly across theplateau, and there were dense thickets of toadstools in which thetribesmen might find secure hiding-places. The tribe would make itself anew home here.

  That night they hid among inextricably tangled masses of mushrooms, andsaw with amazement the multitude of creatures that ventured forth in thedarkness. All the valley and the plateau were illumined by the shiningbeacons of huge but graceful fireflies, who darted here and there indelight and--apparently--in security.

  Upon the earth below, also, many tiny lights glowed. The larvae of thefireflies crawled slowly but happily over the fungus-coveredmountainside, and great glow-worms clambered upon the shining tops ofthe toadstools and rested there, twin broad bands of bluish fire burningbrightly within their translucent bodies.

  They were the females of the firefly race, which never attain to legsand wings, but crawl always upon the earth, merely enlarged creatures inthe forms of their own larvae. Moths soared overhead with mighty,throbbing wing-beats, and all the world seemed a paradise through whichno evil creatures roamed in search of prey.

  And a strange thing came to pass. Soon after darkness fell upon theearth and the steady drip-drop of the rain began, a musical tinklingsound was heard which grew in volume, and became a deep-toned roar,which reechoed and reverberated from the opposite hillsides until it waslike melodious and long-continued thunder. For a long time the peoplewere puzzled and a little afraid, but Burl took courage andinvestigated.

  He emerged from the concealing thicket and peered cautiously about,seeing nothing. Then he dared move in the direction of the sound, andthe gleam from a dozen fireflies showed him a sheet of water pouringover a vertical cliff to the river far below.

  The rainfall, gentle as it was, when gathered from all the broad expanseof the mountainside, made a river of its own, which had scoured out abed, and poured down each night to plunge in a smother of spray and foamthrough six hundred feet of empty space to the swiftly flowing river inthe center of the valley. It was this sound that had puzzled thetribefolk, and this sound that lulled them to sleep when Burl at lastcame back to allay their fears.

  The next day they explored their new territory with a boldness of whichthey would not have been capable a month before. They found a singlegreat trap-door in the earth, sure sign of the burrow of a monsterspider, and Burl resolved that before many days the spider would bedealt with. He told his tribesmen so, and they nodded their headssolemnly instead of shrinking back in terror as they would have done notlong since.

  The tribe was rapidly becoming a group of men, capable of taking theaggressive. They needed Burl's rash leadership, and for many generationsthey would need bold leaders, but they were infinitely superior to thetimid, rabbit-like creatures they had been. They bore spears, and theyhad used them. They had seen danger, and had blindly followed Burlthrough the forest of strangled things instead of fleeing weakly fromthe peril.

  They wore soft, yellow fur about their middles, taken from the bodies ofgiant slugs they had slain. They had eaten much meat, and preferred itssucculent taste to the insipid savor of the mushrooms that had once beentheir steady diet. They knew the exhilaration of brave adventure--thoughthey had been forced into adventure by Burl--and they were far moreworthy descendants of their ancestors than those ancestors had known formany thousand years.

  The exploration of their new domain yielded many wonders and a fewadvantages. The tribefolk found that the nearest ant-city was milesaway, and that the small insects would trouble them but rarely. (Thenightly rush of water down the sloping sides of the mountain made itundesirable for the site of an ant colony.)

  And best of all, back in the little pocket in the mountainside, theyfound old and disused cells of hunting wasps. The walls of the pocketwere made of soft sandstone with alternate layers of clay,
and the waspshad found digging easy.

  There were a dozen or more burrows, the shaft of each some four feet indiameter and going back into the cliff for nearly thirty feet, wherethey branched out into a number of cells. Each of the cells had onceheld a grub which had grown fat and large upon its hoard of paralyzedcrickets, and then had broken away to the outer world to emerge as afull-grown wasp.

  Now, however, the laboriously tunneled caverns would furnish ahiding-place for the tribe of men, a far more secure hiding-place thanthe center of the mushroom thickets. And, furthermore, a hiding-placewhich, because more permanent, would gradually become a possession forwhich the men would fight.

  It is a curious thing that the advancement of a people from a state ofsavagery and continual warfare to civilization and continual peace isnot made by the elimination of the causes of strife, but by the additionof new objects and ideals, in defense of which that same people willoffer battle.

  A single chrysalis was found securely anchored to the underside of arock-shelf, and Burl detached it with great labor and carried it intoone of the burrows, though the task was one that was almost beyond hisstrength. He desired the butterfly that would emerge for his own use.

  He preempted, too, a solitary burrow a little distant from the others,and made preparations for an event that was destined to make his planswiser and more far-reaching than before.

  His followers were equally busy with their various burrows, gatheringstores of soft growth for their couches, and later--at Burl'ssuggestion--even carrying within the dark caverns the radiant heads ofthe luminous mushrooms to furnish illumination. The light would be dim,and after the mushroom had partly dried it would cease, but for a peopleutterly ignorant of fire it was far from a bad plan.

  Burl was very happy for that time. His people looked upon him as asavior, and obeyed his least order without question. He was growing torepose some measure of trust in them, too, as men who began to have someglimmerings of the new-found courage that had come to him, and which hehad striven hard to implant in their breasts.

  The tribe had been a formless gathering of people. There were six orseven men and as many women, and naturally families had come intobeing--sometimes after fierce and absurd fights among the men--but thefamilies were not the sharply distinct agreements they would have beenin a tribe of higher development.

  The marriage was but an agreement, terminable at any time, and the menhad but little of the feeling of parenthood, though the women had allthe fierce maternal instinct of the insects about them.

  These burrows in which the tribefolk were making their homes would putan end to the casual nature of the marriage bonds. They were homes inthe making--damp and humid burrows without fire or heat, but homes,nevertheless. The family may come before the home, in the development ofmankind, but it invariably exists when the home has been made.

  The tribe had been upon the plateau for nearly a week when Burl foundthat stirrings and strugglings were going on within the huge cocoon hehad laid close beside the burrow he had chosen for his own. He castaside all other work, and waited patiently for the thing he knew wasabout to happen. He squatted on his haunches beside the huge, oblongcylinder, his spear in his hand, waiting patiently. From time to time henibbled at a bit of edible mushroom.

  Burl had acquired many new traits, among which a little foresight wasmost prominent, but he had never conquered the habit of feeling hungryat any and every time that food was near at hand. He had to wait. He hadfood. Therefore, he ate.

  The sound of scrapings came from the closed cocoon, caked upon its outerside with dirt and mold. The scraping and scratching continued, andpresently a tiny hole showed, which rapidly enlarged. Tiny jaws and adry, glazed skin became visible, the skin looking as if it had beenvarnished with many coats of brown shellac. Then a malformed head forcedits way through and stopped.

  All motion ceased for a matter of perhaps half an hour, and then thestrange, blind head seemed to become distended, to be swelling. A crackappeared along its upper part, which lengthened and grew wide. And thena second head appeared from within the first.

  This head was soft and downy, and a slender proboscis was coiled beneathits lower edge like the trunk of one of the elephants that had beenextinct for many thousand years. Soft scales and fine hairs alternatedto cover it, and two immense, many-faceted eyes gazed mildly at theworld on which it was looking for the first time. The color of the wholewas purest milky-white.

  Slowly and painfully, assisting itself by slender, colorless legs thatseemed strangely feeble and trembling, a butterfly crawled from thecocoon. Its wings were folded and lifeless, without substance or color,but the body was a perfect white. The butterfly moved a little distancefrom its cocoon and slowly unfurled its wings. With the action, lifeseemed to be pumped into them from some hidden spring in the insect'sbody. The slender antennae spread out and wavered gently in the warm air.The wings were becoming broad expanses of snowy velvet.

  A trace of eagerness seemed to come into the butterfly's actions.Somewhere there in the valley sweet food and joyous companions awaitedit. Fluttering above the fungoids of the hillsides, surely there was amate with whom the joys of love were to be shared, surely upon thosegigantic patches of green, half hidden in the haze, there would be laidtiny golden eggs that in time would hatch into small, fat grubs.

  Strength came to the butterfly's limbs. Its wings were spread andclosed with a new assurance. It spread them once more, and raised themto make the first flight of this new existence in a marvelous world,full of delights and adventures--Burl struck home with his spear.

  The delicate limbs struggled in agony, the wings fluttered helplessly,and in a little while the butterfly lay still upon the fungus-carpetedearth, and Burl leaned over to strip away the great wings of snow-whitevelvet, to sever the long and slender antennae, and then to call histribesmen and bid them share in the food he had for them.

  And there was a feast that afternoon. The tribesmen sat about the whitecarcass, cracking open the delicate limbs for the meat within them, andBurl made sure that Saya secured the choicest bits. The tribesmen werehappy. Then one of the children of the tribe stretched a hand aloft andpointed up the mountainside.

  Coming slowly down the slanting earth was a long, narrow file of livinganimals. For a time the file seemed to be but one creature, but Burl'skeen eyes soon saw that there were many. They were caterpillars, eachone perhaps ten feet long, each with a tiny black head armed with sharpjaws, and with dull-red fur upon their backs. The rear of the processionwas lost in the mist of the low-hanging cloud-banks that covered themountainside some two thousand feet above the plateau, but the foremostwas no more than three hundred yards away.

  Slowly and solemnly the procession came on, the black head of the secondtouching the rear of the first, and the head of the third touching therear of the second. In faultless alignment, without intervals, theymoved steadily down the slanting side of the mountain.

  Save the first, they seemed absorbed in maintaining their perfectformation, but the leader constantly rose upon his hinder half and wavedthe fore part of his body in the air, first to the right and then to theleft, as if searching out the path he would follow.

  The tribefolk watched in amazement mingled with terror. Only Burl wascalm. He had never seen a slug that meant danger to man, and he reasonedthat these were at any rate moving slowly so that they could bedistanced by the fleeter-footed human beings, but he also meant to becautious.

  The slow march kept on. The rear of the procession of caterpillarsemerged from the cloud-bank, and Burl saw that a shining white line wasleft behind them. No less than eighty great caterpillars clad in whiteand dingy red were solemnly moving down the mountainside, leaving a pathof shining silk behind them. Head to tail, in single file, they had noeyes or ears for anything but their procession.

  The leader reached the plateau, and turned. He came to the cluster ofgiant cabbages, and ignored them. He came to a thicket of mushrooms, andpassed through it, followed by his devoted band. T
hen he came to an openspace where the earth was soft and sandy, where sandstone had weatheredand made a great heap of easily moved earth.

  The leading caterpillar halted, and began to burrow experimentally inthe ground. The result pleased him, and some signal seemed to passalong the eight-hundred-foot line of creatures. The leader began to digwith feet and jaws, working furiously to cover himself completely withthe soft earth. Those immediately behind him abandoned their formation,and pressed forward in haste. Those still farther back moved morehurriedly.

  All, when they reached the spot selected by the leader, abandoned anyattempt to keep to their line, and hastened to find an unoccupied spotin the open space in which to bury themselves.

  For perhaps half an hour the clearing was the scene of intense activity,incredible activity. Huge, ten-foot bodies burrowed desperately in thewhitish earth, digging frantically to cover themselves.

  After the half-hour, however, the last of the caterpillars had vanished.Only an occasional movement of the earth from the struggle of a buriedcreature to bury itself still deeper, and the freshly turned surfaceshowed that beneath the clearing on the plateau eighty great slugs werepreparing themselves for the sleep of metamorphosis. The piled-up earthand the broad, white band of silk, leading back up the hillside until itbecame lost in the clouds, alone remained to tell of the visitation.

  The tribesmen had watched in amazement. They had never seen thesecreatures before, but they knew, of course, why they had entombedthemselves. Had they known what the scientists of thirty thousand yearsbefore had written in weighty and dull books, they would have deducedfrom the appearance of the processionary caterpillars--orpine-caterpillars--that somewhere above the banks of clouds there weregrowing trees and sunlight, that a moon shone down, and stars twinkledfrom the blue vault of a cloudless sky.

  But the tribesmen did not know. They only knew that there, beneath thesoft earth, was a mighty store of food for them when they cared to digfor it, that their provisions for many months were secure, and thatBurl, their leader, was a great and mighty man for having led them tothis land of safety and plenty.

  Burl read their emotions in their eyes, but better than their amazementand wonderment was a glance that had nothing whatever to do with hisleadership of the tribe. And then Burl rose, and took the twosnowy-white velvet cloaks from the wings of the white butterfly. One ofthem he flung about his own shoulders, and the other he flung aboutSaya. And then those two stood up before the wide-eyed tribesmen, andBurl spoke:

  "This is my mate, and my food is her food, and her wrath is my wrath. Myburrow is her burrow, and her sorrow, my sorrow.

  "Men whom I have led to this land of plenty, hear me. As ye obey mywords, see to it that the words of Saya are obeyed likewise, for myspear will loose the life from any man who angers her. Know that as I amgreat beyond all other men, so Saya is great beyond all other women, forI say it, and it is so."

  And he drew Saya toward him, trembling slightly, and put his arm abouther waist before all the tribe, and the tribesmen muttered inacquiescent whispers that what Burl said was true, as they had alreadyknown.

  Then, while the pink-skinned men feasted on the meat Burl had providedfor them, he and Saya went toward the burrow he had made ready. It wasnot like the other burrows, being set apart from them, and its entrancewas bordered on either side by mushrooms as black as night. All aboutthe entrance the black mushrooms clustered, a strange species that grewlarge and scattered its spores abroad and then of its own accord meltedinto an inky liquid that flowed away, sinking slowly into the ground.

  In a little hollow below the opening of the burrow an inky pool hadgathered, which reflected the gray clouds above and the shapes of themushrooms that overhung its edges.

  Burl and Saya made their way toward the burrow in silence, a picturesquecouple against the black background of the sable mushrooms and the earthmade dark by the inky liquid. Both of their figures were swathed incloaks of unsmirched whiteness and wondrous softness, and bound toBurl's forehead were the feathery, lacelike antenna of a great moth,making flowing plumes of purest gold. His spear seemed cast frombronze, and he was a proud figure as he led Saya past the black pool andto the doorway of their home.

  They sat there, watching, while the darkness came on and the moths andfireflies emerged to dance in the night, and listened when the rainbegan its slow, deliberate dripping from the heavy clouds above.Presently a gentle rumbling began--the accumulation of the rain from allthe mountainside forming a torrent that would pour in a six-hundred-footdrop to the river far below.

  The sound of the rushing water grew louder, and was echoed back from thecliffs on the other side of the valley. The fireflies danced like fairylights in the chasm, and all the creatures of the night winged their wayaloft to join in the ecstasy of life and love.

  And then, when darkness was complete, and only the fitful gleams of thehuge fireflies were reflected from the still surface of the black poolbeneath their feet, Burl reached out his hand to Saya, sitting besidehim in the darkness. She yielded shyly, and her soft, warm hand foundhis in the obscurity. And Burl bent over and kissed her on the lips.

  THE END