by Chad Oliver
“You didn’t know.”
“But I did the worst possible thing! I set up our camp in a clearing, where they could watch us. I wanted them to see what we were like. And we had our women with us, all the time. We flaunted them. And then we went to the village with their women—”
“You couldn’t have known.”
Monte sat down again wearily. “Me, the great anthropologist! Any fool bonehead could have done better. I should have known—what was that guy doing in the tree by himself in the first place? We landed and the very first thing we did was to break the strongest taboo in their culture! It was just like they had landed in Chicago or somewhere and had promptly started to mate in the streets. My God!”
“It’s something to think about. But that isn’t the whole answer.”
“No, but it’s a lead! They don’t seem quite so unfathomable now. Charlie, I can crack that culture! I know I can.”
Charlie lit another cigarette. “You’re going back there.” He said it as a simple statement of fact, not as a question.
“Yes. I’ve got to give York a royal frosted snow-job to do it, but I’m going back.”
“Don won’t go. York won’t let Tom and Janice out of this ship again.”
“I don’t give a damn. I’m going alone.”
“You can forget that. Include me in. I’m going with you.”
Monte looked at him. “You don’t have to go, Charlie.”
“Don’t I?”
“You know what the odds are. I don’t think we’ll ever come back, to tell you the truth.”
“So? Who wants to come back? What for?”
Monte sighed. He had no answer for that one.
“We’re both crazy. But we’ve got to come up with a plan for Bill York. An eminently sane plan.”
“Yeah, sure. Sane.”
“Let’s hit it. Got any ideas?”
Charlie smiled, relaxing a little. “I’ve got a few. I was afraid you were going to try to sneak off and leave me here. I was working on a small snow-job of my own.” Monte pulled his chair up to the table and the two men put their heads together.
An hour or so later, a passing crewman was astonished to hear gales of laughter behind the closed door of Charlie Jenike’s linguistics lab.
EXTRACT FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF MONTE STEWART:
I’ve lost track of time.
Sure, I know what “day” it is and all that. It’s easy to look at the ship’s calendar. But it doesn’t mean anything to me. (Funny to think of how much trouble a people like the Maya went to in order to invent a calendar more accurate than our own. And even their calendar was forgotten in time; it got to the point where it didn’t matter. I wonder why? I wonder what really happened?)
It seems to me that Louise died only yesterday. That is the only past I know, the only past I have. There is a time when the pain is too much to bear. There is a time when the pain goes away—or so people tell me. Those are the two dates on my calendar.
I find it almost impossible to work on my official notebook. In this one, the one for myself, I can think. A man can’t think in terms of large abstractions like the United Nations and the First Contact with an Alien Culture. It gets to be a personal thing, a personal fight. There comes a time when a man must get up on his own hind legs and admit the truth. I’m doing it for me, for Monte Stewart. I’m doing it because I am what I am.
(And what am I? Cut it out, boy! You’re not ready for the giggle academy yet!)
Well, a long time ago I asked myself some questions about the people of Sirius Nine. Or should I say questions about the Merdosi of Walonka? That is progress of a sort. And I think I’ve got some answers now; the questions must have been good ones. And, as usual, I’ve got some more questions.
But what do I know?
I know what that man was doing in the forest by himself. The Merdosi have a mating season of some sort. The men live out in the forest most of the time, and only come into the cave village with the gals at certain times of the year. This may be biological, or cultural, or—more probably—both. Question: What in blazes do the men do out there in those hollow trees? Question: How do the women and kids get by on their own in the village?
The Merdosi are afraid of us, and I still don’t know why. Sure, we broke a powerful taboo by living with our women at the wrong time of the year—but that doesn’t explain everything. They attack us because they are afraid of us; I’m certain of that. At other times they try to ignore us. It is as though we are a threat to them simply by being here. Why?
Obviously, there is a very close relationship between the people and the wolf-things—between the Merdosi and the Merdosini. The Merdosini are the Hunters for the People. The two life-forms are interdependent. Can we call this symbiosis? Regardless of the name we tag it with, we have a problem. It’s easy to see what the wolf-things do for the natives—they do their hunting for them, and their fighting as well. But what do the natives do for the wolf-things? What do the Merdosini get out of the deal? It must be a very old pattern, but how did it start? How do the natives control those animals? On Earth, the dog probably domesticated itself—hung around the fire for scraps of food and the like. But that won’t work here, because the natives seem to get their food—or some of it—from the Merdosini. What’s the answer? (And we’ve got the same puzzle with those tarsier-like critters I saw in the village. Are they just pets, or something else?)
I’m convinced that the key to this whole thing is somehow mixed up with the fact that these people have no tools. We are so used to evaluating people in terms of the artifacts they use that we are lost when these material clues are denied to us. Making tools seems to us to be the very nature of man. The first things we see when we look at a culture are artifacts of some sort: clothes, weapons, boats, skyscrapers, glasses, watches, copters—the works. But most of this culture isn’t visible. We can’t see it, but it’s there.
What can it be like? Is there a richness here that we are just not equipped to see?
And remember that they do have the concept of tools. They even have a word that means an artifact of some sort: kuprai. The old man knew what a knife was for, but he was not impressed by it. Well, we have a lot of concepts in our culture that we don’t make much use of. I can remember hearing a lot of twaddle about how it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, but only how you play the game. Try telling that to a football coach. Try telling that to an honest man whose kids don’t have enough to eat.
Take away all our tools, all the trappings of our civilization, and what do we have left?
What do the Merdosi have?
The gray metallic sphere came down out of cold blackness into warm blue skies. The white inferno of Sirius burned in the heavens like a baleful eye that looked down upon a red and steaming world.
The sphere landed in the clearing where the charred logs told of a fire that once had burned, and bright cans of food and broken chairs hinted at a meal that had never been eaten.
The hatch opened and two men climbed out into the breathless heat of the day. They moved slowly and clumsily, for their bodies were completely encased in what had been spacesuits a few days before. They looked like awkward robots who had somehow strayed into a nightmare jungle in the beginning of time, and they carried extra heads in their hands.
Supplies were unloaded and the sphere lifted again into the wet blue sky and disappeared.
The two men carried no weapons.
They stood for a moment looking at the dark and silent forest that surrounded them. They heard nothing and saw nothing. They were not afraid, but they knew that they faced a world that was no longer indifferent and unprepared. They faced a world that was totally alien, and a world that was hostile beyond reason, beyond hope.
They were the Enemy. It was a fact of life.
Strange and unnatural in their stiff-jointed armor, already sweating under the great white furnace of the sun, they methodically began to make camp.
All around them, in the tall trees th
at reached up to touch the sky, long-armed shadows stirred and watched and waited.
10
Monte wiped the stinging sweat out of his eyes—no simple matter with his hand inside a spacesuit glove—and squinted up at the sun. The swollen white fireball was hanging just above the trees, as though reluctant to set. Its light turned the leaves to flame and sent dark shadow-tongues licking across the clearing.
It had been the longest afternoon of his life. The space-suits, even with the air vents that had been drilled into them, were miserably hot and clumsy. He felt as though he were standing in twin pools of sweat, and the faint breeze that whispered against his damp face only made the contrast more unbearable. He thought of what it would be like with the helmets on and shuddered.
Still, it was the only way.
His throat was getting sore again from the irritants in the air, but his nose was clear. It was odd, he thought, how different things affected a man at different times on an alien world. Now that he was used to the way Sirius Nine looked, now that he knew that the name of the world was Walonka and its appearance was familiar, he was struck by the way the place smelled. Even if he had been blind, he would have known that he was not on Earth.
He smelled the acrid smell of sun-blasted canyons and the brown-rock smell of the mountains. He smelled the bubbling silver of the streams and the close, heavy smell of the trees. He caught the perfume of strange flowers and the greasy scent of vines that crawled up to the roof of the world. He smelled the slow wind that had flowed like oil over places he had never seen. He sniffed the rank odor of furtive animals that padded across the forest floor. He sensed the tang of seasons and wood smoke and the great vault of the sky, and he smelled things that were unknown and nameless and lost.
How strange it was to smell things that conjured up no memories, brought back no nostalgia…
“Soup’s on,” Charlie said, looking more grotesque than ever in his bulbous spacesuit. “Get it while it’s hot.”
“I’ll settle for a cold beer.”
“Got to eat, don’t we? Can’t be a hero on an empty stomach, as someone once should have said.”
“How about Ghandi? He was good enough to have York’s ship named after him.”
Charlie tried to shrug, but it was virtually impossible. “He wasn’t lugging a spacesuit around on his back. Burns up the old calories, you know.”
Monte took a self-heating can that Charlie handed to him and awkwardly spooned out a steaming horror that was supposed to be beef stew. He ate it standing up, for the simple reason that sitting down was too much trouble. He washed the stuff down with a canteen of cold water and was surprised to find that he felt somewhat better.
Sirius was below the rim of the trees now, although it was still flooding the sky with light. There were puffy, moisture-laden clouds on the horizon, and they looked black in the middle and crimson around the edges. It was still hot, but the evening breeze was freshening.
They built up the fire in the clearing until the logs sizzled and popped and white smoke funneled into the sky. They checked their tents and then they were ready.
“Do you see them?” Monte asked.
“No. But I feel ’em. They’re all around us, up in the trees.”
“Time for your speech, wouldn’t you say?”
“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather do it yourself? You can speak the lingo as well as I can by now.”
“Not quite. Anyhow, you’re more eloquent. Give ’em the works.”
“It’s useless, you know.”
“Maybe. We’ve got to try.”
Charlie Jenike walked stiff-legged to the other side of the fire. He stood there facing the trees. The fire hissed behind him. He looked somehow more alien than the world he faced: a squat mechanical man that had stepped out of a factory in a dark land beyond the stars.
The red-leafed forest was an abyss of electric silence: waiting, watching, listening.
Charlie Jenike took a deep breath and made his pitch.
“Merdosi!”
There was no answer; Charlie hadn’t expected one.
“Merdosi!”
There were only the trees rooted in the hostile soil, only the immense night that rolled in from far away.
“Merdosi! Hear my voice. We do not come to you in anger. We carry no weapons.”
(Monte smiled in appreciation; Charlie really was good with the native language. That last sentence was a marvel of circumlocution.)
“Merdosi! My people came to Walonka to be friends with your people. We meant you no harm. In our ignorance, we made many mistakes. We are sorry for them. The Merdosi too have made mistakes. It was wrong for you to send the Merdosini after our people. It was wrong to kill. We did not understand, and we too were wrong when we killed one of your men. This clearing has been stained with blood—your blood and our blood. That is past. We want no more killing. We will kill no more. Our only wish is to speak with you in peace.”
The shadow-filled forest was silent. A log burned through on the fire and collapsed in a shower of sparks.
Charlie lifted his heavy arm. “Hear me, Merdosi! This is another chance for both of us. We are all people together. We must trust one another. On our world beyond the sky, many bad things have happened because people could not trust each other. Many times the first step was never taken, and that was wrong. Here and now, we are taking the first step. We have come in peace. We have trusted you. We have washed our hands of blood. Come out! Come out and let us sit by the fire and talk as men!”
No voice answered him. In all the darkening hush of the woods, no figure stirred.
“Merdosi! We have learned your words, and we speak them to you. There is nothing to fear! There is much to be gained. Do you not wonder about us, as we wonder about you? Will you not give us a chance, even as we have given you a chance? It is wrong for a man to hide like an animal! Come out! Come out, and let us be men together!”
There was no reply. He might as well have been talking to the trees themselves. Slowly, he let his arm fall to his side. He turned and rejoined Monte by the tents. There was a bleak sadness in his eyes.
“Well,” he said, clearing his throat.
“It was good, Charlie. No man could have done any better.”
“It wasn’t good enough.”
“Maybe not. We knew it was a long shot, didn’t we? We gave it a try. What the hell.”
Monte stroked his matted beard absently. He looked around the little clearing. The firelight seemed brighter now; the long night was near. He found himself looking at the exact spot where Louise had died. Quickly, he averted his eyes.
Charlie snorted. “We’re nuts. They’re nuts. The whole thing is insane. If we had all our marbles, we’d go back to Earth and forget there ever was a Sirius Nine.”
“Think you could forget?”
“Maybe. I could try.”
Monte laughed. “I’ll tell you, Charlie: it’s probably easier for me to come here than it would be to go home, and that’s the truth. But the notion is not without its appeal. I could go back to Earth and file a classic report with the U.N. The intrepid anthropologist returns from the stars and gives the boys the word. The natives are bloodthirsty jerks! I advise that they be obliterated for the good of mankind! Ought to create quite a stir, hey?”
“Maybe that’s just the report you should file,” Charlie said soberly.
“There’s another good one we could come up with; it would be very popular and would make everybody feel good. The natives are poor ignorant dopes who don’t know what they’re doing. I advise that their culture be manipulated by the all-wise earthmen to make them smart like us. I propose an ‘earthman’s burden’ for the good of the universe! How’s that sound?”
“Familiar. Stupid, but familiar.”
“The devil of it is that most people would welcome a report like that. It’s funny how many people there are who like to play God.”
Charlie started to say something, then changed his mind. He walked over
and managed to lift another log and toss it on the fire.
“Think we’ll last out the night?” he asked casually.
“Maybe.”
“Let’s get with it. I’d just as soon try to make pals with the Devil as the Merdosi.”
“We might have a better chance, at that. After all, the Devil is a product of our own culture a few millenniums back. He’s one of the boys, even with his horns and tail. He even speaks our language, according to usually reliable sources. He makes deals.”
“To hell with him,” Charlie grinned.
“Exactly. Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
“Put your helmet on and let me test it.”
Charlie picked up his gleaming helmet, stared at it a moment, took a deep breath, and settled it on his shoulders. It clamped into place with an audible click, and Charlie locked the catches with gloved, puffy fingers.
Monte checked the helmet carefully. It was secure. Charlie’s face, behind the thick glassite plate, seemed swollen and remote. Monte put on his own helmet and fastened the catches. All sounds from outside ceased. He knew a moment of panic when he felt as though he were smothering, but then the air came in. The doctored suits had breathing holes in the helmets, so that they did not have to depend on canned air.
He spoke into his mike. “All set?” His voice had a hollow sound to his own ears.
Charlie poked at the helmet and gave it a pull or two.
“Okay.” His voice was tinny in Monte’s ears. “You’re sealed in like a sardine.”
“This ought to be quite a night.”
“Yeah. At least we won’t die of boredom.”
“We may roast to death, though.”
“It’s a thought.”
They fell silent; there was nothing more to say. Monte felt oddly detached, as though his body belonged to someone else. It was already hot in the suit. The silence was overwhelming. The world seemed to have disappeared…
