Stress Pattern

by Barrett, Jr. , Neal

  Rhamik, on his first visit, had made it clear that he had his "place". and I had mine. That my hut was in a "good spot." Fair enough. I didn't push the issue. No doubt, there was a village or settlement somewhere in the grove. Either that, or he lived alone. And I didn't think the latter was likely.

  I held back my surprise, then, when he plodded into my clearing and announced that this would be a good time to go to his place. I said, matching his tone, that it would, indeed, be a good time. I could play the inscrutable alien game, too.

  It was less than an hour's walk.

  I could have stumbled over it during my early explorations—and I could have just as easily come within two or three meters of it and never seen a thing. The thick stands of bamboo effectively masked both sight and sound unless you were right on top of what you were looking for.

  "Stay with me, Andrew," Rhamik said quietly over his shoulder.

  He always managed to con me with something like that. He was crazy about mysteries. What would happen if I wandered off? Was there some great danger? Would I violate a sacred taboo of the village? He liked to leave these fun answers to my imagination.

  There was a ready picture of the village in my mind, cornpiled from village images I already had on hand. I was disappointed—no cluster of huts about the traditional clearing, hunters coming and going, females carrying things.

  It was more like a quiet residential section on Earth, where you pay plenty for trees. The huts were like mine—bigger, better construction methods. And where I had used green wood, they had used dried materials. It made the huts look darker, ash-colored.

  Privacy was the big thing.

  I should have expected that. We would pass one hut, almost invisible before you were on it, then we'd wind among the bamboo along a narrow trail and finally pass another.

  Privacy—and silence.

  Occasionally I caught a glimpse of someone. But I never heard them.

  I saw a man patiently stripping long strands of raw fiber from a split section of bamboo. A woman went about the same job farther along. A man wove dried fibers into rough matting. Both sexes did much the same labor.

  We passed the back of one hut and I spotted one of the bamboo-covered trenches. It was just like the one Rhamik had built for me. But the thing I glimpsed through the green covering seemed much larger than the whatever-it-was resting in my own garden. I paused to look at it. I didn't really pause. Just took a slower step.

  Rhamik jerked around and gestured me on. I caught up with him quickly. His eyes brushed past me to the hut, then came back to me. And what was there? Irritation? Small sparks of anger? I gave him a shrug that said now what did I do? He just looked ahead and walked on, and evidently that was that.

  Unexpectedly, the bamboo maze came to an abrupt end in a harsh blaze of sunlight. After the closeness of the forest it was a startling effect. The land had been cleared in a wide circle, shorn of all growth. Only green stubs remained and a scattering of dead branches, already turning brown. The far side of the clearing was filled with neat racks of bamboo logs. I looked questioningly at Rhamik.

  "Over there"—he pointed—"you see?"

  A dozen workers were hacking away at tall stands of growth, extending the clearing farther. He walked that way, Rhamik stopping once to pick something from the ground.

  "Here. For you."

  He handed me a flat, gray stone, crudely sharpened at one end. It was heavier than it looked and sparkled with slivers of mica.

  "Thanks," I told him, and ran my fingers over the sharpened edge.

  Rhamik gave me a slight grin. "It will not cut much," he explained. "It is used in another manner." He took the rock back and wrapped his hand around a fair-sized trunk, then struck it twice with the stone. On the second blow I heard a sharp crack go through the wood. Rhamik whipped out a spindly leg and struck the trunk just above the strike area. It snapped cleanly.

  "See." He squatted down, and ran a stubby finger over the break. "The plant grows in sections. There is a small groove between the sections, and that is where it is struck."

  I nodded and we stood. "Fine," I said, "so what's it all about, Rhamik?" I swept my arm over the clearing and the cut logs. "What are you going to do with all this?"

  "It is to build," he said simply.

  "To build what?"

  He shook his head. "Not for now. Later. Very soon, Andrew."

  Not much of an answer. All right. Very soon, then. Later. I did not contribute my opinion that there was enough lumber drying here to build three or four good-sized villages. That unless he planned to go into the bamboo apartment business it appeared that he might be stuck with one hell of an inventory.

  Later, thinking about this, it occurred to me that Rhamik did not do things without a reason. Not anything. He had not shown me his village or his bamboo hoard simply to break up my day. There was something I was supposed to see, learn, or understand from all this. What that might be was my problem, not his. Rhamik was a subtle teacher. In a way, he was a good one. The student was not denied the opportunity to think for himself.

  The next morning I tried my hand at the fine art of fracturing bamboo at the proper juncture, and was glad Rhamik hadn't decided to call.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  When I woke I knew the morning was still far away.

  A warm wind sifted through the tops of the bamboo and set it singing. Cold stars winked through the branches.

  The other sound, though, wasn't the wind. I'd heard this one before.

  The Bhano was nervous. He met me before I reached the edge of the grove. He usually stayed just outside the point where the bamboo began so he could roll in the soil and dig for bulbs. But something had driven him in tonight and I patted him reassuringly and spoke to him before I moved away.

  The long ribbon of dust stretched across the flatlands. With nothing to color it but the stars it was ghost-white. Whatever it was, it was no more than a kilometer from the grove, and its thunder shook the ground. I held the trunk of one of the plants and felt it hum under my grip.

  For a long while I watched, just standing there and not moving, and then I knew someone else was there.

  "Rhamik," I said without turning. "What in hell is all that? I heard it once before. And saw the dust cloud. When I was camping out there, before I reached the grove."

  Rhamik moved up beside me. "Look closely. You can see."

  "I can't see anything but dust."

  "Just below the dust. Where the dust meets the ground. Sometimes there is something."

  There was. If you looked for it, and had a fair imagination. Movement. No—the suggestion of movement.

  "All right," I told him, "yes, I see."

  Rhamik was pleased.

  "So what is it, then? What's out there?"

  "Now that you see. What would you say?"

  I tried to bury impatience. I didn't want to get into the teacher-student thing.

  "I don't know. Something. Lots of somethings, to kick up that much dust." I looked at Rhamik. "Big. Big, with weight behind them. Heavy enough to shake the earth."

  Rhamik seemed to think about that. "They are the Ghroals," he said after a moment. There was a note of finality in his voice, as if that explained everything.

  "Well, what are they like? Big? Christ, Rhamik, if a herd that size ever changed course—toward the grove, for instance. . . .

  "They will not bother the grove," he said. Then, he added thoughtfully, "And, yes—I would think they are big, as you say."

  I looked at him. "You think they're big?"

  "How could I speak of their size, Andrew? I see them as you see them. They are Ghroals. There have always been Ghroals passing this place. And they are always too far to see, and ever hidden in their dust."

  All right. No one throughout history had seen a Ghroal. They had always remained hidden. None had ever strayed from the herd. The dust had never parted. Totally illogical, of course. Anywhere but here.

  We sat with our thoughts and the G
hroals thundered endlessly by and the stars turned.

  "Andrew," Rhamik said after a while, "I would ask you something. If you wish to answer things now."

  I said I'd do the best I could.

  "The things I would know are things about you. What you are, and where you come from."

  Rhamik was ever an enigma. I had never really been sure whether he was totally lacking in curiosity, or just didn't want to ask. At any rate, I was surprised, and a little hesitant too.

  "There is a—reason, Rhamik, why I haven't told you these things."

  He looked puzzled. "But, Andrew, I have never asked before now."

  "No, you haven't. But I've wanted to talk about such things. I was simply afraid you might find what I had to say—well, difficult to believe."

  "Because they differ from our ways."

  I glanced at him quickly. "Yes. For that reason." Well, he had taken it another way, and just as well. I decided I'd guessed right about Rhamik some time ago. He didn't understand the concept of one person telling an "untruth" to another. When you didn't want to talk about something, you avoided that subject, or ignored it. Rhamik was a past-master at that. But not lying. That wasn't in the vocabulary.

  I did the best I could.

  I tried to keep it simple. Not because I doubted his intelligence. Simply because a child on my world could more easily accept the complexities of other worlds. This planet was a poor training ground for knotty reasoning.

  So I told him about the escape capsule, and where it had come from. That the ship itself had come from another world circling a distant star. Etcetera. I didn't go into the science of economics. I said I "taught things to others." I talked until the sky turned in the east, and Rhamik listened. He never stopped me, or asked a question. I knew, though, he would remember and consider everything.

  When I finished, he didn't say anything for a long time. He watched the lightening sky, and the dark ribbon of the Ghroals. And when he looked at me his face was sober and thoughtful.

  "Andrew," he said, "I knew you were from a distant place. This had to be, because so much is different about you. And there are so many things you do not understand."

  I had to work hard at a solemn face because he wouldn't have understood I was laughing at myself. Earthman bring big knowledge to poor alien. Poor alien sympathizes with Earthman because the dumb bastard just doesn't have the proper background!

  OK. I wouldn't argue that. "Rhamik, can I put a question or so to you—so that I might better understand?"

  He nodded easily. Hadn't he always answered all questions promptly?

  "You know I come from far away, now," I said, "so you can understand why you and I are different, and have different ways of looking at things. But I don't understand, Rhamik, why you are so completely different from Phretci and his people, or Thraxil and Sterzet. No one is exactly alike on my world, but the people I've seen here are as different from each other as—as"—I spread my hands "as Bhanos from Dhoolhs, or the thing that ate my capsule!"

  Rhamik nodded. "What you say is true, Andrew. It strikes me as strange that your people live as they do. Clearly, our worlds are not the same. Always being together!" He shook his head in wonder. "I cannot conceive of that. It would not be right, here. It would surely not be right, Andrew."

  "Rhamik—"

  He stood. "There is much we should talk about, Andrew."

  Later, he meant. Not now.

  He disappeared into the forest and I gave a last, bleary glance at the horizon. The Ghroals had passed all through the long night. And were passing still.

  A few days later when I went to the edge of the grove to ride the Bhano I found him dead. I asked Rhamik what could have happened and he told me that life begins, Andrew, and life ends. Well, so it does.

  I buried the animal in a shallow grave out on the flatland. He had had no personality or character to speak of, but he had been cooperative and pleasant, and I would miss him.

  I began cutting my own stands of bamboo, and setting timber aside to dry. Though God knows what I planned to do with it. Monkey see, monkey do. Rhamik was so pleased he took me on another trek to the clearing. Not via the huts, this time.

  The sun was rapidly drying his bamboo. It was turning a silvery gray and had the hollow sound of seasoned wood when I tapped it.

  More activity: Several of Rhamik's people were trying to build something out of some of the larger trunks. They were having a time of it. The project was a raised platform of some kind—four vertical corner poles and various angled struts and supports roped in at intervals. The problem was that the vertical pillars needed to be buried for stability. The workers knew that, but they had no tools to dig deep, pole-sized holes. It was a painful solution—dig a much bigger hole than you need, lower the poles and fill in around them.

  "What are they building?" I asked.

  "Oh, they are not really building anything as yet," he said absently.

  "Well, what will it be when they do start building it?"

  "It will be much taller than that, Andrew. Much taller."

  Enough of that, then. Rhamik didn't like to burden me with things until I needed to know about them.

  Later in the week he caught me making feeble efforts toward some construction of my own. I wasn't imitating anything I'd seen in the clearing—just experimenting; maybe I'd stumble upon some useful technique they'd find helpful.

  Rhamik smiled at my efforts. "No, Andrew," he said, "not yet."

  And when he left I looked after him and introduced this world to a new tradition. It is an ancient and revered gesture on my world—a gesture that does not utilize the entire set of digits on one hand.

  Not yet, Andrew. He's a good child, Mrs. Gavin, just a bit headstrong. Tends to work ahead of the class. An attention-getter is what he is.

  That was not the day l would have chosen to find out what it was I had been carefully feeding and watering in my garden.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Gardening was a subject we didn't talk about.

  I dutifully fed and watered my whatever-it-was. This made Rhamik happy, and I didn't pursue the matter. Certainly, not after my subtle rebuke during our first tour of the village. I had not even touched. I had merely looked. Clearly, though, you did not gaze upon other people's deities. So I shelved whatever curiosity I had on this subject. Local religions are not to be tampered with. And—it must be said that since my amulet had been planted behind the hut, I had suffered no disasters.

  All this was before I walked behind my hut to do my chores and saw my garden moving about.

  I didn't move for a long moment. I stood dropping water bulbs like small bombs at my feet. Whatever it might be down there, it was no longer a lemon-sized household god. It had tossed its fiber wrappings aside, scattered its coating of bulb petals, and swollen to watermelon proportions—and then some. What the hell did I have here? I could see through its fresh, pink outer coating, and didn't care at all for what seemed to be thrashing about inside.

  I let the green bulbs lay. If it got food and water, it would not get them from me. I was not about to encourage it further.

  When my good friend and mentor arrived I was squatting at the rear of the hut. I was scraping together a large mound of wet soil, and when the mound got high enough, I planned to dump it into the trench and put an end to gardening.

  "Andrew," he said, looking over my shoulder, "it is doing well."

  I glared up at him. "Rhamik, I want some answers."

  "You have not finished the feeding and watering. It is important that this is accomplished."

  "Rhamik—"

  "I will need more bulbs, Andrew. Please."

  He moved me aside and began doing things, and of course it was useless to talk to him. I gave another salute to his back, and did as I was told. Fine, I told myself. He wants it, he can have it. We'll pot it and put it in his kitchen window.

  He wouldn't look at me until he had thoroughly covered the thing with petals and watered it down, and
added a new layer of bamboo leaves.

  "Andrew," he told me finally, "it will require more frequent care, now. You—"

  "Forget it." I cut him off. "It's not going to get frequent care. It's not going to get any care at all. I don't want that thing in my backyard."

  Rhamik looked pained. "But you must do this, Andrew."

  I stood up and walked around him. "It seemed like a fine idea, Rhamik. I did not want to offend anyone. But that no longer looks like a good-luck charm to me."

  He ran a slim hand over his face. He looked troubled. "This is something we must talk about soon, Andrew," he said thoughtfully.

  "Oh, no—this is something we must talk about now, Rhamik. What is it, where did it come from, and what does it do?"

  He sensed we could not play teacher-pupil on this one. "Yes," he sighed, "we will talk now. Perhaps that is best."

  "It is, Rhamik. It's something I need to know. It is behind my hut, where I have to sleep."

  "It can't harm you, Andrew."

  "Maybe."

  "It is still quite dormant. It is simply, growing and needs care."

  "I can see it's growing. I don't know about dormant. It looks alive, to me."

  Rhamik looked surprised. "Well, Andrew—of course it is alive."

  I sat up. "What do you mean, of course? Look. Don't play around, Rhamik—just tell me, all right?"

  He shook his head wearily. "I must be forgiven, Andrew. Sometimes it is difficult to remember the degree to which you lack understanding."

  "Never mind that. What is it?"

  "Andrew, it is a new person. Your new person."

  I stared at him.

  "Did you really not know this? Truly? Sometime you must tell me, much more about your world. I am thinking now the life processes may differ considerably and—"