Of course, impatience was a large part of the crime that had left Barath exiled from Kurth in the first place.
It hadn’t been a serious offense, as such things were judged among his people. It wasn’t killing without acceptable cause, or procreation without a cleansing fast. It had just been slovenly work: bored performance of a task contracted and paid for. Important people had been inconvenienced; a lucrative industrial concern had been shamed; a slave had been damaged beyond repair. It had all been tracked back to him. Barath would never be allowed back on Kurth unless he redeemed both his reputation and his finances—which was one reason he’d seized upon the claims of the dying Bursteeni he’d encountered at the mining camp infirmary.
The Bursteeni had claimed to have seen Magrison with his own eyes before illness felled him on his way to reporting this momentous discovery to human interests. To Barath, fallen so far that he might as well have been one of the slaves commanded by his people, the prospect of finding Magrison himself was a map offering a possible route out of hell. Even split between himself and his guide, the reward offered by the Hom.Saps could be enough to fund an outcast’s way home. It could even be enough to fund a return with honor.
If the Trivids could be made to see reason.
If there were a way to take Magrison without their permission.
If.
In the midst of lighting a bowl of herbs—he claimed the intoxicating effect was essential for his nightly ceremony—Mukh’than said, “Do you know, we could satisfy ourselves with bringing back a scraping of Magrison’s skin. After all, telling the human beings where to find him is almost as good as managing an actual capture.”
Barath had thought of that. “They would have no reason to believe us. Samples were sent everywhere the Humans even thought of looking for him. Some have gone missing and later turned up in fraudulent claims.”
“I know. But we could make a visual record. Bring back pictures.”
“A child could fake those.”
“But between the DNA and the pictures and their hunger to see this man caught—they would investigate, wouldn’t they?”
Barath picked at the scab forming over his scaleworm sore. “The humans would still find a way to give full credit to whoever made the actual capture. We’d wind up with a small finder’s fee, nothing more. No, it has to be all or nothing. We have to be the ones who bring him back. He has to be ours, if we want to earn the full reward.”
Mukh’than lowered his face over the rising mists. “You sound like one of the Trivids. They consider him theirs, too.”
“They’re ignorant,” Barath said. “They can’t know the kind of monster he is.”
Mukh’than was just a silhouette shrouded by a curtain of malodorous vapor. “And maybe it’s just as ignorant for us to think that monstrousness on his scale can be reduced to a commodity for our profit. Maybe that’s why we’re not fit to have him.”
The words hung heavy in the little sleepcube, with Barath remaining silent not because he concurred but because he saw no possible response to a statement so completely at odds with his own sensibility. Searching for signs of betrayal in the Riirgaan’s sudden, unexpected burst of idealism, he wished he knew what the homeworld of the Riirgaans was like. It would be helpful to know if Mukh’than found the unrelenting mugginess of Irkiirish, or the forsaken wilderness of this world in general, an unbearable hell he would forsake principles to leave. After a long pause, he said: “You want him as much as I do.”
“I have already said I do,” Mukh’than said, as he lowered himself into the mists. “But perhaps not for all the same reasons.”
Our Human once worked hard to earn his keep among us. When he was young, and the muscles still clung tightly to his oddly-proportioned bones, he made a point of helping us with the thousand and one small chores necessary to support our lives here. When a hut needed building, the Human lent his strength to the task; when food needed gathering, the Human grabbed a spear like the rest of us; when a child wandered off into the woods and needed finding, the Human searched as diligently as the Firstfather, Secondfather, and Firstmother. Even when we put down the work of our daily lives and sang hymns of praise to the spirits who built all things, our Human sat among us and raised his atonal voice with as much fervor as the most religious holies among us. It was a heroic effort, even if it was doomed to failure, for our Human knew as well as we did that he was not one of us and never could be, not even if the Spirits themselves came down from the sky to declare him an honorary member of the People. He trumpeted his alienness with every word that emerged, foul and unnatural, from his strangely-shaped lips; he came from a world where people walked on air and ate food that never touched the ground and mated in obscene couplings involving only Firstfathers and Firstmothers. Everything he said about his life among the people who had rejected him reinforced our awareness that he was different, that he was strange, and that he rendered us different and strange as well just by the act of living among us. He knew this, too, I think; and throughout the years of his life it made him as lonely as any creature had ever been.
When the next morning’s negotiations began, the villagers all carried the human’s crude totems around their necks. By the time their apparent spokesperson, a wizened member of the maw-chested sex, finished chanting an interminable string of gibberish that might have been anything from legal preamble to heartfelt prayer, Barath’s head throbbed from sheer frustration. How nice it would have been to be able to resolve this by knocking their obstinate heads together!
Barath could only wonder how much Mukh’than was simplifying the story to accommodate the limited comprehension of the audience. These were people who had never been outside their swamp, who had never used weaponry more advanced than sharpened sticks, who had never seen more than a couple hundred of their own kind in one place. They were people who knew almost everybody in their world by sight, with the odd passing stranger a rare but tolerated anomaly. How could they comprehend a war fought worlds apart, over abstractions, between strangers who had never laid eyes on each other?
It was impossible.
But that’s what Mukh’than needed to explain.
The hours crawled as the Riirgaan finished what he needed to say, but the time for words came to an end with daylight still remaining. Mukh’than returned to Barath’s side, sweat glistening on the flat pads beneath his eyes. He grasped a water tube and sucked it dry, then wiped the moisture from his flat line of mouth.
Barath couldn’t stand it. “What?”
Riirgaan feelings are impossible to read on their faces, but Mukh’than still managed to look haunted. “I think I may have made a mistake.”
“What?”
“I told them that Magrison’s victims outnumbered the leaves on the trees.”
“And that’s wrong?”
“Not if I’m trying to earn points for eloquence,” said Mukh’than. “But very wrong if I’m trying to win their hearts. Images like that reduce a disaster to poetry, make it unreal, harder to comprehend—a joke compared to a familiar presence they’ve treasured all their lives.”
“Tell them more, then.”
“Saying more would only weaken what I’ve said so far.”
Barath watched the Trivids confer among themselves. It was easy to tell that the villagers respected the gravity of their decision; they’d formed two dozen groups of three, lowered their heads and begun to mutter their soft liquid sibilants. Many fingered the Human totems around their necks, as if seeking comfort in a simulation of the man they had known. Another, a ridge-backed specimen who might have been moved by Mukh’than’s case, gripped the doll so tightly that it punctured the doll’s canvas skin, freeing the pebbles inside to spill onto the ground like parodies of blood droplets pouring from a wound. Several emitted a sour blaat that might have been their equivalent of weeping. Or laughter. It was impossible to tell whether they were devastated, or just rendered uncomfortable by the Riirgaan’s evident belief that they should be.
Watching them, Mukh’than said, “Has it occurred to you, my friend, that this is all about monsters?”
“Eh?”
“Think about it. Our departed Tchi companion committed crimes that rendered him a monster in the eyes of his people. The Human Being we traveled with did the same. I know that you are no longer welcome among your own kind, for reasons you’ve neglected to share—and that the pathetic creature we wish to take into our custody is also notorious for reasons that make him a monster of the first rank. Did I ever tell you why I live in filth, rather than ever face another of my own kind? I promise you, you’ll find it most instructive.”
Barath said nothing.
But Mukh’than didn’t wait for his approval. “I was a darr’pakh.”
“I don’t know that word.”
“It’s what we call a certain kind of teacher, one who is given total control over the life of a Riirgaan child, for one critical year in that child’s development. During that year, before the child receives any other formal education, it’s permitted no contact with friends, or family, or any adults other than the darr’pakh and the other students under the darr’pakh’s care. Forbidden to speak, permitted only to listen, the child spends that year learning the one lesson most sacred to us, the one lesson we never share with outsiders, the one lesson we think every adult Riirgaan should know.” Mukh’than dropped the empty water tube on the dirt and ground it beneath his foot, not stopping until it snapped. “I stopped teaching that lesson, Barath. After twenty seasons of pounding the same ideas into one student after another, I grew weary of my sacred task and simply abandoned it. I changed the lesson plan and spent one year teaching the students at my retreat another lesson, an irrelevant lesson. My crime was not discovered until after all my charges were returned to their families.”
The Riirgaan’s words had the bearing of broken stumbling things desperate to escape a place that had imprisoned them. But it did not seem to be pain that afflicted him. It didn’t look like pain.
Barath would have asked what the false lesson was if not for the dread fear that the Mukh’than would have needed a full year to teach it. “Why?”
“Weakness. Boredom. The usual temptations. You know.”
“And what happened when your people found out?”
The Riirgaan’s shoulders shuddered again. “Among my kind, the sacred lesson must be learned that year, or not at all. The crime was thus irreversible. None of the children could go on to live useful lives. All were removed from their families. Most were committed to internal exile, or to institutions where they still rot today. Some of the unmanageable ones were euthanized.” Mukh’than turned and cocked his head in a manner that could have been bitterness or amusement. “I was long gone. I knew the disgrace that awaited me otherwise. But given a chance, I would do the same thing all over again. The lesson changed me more than it changed them.”
Barath, whose sense of morality had always been subject to his personal convenience, felt the special kind of revulsion that afflicts the merely flawed in the presence of genuine evil. He hadn’t felt anything like this with Magrison. The human may have been something beyond all imagining once, but that which had burned in him before was all but extinguished by age and infirmity now. It still raged inside the Riirgaan. “Why would you tell me that story?”
“Because,” Mukh’than said, with nauseating calm, “I don’t want you to invest too much hope in my skills as a teacher.”
Our human has been ancient, even by the longer-lived standards of his people, for longer than any of us have been alive. He was ancient even when I was a child still fresh from the litter, curious about anything and everything that walked the world around me, and fascinated most of all by the sad-eyed creature whose only purpose seemed to be storing unhappy memories. He is so old that holding on to breath could only be an act of open defiance against the spirit who brings release at the end of life.
The Trivids said no, of course. It was inevitable that they would: few peoples in their position would have surrendered something so familiar to charges they neither understood nor saw any reason to believe. They reported their verdict to Mukh’than, with all due solemnity; Mukh’than reported it to Barath, with the smugness of a being who has just had his brilliant predictions fulfilled; Barath muttered some of the fouler curses known to his people, with the resentment of a starving creature promised but repeatedly denied sustenance. Then the villagers dispersed, but for a single ridgeback who lingered long enough to leave the two off-worlders with one final message.
Mukh’than rubbed a finger across his cheek as the ridgeback scurried away. “It says they want us to leave. They say we make them uncomfortable: you with your anger, myself with . . . ”—a pause, rare among the Riirgaan’s usual smooth translations—“something they find just as disreputable.”
“And yet they keep him. They don’t consider mass murder disreputable?”
“They do,” Mukh’than said. “But they still consider him theirs. They will let us stay another night, but we will not be safe here if we stay much beyond that.”
Barath’s claws emerged without his conscious consent. He clicked them together, feeling them scrape against each other, yearning for the warm bubbling reward of blood—though whether he most ached to slice the Trivids, the Riirgaan, or Magrison was something even he did not know. He did know it had less to do with the severity of the Human’s crimes than with his own frustration at being denied. “We have weapons. Can we take Magrison by force?”
Mukh’than studied him for several seconds, his frozen features hiding a response that might have been anything from horror to enthusiasm. Transparent lids lowered halfway over the great empty blackness of his eyes. “Are you saying you’re prepared to kill them?”
“If they get in our way . . . ”
“They’ll get in our way,” Mukh’than said, with absolute certainty. “If not before we take him, then afterward. Or do you think we can outrun the natives while carrying an invalid we’d need to keep alive?”
“We can keep them at bay. Threaten to kill him if they don’t let us go.”
“They’ll still follow. And send runners to other villages. The further we run the more surrounded we’ll be.”
“Then we outfight them first.”
“Kill one of them in such a fight and you’ll have to kill all of them. Even assuming they don’t manage to bring us down, a lone witness hiding somewhere beyond the tree line would be able to spread word of crimes committed against indigenes—and that’s not all that popular a practice, even in this orifice of a world. Word of it will be up and down the river long before we reach the nearest outpost. We’d wind up retreating to the jungle and spending the rest of our lives dodging spears and living on bugs and worms.”
It was pretty much how Mukh’than lived now, absent the spears, but Barath’s short glimpse of the filthy lean-to the Riirgaan had constructed for himself had not recommended it as a lifestyle to be actively sought. But the need to suggest something, anything, kept Barath going: “The authorities might forgive us if we had the monster with us.”
“The humans have a hateful history, but they’re much more bound by the morality of interspecies protocol than you suppose. You can read the annals of their Diplomatic Corps if you doubt me. But let us suppose we take your course. What if we kill them all, take our time getting back, and Magrison still doesn’t survive our journey to the river? How will we be forgiven for filling a village with corpses just so we could produce the one the authorities want?”
Barath’s claws now fairly throbbed with impotent anger. As much as it galled him to acknowledge that the twisted Riirgaan could be correct about anything, it was all true. Without the consent of the natives, they really did have no recourse grander than bringing the evidence back to what passed for civilization and hoping that the Hom.Saps who followed up played fair when it came to the reward. And yet, the prospect of a lengthy hike back to the river, enduring Mukh’than’s company, without success to m
ake up for it, seemed more nauseating still. “We’ll think of something before we leave.”
“Do you truly think so?” Mukh’than asked, then added a few sardonic words in his native language.
Suspecting an insult, Barath said: “What?”
“It is a couplet from an epic poem beloved of my people, words spoken by a despairing hero who has given up everything in a fruitless quest to find a villain who once committed a great crime against him. He wanders for years, goes hungry more often than not, suffers every indignity a traveler can suffer, becomes a ragged beggar and then an embittered ancient, only to find that all this time the object of his hatred has lived a rich and full life overflowing with bounty. Cheated of the justice he craves, he collapses in physical and moral exhaustion, shouting those words at the night sky. They mean, ‘The Heavens always favor those who would reduce the heavens to ashes.’ It means that circumstances often conspire to free monsters of the consequences for their crimes . . . while those who hunt monsters destroy themselves by searching for justice. It’s a charming fable that has provided no end of comfort to me through the years.”
Furious, Barath said: “Because it means your hunters may never find you.”
“Exactly. I take my victories where can I find them.”
Once, there was still ample life in our human’s aging bones—enough life, at least, that he still offered conversation to those few of us willing to oblige him. He cursed the bastards who were hunting him with a rage that made his eyes glow bright, and turned his voice into an open flame that would have seared any of them unlucky enough to stand exposed to its terrible heat. “Bastard” was of course a Human word, one of several harsh-sounding terms he used interchangeably with the far more reasonable vocabulary of our people. When I first heard him speak it, and the terrible hate he imbued it with, it conjured up a vague image of a terrible monster, like Our Human, only larger and blacker and better armed with claws and scales and teeth; a creature which could only inhabit the foulest of caves or the most monstrous of afterlives. As a child, the idea filled me with an infinite formless terror, and at night the spirits sent me terrible dreams about slavering Bastards come to get me. It did not make me afraid of Our Human, though. It made me feel sorry for a creature who had lost so much to such monsters. It was several seasons until Ctaas, who would become the Firstmother of my Grouping, but who was then a child as formless as I, heard him curse the bastards. In my presence Ctaas asked the Human the question I had been neither brave nor smart enough to voice: What Is A Bastard? Our Human had made that perverse coughing rasp that for his kind indicated vast amusement, and told us: A Bastard is a Human Being born without a Firstfather. It was even more alien than most of his answers, for we had never imagined that such an unnatural thing could happen, even among a species that only mated in Pairs. Our human brings so much wonder, so much terrible strangeness, into our lives.
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