by Jack Vance
2 Banjee: one of the many varieties of mandoril indigenous to Cadwal. The usual banjee is a massive two-legged creature, somewhat andromorphic, if grotesquely so. The banjee is sheathed in chitin, black in the mature male, which stands eight to nine feet tall. The head is covered with stiff black hair except for the frontal visage of naked bone.
The banjees are remarkable in many ways. They begin life as neuters, become female at the age of six years, metamorphose to males at the age of sixteen, growing each year thereafter in size, mass and ferocity, until they are eventually killed in battle.
Banjees communicate in a language impervious to the most subtle analytical methods of the Gaean linguists. The banjees construct tools and weapons, and exhibit what seems to be the glimmerings of an aesthetic sense, which, like the language, evades the understanding of the human mind.
Banjees are intractable and while ferocious are not actively aggressive under ordinary conditions. They are well aware of the tourists who crowd the terrace at Mad Mountain Lodge to watch them pass, but pay no heed. Reckless persons sometimes approach the marching hordes or even the battles in order to secure dramatic photographs. Emboldened by the apparent indifference of the banjees, they venture a step or two closer, then another step, which takes them past some imperceptible boundary into the banjees’ “zone of reaction,” and then they are killed.
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Chapter VII Footnotes
1 In his monograph The Purple Sliders of Tassadero the biologist Dennis Smith uses more direct language: “They give forth a majestic stench, which, beyond cavil or question, is a thing of truly epic scope. The tourist officials fail to mention a curious side effect of this stench: it penetrates the skin and hair of dainty ladies and dignified gentlemen alike, and cannot be eradicated, nor stifled, nor disguised. The stink persists for several months. Sometimes it is argued that the tourist bureaus of Tassadero should be censured for their ambiguities.”
