Astounding Science Fiction Stories: An Anthology of 350 Scifi Stories Volume 2 (Halcyon Classics)

by Various

  "It sometimes seems you're more Ship's Anthropologist than Captain," the Engineer remarked.

  "I'm an anthro-apologist, Hymie, like Mr. Kipling," the Captain said. "There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays. And--every--single--one--of--them--is--right!" Bells rang, and the ship surged. "Aaron and Martha, God keep you," the Captain said.

  * * * * *

  "Whoa!" Aaron shouted. He peered back toward the ship, floating up into grayness, the cavitation of her wake stirring the snow into patterns like fine-veined marble. "Gott saygen eich," he said, a prayer for his departing friends.

  His wife shivered. "It's cold enough to freeze the horns off a mooley-cow," she said. She glanced about at the snow-drifted little trees and clutched her black cloak tighter. "I'm feared, Stoltz. There's naught about us now but snow and black heathen."

  "It's fear that is the heathen," Aaron said. "By the word of the Lord were the heavens made; and the host of them by the breath of His mouth." He kissed her. "I welcome you to our new homeland, wife," he said.

  Behind them Wutzchen--"piglet"--grunted. Martha smiled back at the giant porker, perched amongst the cases and bags and household goods like the victim of some bawdy chiavari. "I've never heard a pig mutter so," she said.

  "If he knew that his business here was to flatter the local lady-pigs with farrow, Wutzchen would hop out and run," Aaron said.

  "Dummel dich, Stoltz," Martha said. "I've got to make your supper yet, and we don't have so much as a stove lit in our tent."

  Stoltzfoos slapped the team back into motion. "What we need for our journey home are a few of the altie lieder," he said, reaching back in the wagon for his scarred guitar. He strummed and hummed, then began singing in his clear baritone: "In da guut alt Suumer-zeit ...

  "... In da guut alt Suumer-zeit," Martha's voice joined him. As they jolted along the path through the pine trees, heading toward Datura-village, near which their homestead stood, they sang the other homey songs to the music of the old guitar. "Drawk Mich Zrick zu Alt Virginye," nostalgic for the black-garbed Plain-Folk left at home. Then Aaron's fingers danced a livelier tune on the strings: "Ich fang 'n neie Fashun aw," he crowed, and Martha joined in:

  "A new fashion I'll begin," they sang,

  "The hay I'll cut in the winter;

  "When the sun-heat beats, I'll loaf in the shade.

  "And feast on cherry-pie.

  "I'll get us a white, smearkase cow,

  "And a yard full of guinea-hen geese;

  "A red-beet tree as high as the moon,

  "And a patent-leather fence.

  "The chickens I'll keep in the kitchen," they sang; whereupon Martha broke down laughing.

  "It's a new world, and for now a cold world; but it's God's world, with home just up ahead," Aaron shouted. He pulled the wagon up next to the arctic tent that was to be their temporary farmhouse, beside the wagon loads of provision he'd brought before. He jumped down and swung Martha to earth. "Light the stove, woman; make your little kitchen bright, while I make our beasts feel welcome."

  The Amishwoman pushed aside the entrance flap of the tent. Enclosed was a circle some twelve feet wide. The floor was bare earth. Once warmed by the pump-up "naptha" lantern and the gasoline hotplate, it would become a bog. Martha went out to the wagon to get a hatchet and set out for the nearby spinny of pines to trim off some twigs. Old Order manner forbid decorative floor-coverings as improper worldly show; but a springy carpet of pine-twigs could be considered as no more than a wooden floor, keeping two Plain Folk from sinking to their knees in mud.

  The pots were soon boiling atop the two-burner stove, steaming the tent's air with onion-tangy tzvivvele Supp and the savory pork-smell of Schnitz un Knepp, a cannibal odor that disturbed not a bit Wutzchen, snoring behind the cookstove. Chickens, penned beneath the bed, chuckled in their bedtime caucus. The cow stood cheek-by-jowl with Yonnie, warming him with platonic graciousness as they shared the hay Aaron had spread before them. Martha stirred her soup. "When the bishop married me to you," she told Aaron, "he said naught of my having to sleep with a pig."

  "Ah, but I thought you knew that to be the purpose of Christian marriage, woman," Aaron said, standing close.

  "It's Wutz I mean," she said. "Truly, I mind not a bit living as in one of those automobile-wagons, since it's with you, and only for a little while."

  "I'll hire a crew of our neighbors to help with the barn tomorrow," Aaron said. "That done, you'll have but one pig to sleep with."

  After grace, they sat on cases of tobacco to eat their meal from a table of feed sacks covered with oilcloth. "The man in the ship's little kitchen let me make and freeze pies, Stoltz," Martha said. "He said we'd have a deepfreeze big as all outdoors, without electric, so use it. Eat till it's all, Maan; there's more back."

  Yonnie bumped against Aaron's eating-elbow. "No man and his wife have eaten in such a zoo since Noah and his wife left the ark," Aaron said. He cut a slice of Schnitz-pie and palmed it against the bull's big snout to be snuffled up. "He likes your cooking," he said.

  "So wash his face," Martha told him.

  * * * * *

  Outside the tent there was a clatter of horse-iron on frozen ground. "What the die-hinker is that?" Aaron demanded. He stood and picked up the naphtha lantern.

  Outside, Aaron saw a tall black stranger, astride a horse as pale as the little Murnan moons that lighted him. "Rankeshi dade!" the visitor bellowed.

  "May your life be a long one!" Aaron Stoltzfoos repeated in Hausa. Observing that his caller was brandishing a clenched fist, the Amishman observed the same ambiguous courtesy. "If you will enter, O Welcome Stranger, my house will be honored."

  "Mother bless thee, Bearded One," the Murnan said. He dismounted, tossing his reins to one of the four retainers who remained on horseback. He entered the tent after Aaron; and stared about him at the animals, letting his dark eyes flick across Martha's unveiled face. At the Amishman's invitation, the visitor sat himself on a tobacco case, revealing as he crossed his legs elaborately embroidered trousers and boot tops worked with designs that would dazzle a Texan. Martha bustled about hiding the remains of their meal.

  The Murnan's outer dress was a woolen riga, the neckless gown of his West-African forefathers, with a blanket draped about his shoulders, exactly as those ancestors had worn one in the season of the cold wind called harmattan. Aaron introduced himself as Haruna, the Hausa version of his name; and the guest made himself known as Sarki--Chief--of the village of Datura. His given name was Kazunzumi. Wutzchen snuffled in his sleep. The Sarki glanced at the huge pig and smiled. Aaron relaxed a bit. The Islamic interdict on swine had been shed by the Murnans when they'd become apostates, just as Colonial Survey had guessed.

  Stoltzfoos' Hausa, learned at the Homestead School at Georgetown University, proved adequate to its first challenge in the field, though he discovered, with every experimenter in a new language, that his most useful phrase was magana sanoo-sanoo: "please speak slowly." Aaron let the Chief commence the desultory conversation that would precede talk of consequence. Martha, ignored by the men, sat on the edge of the bed, reading the big German-language Bible. Aaron and Kazunzumi sang on in the heathen tongue about weather, beasts, and field-crops.

  The Sarki leaned forward to examine Aaron's beard and shaven upper lip, once; and smiled. The Murnan does not wear such. He looked at Martha more casually now, seeing that the husband was not disgraced by his wife's naked face; and remarked on the whiteness of her skin in the same tones he'd mentioned Wutzchen's remarkable girth.

  Aaron asked when the snows would cease, when the earth would thaw. The Sarki told him, and said that the land here was as rich as manure. Gradually the talk worked round to problems involving carpenters, nails, lumber, hinges--and money. Aaron was pleased to discover that the natives thought nothing of digging a cellar and raising a barn in midwinter, and that workers could be easily hired.

  Suddenly Sarki Kazunzumi stood and slapped his palms together. The tent flap wa
s shoved open. Bowed servants, who'd shivered outside for over an hour, placed their master's presents on the sack table, on the twig floor, even beside Martha on the bed. There were iron knives, a roast kid, a basket of peanuts, a sack of roasted coffee beans, a string of dried fruit, and a tiny earthware flask of perfume. There was even a woolen riga for Aaron, black, suggesting that the Survey had said a bit to the natives about Amish custom; and there were bolts of bright-patterned cloth too worldly for aught but quilts and infant-dresses, brightening Martha's eyes.

  Aaron stood to accept the guest gifts with elaborate thanks. Sarki Kazunzumi as elaborately bemeaned his offerings. "Musa the carpenter will appear on tomorrow's tomorrow," he said. "You will, the Mother willing, visit me in Datura tomorrow. We will together purchase lumber worthy of my friend-neighbor's barn-making. May the Mother give you strength to farm, Haruna! May the Mother grant you the light of understanding!"

  "Sannu, sannu!" Stoltzfoos responded. He stood at the door of his tent, holding his lantern high to watch the Sarki and his servants ride off into the darkness.

  * * * * *

  "Er iss en groesie Fisch, nee?" Martha asked.

  "The biggest fish in these parts," Aaron agreed. "Did you understand our talk?"

  "The heathen speech is hard for me to learn, Stoltz," Martha admitted, speaking in the dialect they'd both been reared to. "While you had only the alien speech to study, I spent my time learning to grow the buglets and tell the various sorts apart. Besides, unser guutie Deitschie Schproech, asz unser Erlayser schwetzt, iss guut genunk fa mier." (Our honest German tongue, that our Saviour spoke, is good enough for me).

  Aaron laughed. "So altfashuned a Maedel I married," he said. "Woman, you must learn the Hausa, too. We must be friends to these Schwotzers, as we were friends with the English-speakers back in the United Schtayts." He pushed aside the bolt of Murnan cloth to sit beside his wife, and leafed through the pages of their Familien-Bibel, pages lovingly worn by his father's fingers, and his grandfather's. "Listen," he commanded:

  "For the Lord thy God bringeth thee into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills; a land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig trees, and pomegranates; a land of oil olive, and honey; a land wherein thou shalt eat bread without scarceness, thou shalt not lack any thing in it; a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass. When thou hast eaten and art full, then thou shalt bless the Lord they God for the good land which He hath given thee." Aaron closed the big book reverently. "Awmen," he said.

  "Awmen," the woman echoed. "Aaron, with you beside me, I am not fretful."

  "And with the Lord above us, I fear not in a strange land," Aaron said. He bent to scrape a handful of earth from beneath Martha's pine-twig carpet. "Guuter Gruundt," he said. "This will grow tall corn. Tobacco, too; the folk here relish our leaf. There will be deep grasses for the beasts when the snow melts. We will prosper here, wife."

  The next morning was cold, but the snowfall had ceased for a spell. The Stoltzfooses had risen well before the dawn; Martha to feed herself, her husband, and the chickens; Aaron to ready the horse and wagon for a trip into Datura. He counted out the hoard of golden cowries he'd been loaned as grubstake, did some arithmetic, and allowed his wife to pour him a second cup of coffee for the road. "You may expect the Sarki's wives to visit while I'm gone," he remarked.

  "I'd be scared half to death!" Martha Stoltzfoos said. Her hands went to the back of her head, behind the lace prayer covering. "My hair's all strooby, this place is untidy as an auction yard; besides, how can I talk with those dark and heathen women? Them all decked out in golden bangles and silken clothes, most likely, like the bad lady of Babylon? Aaron Stoltz, I would admire a pretty to ride into town with you."

  "Haggling for hired-help is man's Bissiniss." he said. "When Kazunzumi's women come, feed them pie and peaches from the can. You'll find a way to talk, or women are not sisters. I'll be back home in time for evening chores."

  * * * * *

  Bumping along the trail into Datura, Aaron Stoltzfoos studied the land. A world that could allow so much well-drained black soil to go unfarmed was fortunate indeed, he mused. He thought of his father's farm, which would be his elder brother's, squeezed between railroad tracks and a three-lane highway, pressed from the west by an Armstrong Cork plant, the very cornstalks humming in harmony with the electric lines strung across the fields. This land was what the old folks had sought in America so long ago: a wilderness ripe for the plow.

  The wagon rumbled along the hoof-pocked frozen clay. Aaron analyzed the contours of the hills for watershed and signs of erosion. He studied the patterns of the barren winter fields, fall-plowed and showing here and there the stubble of a crop he didn't recognize. When the clouds scudded for a moment off the sun, he grinned up, and looked back blinded to the road. Good tilth and friendship were promised here, gifts to balance loneliness. Five years from spring, other Amish folk would come to homestead--what a barn-raising they'd have! For now, though, he and Martha, come from a society so close-knit that each had always known the yield-per-acre of their remotest cousin-german, were in a land as strange as the New York City Aaron, stopping in for a phone-call to the vet had once glimpsed on the screen of a gay-German neighbor's stereo-set.

  Datura looked to Aaron like a city from the Bible, giving it a certain vicarious familiarity. The great wall was a block of sunbaked mud, fifty feet tall at the battlements, forty feet thick at its base; with bright, meaningless flags spotted on either side of the entrance tower. The cowhide-shielded gate was open. Birds popped out of mud nests glued to the mud wall and chattered at Aaron. Small boys wearing too little to be warm appeared at the opening like flies at a hog-slaughtering to add to the din, buzzing and hopping about and waving their arms as they called companions to view the black-bearded stranger.

  Aaron whoaed his horse and took a handful of anenes, copper tenth-penny bits, to rattle between his hands. "Zonang!" he shouted: "Come here! Is there a boy amongst you brave enough to ride with an off-worlder to the Sarki's house, pointing him the way?"

  One of the boys laughed at Aaron's slow, careful Hausa. "Let Black-Hat's whiskers point him the way!" the boy yelled.

  "Uwaka! Ubaka!" Damning both parents of the rude one, another youngster trotted up to Aaron's wagon and raised a skinny brown fist in greeting. "Sir Off-Worlder, I who am named Waziri, Musa-the-Carpenter's son, would be honored to direct you to the house of Sarki Kazunzumi."

  "The honor, young man, is mine," Stoltzfoos assured the lad, raising his own fist gravely. "My name is Haruna, son of Levi," he said, reaching down to hoist the boy up beside him on the wagon's seat. "Your friends have ill manners." He giddapped the horse.

  "Buzzard-heads!" Waziri shouted back at his whilom companions.

  "Peace, Waziri!" Aaron protested. "You'll frighten my poor horse into conniptions. Do you work for your father, the carpenter?"

  "To, honorable Haruna," the boy said. "Yes." The empty wagon thumped over the wheel-cut streets like a wooden drum. "By the Mother, sir, I have great knowledge of planing and joining; of all the various sorts of wood, and the curing of them; all the tools my father uses are as familiar to me as my own left hand."

  "Carpentry is a skillful trade," Aaron said. "Myself, I am but a farmer."

  "By Mother's light! So am I!" Waziri said, dazzled by this coincidence. "I can cultivate a field free of all its noxious weeds and touch never a food-plant. I can steer a plow straight as a snapped chalk-string, grade seed with a sure eye; I can spread manure--"

  "I'm sure you can, Waziri," Aaron said. "I need a man of just those rare qualifications to work for me. Know you such a paragon?"

  "Mother's name! Myself, your Honor!"

  Aaron Stoltzfoos shook the hand of his hired man, an alien convention that much impressed Waziri. The boy was to draw three hundred anenes a day, some thirty-five cents, well above the local minimum-wage conventions; and he would get his bed an
d meals. Aaron's confidence that the boastful lad would make a farmer was bolstered by Waziri's loud calculations: "Three hundred coppers a day make, in ten day's work, a bronze cowrie; ten big bronzes make a silver cowrie, the price of an acre of land. Haruna, will you teach me your off-world farming? Will you allow me to buy land that neighbors yours?"

  "Sei schtill, Buu," Aaron said, laughing. "Before you reap your first crop, you must find me the Sarki."

  "We are here, Master Haruna."

  * * * * *

  The Sarki's house was no larger than its neighbors, Moorish-styled and domed-roofed like the others; but it wore on its streetside walls designs cut into the stucco, scrolls and arabesques. Just above the doorway, which opened spang onto the broadway of Datura, a grinning face peered down upon the visitors, its eyes ruby-colored glass.

  Waziri pounded the door for Aaron, and stepped aside to let his new employer do the speaking. They were admitted to the house by a thin, old man wearing a pink turban. As they followed this butler down a hallway, Aaron and Waziri heard the shrieks and giggles of feminine consternation that told of women being herded into the zenana. The Amishman glimpsed one of the ladies, perhaps Sarki Kazunzumi's most junior wife, dashing toward the female sanctuary. Her eyes were lozenges of antimony; her hands, dipped in henna, seemed clad in pale kid gloves. Aaron, recalling pointers on Murnan etiquette he'd received at Georgetown, elaborately did not see the lady. He removed his hat as the turbaned butler bowed him to a plush-covered sofa. Waziri was cuffed to a mat beside the door.

  "Rankeshi dade!" the Sarki said. "May the Mother bring you the light of understanding."

  "Light and long life, O Sarki," Stoltzfoos said, standing up.

  "Will the guest who honors my roof-cup taste coffee with his fortunate host?" the Sarki asked.

  "The lucky guest will be ever the Sarki's servant if your Honor allows him to share his pleasure with his fellow-farmer and employee, Waziri the son of Musa," Aaron said.