“You don’t hear it.”
“Hear what?”
“People cannot hear their native language. All right, listen, carefully please!” He was charming when he got excited; the hauteur fell off him like dried mud from a water buffalo. “I’m going to say a sentence in English the way my uncle, who didn’t attend World Government School, spoke English. Now. ‘Excuse please I have to go by this path.’ Repeat!”
“Excuse please I have to go by this path.”
“Askiös-bhis iyava oe is-bhassa.”
A chill, like a touch of that cold dazzling planet light, proceeded slowly up Tamara’s backbone and prickled in the roots of her hair.
“Funny,” she said.
“Saweya: sway. Beliya: belly dance, Bali. Fini: ravine, vines. Bhasto: bat, baseball. Bhani: cabin, cabana. Shuwushu: ocean, sea—”
“Onomatopoeia.”
“Oe: go. Tunu: return. Itunu: I return; utunu: you return; tunusi: he returns. Padu, to hit, strike. Fatu, to build, make—facere, factus—factory. Say a word in Ndif!”
“Sikka.”
“Fishing lines. Wait. No, I can’t get that one. Another please.”
“Fillisa.”
“The Unclean Huts—Filth, filthy.”
“Uvanai.”
“Strangers. Visitors. Foreigners... singular uvana. You-foreigner.”
“Ram, you don’t have diarrhoea. You have paranoia.”
“No,” he said, so harsh and loud that she started. He cleared his throat. She could not see his eyes but she knew him to be looking at her. “I am serious, Tamara,” he said. “I am frightened.”
“Of what?” she jeered.
“Frightened sick,” he said. “Scared shitless. You must take words seriously. They are all we have.”
“What are you frightened of?”
“We are thirty-one light-years from Earth. No one from Earth ever came to this solar system before us. These people speak English.”
“They don’t!”
“The structure and vocabulary of Young Ndif is based at least sixty percent upon the structure and vocabulary of Modern English.”
His voice shook, as if with fear, or with relief.
Tamara sat solidly, clasping her knees, and held fast to incredulity. A Ndif word went through her mind, and another, and another, each one followed by its English root or shadow, shadows that had been waiting for the light to show them; but it was absurd. She should not have said the word “paranoia.” It was true. The man was ill. Weeks of touch-me-not rudeness and now this sudden change to talk, excitement, warmth. A manic change; and paranoid. The Ndif speaking an English-based code, for mysterious purposes, understood by the expert alone Ono, one. Te, two. Ti, three...
“All female names,” Ramchandra said morosely, “end in ‘a.’ That is a cosmic constant established by H. Rider Haggard. Male names never end in ‘a.’ Never.”
His voice, light-timbred, still a little uneven, confused her thoughts. “Listen, Ram.”
“Yes.”
He was listening, all right. She could not ask him, as she had intended, whether he was playing an elaborate and disagreeable joke on her. His trust must be met in kind. She did not know how to go on; and he broke urgently into her pause—“I saw this within a week, Tamara. First the syntax—Then I wouldn’t see it. Meaningless coincidence, et cetera, et cetera. I said no. But it says yes. It is so. It is English.”
“Even the Old language?”
“No, no, that’s different,” he said, hurried, grateful, “that’s not English, that’s itself, wherever it’s not based on the baby talk. But the—”
“All right, then. The Old language is old, the original language, and the Youngs have been influenced, corrupted, by some contact with Space Service people we don’t know about, weren’t told about.”
“How? When? They say we are the first. Why would they lie?”
“The Space Service?”
“Or the Ndif. They both say we are the first!”
“Well, if we are the first, then it’s us. We're influencing the Ndif. They talk the way we unconsciously expect people to talk. Telepathy. They’re telepaths.”
“Telepaths,” he said, seizing the idea eagerly; and during the pause that followed he was evidently wrestling with it, trying to make it fit the circumstances, for he said at last, with frustration, “If only we knew anything about telepathy!”
Tamara meanwhile had been going around the problem in another direction, and asked, “Why didn’t you say anything about this till now?”
“I thought I was insane,” he said, in the controlled precise tone that sounded arrogant because his honesty would not permit him to evade. “I have been insane. Six years ago, after my wife died. There were two episodes. Linguists are often unstable.”
After a little while Tamara said almost in a whisper, “Ramchandra is a beautiful noble person...” She spoke in Ndif.
Ah-weh, weh, ah-weh, weh, went the chanting of the baliya dancers off on the dancing grounds at the edge of the village. A baby cried in a nearby hut. The dark-dazzling air was rich with the scent of night-blooming flowers.
“Look,” she said. “Doesn’t a telepath know what you’re thinking? The Ndif don’t. I’ve known people who do. My grandfather, he was Russian, he always knew what people were thinking. It was maddening. I don’t know if it was telepathy, or being old, or being Russian, or what. But anyhow, they’d get the thoughts, not the words—wouldn’t they?”
“Who knows? Maybe—You said it’s like a stage play, a movie, the island paradise. Maybe they sense what we expect or desire, and act it, perform it.”
“What for?”
“Adaptation,” he said, triumphant. “So that we like them and therefore don’t harm them.”
“But I don’t like them! They’re boring! No kinship systems, no social structure except stupid age-grading and detestable male dominance, no real skills, no arts—lousy carved spoons, all right, like a Hawaiian tourist trap—no ideas—once they grow up, they’re bored. Kara told me yesterday, ‘Life’s much too long.’ If they’re trying to produce a facsimile of somebody’s heart’s desire, it isn’t mine!”
“Nor mine,” Ramchandra said. “But Bob?”
There was a harshness, a homing-in quality, to the question. Tamara hesitated. “I don’t know. At first, sure. But he’s been restless, lately. After all he’s a myths man. And they don’t even tell stories. All they ever talk about is who they slept with last night and how many poro they shot. He says they all talk like Hemingway characters.”
“He doesn’t talk with the Old Ones.” Again that harshness, and Tamara, defensive of Bob, said, “Neither do I, much; do you? They don’t participate, they seem so shadowy... unimportant.”
“That was a healing song old Binira sang.”
“Maybe.”
“I think so. A ritual song, in the more complex language. If there is high culture, the Old Ones have it. Maybe they lose the telepathic power as they grow older; so then they can withdraw; they’re no longer influenced, forced to adapt—”
“Forced by whom to adapt to what? They’re the only intelligent species on the planet.”
“Other villages, other tribes.”
“But then they’d all talk each other’s language, all their customs would melt together—”
“Exactly! That explains the homogeneity of the culture! A solution to Babel!”
He sounded so pleased, and it sounded so plausible, that Tamara did her best to accept the hypothesis. The best she could do was admit finally, “The idea makes me queasy, for some reason.”
“The Old Ones have developed true language, nontelepathic language. They are the ones to talk with. I will request admission to the Old Men’s House tomorrow.”
“You’ll have to grow some grey hair...”
“Easily! Is it still black?”
“You’d better get some sleep.”
He was silent a while, but did not lie down. “Tamara,” he said, “you ar
e not humoring me, are you?”
“No,” she said gruffly, shocked that he was so vulnerable.
“It is so very like a delusional system.”
“Then it’s folie á deux. All this about the language just brings the rest into focus. All six villages we’ve visited, all the same, the same things missing, the same—improbability—only it’s like overprobability—”
“Projected telepathy,” he said, brooding. “They are influencing us. Confusing our perceptions, forcing us into subjectivity—”
“Driving us away from the Reality Principle?” she said, defensive, now, of him. “Rubbish.” She recognized the quotation, and laughed. “We’re talking much too cleverly to be gaga.”
“I talked brilliantly in the mental institution,” he said. “In several languages. Even Sanskrit.” He sounded reassured, however; and she stood up. “I’m going to bed,” she said. “A fine night’s sleep I’ll have now! Do you need a fresh hot rock?”
“No, no. Listen, I’m sorry—”
“Askiös, askiös.”
No rest for the wicked. She had just lit her oil lamp and was spitting on her fingers and pinching the wick to keep it from smoking, which it continued to do, when Bob appeared in the doorway of her hut. The light of Uper haloed his thick fair hair; the importance of his return filled the entire biosphere as the bulk of his body filled the doorway. “I just got back,” he announced.
“From where?”
“Gunda.” The next village downriver.
He came in and sat down on the cane stool, while she swore at the burned poro fat on her fingers. An even more world-shaking announcement than that of his return loomed, imminent, in his scowl. She beat him to the draw. “Ram’s sick,” she said.
“What with?”
“Delhi belly, you could call it.”
“How could anybody get sick here?”
“They have a cure. You sleep with a hot boulder.”
“Christ! Sounds like a cure for potency!” Bob said, and they both broke into laughter. While laughing she almost began to tell Bob about Ram’s peculiar linguistic discovery, which for a moment seemed equally ridiculous; but she should let Ram do it, even if it was just a joke. Bob had gone serious again, and now emitted his announcement. “I have to fight a duel. Single combat.”
“Oh, Lord. When? Why?”
“Well, that girl. Potita, you know, the redhead. One of the Young Men in Gunda has his eye on her. So he challenged me.”
“An exogamy arrangement? Has he a claim on her?”
“No, you know they don’t have any affiliation patterns, stop hunting for them. All she is is an excuse for a combat.”
“I thought you’d get into trouble,” Tamara said priggishly, though she had thought no such thing. “You can’t sleep with all the native girls and not expect the assegai of a maddened savage in your back—Half the native girls, O.K., but not all of them—”
“Shit,” Bob said with discouragement. “I know. Look, I never got mixed up like this before. Sleeping with informants and stuff. I can’t seem to keep anything straight here. But they expect it. We talked it all out, way back in Buvuna, remember? Ram said he wouldn’t. That’s O.K., he’s forty, he’s an old man to them, anyhow he looks alien. But I look just like them, and if I refuse I’m offending local custom. It’s practically the only custom they’ve got. I have no choice—”
A laugh, a deep, Middle-Aged Woman belly laugh, welled up from Tamara. He looked at her a little startled. “All right, all right,” he said, and laughed too. “But God damn it! They always talked like these combats were voluntary!”
“They’re not?”
Bob shook his head. “I represent Hamo village against Gunda. It’s the only kind of war they have. All the Young Men are really worked up. They haven’t won a combat with Gunda for half a year, or some such huge historical timespan. It’s the World Cup. Tomorrow I get purified.”
“A ceremony?” Tamara found Bob’s predicament funny but trivial; she leapt from it to the hope of a ceremony, a ritual, anything that would prove some sense and structure in the rudimentary social life of the Ndif.
“Dances. Saweya and baliya. All day.”
“Bah.”
“Look. I know you’d like some patterns to study, being a configurationist and all, but I have an even more urgent problem. I have to fight a man day after tomorrow. With knives. In front of the entire population of two villages.”
“With knives?”
“Right. Hunters wrestle. Sallenzii fight with knives.”
“Sallenzii?”—As Bob translated, “Competitors for a girl,” she transliterated: “Challengers...”
After a short silence she suggested, “Could you just give him the girl?”
“No. Honor, local pride, all that.”
“And she... she’s content just to be the prize pig?”
Bob nodded.
“The pattern is familiar,” she said, and then, abruptly, “Nothing—There is nothing alien about these people. Nothing!”
“What?”
“Never mind. Let me work it out. Ram has an idea... Listen, Bob, I think you ought to get out of this, even if you lose face. We can always move on. It would be better than you killing the fellow! Or getting killed.”
“Thanks for the afterthought,” Bob said kindly. “Don’t worry. I’ll cheat.”
“Hypodermic?”
“Karate ought to do. I don’t mind. It’s just that I feel so damned foolish. Public knife fights for a girl. Like a lot of stupid teenagers.”
“It’s a teenage society, Bob.”
“Locker-room aliens!” He scratched his lion’s mane of hair and stood up, stretching. He was very beautiful; no wonder the villagers had picked him for their champion. The fact that his physical splendor was informed and animated by an intellectual spirit of no less splendor, a passionate trained mind that sought the stuff of poetry for its own sake—this fact would mean nothing much to the Ndif, or to many people on Earth, for that matter. But Tamara, in that moment, saw the young man as what he was, a king.
“Bob,” she said, “say no. Beg off. We can just move on.”
“No sweat!” he said, and, grateful for her concern, gave her an affectionate bear hug. “I’ll clobber the poor bastard before he knows what hit him. And then give a lecture. Freshman Hygiene: Murder is Hazardous to Your Health. It’ll wow ’em.”
“Do you want me there, or not there?”
“There,” he said. “Just in case he’s a black belt too.”
She was down at the laundry beach next afternoon having an interesting discussion of menopause with Kara and Libisa when Ramchandra came out onto the beach from the peacock-colored forest. Watching him from her rock amid the swirling waters, she thought how foreign he looked, how alien, as Bob had said—like the shadow of somebody standing up in the front row against the marvelous flowing colors of a jungle epic on a movie screen: too small, too black, too solid. Kara saw him too and shouted, “How’s the belly, Uvana Ram?”
When he was close enough not to have to shout, he replied, “Askiös, Kara, much better. I finished the guo this morning.”
“Good, good. Another potful tonight. You’re all skin,” Kara said, not inaccurately.
“Maybe if he eats enough guo he’ll turn people-colored,” said Brella, studying him; Kara’s mention of skin seemed to have brought Ramchandra’s swarthy,dusky complexion to her notice for the first time. The Ndif were remarkably inattentive to details. Brella now compared the two foreigners and said, “You too, Tamara. If you only ate people-colored food, maybe you wouldn’t be so ugly and brown.”
“I never thought of that,” said Tamara.
“Tamara, we are invited to the Old Men’s House.”
“Both of us? When?”
“Both. Now.”
“How did you swing that?” Tamara asked in English, splashing ashore from the boulder she had been sharing with Kara, Libisa, and a lot of freshly washed loincloths.
“I ask
ed.”
“I’ll come too,” Kara announced, splashing after Tamara. “Askiös!”
“Is it right for women to do, Kara?”
“Of course. It’s the Old Men’s House, isn’t it?” Kara dusted off her flat little breasts and brought the fold of her sari-like garment neatly across them. “Go on ahead. I’ll stop by and pick up Binira. She told me it’s worth listening to sometimes in there. I’ll see you there.”
Tamara, her wet feet rimmed with the silvery river sand, joined Ramchandra and entered the peacock forest with him on the narrow path.
She was intensely aware of his brown shoulder beside hers, his dark, well-knit, and fragile body, the excellent nose in the stern profile. She was aware that she was aware of this, but it was not the important thing just now. “Are they holding a ceremony for us?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t got some of the key words yet. My request to go there appears to be sufficient reason for a gathering there.”
“Is it all right to bring that?” He was carrying a tape recorder.
“Anything goes in Cloud-Cuckoo Land,” he said, and the stem profile softened with a laugh.
Two of the withered, shadowy, scarce Old Men of the Ndif preceded them into the House, a large decrepit dugout; six or seven more were sitting around inside. There was much muttering of “askiös” and a strong reek of poro fat. The two foreigners joined the ill-defined circle, sitting on the dirt. No fire was lit. No apparatus or atmosphere of ritual was apparent. Presently Kara and Binira came in and sat down muttering “askiös” and cracking mild jokes with the Old Men. From across the circle—the place was lit only by the smokehole, and it was hard to see faces clearly—somebody asked something of Kara. Tamara did not understand the question. Kara’s response was, “I’m getting old enough, aren’t I?” There was a general laugh. One more came in, Bro-Kap, said once to have been a famous hunter, still a big man but stooped, wrinkled, and turtle-mouthed from the loss of his teeth. Instead of sitting down he went to the empty firepit under the smokehole and stood there, arms at his sides. Silence grew around him.
He turned slowly till he faced Ramchandra.
The Compass Rose Page 18
