Nova 1

by Anthology

  Dakeham gave up, went out, and closed the door of the communications room of the Strongpoint behind him. To the best of my recollection, it was never opened again.

  That evening, the K’ahari hit the walls again in another assault. It was not as determined as the first, and it met a more determined resistance. It was beaten off, with only two men slightly wounded. But that was just the first day of full-scale attack.

  Twice and sometimes three times a day after that, the K’ahari attacked the Strongpoint. The odor of death grew so strong about the fort that it even got into my dreams, high up in my treetop; and I would dream I was wandering through fields of dead of the past and forgotten wars I had read about as a student in school. The K’ahari lost unbelievably with every assault—but always there were more coming in through the jungle to increase their numbers. This one Strongpoint was holding up all the K’ahari advance, for psychologically they could not break off a contest once it was begun, though they could retreat temporarily to rest. But inside the Strongpoint, its defenders were being whittled down in number. It was almost unbearable to watch. A dozen times I found my gun at my shoulder, my finger on the trigger. But I didn’t pull it. My small help would not change the outcome of the battle—and it would be suicide on my part. They would come up after me, in the dark, watching me, waiting for me to sleep. When I dozed I would be dead. I knew this, but it did not help the feeling of helplessness that overwhelmed me while I watched them die, one by one.

  Daily, though neither the besieging K’ahari nor the humans in the Strongpoint could see or hear it, a reconnaissance plane circled high up out of sight over the area, to send back pictures and reports of the fight there to Regional Installation. Daily, swaying in my treetop sentinel post, I heard over my voice receiver, the steady, clear tones of the newscaster from Regional Installation, informing the rest of the humans on Utword.

  “. . . the thirty-seventh attack on the Strongpoint was evidendy delivered shortly after dawn today. The reconnaissance plane saw fresh native casualties lying in the clearing around all four walls. Numbers of K’ahari in the surrounding jungle are estimated to have risen to nearly forty thousand individuals, only a fraction of whom, it is obvious, can take part in an attack at any one time. With the Strongpoint, pictures indicate that its defenders there seem to be taking the situation with calmness . . .”

  And I would turn to my scanners and my phones showing me the inside of the Strongpoint and hear the sounds of the wounded, the dying, and those who were face-to-face with death . . .

  “. . . They’ve got to quit sometime,” I heard Bert Kaja, one of the planters, saying on my fifteenth day in the tree. He was squatting with the wounded, and Dakeham, under the awning.

  “Maybe,” said Dakeham, noncommittally. He was a tall, lean, dark individual with a slightly pouting face but hard eyes.

  “They can’t keep this up forever. They’ll run out of food,” said Kaja, seated swarthy and crosslegged on the ground. “The jungle must be stripped of food all around here by this time.”

  “Maybe,” said Dakeham.

  They discussed the subject in the impersonal voices with which people back home discuss the stock market. Jean Dupres was less than eight feet from them, and possibly he could have answered their questions, but he was still in the occupation to which Strudenmeyer had assigned him—caring for the wounded.

  Right now he was washing the lance wound, the original wound in his father’s shoulder. Pelang watched him, scowling, not saying anything until the other two men rose and left. Then he swore—abruptly, as Jean tightened a new bandage around the shoulder.

  “—be careful, can’t you?”

  Jean loosened the bandage.

  “You . . .” Pelang scowled worse than ever, watching the boy’s face, tilted downward to watch his working hands. “You and she wanted to go back . . . to Earth, eh?” Jean looked up, surprised.

  “You said she wanted to be buried back home? You told me that!” said Pelang. Still staring at his father, Jean nodded.

  “And you, too? Eh? You wanted to go back, too, and leave me here?”

  Jean shook his head.

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  “I’m not!” Jean’s voice was injured.

  “Ah, you lie . . . you lie!” snarled Pelang, unhappily. “You don’t lie to me with words, but you lie anyway, all the time!” He reached up with his good hand and caught the boy by the shoulder. “Listen, I tell you this is a terrible place, but me, your daddy, worked hard at it to make you rich someday. Now, answer me!” He shook the boy. “It’s a terrible place, this jungle, here! Isn’t it?”

  “No,” said the boy, looking as if he was going to cry.

  “You . . . Pelang let go of Jean’s shoulder and clenched his fist as if he were going to strike his son. But instead his face twisted up as if he were going to cry himself. He got to his feet and lumbered away, toward the walls, out of range of my immediate scanner. Jean sat still, looking miserable for a moment, then his face smoothed out and he got to his feet and went off about some business of his own to do with the wounded.

  In that evening’s assault they lost two more men to the attacking K’ahari, one of them Dakeham. It was the fifteenth day of full-scale assaults and they were down to eight men able to man the walls, each one of them handling half a wall of rifles on automatic remote, instead of one rifle direct and the rest on automatic. They had found that it was point-blank massed firepower that beat back the attacks; and that what was to be feared were not the K’ahari rushing the walls, but the one or two natives who by freak chance got to the top of these barriers and inside the Strongpoint. A K’ahari inside the walls could usually kill or wound at least one man before he was shot down.

  The one who killed Dakeham did so before any of the others noticed it and went on to the wounded under the awning before he could be stopped. There, Jean killed him, with a rifle one of the wounded had kept by him—but by that time the wounded were all dead.

  But there were fresh wounded. Pelang had been lanced again —this time in the side, and he bled through his bandage there, if he overexerted himself. Kaja had been chosen to command in Dakeham’s place. Under the lights, once night had fallen, he went from man to man, slapping them carefully on unwounded back or shoulder.

  “Brace up!” he said to them. “Brace up! The K’ahari’ll be quitting any day now. They must be out of food for miles around. Just a matter of hours! Any day now!”

  No one answered him. A few, like Pelang, swore at him. Jean looked at him gently, but said nothing. And, voiceless as far as they were concerned, up in my sentinels post, I understood what Jean’s look meant. It was true that the K’ahari were out of food for kilometers about the Strongpoint, but that made no difference. They were able, just like humans, to go several days without food if it was worth it to them—and in this case it was worth it. Going hungry was just the price of being in on the party. After several days the hungriest would break off, travel away in search of fruit and roots and when they were full again, come back.

  “. . . the season’s not more than a week from being over!” said Kaja. “With the end of the season, they always move to a new place.”

  That was truer. It was a real hope. But two weeks was a long way off in a Strongpoint under two or three assaults a day. The evening radio news broadcast came on to emphasize this.

  “. . . this small jungle outpost holds all the K’ahari young men at bay,” recited the announcer calmly. “The native advance has been frustrated . . .”

  I dozed off in the rocking treetop.

  Sometime in the next two days, Jean finally returned to the walls. I did not remember, and I think no one in the Strongpoint remembered when it happened exactly. He must have taken over a bank of rifles on automatic fire when the man handling them was killed by a K’ahari who had gotten over the wall. At any rate, he was once more fighting with the men. And the men were now down to three able to fight and two dying under the awning, so no one objected.
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  They did not lose a man for two days. Jean not only manned his section of the walls, but shot the three K’ahari that got over the walls, in that time. It was as if he had eyes in the back of his head. Then, suddenly, in one morning assault, they lost two men and Pelang went down from loss of blood—the wound in his side having reopened and bled during the fighting. Later on that day, the two wounded died. At the evening assault, Pelang lay useless, half-dozing under the awning, while Jean and the remaining planter in fighting shape stood back-to-back in the open middle of the Strongpoint, scanners set up in front of them, each handling two adjacent walls of guns on automatic remote fire.

  Half a dozen K’ahari made it over the walls and into the Strongpoint. Jean and the planter—whose name I do not remember—grabbed up hand weapons and shot them down. By what amounted to a wild stroke of luck, the man and the boy were able to get them all killed without being wounded themselves.

  Night fell, and brought an end to the day’s fighting. But later on, about the middle of the night, there was the single, sharp report of a handgun that woke me in my treetop. I turned to the scanners, lifted their hoods one by one, and located Jean standing in the open space before the awning, half in shadow above something lying in an interior angle of the walls. As I looked, he turned, crossed under the lights and came back underneath the awning. I had a scanner there, as I may have mentioned, but the night contrast between the shadow and the interior lights was such that I could barely make out the darkly upright shape of Jean and the recumbent shape of a man, who would be Pelang. Pelang had been half-unconscious earlier, but now his voice came weakly to the phone connection nearby.

  “—what is it?”

  “He’s shot,” answered Jean; and I saw the upright shape of him fold itself down beside the larger darkness of his father.

  “Who . . .?” Pelang barely whispered.

  “He shot himself.”

  “Ah . . . It was a sigh from the man’s lips, but whether one of despair or just of weariness or exhaustion, I could not tell. Pelang lay still and silent, and Jean stayed sitting or crouching beside his father . . . and I almost dozed off again, watching the screen. I was roused by the whispering sound of Pelang’s voice. He had begun to talk again, half to himself, just when, I was not sure.

  “. . . I am a man . . . I can go anywhere. Back home . . . look at the stars. I told myself, Elmire and me . . . Nobody farms better than me, Pelang. Nobody works harder. This is a terrible place, but it don’t stop me. Elmire, your mama, she wanted to go back home; but we got earth here you can’t match on them stony old fields, bord la rive Mistassibi. Man don’t let himself be pushed from his crops—no, they don’t get away with that, you hear?” He was becoming louder-voiced and excited. I saw the shadow of him heave up and the shape of Jean bowing above him.

  “Lie down, Papa . . .” it was the boy’s whisper. “Lie down . . .”

  “This terrible place, but I make my boy rich . . . you’ll be rich someday, Jean. They’ll say—‘Hey, Jean, how come you’re so rich?’ then you say—‘My daddy, mon pere Pelang, he made me so.’ Then you go back home, take your mama, also; you let them see you way up beyond Lac St. John. ‘My daddy, Pelang,’ you say, ‘he don’t never back down for no one, never quits. He’s a man, my daddy, Pelang . . .”

  His voice lowered until I could not make out the words and he rambled on. After a while I dozed; and a little later on I slept deeply.

  I woke suddenly. It was day. The sun was up above the leaves over me—and there was a strange silence, all around.

  Then I heard a voice, calling.

  It was a calling I recognized. I had heard it once before, outside the walls of the Strongpoint, the first day I had been in the treetop sentinel post. It was the calling of the K’ahari, that Jean had told Strudenmeyer was for him, days before.

  I rolled to the scanners and flipped up all their hoods. Jean still sat where I had seen his indistinct form in the darkness, above the shape of his father, under the awning. But now Pelang was covered with a blanket—even his face—and unutterably still. Jean sat cross-legged, facing the body under the blanket—not so much in the posture of a mourner, as of a guard above the dead. At first as I watched it seemed to me that he did not even hear the calling beyond the walls.

  But, after a while, as the calling kept up in the high-pitched K’ahari voice, he got slowly to his feet and picked up the issue rifle beside him. Carrying it, he went slowly across the open space, climbed to the catwalk behind the west wall and climbed from that on to the two-foot width of the wall, in plain sight of the K’ahari hidden in the jungle. He sat down there, cross-legged, laying the rifle across his knees and stared out into the jungle.

  The calling ceased. There came after that a sound I can’t describe, a sort of rustling and sighing, like the sound of a vast audience, after a single, breath-held moment of uncertainty, settling itself to witness some occasion. I switched to binoculars, looking directly down into the clearing before the west wall. Several tall K’aharis came out of the jungle and began clearing the dead bodies from a space about twenty feet square before the west wall. When they had gotten down to the macerated earth below the bodies they brought out clean leaves of fern and covered the ground there.

  Then they backed off, and three K’ahari, feathered and ornamented as none I had ever seen before, came out of the jungle and sat down themselves on the ferns, cross-legged in their fashion —which Jean had imitated on the wall above. Once they were seated, K’ahari began to emerge from the jungle and fill in the space behind them, standing and watching.

  When as many were into the open space as could get there without getting between the seated three and their view of Jean, another silence fell. It lasted for a few seconds, and then the K’ahari on the end got to his feet and began to talk to Jean.

  In the Rangers we are taught a few K’ahari phrases—“you must disperse—” “lay down your weapons”—and the like. A few of us learn to say them well enough to make the K’ahari understand, but few of us learn to understand more than half a dozen of the simplest of K’ahari statements. It is not only that the native voice is different—they talk high and toward the back of a different-shaped throat than ours; but the way they think is different.

  For example, we call this planet “Utword,” which is a try at using the native term for it. The K’ahari word—sound rather—is actually something like “Ut,” said high and cut off sharp, toward the back of your mouth. But the point is, no K’ahari would ever refer to his planet as simply “Ut.” He would always call it “the world of Ut”; because to the K’ahari, bound up in this one planet there are four worlds, all equally important. There is the world that was, the world of all past time. There is the world yet to be, the world of time to come. There is a sort of K’ahari hell—the world populated by the dead who died in failure; and whose souls will therefore never be reincarnated in K’ahari yet to be bom. And there is the world of the physical present—the world of Ut. So “Utword” is “Ut”-tied onto the human word “world” minus the 1-sound the K’ahari can’t pronounce.

  Therefore I understood nothing of what was said by the K’ahari who was speaking. From his gestures to the Strongpoint walls and the jungle behind him, I assumed he was talking about the conflict here. And from the way Jean sat listening, I guessed that Jean understood, where I did not. After the speaker was finished, he sat down; and there was a long silence that went on and on. It was plain even to me that they were waiting for some answer from Jean, but he simply sat there. And then the middle K’ahari stood up to speak.

  His gestures were more sharp and abrupt, more demanding. But aside from that he was as incomprehensible to me as the first, except that something about the gestures and the talk gave me the impression that a lot of what he said was repeating what the first speaker had said. At last he sat down, and again there was the silence and the waiting for Jean to speak.

  This time Jean did speak. Without standing up, he said one short phrase and t
hen sat still again, leaving me with the tantalizing feeling that I had almost understood him, because of the simpleness of his statement and the fact that it was made by a human mouth, throat and tongue.

  But the response was another rustling sigh from the audience, and when it died, the third and tallest K’ahari got slowly to his feet and began to talk. I do not know if the few words from Jean had sharpened my wits, or whether the last speaker was himself more understandable, but without being able to translate a single word, I felt myself understanding much more.

  It seemed to me that he was asking Jean for something—almost pleading with the boy for it. He was advancing reasons why Jean should agree. The reasons were possibly reasons the first two to speak had advanced—but this speaker seemed to take them with a deeper seriousness. His gestures were at arms’ length, slow and emphatic. His voice rose and fell with what seemed to me to be a greater range of tone than the voices of the others. When at last he sat down, there seemed to be a deeper, more expecting silence, holding all the listening jungle and the silent Strongpoint.

  Jean sat still. For a moment I thought he was not going to move or answer. And then he said that phrase again, and this time I understood why I had almost felt I could translate it. The first sounds in it were “K’ahari . . . the native name with the throat-catch in the beginning of it that we replace with a more humanly pronounceable “I,” to get the word “K’ahari.” I had almost had the whole phrase understood with that identification, it seemed to me.

  But Jean had risen to his feet and was finally beginning to talk, his high-pitched child’s voice matching the pitch of the native vocal apparatus.

  He spoke impassionedly—or maybe it was because he was as human as I was that I could see the passion in him, where I hadn’t been able to see it in the K’ahari. He gestured as they had, but he gestured in one direction that they had not gestured, and that was back the way they had come to the Strongpoint, back toward the now overrun fields of his family farm, the deep jungle and the desert beyond. Twice more, I caught in his speech the phrase he had used to answer the second and third native speakers—and finally it stuck in my head: