The Best of Joe Haldeman

by Joe W. Haldeman

  (They know that this can eventually make the difference between life and death. The higher up you start, the more likely you are to wind up an elder. Those who aren't elders are allowed to die when they can no longer provide for themselves; elders are fed and protected indefinitely.)

  Most of them travel as far as the crater lake island, but a few go all the way to the northern mainland. That was the ambition of the one we were talking to. I interrogated him as to his preparations for a boat, food, and water, and he said a boat would be nice but not necessary, and the sea was full of food and water. He figured he could swim it in three hands of days, twelve. Unless he was chaffing me, they can evidently sleep floating and drink salt water. That will complicate our escape, if they keep pursuing.

  I take it that the three of them were cheating a bit by banding together. He repeatedly stressed that they would be going their separate ways as soon as they got to the archipelago. I hope they stayed together the whole way. I'd hate to face that forest alone. Maybe I'll have to, though.

  Before he left he gave us directions to his family, but we'd decided to at least start out with a different one from Garcia's, in the interests of objectivity and to see how much information traveled from family to family. Little or none, it turned out. Our Camchai family knew about the Tumlils, since they shared the same area of veldt during the late summer, but none of the Tumlils had mentioned that ten hairless dwarfs had spent one winter with them.

  After two days of relatively easy travel, we found the Camchais in their late-summer habitat, the almost treeless grassland at the foot of the southern mountains. Duplicating the experience of Garcia's group, we found ourselves unexcitedly welcomed into the tribe: we were shown where the food was, and various Plathys scrounged up the framework and hides to cobble together a maffa for us. Then we joined the family in their typical summertime activity, sitting around.

  After a few weeks of trying to cajole information out of them, we witnessed the sudden explosion of sexual activity described earlier. Then they rested some more, five or six days, and began to pull up stakes.

  Their supply of stored food was getting low and there was no easy hunting left in that part of the veldt, so they had to move around the mountains to the seashore and a wretched diet of fish.

  The trek was organized and led by Kalyym, who by virtue of being the youngest elder was considered chief for such practical matters. She was one of the few Plathys we met who wore ornaments; hers was a necklace of dinosaur teeth she'd brought back from her Walk North, the teeth of a large carnivore. She claimed to have killed it, but everyone knew that was a lie, and respected her for being capable of lying past puberty.

  It was significantly cooler on the other side of the mountains, with a chilly south wind in the evening warning that fall had begun and frost was near. The Plathys still lazed through midday, but in the mornings and evenings they fished with some energy and prepared for the stampede. They stockpiled driftwood and salt and sat around the fire chipping extra flints, complaining about eating fish and looking forward to bounty.

  We spent several months in this transitional state, until one morning a lookout shouted a happy cry and the whole family went down to the shore with clubs. Each adult took about three meters of shoreline, the children standing behind them with knives.

  We could hear them before we could see them—the tolliws, rabbit-sized mammals that chirped like birds. They sounded like what I imagine a distant cloud of locusts sounded like, in old times. The Plathys laughed excitedly.

  Then they were visible, one whirring mass from horizon tohorizon, like an island-sized mat of wriggling wet fur. Mammals schooling like fish. They spilled on to dry land and staggered into the line of waiting Plathys.

  At first there was more enthusiasm than result. Everybody had to pick up his first tolliw and bite off its head and extol its gustatory virtues to the others, in as gruesome a display of bad table manners as you could find anywhere in the ConfederaciOn. Then, after a few too-energetic smashings, they settled into a productive routine: with the little animals milling around their ankles in an almost continuous stream, the adult would choose a large and healthy-looking one and club it with a backhand swipe that lofted the stunned animal in an arc, back to where the child waited with the knife. The child would slit the animal's throat and set it on a large hide to bleed, and then wait happily for the next one. When the carcass had bled itself nearly dry, the child would give it a squeeze and transfer it to a stack on the sand, eventually working in a smooth assembly-line fashion. The purpose of the systematic bleeding was to build up on the hide layers of coagulated blood that, when dry, would be cut up into squares and used for snacks.

  Large predators were scattered here and there through the swimming herd, fawn-colored animals resembling terrestrial kangaroos, but with fingerlong fangs overhanging the lower jaw. Most of them successfully evaded the Plathys, but occasionally one would be surrounded and clubbed to death amid jubilant screeching and singing.

  This went on for what seemed to be a little less than two hours, during which time the oldest elders busied themselves filling a long trench with wood and collecting wet seaweed. When the last stragglers of the school crawled out of the water and followed the others down the beach, there were sixty pyramidal stacks of furry bodies, each stack nearly as tall as a Plathy, ranged down the beach. We could hear the family west of us laughing and clubbing away.

  (The statistics of the process bothered me. They seemed to have killed about one out of a hundred of the beasts and then sent the remainder on down the beach, where the next family would presumably do the same, and so on. There were more than a hundred families, we knew. Why didn't they run out of tolliws? For once, Tybru gave me a straightforward answer: they take turns. Only sixteen families "gather" the creatures during each migration, alternating in a rotating order that had been fixed since the dawn of time. The other families took advantage of the migrations of other animals; she was looking forward to two years hence, when it would be their turn for the jukha slaughter. They were the tastiest, and kept well.

  By this time it was getting dark. I had been helping the elders set up the long trench of bonfires; now we lit them, and with the evening chill coming in over the sea I was grateful for the snapping flames.

  Tybru demonstrated the butchering process so we could lend a hand. Selected internal organs went into hides of brine for pickling; then the skin was torn off and the yellow layer of fat that clung to it was scraped into clay jars for reducing to oil. More fat was flensed from the body, and then the meat was cut off in thin strips, which were draped over green sticks for smoking. Alas, they had no way to preserve the brains, so most of the Plathys crunched and sucked all night while they worked.

  We weren't strong enough or experienced enough to keep up with even the children, but we gamely butchered through the night, trying not to cut ourselves on the slippery flint razors, working in the light of guttering torches. The seaweed produced an acrid halogen-smelling smoke that Tybru claimed was good for the lungs. Maybe because of its preservative effect.

  The sun came up on a scene out of Hieronymus Bosch: smoke swirling over bloody sands littered with bones and heaps of entrails, Plathys and people blood-smeared and haggard with fatigue. We splashed into the icy water and scrubbed off dried blood with handfuls of sand, then stood in the stinging smoke trying to thaw out.

  It was time to pack up and go. Already the rich smell of fresh blood was underlaid with a whiff of rot; insects were buzzing, and hardshell scavengers were scuttling up onto the beach. When the sun got high the place would become unlivable, even by Plathy standards.

  We rolled up the smoked meat and blood squares into the raw scraped hides, which would later be pegged out and dried in the sun, and followed a trail up into the mountains. We set up our maffas on a plateau about a thousand meters up and waited placidly for the snow.

  Someone coming.

  ~ * ~

  Derek

/>   I can no longer view them as other than dangerous animals. They mimic humanity—no, what I mean is that we interpret in human terms the things they do. The animal things they do. Maria, I'm sorry. I can't be a scientist about this, not any more. Not after what I just saw.

  Herb and I were supposed to crisscross, going northeast a thousand steps, then northwest a thousand, and so forth. That was supposed to confuse them. They caught Herb.

  I heard the scream. Maybe half a kilometer away. I should have run, knowing there was nothing I could do, but Herb and I've been close since school. Undergraduate. Were close. And there he

  Two of them had run him down in a small clearing, killed him and taken off his head. They were, one of them was . . I can't.

  I hid in the underbrush. All I had was a club there was nothing I could do. One of them was eating his, his private parts. The other was scooping him out, curious, dissecting him. I ran away. It's a wonder they didn't

  Oh shit. Here they come.

  ~ * ~

  Gabriel

  I think my wrist is broken. Maybe just sprained. But I killed the son of a bitch. He came around a bend in the river and I was on him with the spear. Element of surprise. I got him two good ones in the thorax before he grabbed me—where are their goddamned vital organs? A human would've dropped dead. He grabbed me by the wrist and slammed me to the ground. I rolled away, retrieved the spear, and impaled him as he jumped on me. He made a lot of noise and finally decided to die, after scraping my arm pretty well. For some reason he wasn't armed. Thank God. He was Embrek, the one who taught me how to fish. We got along so well. What the hell happened?

  It was the first time it rained instead of snowing. All the music and everything stopped. They moped around all day and wouldn't talk. When it got dark they went wild.

  They burst into our igloo, four of them, and started ripping off our clothes. Nanci, Susan, and Marcus resisted and were killed right there. One bite each. The rest of us were stripped and led or carried out into the cold, into the center of the compound. The cheerful fire was black mud now, starting to glaze with ice.

  All the family except the oldest elders were there, standing around like zombies. No one spoke; no one took notice of anybody else. We all stood naked in the darkness. Kalyym eventually brought out a single oil candle, so we could be mocked by its flickering warm light.

  The nature of the rite became clear after a couple of hours. It was a winnowing process. If you lost consciousness the Plathys would gather around you and try to poke and kick you awake. If you stood up they would go back to ignoring you. If you stayed down, you would die. After a certain number of pokes and kicks, Kalyym or some other elder would tear open the thorax in a single rip. Even worse than the blood was the sudden rush of steam into the cold air. Like life escaping the body.

  Then they would feed.

  We knew we wouldn't last the night. But the slippery walls were impossible to scale, and the largest Plathys stood guard at every entrance to the ring of igloos.

  After some whispered discussion, we agreed we had to do the obvious: rush the Plathy who stood guard in front of our own igloo. The ones who survived would rush in, quickly gather weapons and clothing, and try to make it out the back entrance before the Plathys could react. Then run for the caves.

  We were lucky. We rushed the guard from six different directions. Crouching to slash at Derek, he turned his back to me, and I leaped, striking him between the shoulders with both feet. He sprawled face down in the mud, and didn't get up. We scrambled into the igloo and I stood guard with a spear while the others gathered up things. A couple of Plathys stuck their heads in the entrance and snarled, but they evidently didn't want to risk the spear.

  We weren't immediately followed, and for the first hour or so we made good time. Then it started to rain again, which slowed us down to a crawl. With no stars, we had to rely on Maria's sense of direction, which is pretty good. We found the caves just at dawn, and got a few hours' sleep before Mylab found us and we had to kill him.

  How long is this phase going to last? If it goes as long as thesummer or winter phases, they're sure to track us down. We may be safe inside the dome, if we can get that far—Noise ... Maria!

  ~ * ~

  Maria

  I might as well say it. It might be of some interest. None of us is going to live anyhow. I'm beyond embarrassment, beyond dignity. Nothing to be embarrassed about anyhow, not really.

  The thing that was splashing up the stream turned out to be Gabriel. I ran out of hiding and grabbed him, hugged him; we were both a little hysterical about it. Anyhow he got hard and we took care of it, and then we went back to my hiding place and took care of it again. It was the first happy thing that's happened to me in a long time. Now I'm watching him sleep and fighting the impulse to wake him up to try for thirds. One more time before we die.

  It's a strange state, feeling like a girl again, all tickled and excited inside, and at the same time feeling doomed. Like a patient with a terminal disease, high on medicine and mortality. There's no way we can outrun them. They'll sniff us down and tear us apart, maybe today, maybe tomorrow. They'll get us. Oh, wake up, Gab.

  Be rational. This ferocity is just another change of state. They don't know what they're doing. Like the sex and birth phases. Tomorrow they may go back to being bovine sweet things. Or artisans again. Or maybe they'll discover the wheel for a week. What a weird, fucked-up bunch of ...

  There must be some survival value in it. Certainly it serves to cull the weakest members out. And killing most of the females before puberty compensates for the size of the litters—or could the size of the litters be a response to the scarcity of females? Lamarckism either way. Can't think straight.

  At any rate it certainly can't be instinctive behavior in regard to us, since we aren't part of their normal environment. Maybe we've unknowingly triggered aberrant behavior. Stress response. Olfactory catalyst. Violent displacement activity. Who knows? Maybe whoever reads this tooth will be able to make some sense of it. You will excuse me for the time being. I have to wake him up.

  ~ * ~

  Brenda

  Maria and Gab were waiting for me when I got to the mouth of the river. Gab has a badly sprained wrist; I splinted and bound it. His grip is still good, and fortunately he's left-handed. Maria's okay physically, just a little weak, but I wonder about her psychological state. Almost euphoric, which hardly seems appropriate.

  We waited an extra half day, but the others are either dead or lost. They can catch up with us at the dome. We have axe, spear, and two knives. Gab turned one of the knives into a spear for me. Two water bladders. We filled the bladders, drank to saturation, and waded out into the sea.

  The water seems icy cold, probably more than ten degrees colder than when we walked through it before. Numb from the waist down after a few minutes. When the water is shallow or you get to walk along a sandbar, sensation returns, deep stinging pain. It was a good thing we'd found that second water island; only 10 kilometers of wading and limping along the wet sand.

  We'd rolled up our furs and shouldered them, so they were fairly dry. Couldn't risk a fire (and probably couldn't have found enough dry stuff to make one), so we just huddled together for warmth. We whispered, mapping out our strategy, such as it was, and kept an eye out to the south. Though if we'd been followed by even one Plathy we'd be pretty helpless.

  Thirty kilometers to the next water hole. We decided to stay here for a couple of days, eating the sulfurous oysters and regaining strength. It would have to be a fast push, going all the way on less than five liters of water.

  In fact we stayed four days. Gab came down with bad diarrhea, and we couldn't push on until his body could hold fluid. It was just as well. We were all bone-tired and stressed to the limit.

  The first night we just collapsed in a hamster pile and slept like the dead. The next day we gathered enough soft dry grass to make a kind of mattress, and spread our furs into a pi
ecemeal blanket. We still huddled for warmth and reassurance, and after a certain amount of nonverbal discussion, Gab unleashed his singular talent on both of us impartially.

  That was interesting. Something Maria said indicated that Gab was new to her. I'd thought that nothing—male, female, or Plathy—was safe around him. Maybe Maria's strength intimidated him, or her age. Or being the authority figure. That must be why she was in such a strange mood when I caught up with them. Anyhow, I'm glad for her.

  Gab entertained us with poetry and songs in three languages. It's odd that all three of us know English. Maria had to learn it for her study of the Eskimos, and I did a residency in Massachusetts. Gab picked it up just for the hell of it, along with a couple of other Earth languages, besides Spanish and Pan-Swahili, and all three Selvan dialects. He's quite a boy. Maria was the only one who could speak Plathy better than he. They tried duets on the blood songs and shit songs, but it doesn't sound too convincing. The consonants !ka and !ko you just can't do unless you have teeth like beartraps.