We'd been in the jungle for perhaps twelve hours, dusk approaching, when a lizard pack hit us, or two packs, from in front and behind. The trail is scarcely two meters wide, which saved us. The carcasses piled up and impeded their charge. We must have killed forty of them, man-sized or slightly smaller. Not a type we'd seen on the way down.
Were they intelligent enough to coordinate their charge, or is it some kind of instinctive attack pattern? Scary either way. Used up a lot of energy. If it happens a few more times . . . it happens. No use thinking about it.
At least the action seems to have been good for morale. Both of them have been radiating depression and fear since we started out this morning. Reinforcing each other's premonitions of doom. I shouldn't have let her go to him at watch change, or I should have admonished her to fuck, don't talk. It was too much like saying goodbye. I got that feeling from Gab too, last night, but I tried to reassure him. Words.
By my reckoning we have fourteen to eighteen hours to go, depending on how much ground we can cover without light. Decided against torches, of course. The Plathys don't normally hunt at night, but they sure as hell attacked us in the dark.
Natural impulse is to climb a tree and wait for dawn. That would be suicidal. The jungle canopy is thick and supports its own very active ecology. We can't take to the water because the current's too swift, even if we wanted to chance the snakes.
We'll stay within touching distance, Gab in front because he has the best hearing. Brenda hears better than me, so she should bring up the rear, but I think she'll be better off in the middle, feeling protected. Besides, I want to have one of the weapons.
~ * ~
Gabriel
Never another night like that. I wound up firing at every sound, jumpy. But a few times there actually was something waiting in front of us, once something that wasn't a lizard. Big shaggy animal that stood up on its hind legs and reared over us, all teeth and claws and a dick the size of my arm. He was too dumb to know he was dead, and actually kept scrabbling toward us after I cut him off at the knees. If we'd gone a few steps farther before I fired he would have gotten at least me, maybe all of us. The crazer light was almost bright in the pitch blackness, a lurid strobe. I used up the last of one fuel cell and had to reload by touch.
At least we don't have to worry about the Plathys. Nothing remotely edible could make it through a night like that without energy weapons.
When I mentioned that to Maria, she said not to be too sure. They were tracking us on the jungle side before. Not the same, though. This jungle makes that one look like a park.
Dead tired but moving fast. We're looking for a pink granite outcropping. Fifty paces upstream from it there's a minor trail to the right; the dome clearing is about half a kilometer in. Can't be more thana few hours away.
~ * ~
Brenda
There it is! The rock! Hard to...talk running...
~ * ~
Maria
Slow down! Careful! That's better. Not a sound now.
~ * ~
Gabriel
Oh, no. Shit, no.
~ * ~
Brenda
They . . . burned it?
~ * ~
Gabriel
Spears
~ * ~
Maria
Take his weapon! Get to cover! Here!
~ * ~
Brenda
I—oh!
~ * ~
Maria
So . . . so this is how it ends. Gab died about ten minutes ago, in the first moment of the attack. A spear in the back of his head. Brenda was hit then too, a spear that went in her shoulder and came out her back. She lived for several minutes, though, and acquitted herself well when the Plathys charged. I think we killed them all, thirty-seven by my count. If there are any left in the jungle they are staying there for the time being.
They must have piled wood up around the dome and kept a bonfire going until the force field overloaded and collapsed. It wasn't engineered for that kind of punishment, I suppose. Obviously.
Little of use left in the ruins. Rations destroyed, fuel cells popped by the heat. There's a toolbox not badly harmed. Nothing around to repair with it, though. Maybe if I dug I could find some rations merely overcooked. But I don't want to stay around to search. Doubt that I'll live long enough to have another meal, anyhow.
My fault. Eleven good people dead, and how many innocent savages, because I wasn't prudent. With that first abrupt life change, the frenzied breeding, I should have ordered us to tiptoe away. Another decade of satellite surveillance and we would have learned which times were safe to come in for close-up study. Now everything is a shambles.
Racial vanity is part of it, I guess, or my vanity. Thinking we could come naked into a heavily armed Stone Age culture and survive by our superior intelligence and advanced perspective. It worked before. But this place is not Obelobel.
I guess all I can do now is be sure a record survives. These teeth might not make it through a Plathy or lizard digestive system. I'll . . . I'll use the pliers from the tool kit. Leave the teeth here in the ruins. Buried enough so the Plathys can't find them easily. One hell of a prize to bring back from your Walk North.
I have only about a tenth charge left. Brenda used up all of the other before she died. Not enough to get out of the jungle, not even if it were all daylight. One woman alone doesn't have a bloody fucking chance on this world. I'll try the river. Maybe I can find a log that will float me down to the savannah. Then hike to the coast. If I can make it to the beach maybe I can stay alive there for a while. Sleep with one eye open. I don't know. Look for me there. But don't bother to look for too long. The pliers.
Sorry, Brenda....
Sorry ... Gab. Sweet Gab. Still warm.
Now mine. One jerk. Some blood, some pain. Tem se garlish. !ka.
~ * ~
To: Ahmadou Masire, Coordinator
Selva Sector Recreational Facilities
Confederacion Office Building, Suite 100
Bolivar 243 488 739
Selva
From: Federico Santesteban, Publicity Director
Office of Resources Allocation
Chimbarazo Interplanetario
Ecuador 3874658
Terra
Dr. Masire:
I hope you will find the enclosed transcript of some use. Your assistant, Sra. Videla, mentioned the possibility of a documentary cube show to generate interest in the hunting trips to Sanchrist IV. Seems to me that if you inject some romance into this you have a natural story: sacrifice, tragedy, brave kids battling against impossible odds.
We could save you some production costs by getting a few Plathys shipped to your studio via our xenological division on Perrin's World. They have a hundred or so there and keep their stock stable by cloning. You'll have to have somebody put together a grant proposal demonstrating that they'll be put to legitimate scholarly use. Garcia Belaunde at your Instituto XenolOgico is a tame one, as you probably know. Have him talk to Leon Jawara at the PW Xenological Exchange Commission. He'll make sure you get the beasts at the right part of their life cycle. Otherwise they'd eat all of your actors.
I tried to pull some strings, but I'm afraid there's no way we can get you permission to take a crew onto the Plathy island itself. That's a xenological preserve now, isolated by a force field, the few remaining Plathys constantly monitored by flying bugs. You can shoot on the mainland, if your actors are as crazy as your hunters, or use the crater lake island. There are a few feral Plathys roaming there, though, so take precautions, no matter what the season. Use a restraining field if that's within your budget; otherwise, regrettably, the smartest thing would be to kill them on sight. Their behavior patterns become erratic if they're separated from family for more than a year.
The search party that followed up on Dr. Rubera's expedition could only find five of the tooth transmitters. There was no trace of Maria Rubera, or any
other human remains.
A sad story but I think a useful one for your purposes. Gives your expeditions a dramatic historical context.
Let me know if I can be of further service. And by all means send us a copy of the cube, if you decide to go into production.
Your servant,
Federico Santesteban
TECHNICAL NOTE
If I were using “Seasons” as a “write something like this” example in a class, it could be illustrative of various things:
Multiple viewpoint. The story is told through the eyes of five different characters (though one’s used only once) with a coda at the end from an ironically detached viewpoint. Actually, I’d call it a “rotating” viewpoint, since most of the story develops linearly, one character picking it up where the previous one stopped. (I wrote a “mosaic novel” called The Coming that uses this technique with dozens of characters.)
Classical dramatic structure. Novellas tend to mimic the structure of three-act plays. With “Seasons” this notion drove the plot of the story very consciously. I wanted to mimic Greek tragedy, but with a purely science-fictional approach—so how can you have tragedy in a universe where there are laws but no gods? My substitute for the tragic flaw, hamartia, is Maria’s faith in scientific method—in anthropologic methodology, specifically. And natural law substitutes for the wrath of the gods; the aliens do nothing that’s evil or even wrong.
Compactness. A hell of a lot goes on in “Seasons,” in terms of both action and ideas, and this seems to characterize readable novellas. Irving Howe says:
“Whereas the short story writer tries to strike off a flash of insight and the novelist hopes to create the illusion of a self-sufficient world, the author of the short novel is frequently concerned with showing an arc of human conduct that has a certain symbolic significance. The short novel is a form that encourages the writer to struggle with profound philosophic or moral problems through a compact yet extended narrative.”
It wouldn’t be a bad use of a semester to give a student that quote and say “Write me one.”
~ * ~
INTRODUCTION TO “THE MONSTER”
People talk about “voice” in writing, but they don’t normally mean a literal voice. In the case of this story, it was a real man’s voice, beautiful and haunting.
He was our tour bus driver in Montego Bay, Jamaica. His basso growl was wonderfully creepy; an island accent redolent of voodoo, zombies, witch doctors.
We drove past a cemetery, strangely decorated with festive paper streamers. “That be the graveyard,” he said in his sepulchral voice. “Ain’t nobody want to be dere. Ev’ybody gettin’ dere.”
THE MONSTER
S
tart at the beginning? Which beginning?
Okay, since you be from Outside, I give you the whole thing. Sit over there, be comfort. Smoke em if you got em.
They talk about these guys that come back from the Nam all fucked up and shit, and say they be like time bombs: they go along okay for years, then get a gun and just go crazy. But it don’t go nothing like that for me. Even though there be the gun involved, this time. And an actual murder, this time.
First time I be in prison, after the court-martial, I try to tell them what it be and what they get me? Social workers and shrinks. Guy to be a shrink in a prison ain’t be no good shrink, what they can make Outside, is the way I figure it, so at first I don’t give them shit, but then I always get Discipline, so I figure what the hell and make up a story. You watch any TV you can make up a Nam story too.
So some of them don’t fall for it, they go along with it for a while because this is what crazy people do, is make up stories, then they give up and another one come along and I start over with a different story. And sometime when I know for sure they don’t believe, when they start to look at me like you look at a animal in the zoo, that’s when I tell them the real true story. And that’s when they smile, you know, and nod, and the new guy come in next. Because if anybody would make up a story like that one, he’d have to be crazy, right? But I swear to God it’s true.
Right. The beginning.
I be a lurp in the Nam, which means Long Range Recon Patrol. You look in these magazines about the Nam and they make like the lurps be always heroes, brave boys go out and face Charlie alone, bring down the artillery on them and all, but it was not like that. You didn’t want to be no lurp where we be, they make you be a fuckin lurp if they want to get rid of your ass, and that’s the God’s truth.
Now I can tell you right now that I don’t give a flyin fuck for that U.S. Army and I don’t like it even more when I be drafted, but I got to admit they be pretty smart, the way they do with us. Because we get off on that lurp shit. I mean we be one bunch of bad ass brothers and good ole boys and we did love that rock an roll, and God they give us rock an roll— fuck your M-16, we get real tommy guns with 100-round drum, usually one guy get your automatic grenade launcher, one guy carry that starlite scope, another guy the full demo bag. I mean we could of taken on the whole fuckin North Vietnam army. We could of killed fuckin Rambo.
Now I like to talk strange, though any time I want, I can talk like other people. Even Jamaican like my mama ain’t understand me if I try. I be born in New York City, but at that time my mama be only three months there—when she speak her English it be island music, but the guy she live with, bringing me up, he be from Taiwan, so in between them I learn shitty English, same-same shitty Chinese. And live in Cuban neighborhood, por la español shitty.
He was one mean mother fuckin Chinese cab driver, slap shit out of me for twelve year, and then I take a kitchen knife and slap him back. He never come back for the ear. I think maybe he go off someplace and die, I don’t give a shit anymore, but when I be drafted they find out I speak Chinese, send me to language school in California, and I be so dumb I believe them when they say this means no Nam for the boy: I stay home and translate for them tapes from the radio.
So they send me to the Nam anyhow, and I go a little wild. I hit everybody that outranks me. They put me in the hospital and I hit the doctor. They put me in the stockade and I hit the guards, the guards hit back, some more hospital. I figure sooner or later they got to kill me or let me out. But then one day this strac dude come in and tell me about the lurp shit. It sound all right, even though the dude say if I fuck up they can waste me and it’s legal. By now I know they can do that shit right there in LBJ, Long Binh Jail, so what the fuck? In two days I’m in the jungle with three real bad ass dudes with a map and a compass and enough shit we could start our own war.
They give us these maps that never have no words on them, like names of places, just “town pop 1000” and shit like that. They play it real cute, like we so dumb we don’t know there be places outside of Vietnam, where no GIs can go. They keep all our ID in base camp, even the dog tags, and tell us not to be capture. Die first, they say, that shall be more pleasant. We laugh at that later, but I keep to myself the way I do feel. That the grave be one place we all be getting to, long road or short, and maybe the short road be less bumps, less trouble. Now I know from twenty years how true that be.
They don’t tell us where the place be we leave from, after the slick drop us in, but we always sure as hell head west. Guy name Duke, mean honky but not dumb, he say all we be doin is harassment, bustin up supply lines comin down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, in Cambodia. It do look like that, long lines of gooks carryin ammo and shit, sometime on bicycles. We would set up some mine and some claymores and wait till the middle of the line be there, then pop the shit, then maybe waste a few with the grenade launcher and tommy guns, not too long so they ain’t regroup and get us. Duke be taking a couple Polaroids and we go four different ways, meet a couple miles away, then sneak back to the LZ and call the slick. We go out maybe six time a month, maybe lose one guy a month. Me and Duke make it through all the way to the last one, that last one.
That time no different from the other times except they te
ll us try to blow a bridge up, not a big bridge like the movies, but one that hang off a mountain side, be hard to fix afterward. It also be hard to get to.
We lose one guy, new guy name of Winter, just tryin to get to the fuckin bridge. That be bad in a special kind of way. You get used to guys gettin shot or be wasted by frags and like that. But to fall like a hundred feet onto rocks be a different kind of bad. And it just break his back or something. He laying there and crying, tell all the world where we be, until Duke shut him up.
So it be just Duke and Cherry and me, the Chink. I am for goin back, no fuckin way they could blame us for that. But Duke crazy for action, always be crazy for killing, and Cherry would follow Duke anywhere, I think he a fag even then. Later I do know. When the Monster kill them.
The Best of Joe Haldeman Page 27
