Silence is Deadly

by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.

  Darzek moved close enough to the flares so they could see to talk. He asked the child, What sort of work?

  Forest, she answered.

  Is it good work?

  Her face brightened. Yes. Good.

  Did your father do that kind of work?

  Once. Before he was hurt.

  Obviously the scruffy applicants thought it good work. They seemed pathetically eager.

  But the employers weren’t hiring just anyone. There were two doctors present, a purger and a manipulator, and both had to approve an applicant before the three males in dusky green work clothing would look at him. Those the doctors accepted were waved to a log that lay on the ground near the caravan. They had to pick it up and walk the length of the caravan and back with it. Few of the applicants got past the doctors, and few of those who did were able to pass the strength test.

  Where is the forest? Darzek asked the child.

  She pointed southward. Then her hands answered, A night and a day.

  Riding? Darzek asked.

  She gazed at him blankly. Probably she had never thought of distances in terms of riding.

  It was much too far. He had to get back to the city and start a systematic search for the Synthesis headquarters and get on with his mission.

  She was watching him hopefully. She seemed as pathetically eager for him as the other applicants were for themselves. He said to her, Thank you for your help, but I must find a job in the city.

  Tears filled her eyes, and she turned away. Darzek gazed after her perplexedly, wondering why his lack of interest in a forest job could possibly matter to her. He turned away himself, intending to get back to the city and resume his search for the Synthesis headquarters. As he did so, light glowed softly in the dark interior of the caravan.

  It glowed again, gained in intensity, remained half bright for a moment, and then slowly faded. One of the green-clad males in charge, evidently a scribe, came to the caravan door carrying a box.

  Darzek moved in a wide circle and approached the caravan from the far side. There was a kind of running board along the wagon, and he stepped on it and pulled himself up. He edged along it to an uncurtained window and peered inside.

  The interior was dark, and he could make out nothing at all.

  He continued to cling to the side of the caravan. He had no notion of what he had seen, but he felt certain that it had no business happening on a world with a level three technology. His muscles soon protested his unnatural position, and his wounded arm began to throb furiously, but he held his position and waited.

  Then the scribe returned. He went to the far end of the caravan, away from the door, and seated himself.

  Abruptly the light glowed and brightened. It seemed blazing in that restricted space.

  Darzek dropped to the ground before it faded. He almost landed on the child, who had trailed after him. He circled around to the other side of the caravan and took his place in line.

  The child continued to follow him. Darzek turned to her. What was your father’s name?

  Lazk, she answered.

  Then my name is Lazk. What’s your name?

  Sajjo.

  They exchanged smiles.

  Minutes later, Darzek had been hired. The officials, on the lookout for the healthiest specimens available, saw him at once and brought him forward out of turn. The doctors passed him with no more than a cursory thumping. The test log was heavy, but he had no difficulty with it. The scribe entered his name, Lazk, and handed him a wood chit. Another official administered a strangely worded oath of fealty to the Duke Lonorlk, who, Darzek gathered, owned the forest.

  The scribe had one more question for him. Family? he asked.

  The child was still trailing after Darzek, her face now wreathed with elation. Darzek suddenly understood: she had adopted him. The thought pleased him. She added to his protective coloration. No one would suspect the humble, hard-working head of a family; and if he could trust her—and he thought he could—she would be invaluable in teaching him about Kamm.

  One child, he said.

  Other families were gathering. At midnight the hiring had been completed, and the successful candidates, with their wives and children, set out for the forest, following after the lumbering caravan and the half dozen nabrula that pulled it in tandem.

  The road ran just outside the city wall. After a time it began to climb, and soon they were able to look over the vast expanse of the city, dark except for several distant blazes of torches where sweeps were at work. The lucky families moved along jubilantly in the screeching wake of the caravan’s ungreased wheels. Husbands and wives took turns carrying the smaller children. The older children cavorted about excitedly.

  Darzek’s recently adopted daughter walked at his side with sober maturity, disdaining the antics of the other children. But whenever a faint gleam of light from torches carried ahead of the caravan touched her face, he read rapture there, and something else.

  The something else disturbed him; he had never been worshiped before.

  Then one of the nabrula slipped its harness, and the driver brought the tandem to a halt. In the sudden silence, Darzek heard, somewhere far off in the city, the electrifying shout of a word: “Primores!” Then another: “Synthesis!” And another: “Galaxy!”

  He resisted the impulse to run toward the shouts. Then he had to restrain himself a second time, to keep from kicking himself.

  On a world of the deaf, when he could safely let his colleagues know where he was at any time by shouting, only a half-wit would allow himself to get lost. Throughout Darzek’s agonizing search, he could have found the Synthesis headquarters at any time just by using his voice.

  But now he had no need for his fellow agents. His position was secure, and he’d taken his own giant step toward solving at least one of the mysteries of Kamm.

  Kom Rmmon had told him that Kamm’s crude technology had not even discovered electricity.

  But in this caravan he followed there was, unmistakably, an electric light.

  CHAPTER 7

  Darzek began work with two substantial advantages over the other new employees. He was healthy, and he’d never been malnourished. On the first day out, he was appointed crew chief. On the fourth day, he became village leader. Two days later he was superintending workers from three villages, and it had been made clear to him that his future in the work force of the Duke Lonorlk was very bright indeed.

  He quickly learned why a temporary forest job seemed so desirable to the dregs of the Northpor unemployed. It was the food. On their long night and day march they received regular hot meals, from waiting caravans, and when they finally staggered into their work camp another hot meal was waiting for them.

  And they continued to be fed sumptuously. Wives and children, including Sajjo, gained weight and bloomed.

  Each family was assigned a caravan on wheels, somewhat smaller than the office that had accompanied them from Northpor. These were arranged in work villages of twelve to fifteen units, and they were moved every few days so the work crews could live close to their cuts.

  Their first work had nothing to do with forestry. As soon as they received their housing assignments, all families were ordered to wash their clothing, all the bedding the caravan contained, and themselves, and to scrub their caravans thoroughly. While the families started that chore, using hot water the duke’s foresters hauled in for them, the males were put to work digging latrines.

  This concern for diet and sanitation astonished Darzek. Either the Duke Lonorlk had a social conscience far in advance of his time, or he had somehow grasped the fact that unhealthy, hungry laborers were unproductive laborers.

  When they finished their cleaning chores, Darzek suggested a walk to Sajjo. His mind was on the caravan with the electric light, which had moved on into the forest with workers who were to be assigned to other villages.

  Sajjo gazed at him with something remarkably akin to terror. The Beasts! her hands exclaimed.

  Da
rzek looked about him at the peaceful forest. The maz trees that crowded the small clearing around their caravans were tall and stately, albeit strange-looking because the paper-like white bark gave them a nude look. Except when a wagon came through, the place was blissfully still. Their neighbors, whether awed by the imposing forest or uneasy away from their city cobblestones, remained close to their caravans. The few who were still in sight seemed to be waiting for their bedding to dry so they could retire. The others probably had gone to bed without bedding, which was a luxury few of them were familiar with. They were, all of them, utterly exhausted after the interminable walk.

  Darzek was feeling exhausted himself. He would have liked to question Sajjo about the Beasts, but it was becoming too dark to talk. The luminous night creatures were streaking the forest with light, but they seemed to avoid the clearing.

  Obviously both the electric light and the mystery about the Beasts would have to wait. To bed, then, Darzek’s hands announced. Their own bedding was still damp, so they went back to their caravan and retired without it.

  The forest held one inviolable rule: no fires of any kind, anywhere. Though Darzek never tested it, he got the impression that maz tree sap was as dangerously flammable as petroleum; but no fires were needed. Females and children were organized in shifts to work in a community kitchen, a mammoth stone building that served all of the work villages. It was built over a geyser that supplied hot water for bathing and laundry as well as heat for cooking. Each morning and each evening a wagon brought food and hot water from the community kitchen to all of the work villages.

  The males of each village were organized into crews of four or five. Darzek was amused when he first saw the cutting tools supplied—wood saws and axes. But they proved better balanced and more efficient than any steel tools he could remember using. The prize item was an enormous saw shaped in a half circle. Even after seeing it in action he thought it wouldn’t work, but a crew of sawyers manipulating it back and forth about a gigantic tree could cut through three quarters of its girth with incredible speed to reach the one-quarter notch that the ax workers were cutting simultaneously to direct the fall.

  The techniques of forestry and conservation amazed Darzek as much as the concern for diet and sanitation. Only the most mature trees were harvested, and they were cut in a planned sequence so that each fallen tree made way for the fall of the next.

  Darzek’s rapid promotions pleased him and elated Sajjo, but several aspects of his position were less than satisfactory. For one, his relations with his fellow workers and his superiors puzzled him. His fellow workers were respectful enough, and in casual contacts they seemed friendly, but they avoided him as much as possible. He attributed that to jealousy over his rapid promotions. But his superiors also avoided him, though they obviously thought highly of him.

  None of that bothered him as much as his failure to get near one of the office caravans that contained an electric light.

  He began to take walks in the evening, in the direction of one of the caravans—with Sajjo tagging along with extreme reluctance simply because she followed him everywhere. These occasioned talk and curiosity among their neighbors; the Kammians feared the night, and one who did not was thought to be in league with the Winged Beast itself.

  So Darzek had to give that up. Nor did he have any better success in approaching one of the caravans during the day. With each successive promotion he became better known, and his visit to an area where he had no proper business was likely to be noted and talked about. Fretfully he began counting the days he was wasting.

  His only source of diversion was Sajjo. His promotions automatically conferred status on her, and in a comparatively short time she advanced from zero to the titular head female of the village. Females three times her age deferred to her, and she was excused from kitchen duties. The other females, who themselves had been waifs before they became wives of drudges, delighted in honoring her. When a peddler came through, they pooled a few work chits and bought hair dyes, but when they attempted to color and arrange Sajjo’s hair to reflect her new station in life, she rebelled. Her release from kitchen duties merely meant that she had more time to follow Darzek about. Now she did so even when he was at work, looking on solemnly from the distance, never in the way, but always present.

  During the brief periods when Darzek was home during daylight, when he and Sajjo could see well enough to talk, he attempted to learn as much as he could about Kamm and its people.

  About the Beasts, he said to her one evening.

  He sensed the barrier instantly. She not only feared the Beasts; she feared any mention of them. This had to be connected somehow with the compulsive fear of the night and its creatures that seized all the Kammians when darkness fell. On the long march to the forest, his fellow workers and their families had kept to the center of the lane and shuddered visibly when a luminous night creature fluttered near. And when the procession halted for rest and food, they preferred the hard lane to a soft place in the grass nearby. Here in the forest, nothing but a work order would keep anyone out after sunset, and that unfortunate worker hurried home at a run the moment he was released. Only Darzek’s superiors seemed not to mind the dark—perhaps because their work took them out in it frequently.

  Are these night creatures somehow related to the Winged Beast? Darzek asked Sajjo.

  They light the way for it, she answered.

  So the night creatures were considered harbingers of death.

  These questions so disturbed her that he changed the subject. In subsequent talks he made her recite everything of note she could remember about her life—which did not take long, since it made an uneventful tale of squalor. Then he set her to telling him all of the folklore she could remember.

  And still he was unable to devise an excuse for getting near one of the office caravans.

  It was his fifteenth day in the forest, at dusk, when Darzek stood at a crosslane waiting for his superior to pick up the daily work report that Darzek had chalked on a piece of bark: trees felled, felled trees trimmed and ready for sectioning, standing trees with ground cleared for the morrow’s felling. A worker of Darzek’s background was not expected to be able to write numbers—probably none of his superiors could write them, either, except the scribes—so a series of marks on bark constituted his daily report.

  The superior was late. When he did arrive, he was in a hurry. His fingers flipped a message at Darzek, and he rode away, urging his nabrulk to greater speed.

  Darzek turned stoically and trudged along the lane. He had caught only a part of the message, and he intended to interpret it in his own way. He would take the day’s count to the office himself.

  Eager as he was, he plodded. He was tired. A supervisor’s work was exhausting, for he had to lend a hand in everything his workers undertook and run from crew to crew. It would have looked suspicious if Darzek had seemed to welcome this chore of a ten-kilometer round trip at the end of the day, so he plodded.

  It was already dark when he reached the office caravan. He opened the door, mounted the steps, and entered the dark interior.

  There was no one there.

  He felt his way the length of the room and found the strange apparatus on the scribe’s worktable. He could see nothing at all, but he remembered a lever that the scribe had pushed down at intervals to produce the light. Darzek found it and pushed it down.

  The feeble gleam that resulted seemed blinding in that dark room. Darzek stared in fascination while the glow lasted. Then he looked about uneasily. The light surely would have been visible from a distance, but he had seen no one near the caravan, and he heard no one coming. He pushed the lever again and again, each time studying the contraption until the light faded.

  Finally, unwilling to risk being caught there, he returned to the entrance and seated himself outside the door. When he heard footsteps approaching, he slumped comfortably and feigned sleep, and the scribe fell over him.

  The scribe led him inside the caravan
and to the worktable, where he worked the electric light himself. He was grinning at Darzek; the duke’s officials took no offense when their employees worked hard enough to exhaust themselves. While the scribe kept the light going, he examined Darzek’s report, asked a few questions about the day’s work, and gave Darzek a commendatory back of the hand pat on his forearm.

  Darzek left for home, and while he walked, he mulled over the electric light and its generator.

  It was a crude mechanical device that could have been built by any bright high school student on Earth. The lever applied tension to a leaf spring of highly resilient wood. The spring, through a simple system of wood gears, turned a generator that furnished the electricity that lit the light. Darzek detected nothing in the mechanism that he had not already encountered in Kamm’s technology. Wood springs and gears were common. Any glass blower could have produced the bulb, once he had been given the idea. The filament probably was a loop of the indestructible sponge wood. Only the use of metals was new. Kamm was supposed to employ metal only in coins.

  But coins had been the source of metal in the generator! One of the strip contacts actually had the dim image of a Winged Beast still visible—incontrovertible evidence that the builder had hammered it out of a copper coin! The magnetism was provided by rough pieces of lodestone.

  Darzek found his disappointment crushing. He had wasted fifteen days and probably caused the Synthesis agents an agony of worry, and all he had accomplished was to track down a mechanical contraption that any Kammian handyman could have built with a few instructions. It made an extremely poor light. A candle would have been more efficient and much more convenient, but the highly flammable maz wood prohibited the use of fire in the forest. The choice was between a poor electric light and none.

  “In short,” Darzek told himself, savoring his disappointment, “that electric light is a rudimentary mechanical device that conforms with Kamm’s known technology in every particular.”

  Then he halted abruptly. The device conformed with Kamm’s technology in every particular; any Kammian handyman could have built such a generator and light if he knew how—but there was no possible way for him to know how. That crude device was in fact a fiendishly ingenious adaptation of fantastically complex principles. Something decidedly was wrong in the forest of the Duke Lonorlk.