A Feast Unknown

by Philip José Farmer

  “I admit that I don’t understand what this mechanism is or why he should have one also. I use the term mechanism, but I could just as well say trauma or engram.”

  That beautiful voice was so hypnotic that I almost nodded into sleep. For a moment, it lulled my hatred of him. When Anana spoke, she startled me.

  “Grandrith. Doctor Grandrith. What is your explanation?”

  Caliban’s eyes,opened just a trifle. I don’t think he had known that I was an M.D.

  “Unlike Caliban, I am not the greatest doctor in the world, or even in Kenya. But I can think, and that’s doing more than most doctors I have known. I agree with Caliban that the elixir must be responsible for bringing an already-existing aberration to the surface. I seem to be incapable of getting an erection while loving a woman, unless I am inflicting pain on her. Perhaps you noticed that I had a slight erection while I was biting off that woman’s clitoris. It was the idea of the pain she was having, which I was giving, not the sexual aspect that excited me. If I had thought I was going to kill her, I would have had a big hard-on.

  “I am very disturbed. I have, however, been so busy keeping alive that I haven’t had much time to think about it.

  “If you know the answer, please tell me.”

  My petition indicated my desperation. Nobody asked the Nine, especially Anana, for anything without placing himself in peril.

  She did not reply. I said, “It is possible that the elixir may have nothing to do with it. My aberration came with a shock, the explosions of the shells. Caliban may have suffered a shock, too. But it is strange that we suffer from much the same thing.”

  I was thinking of the news of his cousin’s rape and death.

  “The beautiful Patricia Wilde,” Anana said. “So I will see her no more. Like flowers they . . . never mind. It’s an old old story. We are not concerned with what our servants do to each other, as long as they are not disobeying us or interfering with our plans. But at the moment, Caliban, you have sent off a man to kidnap Grandrith’s wife, in revenge for what you think he did to your cousin. This is not at all like you, who have combatted evil all your life and traveled the world over doing good.”

  The sarcasm was so light in tone that I almost missed it.

  “It seems the only right thing to do,” Caliban said. “Grandrith must pay for the hideous evil he’s done.”

  “Through more evil?”

  “I don’t consider it to be evil!” he said with the most heat in his voice I had yet heard.

  “You admitted you have a psychic aberration.”

  “The aberration,” Caliban said, “consists of this. And nothing else. I can’t get an erection unless I inflict pain or death or am thinking about it.”

  He was one up on me. If I could just work up a hard-on while loving by thinking about murdering someone . . . but what kind of loving would that be? Responsive on the surface and inside totally removed from my Clio. Imagine forth terror and pain and death, while she thought I was melting into her with love.

  Anana said nothing for a while. The others sat as if they were sleeping. The torches were beginning to burn out, and the blackness from the ceiling was sinking towards us. The blackness was gaining substance and, hence, weight. The air even seemed to be compressed beneath it. Instead of getting warmer, the denser air became colder.

  Anana cleared her throat and said, “Grandrith, you had two uncles. One died in Africa, as you well know. The other went at an early age to America because he had assaulted and nearly killed one of his teachers. Your family never heard of him again. He took the name of Wilde and became a doctor.”

  Caliban could be startled. He jerked his head around to stare at Anana, and his eyes had become large.

  “You know who your father was, Grandrith,” Anana said. “Your uncle did not know what had happened to him; he left your father hiding somewhere in Whitechapel. The world knew of your father but it never knew his real name nor what became of him after the murders ceased. We knew, however, because he was one of us. He went to the States, too, and there he became a doctor. This was after the madness passed from him. He became a doctor, like his younger brother, and, indeed, some years afterwards accidentally found him. The youngest brother had a daughter, and your father had a son in America.”

  She paused. My heart was clenching with the excitement and the anticipation. I also felt a little sick, because I knew what she was going to say.

  “All were exceedingly strong men with tendencies to madnesses. All were doctors, too, as if the knife were your totem, your desire, your bliss. All lovers of violence.”

  She stopped speaking again. The silence was like that between the beats of a dying heart.

  Then, from Caliban, softly, a weird rising-falling whistle, and, even more softly, “Incredible!”

  “You two have the same father.”

  27

  In less than a minute after Anana had made that statement, we two were blindfolded and led out through the trapdoor in the platform. A hypodermic knocked me out, and I regained consciousness in a single-motored plane. A short time later, the plane landed, and I was led out and the blindfold removed. The landing strip was at the bottom of a deep valley. The green-shielded mountains were everywhere around.

  The pilot gave me brief instructions and flew away, leaving me naked and armed only with my hunting knife, which was still bent.

  Caliban, I was told, had been taken to a place near the valley of Ophir and released. His instructions were the same as mine. One of us was to return within a month with the other’s head and genitals. The victor would then take the seat left empty by XauXaz.

  I knew my approximate location. If I stopped only to hunt when absolutely necessary and got only three hours of sleep at night, I could get through the mountains in five days to a strip used by a Ugandan mining company. A plane might not be available for some time, however.

  I had wondered at first why the Nine had placed us so far apart. The area was so vast, we could have looked for a year for each other without success. The Nine, of course, did not expect us to do this. I was not going to waste time searching for Caliban while Clio was in danger in England. Caliban would know that, too. He was probably heading for the nearest air strip now, or had got into touch with his two old colleagues and had them radio for a plane. If this happened, he would outstrip me in the race by four or five days.

  I set off. It was a half hour past dawn. A brightly feathered kingfisher swooped down and ahead of me and then soared back up. The native blacks and The Folk would have taken this as a good omen, but I had long ago given up the idea of a higher being who was interested in me. Nevertheless, on seeing the kingfisher, I felt heartened. Perhaps, down there, where the childhood treasures are, I still believed.

  I knew this area well. Some years ago, I had built a tree house here not too dissimilar to that shown in those bad and lying movies made about me. In fact, I got the idea from the movies. It was as comfortable as a house can be in the thin-air water-heavy atmosphere of the high mountain rain forest. Clio lived there with me for a while. The absence of a number of people to talk to, the silence, the cold, and the wet got to her nerves. After two months, she insisted that I take her back to the Kenyan plantation. Of the sixty days, three had been idyllic.

  That day and part of the night, I climbed two mountains. The next day, I was only half a mile from my old tree house. I could not afford the time, but I detoured to see it anyway. I always have a nostalgia for any place in which I have lived any time at all, except for the town house in London, which is surrounded by too many people, too much noise, and too many unpleasant odors.

  In the thickness, the air was not moving. When I smelled the dead body of a human adult male who had not been dead more than an hour, I knew he had to be close. A few steps this way and that showed me the direction to go.

  My biographer has stated many times that I have nostrils as sensitive as an animal’s. He described this as due to my upbringing in the jungle. This was non
sense, and he knew it. No amount of practice will increase the sensitivity of the human nose. My nose is, however, not normal. I am a mutant, as I have said in previous volumes, and I have described my several mutations in detail in Volume IV. My sense of smell is equivalent to a bloodhound’s. This has its advantages. It also has its disadvantages. You humans have no idea of what the odor of gasoline fumes does to me.

  Inside a minute, I came across broken bushes, plants stepped upon and just rising, squashed insects, and other evidences of a struggle. A leopard-skin loincloth was under a bush. Beyond it, the body of a male Caucasian lay on its side. He was about six feet six inches in height and must have weighed 300 pounds. He was very muscular but also fat and big-paunched. He was clean-shaven. His black hair was cut in bangs just above the eyes, and it grew shoulder-length behind. A leopard-skin band went around his head. The left side of his skull was bloody and caved in. His eyes were dark gray. His right arm, which had been torn off his body, was not in sight. Neither were his penis and testicles, which had been ripped off.

  A trail of blood led from his body. I followed it and came across a big knife, much like my uncle’s knife before long usage had worn it stiletto-thin. I deduced that the killer had knocked this out of the man’s hand with the club which I found ten feet further on. Its end bore much blood.

  When I came across two sets of tracks in some soft earth, my heart beat faster. I felt choked with a sense of homecoming and of love. They were the prints of two Folk, a female and male adult.

  I hurried to catch up with them. Tears ran down my cheeks. I had thought that all The Folk were dead, their kind gone forever.

  The trail led to the tree house so directly that I was sure the two were deliberately heading for it. Other tracks showed that the dead man had come from its direction less than 60 minutes ago.

  When I was just outside the small clearing, in the center of which was the great tree with my house, I stopped. I looked through a break in the green wall and saw the female sitting with her back against a tree. She was holding an infant not quite a year old. I was close enough to smell them, and the infant was sweating the scent of near-death. Its eyes were closed, it was breathing shallowly and rapidly, and its lungs bubbled. Its body was wet.

  The mother was stinking of grief and hopelessness. Her dull gaze was fixed on the male and the female under him by the big tree.

  I was surprised when I saw what he was doing. In the first place, ferocious as a male of The Folk can be under some circumstances, he is shy when humans are in the area. If not cornered, he will run. But it was evident that this male had killed the man and at once gone to the tree house with his present activity in mind. I don’t know what made this male behave so unusually. Perhaps, as I later speculated, his abnormal behavior was caused by a combination of long isolation from his tribe (all dead), the sickness of the infant and the female’s concern for it and refusal to mate with him, and the lust aroused by observing the man’s rapings of his woman prisoner.

  Also, there was the sudden madness which sometimes grips the older adult males of The Folk. This results in their running amok, however. I have never seen the temporary insanity cause any kind of sexual behavior; it always causes a desire to kill all within reach. And this male was not trying to kill the woman unless it was with his cock.

  If that was his intent, it was a failure. The woman was paralyzed with terror, but otherwise she was not being hurt. The largest erect penis I’ve ever seen among The Folk was two inches long and 3/8ths of an inch thick (estimated). If she had been a virgin, she would probably have remained one (technically so) no matter how many times he banged her.

  He was on top of her and giving a short subdued scream and his body was shaking. A moment later, he renewed his thrustings.

  The Folk have buttocks, which no true apes have, and hips constructed more like those of homo sapiens than of the gorilla, just as their feet are more hominoid than simian. (Like a Neanderthal’s, I should say.)

  The woman’s arms were behind and under her, by which I deduced that they were tied. Her ankles had been tied together. Someone had untied them, although one end of the rope was around an ankle and the other end tied to a bush. Her legs had been forced open and up over the shoulders of the male. The Folk normally use this position, unlike the apes, who usually favor the rear approach.

  The skin of the woman had the peculiar beautiful bronze hue of Doctor Caliban, and the long hair spread out on the ground behind her was his dark metallic red-bronze. Her face was not visible.

  I moved around the edge of the clearing until I could see that the male was kissing her. (This way of showing affection or sexual desire is customary among The Folk.)

  This probably horrified her far more than the relatively innocuous rape. That great half-apish face had been thrust against hers, and those chimpanzee-thin lips had slobbered all over her face.

  It was this that made me think he must be half-mad with sexual frustration. To one of The Folk, a human is a very ugly and repulsive creature. Only a perverted Folk would want to kiss a human.

  I scouted around carefully, making sure that no one else was in the area. Then I stepped out of the bushes, seeing at the same time the arm of the dead man under a bush where the male had thrown it. The genitals had probably been eaten.

  I gave a soft cry, “Krhgh!”

  The male stiffened and came up off the woman so violently that her legs were thrown forward and she was momentarily jack-knifed. He whirled to face me.

  28

  He was one of the largest I’d ever seen. He was at least six feet two inches tall and weighed about three hundred and fifty pounds. He did not look as nearly gorilloid as my biographer has described The Folk. (As I have fully explained in Volume I, my biographer wrote his first story about me before he knew me. He got all his facts—and misinformation—from records and from a man who had known one of the persons who found me when I was eighteen. Using mainly his imagination, he described The Folk as much more apish than they are. By the time he knew the truth, he could not describe them correctly and maintain consistencey in his novels.)

  His arms, almost as thick with muscles as a gorilla’s, were as short in proportion to his trunk as a man’s. The legs were shorter, however, and bowed. The body was covered with thick straight rusty-red hair which formed a covering not as thick as a chimpanzee’s. The skin was as black as a bush Negro’s. The bones were approximately 2½ times as thick as a man’s, thus giving a broad attachment for the massive muscles.

  (My own bones are almost twice as thick as a modern man’s. I could pass for a Cro-Magnon.)

  The head was large and long and had a sagital crest, like a gorilla’s, for the attachment of the massive jaw muscles. The jaws were quite prognathous, and the canine teeth were as large as a gorilla’s. The teeth had a “simian gap” for the accommodation of the tips of the lower canines. The Folk are primarily vegetarians, though they eat small animals frequently and the meat of large animals when they get a chance. The chin was absent. The supraorbital ridges were massive, and the forehead was very low. (The average adult male cranium capacity is 800 cubic centimeters, an estimate based on my study of four skulls.)

  The eyes were deep sunk and a russet red, although most of The Folk have dark or light brown eyes.

  Under the lower jaw was a sac which swelled out when the male challenged another, or a predator, or just wanted to howl at the moon.

  The male was sweating, although not as heavily as he would have if he had been a man. The Folk have always been forest dwellers and share a paucity of sweat glands with most forest animals.

  All in all, he looked like a giant variety of Zinjanthropus, and he may have been a descendant of this supposedly extinct australopithecine.

  The clearing seemed to crackle and to spark, like a cat’s fur rubbed the wrong way. His hairs bristled; his eyes became even redder; his open mouth showed the thick yellow teeth and sharp canines and incisors, a red tongue, and the black pit of a throat. The
sac on his neck swelled out.

  The back of my neck felt as if my hairs were also bristling. I automatically adopted the stiff-legged sidewise walk of belligerency as I circled him. As soon as I became aware of it, I broke the stance, bent my knees, and opened my left hand. My right hand was empty, because I did not want to threaten him with the knife I had found in the grass. He might be talked into cooperation if I did not scare him with the bright human weapon.

  The male growled and then said, “Yh shttb.” That is, “I am Leopard-Breaker.”

  I replied in the same whispering speech of The Folk, “Yh tlhs.” That is, “I am Worm.”

  The speech of The Folk does contain some voiced consonants, mostly back-of-the-throat sounds, but the majority of words consist of unvoiced consonants. They have only one vowel, similar to the sound of u in the English cut or of o in done, and this vowel is not often used.

  Worm is the literal translation of my name. My biographer used a euphemistic translation, one which reflected his pigmentation orientation. The Folk, however, considered degrees of hairiness to be more important than color. I also had other names: Bird Nose, Big Cock, Smart Ass, Bright Eyes, Fat Mouth, and Monkey Shit. But I was generally known as tlhs or Worm. This name is not as derogatory as humans might think; The Folk consider the worm to be a beautiful creature and very tasty and nutritious. I could have taken a more dignified and impressive name after I came of age and killed the chief of our tribe, but I preferred Worm. To me, it meant the worm that turned.

  He howled at me, “I am Leopard-Breaker!”

  “I am Worm!” I shouted. “Leave the female alone. Or I will kill you.”

  “What? A worm would kill a breaker of leopards?”

  “I have killed many many leopards,” I said, flashing my fingers to indicate an immense number. “I have killed many of the great fighters of The Folk. I have killed many lions.”

  He looked puzzled, and I knew that he did not know the word which the west coast Folk use. He had probably never seen or heard of a lion.