The Compleat Boucher

by Anthony Boucher; Editor: James A. Mann

  Back to that routine, I thought; but Mavra was ahead of me. Her hand wasn’t in mine, and when I turned she was half out of her workclothes.

  “Look,” I glugged. “I know I’ve been patient a long time, but is this quite the moment.”

  “Damn this zipper!” she said intently. “Give me a hand.” And she went on peeling.

  I needed two sets of eyes. Through the camouflage-bushes I could see that I’d been all wrong about Laus’s use for the pebbles.

  And him without even a slingshot.

  The first stone smote the Giant in the forehead all right, but the rest of the sequence didn’t follow. All it did was to irritate the hell out of him. He lashed out with one backhand blow and Laus was stretched on the grass.

  Then the Giant backed away in consternation. My God! another one! But he didn’t back fast, and Mavra’s light on her feet. There she was, curving against him, looking up at him with soft wide eyes. And as his face relented and the old grin came back, he reached out for her and she dropped lithely, rolled over, and contemplated that mirror up there.

  In vague general design, I suppose, she wasn’t too different from his Giantess, but the size and the hair and the breasts would all be enough to keep any such thoughts out of his mind. Gently, soothingly, happily he stroked her, exactly as I was stroking Bast, who had just jumped into my lap with an ill-tempered remark about people who spend their time staring at unimportant things and neglect the comfort of cats.

  It all seems obvious when you look back on it from the vantage of God knows how many years; and up till the day he died, some three here-years ago, Laus was always ready with a speech on why the BLAM boys should have foreseen it.

  “The science fiction writers seemed to be a step ahead,” he’d say, “and the scientists followed their line. It seemed so logical. This was how to communicate with any intelligent being. But practically it meant ‘any intelligent being with a Copernican view of his own world and an understanding of the mathematical use of zero.’ In other words, nobody in the highest civilizations of our own Earth up until only a few hundred years ago. The noblest Roman of them all couldn’t have understood my planetary diagram. The finest Greek mind would have been confused by my system of numbers. From what we know now, the best men here would understand about pi and about the square of the hypotenuse; with such an architectural culture it’s inevitable. But what chance contact would? Even in our own contemporary Earth?”

  And Mavra would always cut him off, eventually, by saying, “But isn’t it better this way? If you had made contact, we’d simply have been lost aliens, trapped in a civilization that could never help us home. As it is,” and she’d yawn and stretch gracefully, “we’ve conquered the planet.”

  Which we have, of course. Like I said, I don’t know how long it’s been. At the rate my great-great-(I think)—grandchildren are growing up, I must be pushing a hundred, which is the expectancy the actuaries gave me when last heard from; but I feel good for maybe another fifty.

  There are hundreds of us by now, and we’re beginning to spread into the other continents. Give us another generation or two, and there’ll be thousands. It isn’t hard to teach the kids something that combines duty and pleasure to such an extraordinary degree as multiplying. (Though I always doubt that Laus had his proper share of descendants; he took his crash-landing harder than I did mine.) And we teach them other things too, of course, all that we can remember of what all three of us knew.

  (Funny: it still seems trine even with Laus gone . . . and by now even I know a fair amount of BLAM to pass on.)

  And we teach them what Bast knew, and never meant to teach us. We still miss her. It’s sad that she had a much shorter lifespan and no mate. But then otherwise she and her tribe would have been competition—and pretty ruthless, considering how much their long training would make them better at it.

  But we learned enough from her. We know how to make the Giants feel that it’s a pleasure to give pleasure to us, and a privilege to provide us with food and shelter. No clothes, since we saw they puzzled the one I still think of as Our Giant (Mavra still lives in his home). We don’t need them much in this climate (I wonder if we ever needed them as much as we thought we did on Earth?), and besides our genes seem to have learned something from Bast too. Our great-greats are hairier than the hairiest Earth man, even a white. (This was a blow to Laus; he never quite got over having to stop scraping his face.)

  The Giants obey well, for a race new to the custom. (Oh, sure they had pets before, but the type of pets that obey them.) Their medical science isn’t bad; they’ve been training special doctors for us for some time, and this year they’re building a hospital. There are farmers making a good living out of foods which we like but which never had much market before. They’ve even started cultivating that weed I accidentally discovered which is so much like tobacco and makes such a fine chaw.

  The camouflage-bushes have grown naturally (with a little irrigation and fertilization when there were no Giants around). They have no idea where we came from, and since they have no notion of evolution or the relation of species, they’ve decided it doesn’t matter. When they do reach that point, their paleontologists can undoubtedly knock up a few fossil reconstructions near enough to suffice as our ancestors.

  And meanwhile we’re ready, whenever our people land, to hand over to them a ready-conquered planet.

  But it’s been a long time. In all these years, wouldn’t a scoutship have . . . ?

  Sometimes I can’t help wondering:

  Have Bast’s people landed on Earth?

  The First

  “He was a bold man,” wrote Dean Swift, “that first eat an oyster.” A man, I might add, to whom civilization owes an enormous debt—were it not that any debt was quite canceled by that moment of ecstasy which he was first of all men to know.

  And countless other such epic figures there have been, pioneers whose achievements are comparable to the discovery of fire and possibly superior to the invention of the wheel and the arch.

  But none of these discoveries (save perhaps that of the oyster) could have its full value for us today but for one other, even more momentous instant in the early history of Man.

  This is the story of Sko.

  Sko crouched at the mouth of his cave and glared at the stewpot. A full day’s hunting it had taken him to get that sheep. Most of another day he had spent cooking the stew, while his woman cured the hide and tended the children and fed the youngest with the breast food that took no hunting And now all of the family sat back there in the cave, growling with their mouths and growling with their bellies from hunger and hatred of the food and fear of the death that comes from no food, while only he ate the stewed sheep-meat.

  It was tired and stale and flat in his mouth. He had reasons that made him eat, but he could not blame the family. Seven months and nothing but sheep. The birds had flown. Other years they came back; who knew if they would this year? Soon the fish would come up the river again, if this year was like others; but who could be sure?

  And now whoever ate of the boars or of the rabbits died in time, and when the Ceremonial Cuts were made, strange worms appeared inside him. The Man of the Sun had said it was now a sin against the Sun to eat of the boar and of the rabbit; and clearly that was true, for sinners died.

  Sheep or hunger. Sheep-meat or death. Sko chewed the tasteless chunk in his mouth and brooded. He could still force himself to eat; but his woman, his children, the rest of The People . . . You could see men’s ribs now, and little children had big eyes and no cheeks and bellies like smooth round stones. Old men did not live so long as they used to; and even young men went to the Sun without wounds from man or beast to show Him. The food-that-takes-no-hunting was running thin and dry, and Sko could easily beat at wrestling the men who used to pound him down.

  The People were his now because he could still eat; and because The People were his, he had to go on eating. And it was as if the Sun Himself demanded that he find a wa
y to make The People eat too, eat themselves back into life.

  Sko’s stomach was full but his mouth still felt empty. There had once been a time when his stomach was empty and his mouth felt too full. He tried to remember. And then, as his tongue touched around his mouth trying for that feeling, the thought came.

  It was the Dry Summer, when the river was low and all the springs had stopped living and men went toward the Sun’s birth and the Sun’s death to find new water. He was one of those who had found water; but he had been gone too long. He ate all the dried boar-meat he carried (it was not a sin then) and he shot all his arrows and still he was not home and needed to eat. So he ate growing things like the animals, and some of them were good. But he pulled from the ground one bulb which was in many small sections; and one of those sections, only one, filled his mouth with so much to taste so sharply that he could not stand it and drank almost all the water he was bringing back as proof. He could taste it still in his mind.

  His hand groped into the hole at the side of the cave which was his own place. He found there the rest of that bulb which he had brought as a sign of the far place he had visited. He pulled the hard purple-brown skin off one yellow-white section and smelled it. Even the smell filled the mouth a little. He blew hard on the coals, and when the fire rose and the stewpot began to bubble, he dropped the section in with the sheep-meat. If one fills the stomach and not the mouth, the other the mouth and not the stomach, perhaps together . . .

  Sko asked the Sun to make his guess be right, for The People. Then he let the pot bubble and thought nothing for a while. At last he roused and scooped a gobbet out of the stewpot and bit into it. His mouth filled a little, and something stirred in him and thought of another thing that filled the mouth.

  He set off at a steady lope for the Licking Place which the tribe shared with the sheep and the other animals. He came back with a white crystal crust. He dropped this into the stewpot and stirred it with a stick and sat watching until he could not see the crust any more. Then he bit into another gobbet.

  Now his mouth was indeed full. He opened it and from its fullness called into the cave the sound that meant Food. It was his woman who came out first. She saw the same old stewpot of sheep and started to turn, but he seized her and forced her mouth open and thrust in a gobbet of the new stew. She looked at him for a long silence. Then her jaws began to work fast and hard and not until there was nothing left to chew did she use the Food sound to call out the children.

  There are other Licking Places to use, Sko thought while they ate; and runners can fetch more of the bulbs from where this one grew. There will be enough for The People . . . And then the pot was empty, and Sko Lyay and his family sat licking their fingers.

  After a thousand generations of cooks, hunger and salt and garlic had combined to produce mankind’s first chef.

  The Greatest Tertian[1]

  One of the outstanding characteristics of the culture of the third planet from the Sun is, as I have stressed earlier, the tendency toward onomatolatry, the worship of great names all but divorced from any true biographical or historical comprehension.

  Many of these names, employed with almost magical significance, must be investigated in later chapters; they include (to give approximate phonetic equivalents) Linkn, Mamt, Ung Klsam, Stain, Ro Sflt (who seems to have appeared in several contradictory avatars), Bakh, Sokr Tis, Mi Klan Jlo, Me Uess-tt, San Kloss, and many others, some of them indubitably of legendary origin.

  But one name appears pre-eminently in every cultural cache so far investigated. From pole to pole and in every Tertian language, we have yet to decipher any cultural remains of any sizable proportion that do not contain at least a reference to what must have been unquestionably the greatest Tertian of all time: Sherk Oms.

  It is well at this point to settle once and for all the confusion concerning the two forms of the name: Sherk Oms and Sherk Sper. A few eccentric scholars, notably Shcho Raz in his last speech before the Academy,[2] have asserted that these names represented two separate individuals; and, indeed, there are small items in which the use of the two forms does differ.

  Sherk Sper, for instance, is generally depicted as a writer of public spectacles; Sherk Oms as a pursuer of offenders against society. Both are represented as living in the capital city of the nation[3] of In Gian under the unusual control of a female administrator; but the name of this female is generally given, in accounts of Sherk Sper, as Li Zbet; in accounts of Sherk Oms, as Vi Kto Rya.

  The essential identity of these female names I have explained in my Tertian Phonology.[4] The confusion of professions is more apparent than real; the fact of the matter is that Sherk Oms (to use the more widespread of the two forms) was both a writer and a man of action and tended to differentiate the form of his name according to his pursuit of the moment.

  Clinching evidence exists in the two facts that:

  (1) While we are frequently told that Sherk Oms wrote extensively, no cultural cache has turned up any fragment of his work, aside from two accounts in his personal adventures.

  (2) While we know thoroughly the literary work of Sherk Sper, no cultural cache has revealed the slightest reliable biographical material as to his life.

  One characteristic, it may be added, distinguished the great Sherk under both names: his love for disguise. We possess full details on the many magnificently assumed characterizations of Sherk Oms, while we also read that Sherk Sper was wont to disguise himself as many of the most eminent writers and politicians of his ear, including Bekn, Ma Lo, Ok Sfud, and others.

  Which aspect of the great Sherk was it, you may well ask, which so endeared him to all Tertians? This is hard to answer. Aside from religious writings, there are two items which we are always sure of discovering in any Tertian cultural cache, either in the original language of In Gian or in translation: the biographical accounts[5] of the crime-hunter Sherk Oms, and the plays (to use an untranslatable Tertian word) of Sherk Sper.

  Both contributed so many phrases to the language that it is difficult to imagine Tertian culture without them:

  The dog did nothing in the nighttime (a proverb equivalent to our: While nature rests, the wise chudz sleeps).

  Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears (indicating the early Tertian development of plastic surgery).

  The game is a foot (a baffling reference, in that no cultural cache has yet yielded evidence of a sport suitable to monopods).

  To bee or not to bee (an obvious reference, though by Sherk Sper, to Sherk Oms’ years of retirement).

  Difficult though it is to estimate the relative Tertian esteem for the Master in his two guises, we certainly know, at least, from our own annals, which aspect of the great Sherk would in time have been more valuable to the Tertians—and it was perhaps a realization of this fact that caused the dwellers in Ti Bet to address their prayers to him in the form: Oms mani padme Oms.[6]

  The very few defeats which Sherk Oms suffered were, as we all know, caused by us. Limited as even he was by the overconventional pattern of Tertian thought, he was quite unable to understand the situation when our advance agent Fi Li Mor was forced to return to his house for the temporospatial rod that Wa Tsn thought to be a rain shield. Our clumsy and bungling removal of a vessel for water transport named, I believe, A Li Sha was still sufficiently alien to perplex him; and he never, to we must thank the Great Maker, understood what we had planted on his Tertian world in what he thought to be a matchbox.

  But in time, so penetrating a mind as he reveals under both guises would have understood; and more than that, he might have developed methods of counterattack. We owe our thanks to the absurd brevity of the Tertian life span that he, considered long-lived among his own people, survived fewer than a hundred orbital cycles of the third planet.

  If Sherk Oms, most perceptive and inventive of Tertians, had still been living, the ultimate conquest of the third planet by the fourth might well have been foiled, and his planet might even today still swarm with pul
lulating Tertians, complete with their concepts of nations, wars, and races,[7] rather than being the exquisitely lifeless playground for cultural researchers which today it offers to us, the inhabitants of that neighboring planet which, as best our phoneticists can make out, the Tertians knew as Marz.

  Expedition

  The following is a transcript of the recorded two-way messages between Mars and the field expedition to the satellite of the third planet.

  First Interplanetary Exploratory Expedition to Central Receiving Station:

  What has the Great One achieved?

  Murvin, Central Receiving Station, to First Interplanetary Exploratory Expedition:

  All right, boys. I’ll play games. What has the Great One achieved? And when are we going to get a report on it?

  Falzik, First Interplanetary Exploratory Expedition, to Murvin, Central Receiving Station:

  Haven’t you any sense of historical moments? That was the first interplanetary message ever sent. It had to be worthy of the occasion. Trubz spent a long time working on the psychology of it while I prepared the report. Those words are going to live down through the ages of our planet.

  Murvin to Falzik:

  All right. Swell. You’ll be just as extinct while they live on. Now, how’s about that report?

  Report of First Interplanetary Exploratory Expedition, presented by Falzik, specialist in reporting:

  The First Interplanetary Exploratory Expedition has landed successfully upon the satellite of the third planet. The personnel of this expedition consists of Kar-nim, specialist in astrogation; Halov, specialist in life sciences; Trubz, specialist in psychology; Lilil, specialist in the art; and Falzik, specialist in reporting.