by J F Bone
Kalvastin shrugged. “Our worlds are quite different. Destroying a deviant like Simmonds is a commendable act on my homeworld and would receive nothing but praise. Here, it seemed possible that I could die for it. Naturally, I did not want to lose my life in carrying out Devian justice. So I located the best Lawman I could find on such short notice.”
“You’ll probably never come to trial,” Judge Gould said. “You’re probably too important. And if a trial was held, you’d probably be pardoned.”
“That does not matter,” Kalvastin said. “No one is above the law.”
“You’re on the wrong planet,” Levenson said, “although it would be nice if what you said was true.”
“It is—at home,” Kalvastin said. “Of course, one has a right to arrange matters so the verdict will be favorable.”
“There may not be as much difference between your world and this as I thought,” Levenson said. “Anyway, the next few days should have a salutary effect upon our legal system.”
“You’re understating the case,” Judge Gould replied. “Technicalities are going to give everyone a splitting headache.” . . .
His words were more prophetic than he knew.
1978
PIÈCE DE RÉSISTANCE
The author was born in Tacoma, Washington, in 1916. A Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, he is Professor of that subject at Oregon State University. In addition to writing textbooks and editing Modern Veterinary Practice, Dr. Bone has been writing SF since 1956.
Here, let me brush you off. This dust sticks like glue. It’s a miracle you weren’t killed, but she was too frightened to stop. Didn’t anyone tell you a basilisk was dangerous? What are you doing here, anyway? You oughta be back at Base where it’s safe.
Oh—I’m sorry, sir. Welcome to Zetah. I didn’t know you were the new Governor. I thought you were another of those Earth-type inspectors who pop in now and then. We don’t expect top brass out here, and you didn’t bring a staff. Governor Claiborne never travelled without a couple of secretaries and a trooper or two.
I guess it takes all kinds, Governor. And you’re right about the briefing manual. You can’t learn much from it. I suppose if you’ve never seen a basilisk you can’t be expected to know how fast they can move. They’re not like Earth animals. They don’t believe in the superiority of man.
Look at that cow over there by the chute, the one the men are unshackling. You wouldn’t think anything that ugly would have a brain, would you? But she’s got one and it’s bigger than ours. The big brains at Base call them centauroids, although I’m damned if I can see where they look like centaurs, unless you stretch the image all out of shape. Sure they have six limbs and the rear four have something like hoofs, and the front two end in something like hands, but that’s where the resemblance ends. Note those jaws and that mouthful of teeth. She’s an obligate carnivore, and those teeth of hers can shear a man’s leg off. No—don’t look at her eyes! She can steer you right into those teeth if she gets a fix on you. That’s why they’re called basilisks.
Yes, sir, that’s a cow. You can tell from the abdominal pouch and the small tusks. A bull’s half again as big, and his tusks are as long as my forearm, and he doesn’t have a pouch. You’re right, sir. She does sound like a leaky steampipe—funny—I never thought of that. Hey! There she goes!
They sure can! They run like scalded cats. An adult cow can get up to 90 k.p.h. when she’s in a hurry, and that girl’s in a screaming rush. You wouldn’t think anything with legs could travel so fast. They use the forelimbs for propulsion when they’re really in a hurry. Most of the time they use just the last four. You’ll have to come down to the lab. We have some stop motion studies Winslow made last year. The leg action in full flight is the damndest thing you ever saw. We have their slow gaits worked out, but high speed is impossible to describe. One loses track of what leg is doing what.
So you noticed the odor? Did it bother you? No? Well, you’re one of the unusual ones. The Project shrink, George Reifenschneider, says it’s a defense mechanism, but I sure as hell don’t know what it’s supposed to defend against. There’s nothing on this world except us that’s one tenth their size, and no native life has anything near their natural armament or brains. Until we came, the basilisks didn’t have an enemy in the world except maybe a few parasites and a virus or two.
No sir, I’m not one of the brains of the Project. They’re back at the Base. I’m the local supervisor; the guy who gets his hands dirty. The only degree I’ve got, beyond a BA in Agriculture, is from the school of experience. I ramrodded a cattle ranch in Wyoming before I came here, and I’ve been running this spread ever since it was established. I know ranching, and I expect that’s why Governor Claiborne put me in this job.
Well—thank you sir. I’m sorry you got knocked down, but you’ve gotta watch them. We’re trying to breed a more easy-going type, but we haven’t had too much luck so far. They’re ugly, suspicious, and antisocial; but we keep trying. We have to, if we’re going to avoid things like that mess at Station Two.
What do I think of Station Two? Well—no one’s asked me. I’m not supposed to think, but if you want my opinion, I think Harris asked for it. I think he committed suicide. Nobody walks into a nursing female’s area and expects to come out alive. Nursing’s a drain on them and they’re hungry. It’s like dangling a chocolate bar in front of a starving kid.
And then that cleanout order from Base really loused things up. It was a knee-jerk reaction to Harris’ death; but it left half the Station worrying about what would happen when the local basilisks were gone, and the other half went ape over unrestricted hunting. Naturally the whole operation went to pot. You can’t run a hatchery with a crew like that. So they didn’t watch the litter, they didn’t vaccinate, they didn’t feed properly or check the humidity, and four hundred thousand chicks went down the drain and our entire program came to a screeching halt. That foulup set us back six months.
Yes sir, we do better now. We’ve got the feed problem solved, and we’ve worked out a method of keeping them quiet during the nursing period. Sight and smell trigger their reactions, so we keep them isolated. They’re nearly blind during rut; and if we keep them in closed nest boxes where they can’t see each other—and filter the air—we can house as many as the Station can hold. We can hold about a hundred at the Station. That’s all the research staff can handle.
That’s right, they’re solitary except at rutting season. That’s why the Project Area is so large. Ordinarily a basilisk won’t come closer than two hundred meters to another one, except to protect their territory. The only other exceptions are when a female’s nursing or when she’s in season. She’s the one who makes the advances. The males just kill each other or avoid each other, depending on the situation. But adult males don’t deliberately attack each other unless their territory’s invaded.
No sir—the pattern’s not really weird. It’s a lot like the habits of terrestrial elk, except the bulls don’t keep harems. A bull may have more than one cow during rut; but he has them successively, not concurrently.
No sir, they’re not exactly mammals. They’re more like a cross between a monotreme and a marsupial. The female lays a single egg about six inches in diameter. She incubates this in an abdominal pouch. When the egg hatches, the young basilisk finds a milk duct on the inside of the pouch and attaches to it for about half a year. By then the calf is big enough to forage for itself and the cow removes it from the pouch and casts it out. The calf runs off and won’t come near another basilisk until puberty when its glands take over. If it’s a cow, it finds a bull and they pair long enough to breed, after which they separate again. If it’s a bull, it stakes out a territory when it gets big enough and fights off other bulls to hold it. Until it gets big and tough a bull calf is hassled a lot by adult bulls. But the adults are big, fat and slow, and the youngsters are lean and quick. Enough of them survive to keep the race supplied with breeding stock. It’s hard on the bull calves, but the tough o
nes survive. The brains at Base think that is one of the reasons why the basilisks remain solitary—a natural tendency enforced by breeding patterns.
That’s right, sir. We try not to disturb the pattern on most of the Project land. We protect this area. We keep a census of the Project and we don’t let the adult population drop. There just might be a critical number. We don’t know about that yet.
It’s not easy to explain, sir. There’s always an unbalanced sex ratio. It goes back before birth. The primary sex ratio in the egg is two females to one male. In the natural state this drops to about one to three by puberty and can get as low as one to twelve among adults without hurting production. Usually it’s about one bull to four cows.
No sir, the present system wouldn’t be bad except for poachers.
You can’t cover a hundred kilometer square very easily, although we try. The guards have orders to arrest trespassers and to shoot those who try to run, but how can you protect against some guy in a flitter who comes in low under the screen, kills a male or female in one of the river nests, and flits out again? We used to chalk it off as natural losses until we started implanting electronic monitors in the ones we caught. That’s when we found out about the poachers. We caught a few in the act at first, but they’re onto us now, and many get away. They’re a bunch of murderers; too goddamn lazy or cowardly to try the wild areas. They kill for no good reason; a few steaks, a set of trophy tusks, or just the fun of killing something that’s bigger and tougher than they are. Hell, sir, if the odds were halfway even, a basilisk would win every time. But the poachers shoot from the air, and the poor beast doesn’t have a chance.
They cut off the head, pull the backstrap, and get the hell out before we can react; and by the time our monitors tell us to get up there because the vital signs are absent, the carcass is crawling with stink bugs unless a calf or a cow has beaten the bugs to it. In either event, the carcass is useless for anything except evidence of poaching. None of us on the Project like poachers, and we have good reason. A hunting party can louse up an entire program. Let me tell you what happened after that trouble at Station Two. We had to send nearly half of our security force up there to help maintain order, and the word got out. It wasn’t a week before we were hit with the biggest hunting parties in Project history. They virtually wiped out Area C where we were breeding a strain that had tendencies toward compatibility. Most of five years’ work went down the drain. That’s why we have guards. This place would be overrun with poachers if there was no security. We could be hunted to extinction; and if the Project goes, the whole colony could collapse.
No sir, I’m not exaggerating, and I’m not an alarmist. This is the only place inside our perimeter that has a precolonial population of basilisks.
Sure, there’s plenty of wild area outside flitter range where basilisks are plentiful, but except for the Project you can draw a five hundred kilometer circle around Base and not find anything worth hunting. We’ve been here ten years, and in that time we’ve hunted the area inside the perimeter so heavily that one can’t find enough survivors to make a hunt profitable except in Project territory. Basilisks are intelligent; and they don’t like to be shot, so they hide their nests from aerial observation, and a man’s a fool to try to hunt them on foot.
The net result is that the Project would be a happy hunting ground if it wasn’t protected. Sure, it’s not too hard to protect, but it’s still a big area. The basilisks stay here because the food’s plentiful and because we protect them. They’re smart enough to figure that their chances are better here than anywhere else inside the perimeter. It’s only occasionally that a hunter or a party gets in, and many of them don’t make it out again.
But about the colony collapsing, I wasn’t kidding. Without the Project we’d lose hope and lose momentum. The quotas would not be met and the BEC might figure we weren’t worth the cost in logistic support, which would mean we’d either be evacuated or abandoned.
Have you ever seen what happens to an abandoned colony, sir? Those Earth-side chairbornes don’t give a damn about us grubbies sweating it out here on Zetah. All the Bureau of Extraterrestrial Colonization cares about is the bottom line. The colony thrives or it’s aborted. It’s as simple as that. After all, there are plenty of planets and plenty of colonists. Right now we’re holding a balance. No one’s happy, but we function. The Project is our hope of relief, and so long as we have hope we’ll continue.
Worth the cost? Sir—you’re joking! It’s worth any cost.
Oh sure—I know the objections, but the basilisks would kill us just as quickly as we kill them—and for the same reason.
I know they’re intelligent. Actually, I think they’re descendants of the survivors of the atomic holocaust that wiped out the planet a few millennia ago. Consider the implications: They are the only large terrestrial animal on this world except us. All the rest are swimmers, burrowers, crawlers, and cave dwellers. Look at their front legs: They’re adapted for grasping, they have binocular vision, they’re potential tool users. They could communicate verbally with each other if they stopped being solitary brutes. Their brains have speech centers, and they have big brains. And if you need any more evidence, there are ruins of a civilization down on the equator that’ll make your eyes pop. So will the scintillometer readings.
Ten thousand years ago the basilisks probably had a civilization as good as ours, one that ruled this world. Even today their descendants dominate the planet. Sure—we control our perimeter, but it’s hardly more than a pimple on Zetah’s face. But in the long ago war they either had better weapons or were more determined. Anyway they did a better job of destroying their civilization than we did ours. And this solitary life of theirs possibly arose from ochlophobia brought on by mass destruction or maybe because there wasn’t much to eat and they had to separate to remain alive. We can relate to that sort of history.
See that group of buildings over there, sir? That’s our next stop. That is the heart of the Project. That’s Headquarters. It has to be big, since we capture every pregnant cow we can get our hands on and hold them until their calves are cast. Then we turn the females loose, braincheck the calves, save the useful ones, cull the excess, and liberate the rest.
Yes, that’s true, but the bulls would do it if we didn’t. We find about one calf in twenty that has gregarious traits. We keep these and introduce them to each other. There’s considerable mortality, of course, but the survivors work out a peck order. They learn to tolerate each other after a fashion. Complete tolerance is our ultimate goal.
No sir, it’s not hard to move them around. They’re terrified of fire. We use solidographs of forest fires with sound and smell effects. It’s hard work handling the projectors, but it gets results. We don’t use the system except just after breeding season when we bring the females up here to hatch their eggs and gestate.
Feed? Why chickens from Station Two, of course. What else? After all, basilisks are obligate carnivores. Maybe they got that way from their war. We can relate to that, but I’m not telling you anything new. And speaking of feed, sir, it’s lunchtime. Would you care to eat with us?
Ah—here we are. The head table’s for guests. Cook likes us to be on time. She has a hard enough job feeding a bunch of bellyachers like the Headquarters crew, without having us come at odd hours.
Try the soup, sir. It’s pure meat stock; rabbit, I think, from the look of it. I’ll admit it isn’t nearly as good as beef, but this isn’t Earth. About the only thing we can ship on long trips are the small animals; the big ones don’t survive, and so far we haven’t managed to keep fertile ova alive over a stellar jump. So what we have are fowl, rabbits, guinea pigs, dogs, and cats. And rodents and fowl are poor fodder for chronic steak lovers. Not a bit of red meat in the lot. We tried dog once; it didn’t work. Too many emotional hangups. Someday, maybe, we’ll be able to ship larger domestic animals, but until we can, we have to live on what we can bring with us and what we can develop locally. Nine times out of ten loca
l sources don’t work. Either the taste is terrible or something is biochemically wrong, like those D-amine groups on Rosso that poisoned the whole colony.
Ah—I guess word got out that you were here! I hoped it would. Cook’s gone all out for you. Here—try this—
I’m not surprised you like it. I’ve never met a person who didn’t. I remember Mrs. Claiborne. She was a real lady; never touched anything except chicken breast and goose liver. She just couldn’t stop once she tasted it. And if you think cutlets are delicious you should try steak.
What is it? Why, basilisk, of course. One of the calves that couldn’t meet the competition. We don’t waste them.
If you don’t want your helping, sir, I’m sure someone will take it. In fact, I will.
Horrible? Not half as horrible as a steady diet of fowl and rodents. After six months of that fodder, you’ll think differently. You’ll hate the sight and smell of birds and bunnies. You’ll dream of pork, beef, and lamb; bacon, ham, roasts, chops, and steak. You’ll wake up with the memory in your tastebuds and cry like a baby when you see the bunnyburger breakfast patties. You’ll remember this meal, sir; and you’ll understand why we’re sweating out this Project. You’ll remember what they told you back on Earth about those colonies that collapsed and went cannibal—
You see, sir, we didn’t really know what the Last War did to us until we went into Space. On Earth we adjusted the ecology to serve our ends, but on colony worlds we can’t do that. Here, we can’t forget what we are. Here’s where it really hits home.
Sure, we didn’t cause the mutation. Our warring ancestors did that with their nukes, but we’re the ones who have to live with it.
