by Chad Oliver
He stood still, waiting.
He showed no outward sign of nervousness. He didn’t smoke, fidget, or pace.
He waited.
And yet he was nervous, and was candid enough with himself to admit it. Partly, it was just the excitement of a new world, a new sky, a new frontier. He had seem many new planets, but he had never gotten to them.
Every world was a miracle, if your eyes were good enough.
And Arcturus III was more than that. It was a mystery and a challenge and a threat.
It was trouble.
Here was a culture that lived by hunting wild animals and gathering roots and berries in the forest—the simplest of all economies. And yet, here was a culture ruled by priest-kings, who had a power of life and death over their people.
Remarkable?
The word was impossible.
You don’t get dense populations and permanent settlements when you get your food by hunting for it, except under the most atypical conditions. If the population of New York had to eat by hunting deer and rabbits, most of the people would starve in nothing flat. If you hunt, you can’t park in one place and wait for the game to jump into your pot—you have to go after it.
Most hunting peoples lived in small bands of perhaps one hundred men, women, and children. There were no sharply defined social classes, and certainly no kings. You’ve got to have surplus food to support non-producing specialists, and famine is a constant threat when you hunt for life. At the most, you might find a shaman or two, and a vaguely defined headman without any formal authority.
No chiefs, generally.
Kings?
Priests?
Vast ceremonial centers?
About as likely as a snake running a digital computer.
The cool breeze sighed through the tall grasses. Mavor waited.
The world of Arcturus III didn’t play by the rules, and that meant danger. Simpson had stumbled across something that looked very much like a big fat monkey wrench in the gears. It wasn’t the first time it had happened, of course—people had a nasty habit of being unpredictable occasionally.
But this time—
“Mavor! Are you there?” The call came from the south, still faint with distance.
“At the spring, Simpson!” Mavor yelled.
A small cloud blotted out the sun, and the wind had a cold edge to it.
Mavor stood quietly, and waited.
Edward Simpson parted the tall grass and stepped forward.
Superficially, he looked like his picture; his features were regular, dominated by a stubborn jaw. He was thinner than Mavor expected, and more nervous. His dark eyes seemed only half-open, but he didn’t appear sleepy by any means.
Wary.
The word popped into Mavor’s mind, and stayed there.
The two men shook hands.
“I didn’t expect a visit from the big boss himself,” Simpson said rapidly. “Lucky I keep my radio on my wrist or I might have missed your call. What brings you to Arcturus III?”
“A spaceship, generally,” Mavor said.
“I meant—”
“Never mind, Ed. Just a speech defect of mine. Looks like you hit the jackpot around here, and I kind of thought I’d wander out and help you count the quarters. Where are they?”
“How much time have you got?”
“Enough.”
“Well, the Lkklah—that’s what they call themselves—live south of here, most of them. Lkklah means ‘people,’ of course—”
“Toward the sea?”
“Generally, yes.” Simpson offered Mavor a cigarette; when Mavor shook his head Simpson took one himself and returned the pack to his pocket.
“How many of them are there?”
“At least thirty thousand, if my census is accurate. That doesn’t count the other tribes around here.”
“There are some people who don’t have this hotshot culture on the hunting base, then?”
“That’s right. It isn’t planetwide; I don’t know the full extent of it yet.”
“Fair enough. Let’s take a gander at ’em.”
“They move around a lot, Mr. Mavor.”
“You mean those huge ceremonial centers have got wheels on them?” Mavor surveyed the anthropologist with bland green eyes.
Simpson laughed. “I don’t think so. But most of the people are scattered in hunting groups, and they’re a little shy of strangers.”
“I see. Your report mentioned resident officials in the big centers, I believe. Are they out to lunch?”
Simpson threw one cigarette into the spring and lit another. “They go on pilgrimages; I haven’t got the exact cycle worked out yet. They’ll be in one center or another, but I’d hate to take you on a long wild goose chase.”
“That would raise certain problems,” Mavor admitted.
Simpson stared at him, trying to find some sort of an expression to read. He couldn’t find one. He started to say something, then contented himself with a shrug.
“Let’s go,” Mavor said.
Simpson turned and led the way through the grass.
He set a fast pace, heading south.
Norman Mavor smiled, just a little, and followed him toward the distant sea.
Evening flowed down the salt wind from the ocean, and delicate rose-tinted clouds hung on the western horizon. Then the sun was gone, and the night turned the world into a shadow.
There was no moon, but the starlight was a silver radiance in the sky.
It was cold, and Mavor jammed his hands into his pockets to keep them warm.
Neither man spoke.
The croaking of frogs and the persistent, irritating whine of some invisible animal blended in with the shuffle of their footsteps.
There was no other sound.
The terrain beneath their feet became rocky and a thorny vegetation pushed out the grass. Then the ground softened and they heard the sibilant glide of water. They came to a good-sized river, black with silver flecks under the stars, and followed a path that wound along its banks.
It was almost morning when they saw it.
In spite of himself, Mavor stopped short and caught his breath.
There, framed by the dark fence of the vegetation and frozen in the pale light of dawn, was magic. No man with an ounce of poetry in his soul could have seen it merely as a “ceremonial center.”
Here was a hall where the gods might dance, and spirits sigh down the wind.
You thought at once of pyramids, but that was force of habit. The structures—there were four of them—were square and massive, like blocks of basalt ripped from the depths of a world. They were terraced, with rock stairways cut into their sides.
How big were they?
Mavor reined in his imagination and estimated: sixty feet high, at least, and perhaps eighty feet on a side. And there were smaller structures on top of them—temples of some kind, beyond a doubt.
There were courtyards, altars, market squares.
The place was deserted, but the silence that hung over it was not the silence of centuries.
The place was used.
“Well?” asked Simpson, not without an edge of malice. His voice was as startling as a rifle shot in the stillness.
“It’s magnificent,” Mavor said quietly. Then: “Anyone home?”
“I don’t think so. We’ll look—these places aren’t booby-trapped.”
They walked through the courtyards and peered into the buildings. They were pitch black inside, but a match showed the extent of the rooms. They were amazingly small considering the size of the exteriors; the construction was impressive, but not overly efficient.
They saw no one, and heard nothing.
“Gone to the World Series,” Mavor commented.
“They’re elusive, sometimes. They may be back here today, or not for months.”
“I’ll leave my card. I still want to see the people who built this place, Ed.”
“How about some sack-time first?” Simpson as
ked, yawning. “It’s comfortable inside the squares, if you don’t mind rock mattresses.”
“I don’t mind,” Mavor said.
They ducked inside one of the entrances and stretched out on the floor. Mavor was asleep in seconds, but whenever Simpson stirred Mavor’s green eyes opened, and waited.
They slept six hours. Mavor would have preferred to breakfast on synthetics, but Simpson insisted on shooting a deerlike animal in the brush and broiling up some steaks.
The food was worth the extra wait.
It was afternoon before they left the ceremonial center and struck out along the river path, heading south. They did not see a single human being. Mavor did notice that the river was full of fish; they looked like salmon or trout leaping in the rapids. He filed that fact away for future reference.
There was a glazing sunset, and then a growing chill as evening faded into night.
There were still no people.
Mavor didn’t complain. He walked along behind Simpson, who had run out of cigarettes and was getting more nervous by the minute. Mavor was tired, but he was ready to walk around the whole damned planet if necessary.
At the Earthly equivalent of three o’clock in the morning, Simpson stopped.
Mavor waited.
“I’ll try a signal,” Simpson said.
It’s about time, Mavor thought, trying to ignore his swollen feet.
Simpson let out a long, moderately blood-curdling yell, and followed it with three short yips.
“Thank you, Tarzan of the Apes,” complimented Mavor.
In seconds, there was an answer.
One long cry, three shorter ones.
About half a mile away, Mavor judged.
“Let’s go,” Simpson said.
They went.
It took them almost an hour, scrambling over rocks and getting their clothes ripped by thorns.
The camp lay before them, ghostlike in the foggy gray of early morning. It was little more than a low fire and a circle of crude lean-tos—a sleeping place that a month’s winds and rains would erase from the face of the planet.
There were three dogs, all yelping.
Mavor counted seventeen people, most of them near-naked, but with skin cloaks against the cold. No tailored clothing, then. He saw some spears and dart-throwers, but no bows.
It looked like an extended family group, and it probably was.
Simpson spoke to one old man in a native language; Mavor couldn’t get a word of it, of course, but he listened attentively. Learning native languages was no picnic in the best of circumstances, and out of the question for an official who had to keep tabs on many cultures, on many worlds.
The old man was delighted to see them. He laughed and clapped his hands together. He pulled them over to the fire and insisted that they eat some meat—which wasn’t bad—and a kind of cold wild vegetable paste, which would have made the proverbial Duncan Hines beat a hasty retreat with all guns blazing.
The four women kept to themselves, although the younger girls were friendly enough. The men and boys swarmed around them, all chattering a mile a minute, and it was difficult to concentrate on anything.
Mavor kept his eyes open, however, and he took notes.
The day passed rapidly. Both Mavor and Simpson were on the weary side by evening, but the natives were hell-bent on hospitality. The men had snared an animal the size of a buffalo during the afternoon, and that was a fine excuse for a feast.
Mavor and Simpson pitched in and helped with the fire, much to the amusement of the women.
It developed that half-raw kidneys were considered the real delights here, and the visitors choked them down with a somewhat pale smile.
There was singing—a monotonous chanting of the same syllables over and over again, to the tick-tick-tick of bones tapped gently against two flat rocks. It wasn’t pretty, but it was hypnotic.
And, somehow, it was sad.
Late that night, when the orange fires were low and the shadows were soft and close, Simpson leaned over to Mavor. The natives were off on a story-telling binge, most of which was too rough linguistically even for Simpson.
Simpson’s usually sleepy eyes were open wide now, and alert in the firelight.
“These people have a saying,” he whispered.
Mavor waited.
“They say that in the spring the winds blow from the south, and the trees and flowers and people will live forever. But when autumn comes the north wind blows; the leaves turn brown and fall, and the people know that they too must die. Listen!”
A night wind sighed through the brush and twisted the flickering flames.
Even here, so close to the sea, the wind came out of the north, and it was cold.
“Goodnight,” Simpson said, and stretched out on the ground and closed his eyes.
Mavor sat silently, listening to the voices and the wind.
It was late when he slept.
In the morning, after a stomach-searing breakfast, Mavor turned to Simpson.
“I’ve got news for you,” he said.
“Well?”
“I may not be an anthropologist, Ed, but I wasn’t born yesterday, either. These people are not the Lkklah you were telling me about. They are just what they seem to be—a band of semi-nomadic hunters. I don’t know who they are, and I don’t care. They didn’t build those ceremonial centers any more than I did.”
Simpson eyed him narrowly, but said nothing.
“I don’t mind games, son,” Mavor said. “If you want to walk me for a hundred years, that’s your business. But I’m going to see these Lkklah of yours before I leave this planet. Why don’t you stop being so damned clever and get it over with?”
Simpson hesitated, shrugged, and said something to the native headman. Then, without a word, he walked away into the brush, heading back toward the river.
Mavor tagged along after him, and did not look back.
They reached the sparkling river and continued south along the path. Simpson set a killing pace, but Mavor didn’t complain. He just watched the river, and noted the fish leaping in the shallows.
Within four hours they hit a stand of sweet-smelling trees that looked like cedars. The smell of salt was strong in the heavy air, and Mavor thought he could hear the sea.
The path through the trees climbed steeply, and then they rounded a turn and the land dropped off sharply before them. The view was excellent, and Mavor saw all he needed to see.
He stopped.
Below them was the sea, almost black beneath a cold gray sky. Between the sea and the rocky cliff they stood on was a stretch of timber perhaps a quarter of a mile wide.
The village was in the trees.
This time it was no simple hunting camp. There were solid plank houses, and lots of them. There were hundreds of people visible, all of them well-dressed in tailored clothing. There were large, graceful sea-going canoes drawn up along the beach.
The houses extended along the shore as far as the eye could see. Thousands of people could have been taken care of without any strain at all.
There were no cultivated fields that Mavor could spot.
But there were rivers.
He counted ten of them from where he stood, winding through the cliffs and emptying into the sea.
He turned to Simpson.
“These are the Lkklah?”
“Some of them. Yes.”
“These are the people who built the ceremonial centers back yonder?”
“Yes.”
Mavor studied the younger man with his cool green eyes. “Maybe you’d like to sit down,” he said.
“You’re not going into the village, after coming all this way?”
“No need for that, Ed.”
A vein began throbbing insistently in Simpson’s forehead.
“Say what you’ve got to say, Mavor.”
“Maybe you’d rather tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“Oh hell, man.” Mavor almost seemed irritated
, but recovered himself. He sat down on a boulder, his unhandsome face lined and tired.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Okay, Ed.” Mavor clasped his hands and rested his chin on his thumbs. “We’ll put it in teensy-weensy little words so there’ll be no mistake. Don’t you know it’s a serious crime to fake your data?”
The scent of the trees was fresh and clean around them, and the beat of the sea was the pulse of unhurried centuries.
But now ugliness was between them on the cliff.
The silence stretched taut.
For a long minute, Mavor thought that Simpson was going to try to brazen it out, even now. But the younger man suddenly slumped and turned his back.
The battle was over.
“How’d you know?” Simpson asked, his voice muffled.
“It’s my job to know, Ed. You were too vague with the crucial details in your report. Any time a miracle crosses my desk, pal, I want photographs, statistics, and an analysis somewhat above the sophomoric level.”
Simpson turned, his eyes narrowed. “I wasn’t that crude. I said there were complex ceremonial centers, and there were. I said these people had no agriculture, and they don’t.”
“Bunk,” Mavor said bluntly. “You know as well as I do that it isn’t the simple technological level that’s important—it’s the total ecological situation. If you’ve got plenty of food, and it’s reliable, it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference where you got it from. If you’ve got the food, you get the population. If you get the population, a complex social structure is possible—though not inevitable. If your social organization is complex enough, you get specialists freed from food production—and you can build your temples, carve your totem poles, and generally raise hell.”
“Thanks for the lecture.”
“You’re welcome. Look, son, the old Indians on the Northwest Coast of North America had exactly the same deal you’ve got here. No agriculture, but streams chock-full of salmon—and just about the most complex prehistoric culture north of Mexico. Lots of the Plains Indians had no agriculture, but they had horses, and they had the bison.”
“Yeah, yeah. I know all that.”
“Good. That means you knew what you were doing. You didn’t just make a mistake—you lied in your teeth.”
