The Rebel Worlds

IX

The forest opened abruptly on cleared land. Stepping out, Flandry saw ordered rows of bushes. On three sides the farm was hemmed in by jungle, on the fourth it dropped into a valley full of vapors. The trend of his six Didonian days of travel had been upward.

He didn’t notice the agriculture at once. “Hold!” he barked. The blaster jumped into his grasp. A rhinoceros herd?

No … not really … of course not. Lord Advisor Mulele’s African preserve lay 200 light-years remote. The half-dozen animals before him had the size and general build of rhinos, though their nearly hairless slate-blue skins were smooth rather than wrinkled and tails were lacking. But the shoulders of each protruded sidewise to make a virtual platform. The ears were big and fanlike. The skull bulged high above a pair of beady eyes, supported a horn on the nose, then tapered to a muzzle whose mouth was oddly soft and flexible. The horn offset that effect by being a great ebony blade with a saw-toothed ridge behind it.

“Wait, Dominic!” Kathryn sped to join him. “Don’t shoot. Those’re nogas.”

“Hm?” He lowered the gun.

“Our word. Humans can’t pronounce any Didonian language.”

“You mean they are the—” Flandry had encountered curious forms of sophont, but none without some equivalent of hands. What value would an intelligence have that could not actively reshape its environment?

Peering closer, he saw that the beasts were not at graze. Two knelt in a corner of the field, grubbing stumps, while a third rolled a trimmed log toward a building whose roof was visible over a hillcrest. The fourth dragged a crude wooden plow across the newly acquired ground. The fifth came behind, its harness enabling it to steer. A pair of smaller animals rode on its shoulders. That area was some distance off, details hard to make out through the hazy air. The sixth, nearer to Flandry, was not feeding so much as removing weeds from among the bushes.

“C’mon!” Kathryn dashed ahead, lightfoot under her pack.

The trip had been day-and-night trudgery. In camp, he and she had been too occupied — the only ones with wilderness experience — for any meaningful talk before they must sleep. But they were rewarded; unable to mourn, they began to mend. Now eagerness made her suddenly so vivid that Flandry lost consciousness of his surroundings. She became everything he could know, like a nearby sun.

“Halloo!” She stopped and waved her arms.

The nogas halted too and squinted nearsightedly. Their ears and noses twitched, straining into the rank dank heat. Flandry was jolted back to the world. They could attack her. “Deploy,” he rapped at those of his men who carried weapons. “Half circle behind me. The rest of you stand at the trailhead.” He ran to Kathryn’s side.

Wings beat. A creature that had been hovering, barely visible amidst low clouds, dropped straight toward the sixth noga. “A krippo.” Kathryn seized Flandry’s hand. “I wish I could’ve told you in advance. But watch. ’Tis wonderful.”

The nogas were presumably more or less mammalian, also in their reproductive pattern: the sexes were obvious, the females had udders. The krippo resembled a bird … did it? The body was comparable to that of a large goose, with feathers gray-brown above, pale gray below, tipped with blue around the throat, on the pinions, at the end of a long triangular tail. The claws were strong, meant to grab and hang on. The neck was fairly long itself, supporting a head that swelled grotesquely backward. The face seemed to consist mainly of two great topaz eyes. And there was no beak, only a red cartilaginous tube.

The krippo landed on the noga’s right shoulder. It thrust a ropy tongue (?) from the tube. Flandry noticed a knot on either side of the noga, just below the platform. The right one uncoiled, revealing itself to be a member suggestive of a tentacle, more than two meters in length if fully outstretched. The krippo’s extended equivalent, the “tongue,” plunged into a sphincter at the end of this. Linked, the two organisms trotted toward the humans.

“We’re still lackin’ a ruka,” Kathryn said. “No, wait.” The noga behind the plow had bellowed. “That entity’s callin’ for one. Heesh’s own ruka has to unharness heesh ’fore heesh can come to us.”

“But the rest—” Flandry pointed. Four nogas merely stood where they were.

“Sure,” Kathryn said. “Without partners, they’re dumb brutes. They won’t act, ’cept for the kind of rote job they were doin’, till they get a signal from a complete entity … Ah. Here we go.”

A new animal dropped from a tree and scampered over the furrows. It was less analogous to an ape than the noga was to a rhinoceros or the krippo to a bird. However, a Terran was bound to think of it in such terms. About a meter tall if it stood erect, it must use its short, bowed legs arboreally by choice, for it ran on all fours and either foot terminated in three well-developed grasping digits. The tail was prehensile. The chest, shoulders, and arms were enormous in proportion, greater than a man’s; and besides three fingers, each hand possessed a true thumb. The head was similarly massive, round, with bowl-shaped ears and luminous brown eyes. Like the krippo, this creature had no nose or mouth, simply a nostrilled tube. Black hair covered it, except where ears, extremities, and a throat pouch showed blue skin. It — he — was male. He wore a belt supporting a purse and an iron dagger.

“Is that a Didonian?” Flandry asked. “A ruka,” Kathryn said. “One-third of a Dodonian.” The animal reached the noga closest to the humans. He bounded onto the left shoulder, settled down by the krippo, and thrust out a “tongue” of his own to join the remaining “tentacle.”

“You see,” Kathryn said hurriedly, “we had to name them somehow. In most Didonian languages, the species are called things answerin’ roughly to ‘feet,’ ‘wings,’ and ‘hands.’ But that’d get confusin’ in Anglic. So, long’s Aenean dialects contain some Russko anyhow, we settled on ‘noga,’ ‘krippo,’ ‘ruka.’ ” The tripartite being stopped a few meters off. “Rest your gun. Heesh won’t hurt us.” She went to meet it. Flandry followed, a bit dazed. Symbiotic relationships were not unknown to him. The most spectacular case he’d met hitherto was among the Togru-Kon-Tanakh of Vanrijn. A gorilloid supplied hands and strength; a small, carapaced partner had brains and keen eyes; the detachable organs that linked them contained cells for joining the two nervous systems into one. Apparently evolution on Dido had gone the same way.

But off the deep end! Flandry thought. To the point where the two little types no longer even eat, but draw blood off the big one. Lord, how horrible. Never to revel in a tournedos or a pêche flambée—

He and Kathryn stopped before the autochthon. A horsey aroma, not unpleasant, wafted down a light, barely cooling breeze. Flandry wondered which pair of eyes to meet.

The noga grunted. The krippo trilled through its nostrils, which must have some kind of strings and resonating chamber. The ruka inflated his throat pouch and produced a surprising variety of sounds.

Kathryn listened intently. “I’m no expert in this language,” she said, “but they do speak a related one ’round Port Frederiksen, so I can follow ’long fairly well. Heesh’s name is Master Of Songs, though ‘name’ has the wrong connotations … ” She uttered vocables. Flandry caught a few Anglic words, but couldn’t really understand her.

I suppose all Didonians are too alien to learn a human tongue, he thought. The xenologists must have worked out different pidgins for the different linguistic families: noises that a Terran epiglottis can wrap itself around, on a semantic pattern that a Didonian can comprehend. He regarded Kathryn with renewed marveling. What brains that must have taken!

Three voices answered her. The impossibility of a human talking a Didonian language can’t just be a matter of larynx and mouth, Flandry realized. A vocalizer would deal with that. No, the structure’s doubtless contrapuntal.

“Heesh doesn’t know pidgin,” Kathryn told him. “But Cave Discoverer does. They’ll assemble heesh for us.”

“Heesh?”

She chuckled. “What pronoun’s right, in a situation like this? A few cultures insist on some particular sex distribution in the units of an entity. But for most, sex isn’t what matters, ’tis the species and individual capabilities of the units, and they form entities in whatever combinations seem best at a given time. So we call a partnership, whether complete or two-way, ’heesh.” And we don’t fool ’round inflectin’ the word.”

The krippo took off in a racket of wings. The ruka stayed aboard the noga. But it was as if a light had dimmed. The two stared at the humans a while, then the ruka scratched himself and the noga began cropping weeds.

“You need all three for full intelligence,” Flandry deduced.

Kathryn nodded. “M-hm. The rukas have the most forebrain. Alone, one of them is ’bout equal to a chimpanzee. Is that right, the smartest Terran subhuman? And the noga alone is pretty stupid. A three-way, though, can think as well as you or I. Maybe better, if comparison’s possible. We’re still tryin’ to find tests and measurements that make sense.” She frowned. “Do have the boys put away their guns. We’re ’mong good people.”

Flandry acceded, but left his followers posted where they were. If anything went agley, he wanted that trail held. The hurt men lay there on their stretchers.

The other partnership finished disengaging itself — no, heeshself — from the plow. The earth thudded to the gallop of heesh’s noga; krippo and ruka must be hanging on tight! Kathryn addressed this Didonian when heesh arrived, also without result though she did get a response. This she translated as: “Meet Skilled With Soil, who knows of our race even if none of heesh’s units have learned pidgin.”

Flandry rubbed his chin. His last application of anti-beard enzyme was still keeping it smooth, but he lamented the scraggly walrus effect that his mustache was sprouting. “I take it,” he said, “that invidi — uh, units swap around to form, uh, entities whose natural endowment is optimum for whatever is to be done?”

“Yes. In most cultures we’ve studied. Skilled With Soil is evidently just what the phrase implies, a gifted farmer. In other combinations, heesh’s units might be part of an outstandin’ hunter or artisan or musician or whatever. That’s why there’s no requirement for a large population in order to have a variety of specialists within a communion.”

“Did you say ‘communion’?”

“Seems more accurate than ‘community,’ true?”

“But why doesn’t everybody know what anybody does?”

“Well, leamin’ does seem to go easier’n for our race, but ’tis not instantaneous. Memory traces have to be reinforced if they’re not to fade out; skills have to be developed through practice. And, naturly, a brain holds the kind of memories and skills ’tis equipped to hold. For instance, nogas keep the botanical knowledge, ’cause they do the eatin’; rukas, havin’ hands, remember the manual trades; krippos store meteorological and geographical data. Tis not quite that simple, really. All species store some information of every sort — we think — ’speci’ly language. But you get the idea, I’m sure.”

“Nonetheless—”

“Let me continue, Dominic.” Enthusiasm sparkled from Kathryn as Flandry had never seen it from a woman before. “Question of culture. Didonian societies vary as much as ever Terran ones did. Certain cultures let entities form promiscuously. The result is, units learn less from others than they might, for lack of concentrated attention; emotional and intellectual life is shallow; the group stays at a low level of savagery. Certain other cultures are ’stremely restrictive ’bout relationships. For ’sample, the units of an entity are often s’posed to belong to each other ’sclusively till death do them part, ’cept for a grugin’ temporary linkage with immature ones as a necessity of education. Those societies tend to be further along technologically, but nowhere beyond the stone age and everywhere esthetically impoverished. In neither case are the Didonians realizin’ their full potential.”

“I see,” Flandry drawled. “Playboys versus puritans.”

She blinked, then grinned. “As you will. Anyhow, most cultures — like this one, clearly — do it right. Every unit belongs to a few stable entities, dividin’ time roughly equally ’mong them. That way, these entities develop true personalities, broadly backgrounded but each with a maximum talent in heesh’s specialty. In addition, less developed partnerships are assembled temporarily at need.”

She glanced skyward. “I think Cave Discoverer’s ’bout to be created for us,” she said.

Two krippos circled down. One presumably belonged to Master Of Songs, the other to Cave Discoverer, though Flandry couldn’t tell them apart. Master Of Songs and Cave Discoverer apparently had a noga and ruka in

common.

The bird shape in the lead took stance on the platform. The companion flew off to find a noga for itself. More krippos were appearing over the trees, more rukas scampering from the woods or the house. We’ll have a regular town meeting here in a minute, Flandry anticipated.

He directed his awareness back to Kathryn and Cave Discoverer. A dialogue had commenced between them. It went haltingly at first, neither party having encountered pidgin for some years and the language of this neighborhood not being precisely identical with that which was spoken around Port Frederiksen. After a while, discourse gained momentum.

The rest of the communion arrived to watch, listen, and have the talk interpreted for them — aside from those who were out hunting or gathering, as Flandry learned later. An entity moved close to him. The ruka sprang off and approached, trailing the noga’s thick “umbilicus” across a shoulder. Blue fingers plucked at Flandry’s clothes and tried to unsheath his blaster for examination. The man didn’t want to allow that, even if he put the weapon on safety, but Kathryn might disapprove of outright refusal. Removing his homemade packsack, he spread its contents on the ground. That served to keep the rukas of several curious entities occupied. After he saw they were not stealing or damaging, Flandry sat down and let his mind wander until it got to Kathryn. There it stayed.

An hour or so had passed, the brief day was drawing to a close, when she summoned him with a wave. “They’re glad to meet us, willin’ to offer hospitality,” she said, “but dubious ’bout helpin’ us across the mountains. The dwellers yonder are dangerous. Also, this is a busy season in the forest as well as the plowland. At the same time, the communion ’ud surely like the payment I promise, things like firearms and proper steel tools. They’ll create one they call Many Thoughts and let heesh ponder the question. Meanwhile we’re invited to stay.”

Lieutenant Kapunan was especially pleased with that. Such medicines as he had were keeping his patients from getting worse, but the stress of travel hadn’t let them improve much. If he could remain here with them while the rest went after help — Flandry agreed. The march might produce casualties of its own, but if so, they ought to be fewer.

Everyone took off for the house. The humans felt dwarfed by the lumbering bulks around them: all but Kathryn. She laughed and chattered the whole way. “Kind of a homecomin’ for me, this,” she told her companions. “I’d ’most forgotten how ’scitin’ ’tis, field work on Dido, and how I, well, yes, love them.”

You have a lot of capacity to love, Flandry thought. He recognized it as a pleasing remark that he would have used on any other girl; but he felt shy about flattering this one.

When they topped the ridge, they had a view of the farther slope. It dropped a way, then rose again, forming a shelter for the dwelling place. Artificial channels, feeding into a stream, must prevent flooding. In the distance, above trees, a bare crag loomed athwart the clouds. Thence came the rumble of a major waterfall. Kathryn pointed. “They call this region Thunderstone,” she said, “’mong other things. Places come closer to havin’ true names than entities do.”

The homestead consisted of turf-roofed log buildings and a rude corral, enclosing a yard cobbled against the frequent mudmaking rains. Most of the structures were sheds and cribs. The biggest was the longhouse, impressive in workmanship and carved ornamentation as well as sheer size. Flandry paid more heed at first to the corral. Juveniles of all three species occupied it, together with four adults of each kind. The grownups formed pairs in different combinations, with immature third units. Other young wandered about, dozed, or took nourishment. The cows nursed the noga calves — two adults were lactating females, one was dry, one was male — and were in turn tapped by fuzzy little rukas and fledgling krippos.

“School?” Flandry asked.

“You might say so,” Kathryn answered. “Primary stages of learnin’ and development. Too important to interrupt for us; not that a partial entity ’ud care anyway. While they grow, the young’ll partner ’mong themselves also. But in the end, as a rule, they’ll replace units that’ve died out of established entities.”

“Heh! “If youth knew, if age could.’ The Didonians appear to have solved that problem.”

“And conquered death, in a way. ’Course, over several generations, a given personality ’ull fade into an altogether new one, and most of the earlier memories ’ull be lost. Still, the continuity — D’ you see why they fascinate us?”

“Indeed. I haven’t the temperament for being a scientist, but you make me wish I did.”

She regarded him seriously. “In your fashion, Dominic, you’re as much a filosof as anybody I’ve known.”

My men are a gallant crew, he thought, and they’re entitled to my loyalty as well as my leadership, but at the moment I’d prefer them and their big flapping ears ten parsecs hence.

The doors and window shutters of the lodge stood open, making its interior more bright and cool than he had awaited. The floor was fire-hardened clay strewn with fresh boughs. Fantastically carved pillars and rafters upheld the roof. The walls were hung with skins, crudely woven tapestries, tools, weapons, and objects that Kathryn guessed were sacred. Built in along them were stalls for nogas, perches for krippos, benches for rukas. Above were sconced torches for night illumination. Fires burned in pits; hoods, of leather stretched on wooden frames, helped draw smoke out through ventholes. Cubs, calves, and chicks, too small for education, bumbled about like the pet animals they were. Units that must be too aged or ill for daily toil waited quietly near the middle of the house. It was all one enormous room. Privacy was surely an idea which Didonians were literally incapable of entertaining. But what ideas did they have that were forever beyond human reach?

Flandry gestured at a pelt. “If they’re herbivorous, the big chaps, I mean, why do they hunt?” he wondered.

“Animal products,” Kathryn said. “Leather, bone, sinew, grease … sh!”

The procession drew up before a perch whereon sat an old krippo. Gaunt, lame in one wing, he nevertheless reminded Flandry of eagles. Every noga lowered the horn to him. The flyer belonging to Cave Discoverer let go and flapped off to a place of his (?) own. That noga offered his vacated tentacle. The ancient made union. His eyes turned on the humans and fairly blazed.

“Many Thoughts,” Kathryn whispered to Flandry. “Their wisest. Heesh’ll take a minute to absorb what the units can convey.”

“Do that fowl’s partners belong to every prominent citizen?”

“Sh, not so loud. I don’t know local customs, but they seem to have special respect for Many Thoughts … Well, you’d ’spect the units with the best genetic heritage to be in the best entities, wouldn’t you? I gather Cave Discoverer’s an explorer and adventurer. Heesh first met humans by seekin’ out a xenological camp 200 kilometers from here. Many Thoughts gets the vigor and boldness of the same noga and ruka, but heesh’s own journeys are of the spirit … Ah, I think heesh’s ready now. I’ll have to repeat whatever information went away with the former krippo.”

That conversation lasted beyond nightfall. The torches were lit, the fires stoked, cooking begun in stone pots. While the nogas could live on raw vegetation, they preferred more concentrated and tasty food when they could get it. A few more Didonians came home from the woods, lighting their way with luminous fungoids. They carried basketsful of edible roots. No doubt hunters and foragers remained out for a good many days at a stretch. The lodge filled with droning, fluting, coughing talk. Flandry and his men had trouble fending curiosity seekers off their injured without acting unfriendly.

At last Kathryn made the best imitation she could of the gesture of deference, and sought out her fellow humans. In the leaping red light, her eyes and locks stood brilliant among shadows. ” Twasn’t easy,” she said in exuberance, “but I argued heesh into it. We’ll have an escort — mighty small, but an escort, guides and porters. I reckon we can start in another forty-fifty hours … for home!”

“Your home,” growled a man.

“Dog your hatch,” Flandry ordered him.