Jem

TEN

WHEN DULLA WAS AWAKE, which was not much of the time, he was only blurrily conscious of what was going on. At first there had been a recurrent which, which that he could not identify, and some person who seemed vaguely familiar manhandling him into whatever it was that was making the sounds. Then pain — a lot of pain. Then long periods when people were talking to him or around him. But he felt no impulse to answer. In his brief conscious times he discovered by and by that he was no longer in pain. The treatment the Greasies had given him had been unpleasant, but it seemed to have done the trick. He was alive. He was rehydrated. The swellings had gone down. He was no longer blind. He was only very weak.

When he woke up and realized that he was not only awake but actually seemed able to keep his eyes open for awhile, Feng Hua-tse was standing by his cot. The Chinaman was looking very stretched out, Dulla thought with some contempt; he looked even worse than Dulla himself felt.

“You are feeling better?” Feng asked sadly.

Dulla thought it over. “Yes. I think so. What has happened?”

“I am glad you are feeling better. The long-noses brought you here from the place of your beetle friends. They said you would live, but I didn’t think so. It has been a long time. Do you want to eat?”

“Yes — no,” Dulla corrected himself. “I do, but not at this moment. I want the w.c. first.”

“Shall I help you?”

“No. I can do it myself.”

“I am glad of that, too,” said Feng, who had been functioning as bedpan orderly for all the days of Ahmed Dulla’s recovery and longer before that than he cared to remember. The Pakistani raised himself painfully from the inflatable cot and moved slowly toward the slit-trench latrine.

He gazed disapprovingly around the camp. One of the noises he had been hearing identified itself for him: a slapping, rasping sound that turned out to be the waterwheel. So at least there should be power. But where were the promised floodlights, the growing crops, the comforts? Where were all the people?

Feng had followed him and stood gazing mournfully as Dulla relieved himself. “Why do you stand there?” snapped Dulla, tying up his pajama cord and making hard work of it. “What has happened? Why has so little been done?”

The leader spread his hands. “What can I say? There were ten of us. Two died with you in this venture you found so necessary. One other died here. Two were so ill they had to be returned to Earth — by courtesy of the Greasies. We had no one well enough to fly the return capsule. The Italian is asleep, and the two women are gathering fuel.”

“Gathering fuel! Are we become peasants again, Feng?”

The leader sighed. “I have done my best,” he said. It was a sentence he had been saying over and over to himself for a long time. “Help is coming. Heir-of-Mao himself has ordered it. Two great ships, material and persons, soon—”

“Soon! And until then, what? Do we do nothing?”

“Go back to bed,” said Feng wearily. “You exhaust me, Dulla. Eat if you will. There is food. The Fats gave it to us; otherwise there would be none.”

“And now we are beggars,” sneered Dulla. He swayed and caught hold of Feng’s shoulder. “For this I studied and came all these light-years! For this I almost died! How foolish we will all look when we return in disgrace to Earth!”

Feng shook his head heavily. He disengaged the Pakistani’s hand from his shoulder and stepped downwind — the man was odorously unwashed. He did not need to hear any of this. He knew it for himself. He had accepted the charity of the Fats for the food without which they all would have starved; of the Greasies for the rescue of Dulla and for the return to Earth of the sick members of the expedition — who would no doubt even now be telling their debriefers how badly Feng Hua-tse had managed the expedition with which he had been entrusted. There would be large-character posters going up in K’ushui about that even now. They would be very critical of him. When they got back to Earth — if they got back — the best hope he had was to become a barefoot biochemist along the Yellow River again.

Of course, if somehow they mercifully spared him until the two great ships arrived -

Ah, then! He had pored over the tactran messages and pictures yearningly. The second ship would bring not ten, not fifteen, but a majestic thirty-four new persons. An agronomist! Someone to take up Feng’s own pitiful beginnings, the mushrooms he had sown, the wheat seedlings he had coaxed to sprout — the fittest of them would survive, and the fittest of their descendants would flourish. There were two more translators, both split-brained, one of them a skilled littoral pisciculturist as well. The Great Water might yet yield food they could eat. A doctor — no, Feng corrected himself, a fully schooled surgeon with a world reputation in the treatment of traumatic injuries. True, he was nearly two meters tall and black as a boy-child’s hair, by his photograph. But still. Three of the new additions had had limnology crash courses, and one of them, who had once been an officer in the Red Guards, had also had three years of experience as a scout in the Gobi, and later in the Himalayas.

And the worldly goods the other ship would carry! Photovoltaic generators, capable of pouring out 230-volt a.c. in really significant quantities. Plastic to spare. Pioneering tools — axes and machetes, and a few rifles for the collection of specimens as well as for “game.” Folbots. Magnesium-frame bicycles. A doubly redundant computer with no fewer than six remote-access terminals. Radio equipment. Laser equipment. Food. More food; food enough for all of them for many months…

It seemed a dream!

But what was not a dream was that very surely, Feng knew, among those thirty-four persons would be one who would come over to him and quietly say, “Feng Hua-tse? I am directed by Heir-of-Mao to receive your report on why your custodianship of this project has not lived up to expectations.” And then would come the sweating time. There would be no excuses accepted. He would not be interested in the mushrooms that were refusing to grow or the specimens that Feng himself had painfully kept alive. He would only be interested in why three had died and two had been sent home and ten had accomplished so very little.

All this was in Feng Hua-tse’s mind, but all he said was, “Go back to sleep, Dulla. I am out of patience with you.”

Dulla did not go back to sleep. Anger had given him strength. What he did was wake up the Italian.

“Oh, you are alive again?” Spadetti yawned and rubbed the blue-black stubble on his chin. “We thought you were going to die,” he said cheerfully. “I almost bet a day’s ration on it. I would have been very angry to lose.”

“I have been talking to Feng, that bungler!”

“It is not all Uazzi’s fault, Dulla. We were the first. We made the mistakes that must be made so others can learn.”

“I did not want to be teacher to the Fats and the Greasies! I did not want them here at all. This can be our planet, to shape as we will!”

“Yes,” admitted Spadetti, “I had some such thought myself. But, chi sa, what can you do? Each step seemed right at the time. Even yours, to make friends with the natives—”

“Those beasts! One cannot make friends with them.”

“Oh, not true, Dulla. Our rivals have succeeded. The Fats have balloonists carrying their cameras all over the planet, or so they promise on the tactran. The Greasies are teaching their moles and earthworms how to burrow under our camp and listen to what we say. Perhaps they are listening now.”

“Nonsense! How stupid you are!”

“Stupid, perhaps, but no, it is not entirely nonsense,” smiled the Italian, unoffended. “Perhaps I have made it a little bit of a joke, but I am not sure that I am joking. And what have we accomplished? I will be more exact, Dulla. What did you yourself accomplish, except to get two people killed, when you visited our frutti-del-mare friends? We failed. It is as simple as that.” He yawned and scratched. “Now, Dulla, per favore, let me wake up by myself a little? I am not so happy with this reality around me that I want to leave my dreams so rudely.”

“Drink your wine and dream then,” said Dulla coldly.

“Oh, Dulla! But that is not a bad idea. If one only had a true wine instead of this filth.”

“Pig,” said Dulla, but softly enough that Spadetti did not have to admit he had heard it. He returned to his cot and sat heavily on the edge of it, ignoring Spadetti’s soft-voiced imprecations as he tasted the jungle juice he had made for himself. Perhaps it would kill him. Why not? The smell of it kept Dulla from wanting to eat, though he knew he should; he judged he had lost ten kilos at least since landing on Son of Kung, and he could not spare very many more. He sat breathing heavily, sucking through a straw at a flask of flat, tepid water from the still. By and by he noticed that there was a plastic pouch under his bed. He upended it and covered the cot with a drift of tiny white fiche prints.

“I see you have found your love letters,” called the Italian from across the tent. “Unfortunately, I cannot read your language. But she is quite a pretty girl.”

Dulla ignored him. He gathered them up and carried them to the radio shack, where the only working viewer was. Spadetti had been right; they were almost all from the Bulgarian girl, and they all said much the same thing. She missed him. She thought of him. She consoled her lonely sorrow with the memory of their days together in Sofia.

But in the photographs there was Ana in Paris, Ana in London, Ana in Cairo, Ana in New York. She seemed to be having an interesting time without him.

Rich countries! At bottom, were they not all the same, whether the wealth was in fuel or in food? Wealth was wealth! A greater distance separated him from the fat Bulgarians than from — from even the Krinpit, he thought, and then realized almost at once that he was being unjust. Nan was not like that. But then, she had had the advantage of spending much of her childhood in Hyderabad.

Away from the smell of the Italian’s imitation wine, Dulla realized he was hungry. He found some cracked corn and ate it while he went through Ana’s letters quickly, and then, more slowly, the synoptics from Earth. Much had happened while he was out of it. The Fats had been reinforced from Earth — it was called a UN peacekeeping team, but that deceived only the most naive. The Greasies had established a satellite astronomical observatory and were monitoring changes in the radiation of Kung. There were problems with the satellite, and the results were unclear. Even so, Dulla studied the reports with fascination and envy. That should have been his own project! It was what he had trained for, all those graduate years. What a waste this expedition was! He glanced distastefully at the gaping rents in the tent, at the instruments that were scattered out to rust because there was no one to use them. So much to be done. So much that he could not think where to begin and so could do nothing.

There was a racket outside which made Dulla glance up, frowning — Feng and the Italian quarreling about something, and behind them the distant squawking of a herd of balloonists. If Heir-of-Mao had been a little more openhanded, and if Feng had been a bit less of a fool… then they might have had a helicopter, like the Greasies, or the wit to make balloons, like the Fats, and he too might have had the chance to fly with the flocks. That chance was lost. Even the Krinpit, whom he himself, Ahmed Dulla, had resolved to make contact with, were as strange to him as ever. It was not fair! He had taken the risk. He remembered well how he had felt as he lay helpless among the curious, jostling masses of crablike creatures. If they hadn’t tried to eat the other two first, he knew he would have wound up as a meal. And for nothing. The one Krinpit they had a chance to communicate with, to keep for a specimen, Feng had allowed to be stolen by the Greasies.

There were sudden new sounds from outside, hissing white sounds that made Dulla get up and peer out of the tent. He saw flames reaching toward the sky and Feng struggling with the Italian while one of the Jamaican women swore angrily at them both.

“What is happening here?” Dulla demanded.

The Italian pushed Feng away and turned toward Dulla, his expression repentant. “Uazzi wished to greet our friends,” he said, peering aloft. The rockets had climbed up into the maroon murk and exploded, and there were smaller explosions all around them. Balloonists had caught fire from the shower of sparks. “I helped him aim, but perhaps — perhaps my aim was not good,” he said.

“Foolish one!” cried Dulla, almost dancing with rage, “Do you see what you have done?”

“I have burned up a few gasbags. Why not?” grumbled Spadetti.

“Not just gasbags! Rub the wine out of your eyes and look again. There! Is that a gasbag? Do you not see it is a human being hanging there, wondering why we have tried to kill him, anxious to return to his base with the Fats or the Greasies and report that the People’s Republics have declared war? Another blunder! And one we may not survive.”

“Peace, Dulla,” panted Feng. “It does not matter if the Fats and the Greasies are angry at us now. Help is on the way.”

“You are as big a fool as he! Shooting off fireworks like some farm brigade celebrating the overfulfillment of its cabbage quota!”

“I wish,” said Feng, “that you had not been rescued, Dulla. There was less struggle here when you were with the Krinpit.”

“And I wish,” said Dulla, “that the Krinpit who tried to kill me was our leader here instead of you. He was less ugly, and less of a fool.”

That Krinpit was many kilometers away, and at that moment almost as angry as Dulla. He had been driven to the brink of insanity with the infuriating attempts of the Poison Ghosts of the Fuel camp to converse with him, with hunger, and above all with the continual blinding uproar of the camp.

In the noisy, bright world of the Krinpit there was never a time of silence. But the level of sound was always manageable: sixty or seventy decibels most of the time, except for the occasional thunderclap of a storm. It almost never reached over seventy-five.

To Sharn-igon, the Fuel camp was torture. Sometimes it was quiet and dim, sometimes blindingly loud. The Krinpit had no internal-combustion engines to punish their auditory nerves. The Greasies had dozens of them. Sharn-igon had no conception of how they worked or what they were for, but he could recognize each of them when it was operating: high clatter of the drilling machine, rubbery roar of the helicopter, rattle and whine of the power saws, steady chug of the water pump. He had arrived at the camp almost blind, for the near- ness of the helicopter’s turbojet had affected his hearing just as staring at the uncaged sun would damage a human’s eyes; the afterimage lasted for days and was still maddeningly distorting to his perceptions. He had been penned behind steel bars as soon as he arrived. However hard he gnawed and sawed, the bars of the cage would not give. As soon as he made a little scratch in one it was replaced. The Poison Ghosts troubled him endlessly, echoing his name and his sounds in a weirdly frightening way. Sharn-igon knew nothing of tape recording, and to hear his own sounds played back to him was as shattering an experience as it would be for a human to see his own form suddenly appear before him. He had realized that the Poison Ghosts wanted to communicate with him and had understood a tiny portion of what they were trying to say. But he seldom replied. He had nothing to say to them.

And he was nearly starving. He survived, barely, on the little he would eat of what they put before him — mostly vegetation, of which he disdained the majority as a human being would spurn thistle and grass. His hunger was maddeningly stimulated because he could smell the tasty nearness of Ghosts Below penned near him, and even a Ghost Above now and then. But the Poison Ghosts never brought him any of these to eat. And always there was the blinding roar of noise, or the equally unpleasant silences when the camp slept and only the faint echo from tents and soft bodies kept him company. Human beings, scantily fed on bread and water in an isolation cell, with bright lights denying them sleep, go mad. Sharn-igon was not far from it.

But he clung to sanity, because he had a goal. The Poison Ghosts had killed Cheee-pruitt.

He had not learned to tell one from another in time to know which was the culprit, but that was a problem easily solved. They were all guilty. Even in his madness it was clear to him that it was proper for him to kill a great many of them to redress their guilt, but what had not become clear to him was how. The chitin of claw and shell-sword were rubbed flat and sore against the bars, and still the bars held.

When all the sounds were out he chatted with the Ghost Above, straining longingly against the bars. “Desire to eat you,” he said. If it had not been for the bars, the Ghost Above would have been easy prey. It had lost most of its gas and was crawling about the floor of a cage like his own. Its song was no more than a pathetic whisper.

“You cannot reach me,” it pointed out, “unless you molt. And then I would eat you.” Each spoke in its own language, but over thousands of generations all the races of Klong knew a little of the language of the others. With the Ghosts Above you could not help being exposed to their constant singing, and even the Ghosts Below could be heard chattering and whistling in their tunnels. “I have eaten several of you hard-shells,” the Ghost Above wheezed faintly. “I particularly like the backlings and the first molt.”

The creature was boasting, but Sharn-igon could believe the story easily enough. The balloonists fed mostly on airborne detritus, but to make their young healthy they needed more potent protein sources now and then. When the breeding time was on, the females would drop like locusts to scour the ground clean of everything they could find. Adult Krinpit in shell were too dangerous, but in molt they were fair game. Best of all was a clutch of Ghosts Below caught on their thieving raids to the surface — for Krinpit as well as balloonist. The thought made Sharn-igon’s salivary glands flow.

“Hard-shell,” whispered the Ghost Above, “I am dying, I think. You can eat me then if you like.”

In all honesty, Sharn-igon was forced to admit, “You may be eating me before that.” But then he perceived that something was strange. The Ghost Above was no longer in its cage. It was dragging slowly across the floor. “How escape?” he demanded.

“Perhaps because I am so close to death,” sang the Ghost Above faintly. “The Killing Ones made a hole in my sac to let the life out of me and then closed it with a thing that stuck and clung and stung. But it has come loose, and almost all my life has spilled away, and so I was able to slide between the bars.”

“Wish I could slide through bars!”

“Why do you not open the cage? You have hard things. The Killing Ones push a hard thing into a place in the cage when they want to, and it opens.”

“What hard thing are you speaking of? I have worn my shell to pulp.”

“No,” sighed the balloonist. “Not like your shell. Wait, there is one by the door. I will show you.”

Sharn-igon’s conception of keys and locks was quite unlike a human’s, but the Krinpit too had ways of securing one thing to another temporarily. He chattered and scratched in feverish impatience while the dying gasbag slowly dragged itself toward him, with something bright and hard in its shadowy mouth.

“Could push hard thing into place in my cage?” he wheedled.

The Ghost Above sang softly to itself for a moment. Then it pointed out, “You will eat me.”

“Yes. Will. But you very close to dying anyway,” Sharn-igon pointed out, and added shrewdly, “Sing very badly now.”

The balloonist hissed sadly without forming words. It was true.

“If push thing in place in my cage so that I can go free,” bargained Sharn-igon, “will kill some of the Poison Ghosts for you.” He added honestly, “Intend to do that in any case, since they killed my he-wife.”

“How many?” whispered the balloonist doubtfully.

“As many as I can,” said Sharn-igon. “At least one. No, two. Two for you, and as many as I can for me.”

“Three for me. The three who come to this place and cause me pain.”

“All right, yes, three,” cried Sharn-igon. “Anything you like! But do quickly, before Poison Ghosts come back!”

Hours later, at almost the last of his strength, Sharn-igon staggered into a Krinpit village. It was not his own. He had seen the sounds of it on the horizon for a long time, but he was so weak and filled with pain that it had taken him longer to crawl the distance than the tiniest backling. “Sharn-igon, Sharn-igon, Sharn-igon,” he called as he approached the alien Krinpit. “Am not of your place. Sharn-igon, Sharn-igon!”

A gravid female scuttled past him. She moved slowly because she was near her time, but she ignored his presence.

That did not surprise Sharn-igon. It was what he had expected. Indeed, each lurching step into the alien village was harder for him than the one before, and he was a professional empathizer. “Sharn-igon,” he called bravely. “I would speak to one among you, although I am not of this place.”

There was no answer, of course. It would not be easy to make contact. Each village was culturally as well as geographically isolated from every other. They did not fight. But they did not interact. If a party of Krinpit from one village chanced upon an individual or a party from another, they depersonalized each other. One Krinpit might push another from a different village out of the way. Two alien Krinpit might each take an end of a many-tree trunk that was barring their mutual way. Both would lift. Neither would address the other.

Genetically the villages were not isolated. The seedlings dropped from their he-father’s backs when they were ripe to do so, wherever they might be. If they chanced to be near an alien village when they did — and if they were lucky enough to make their way to it without becoming food for a Ghost Below or any other marauder — they were accepted there as readily as any autochthon. But adults never did such a thing.

On the other hand, an adult had never found himself in Sharn-igon’s position — until now.

“Sharn-igon, Sharn-igon,” he called over and over, and at last a he-mother crept toward him. It did not speak directly to him, but it did not retreat, either. As it moved, it softly made the sound of its name: Tsharr-p’fleng.

“Have had good Ring-Greeting, alien brother?” Sharn-igon asked politely.

No answer, except that the sound of the stranger’s name grew a trifle louder and more assured.

“Am not of this place,” Sharn-igon acknowledged. “Most unpleasant for me to be here. Am aware is unpleasant also for you. However, must speak with you.”

Agitatedly the other Krinpit scratched and thumped its name for a moment and then managed to speak. “Why you here, Sharn-igon?”

He collapsed on the knees of his forelegs. “Must have food,” he said. The balloonist had been so very thin and frail that he made only half a meal, and of course Sharn-igon had been careful not to eat any part of the Poison Ghosts. He was not sure he had succeeded in killing all three, but two at least were certain, and the other would be a long time recovering. That settled the score for the balloonist.

But not for Cheee-pruitt.

If Sharn-igon had not been a professional empathist he could not have broken through the barriers between villages. As it was, it took much time and all of his persuasion; but at the end of it Tsharr-p’fleng helped him to a dwelling pen and ministered to his needs.

Sharn-igon devoured the crabrat they brought him while Tsharr-p’fleng engaged in agitated conversation with others of the village just outside the wall. Then they came in and ranged themselves around Sharn-igon, listening to him eat. He ignored their polite scratches of curiosity and concern until every morsel was gone. Then he pushed away the splintered carapace and spoke.

“Poison Ghosts killed my he-wife and did not eat him.”

A flickering sound of disgust.

“They captured me and held me in a place without doors. They removed my backlings and took them away. I do not think they were eaten, but I have not heard them since.”

Brighter sounds — disgust mixed with sympathy and anger.

“Moreover, they have also captured Ghosts Above and Ghosts Below and many of the lesser living things, and have eaten none of them. I therefore killed three of the Poison Ghosts. Intend to kill more. Are you back-mates with the Poison Ghosts?”

The he-mother rustled and spoke with contempt. “Not those! Their back-mates are the Ghosts Below.”

Another said, “But Poison Ghosts have ways of killing. They have spoken to us in our language and told us to beware of them, lest they kill us.”

“Beware of what? What did they tell you to do?”

“Only to refrain from harming any of them, for then they will kill all in our village.”

Sharn-igon said, “The Poison Ghosts do not speak truth. Listen! They say they come from another world, like stars in sky. What are these stars?”

“They say they are like heat from sky,” muttered the other.

“Have felt heat from sky. Have felt no heat from these other stars. I hear nothing from them. No matter how loud I shout, hear no echo from any of them.”

“We have said these things ourselves,” said Tsharr-p’fleng slowly. “But we are afraid of the Poison Ghosts. They will kill us, without eating.”

“They will; it is true,” said Sharn-igon. He paused. Then he went on. “Unless we kill them first. Unless all of our villages together fall upon them and kill them, without eating.”