Monument (novel)

22

The village was deathly quiet. Pausing in the street outside the improvised hospital, Talitha Warr tried to remember the last time she’d heard singing there. Once the natives had accompanied every mood with an appropriate song, from the tender love melodies of the youths to the stirring chants that were used with heavy work and the burying of koluf; but now so many natives were weak from hunger that the heavy work went undone, and the few koluf that were caught were buried in tragic silence.

There were no more songs—only lamentations for the dead, and she heard one beginning now. Shivering, she walked despondently down to the beach, where Aric Hort was to meet her. He was sitting alone on the vast stretch of sand. There were no more native children well enough to play there.

She said, “Did you hear?”

He nodded. “The natives gave your uncle everything he asked for.”

They set out along the beach for the medical center, and for a time they walked silently, keeping their eyes on the unmarked, wind-rippled sand. “It was their last chance for help from the courts,” Hort said finally. “Fornri doesn’t even seem worried. He says it’s part of the Plan.”

“I have an appointment with Uncle tomorrow,” she said. “I’m going to try again to persuade him to hire an experienced nutritionist. We’ve got to find something they can eat. If only they would trust us—”

“But they won’t,” Hort said. “If one thing is more responsible than any other for the mess they’re in, that’s it. They need help desperately, and they won’t trust anyone. Turn your head slowly and look at that bush on the ridge.”

She did as he told her and saw two native children peering at them from behind the bush. “It’s only a couple of children,” she said.

“Any time you can see two, there are ten others you can’t see. Weak as they are, they follow every alien on Langri who takes a step away from the construction sites. They watch his every move and carry regular reports to a secret native headquarters. They’ve been doing that from the moment your uncle set up an embassy, and they’re still doing it, malnutrition or not. One would think that by this time they’d trust you and me, but they don’t. We’re followed everywhere we go. Didn’t you know?”

She shook her head. “I’m not surprised, though. Certainly they have every right—”

He gripped her arm. The two of them stopped and stood facing each other. “Would you join me in an experiment?” he asked. “There’s something I’ve wanted to investigate for weeks, but I know the natives would stop me if they caught me at it. There’s only one way I can think of to shake off those children.”

She resisted the temptation to look again at the bush. “What sort of an experiment?”

“Come on. I’ll show you.”

They turned back, left the beach, and crossed the seaside meadow to a forest path. After some distance the path forked; one branch sloped upward steeply, and when they turned into it they saw, far ahead of them, a young native couple walking along slowly in close embrace.

“Where are we?” Talitha asked.

Hort gestured toward the top of the slope. “This is a Bower Hill.”

“Bower Hill?” she echoed. “I never heard of such a thing.” She glanced about her. “I’ve never been this way before.”

“I should hope not!” Hort said with a grin.

“Now what do you mean by that?”

He shook his head and took a surreptitious backward glance. “We brought the whole flock with us,” he said disgustedly.

“Was that the experiment? Did you think they wouldn’t come here?”

“I hoped they wouldn’t, but they probably want to make certain where we’re going.”

“So where are we going?” she asked.

“To the Bower Hill.”

As they approached the crest she saw why the word “bower” was used—along each side of the path were openings into small forest glades. In one of them she saw the young couple they had. followed up the path lying in close embrace. She averted her eyes and then turned a puzzled gaze on Hort; he was looking behind them again, and they walked on for some distance. Then, before she quite knew what was happening, he had drawn her into a bower on the opposite side of the path.

She struggled furiously as he tried to embrace her. “So this is your idea of an experiment!” she snapped. She beat futilely against his face with her fists.

“Hush!” he whispered. “It’s the only way to get rid of the escort!”

She continued to struggle. “With you, a girl needs an escort!”

“Hush! If it isn’t a good act, they won’t leave!”

Then his lips found hers, and she stopped struggling.

A moment later, an hour, an eternity, she lay in his arms on the soft, springy blanket of pliable fronds, and she opened her eyes bewilderedly when he suddenly released her and raised himself up.

“I think they’re gone,” he whispered.

“Good for them,” she said, and pulled him back.

His beard caressed her face and his lips sealed her eyes, and she heard his whispered words with a wild surge of joy. “If we had only ourselves to think of—they call this world paradise, but it wasn’t, not until you came. But the natives—”

Her joy took flight, and reluctantly she pushed herself into a sitting position. “The natives are starving. What was it you wanted to find out?”

He got to his feet and helped her up. “There’s a path they keep concealed. I’d like to find out where it leads.” He went to the bower opening and cautiously looked down the path. Then he returned to her. “They’re gone. It was a magnificent act.”

She went willingly to his arms, and when they finally drew apart she said, “You’re rather convincing yourself, but was it necessary to climb up here for our acting?”

He smiled at her. “You really don’t know where you are?”

She shook her head.

“It’s a Bower Hill. There’s one for every two or three villages, and they’re the places where the young people do their courting. They’re the only locations on Langri where there’s a right to privacy. Come on—they’ll be waiting for us at the bottom of the hill, so we’ll have to sneak out the back way.”

A narrow path, only slightly worn, took them down the hill in another direction. After watching for a time to make certain they were unobserved, they sprinted across a meadow to the forest and cautiously skirted it until they came upon one of the main paths. They followed it in single file with Hort leading the way. So well camouflaged was the intersecting path that he missed it completely and had to fumble in the tall undergrowth searching for it, but finally he found the place. The opening was cunningly laced together with vines, and they parted it only enough to squeeze through.

They found themselves on a broad avenue—not only was this path wider than any other forest path Talitha could remember, but the undergrowth had been trimmed back from it. It had the appearance of a tidy roadway, and to aggravate the mystery, the path ran absolutely straight. Other forest paths meandered— around trees, away from thickets and bogs, along watercourses— but this one ran as straight as a survey. It turned aside for nothing, and no trace remained of the trees that must have been felled to make its course possible.

They had to get back to the Bower Hill before the children suspected their ruse, so they walked quickly. The wide path provided some consolation: they could walk side by side, and his arm encircled her warmly.

“Did you ever see a forest path that ran so straight?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Nor one so wide.”

“What could be back here in the forest that attracts so much traffic?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

The only obstacle they encountered was a small stream. They waded across, and far up ahead of them the path seemed to end in a blaze of sunlight. A large forest clearing opened before them. It was roughly circular and carpeted with thick grass and flowers. They paused for a moment to look about, and then almost simultaneously they saw it: the rusting, overgrown, smashed hulk of an old survey ship. The forest growth of decades so obliterated its outline that had it not been for the open hatch and the rusting ramp they would have overlooked it.

They ran toward it, and Hort stopped at the foot of the ramp and whistled softly. “Someone came down rather hard. It happened a long, long time ago, but it probably explains a lot of things.”

Together they climbed the wobbly ramp and entered the ship. They felt their way cautiously along the dim corridor to the control room, where cracks in the hull permitted the jagged entry of light. There, on the chart table, atop the brittle remains of the charts, was an amazing clutter of objects: the ship’s log, a few books, a rusted pocket knife, a broken compass, a rosary.

In the center of the table was a heap of fresh flowers.

“It’s a shrine!” Talitha exclaimed.

Hort picked up the logbook. “The ship’s log. This may answer questions I’ve been asking myself ever since I arrived here. Let’s take it outside and have a look.”

They sat side by side at the top of the ramp and held the log between them. “It’s an old-fashioned script,” Hort said, leafing through the pages. “Can you make it out?”

“Just barely.”

“After the ship crashed, it seems to have been used as a diary, and also—” He stared at it. “Also I don’t know what. Let’s start at the beginning and see what we can make of it.”

So they read together, page after page after page.

His name was Cerne Obrien. He was a little freebooter who had somehow managed to buy or steal a junked government survey ship, and he went batting about the galaxy raising hell and generally having himself a grand puff of a good time. He also did a bit of illegal prospecting when he felt like it, which didn’t seem to be often. When the miracle occurred, and he did strike it rich, he actually seemed to resent the fact. He crashed on his way back to civilization, but he remained the freebooter, now lording it among unsophisticated natives. He explored, he prospected for metals, and he added an outrigger to the hunting boats to give them stability in the furious struggles with the koluf.

Cerne Obrien, the wanderer, finally remained in one place because he was unable to leave. He acquired a native wife, rose high in native councils, and became a leader. And down through the years, as they leafed the pages, a subtle change became more and more pronounced. Obrien increasingly identified with the natives, became one of them, and began to worry about their future. He penned in the logbook an astute summary of Langri’s potential as a resort planet that might have been written by Wembling, followed by a warning as to the probable fate of the natives. He added, “If I live, this won’t happen. If I don’t live, there must be a Plan for them to follow.”

“Tal!” Hort exclaimed. “It isn’t possible! One man couldn’t have done all that. He taught the natives government and law and economics and history and science and language and political science and colonial procedure and an entire university curriculum. He even taught military subjects. How could one man—obviously an uneducated man—how could he do it?”

“He did more than that,” Talitha said. “He taught them their Plan.”

The initial landing, probably by survey ship (government or private). Steps to observe in capturing the crew. Subsequent landings by ships searching for the first ship. How to approach the Space Navy ship. Negotiations, lists of violations and penalties. Achievement of independent status. Steps to follow when independent status is violated. Steps to follow in preparing for Federation membership.

Every detail was there. Everything the natives had done since Wembling’s ship touched down was laid out in the form of meticulous instructions for them to follow: the exploding gourds that terrified the Space Navy, the sly tricks and dodges used to interrupt Wembling’s work, the directions for their attorney…

Everything. They found themselves gazing awesomely at the natives’ cryptic Plan in all of its breathtaking completeness, right up to its final master stroke, laboriously written out by an uneducated man who had vision and wisdom and patience. By a great man. It was a brilliant prognostication, with nothing lacking except her uncle’s name, and Talitha had the impression that Cerne Obrien had known more than a few H. Harlow Wemblings in his day.

“Not just one man!” Hort exclaimed again. “He couldn’t!”

But he had.

Talitha cast an anxious glance at the lengthening shadows in the clearing. “It’s getting late. How long a courtship will they believe from a couple of beginners?”

“I never thought to ask the rules. Well—” Hort closed the book reverently and got to his feet. “Cerne Obrien, we salute you. Someday we want to come back here and read this carefully. Eventually Langri will have its own historians, and they’ll venerate it.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Talitha said. “They’ll send the name of Cerne Obrien across the galaxy in dryly written tomes read only by other historians. The man deserves a better fate.”

Hort returned the logbook to the chart table, and the two of them scrambled down the ramp. At the bottom they turned, looked at each other, and then solemnly genuflected. “I wrote down his name and the ship’s registration number,” Hort said. “Someone, somewhere, may want to know what happened to him.”

They left the clearing behind them and hurried along the wide path—the memorial path—that led to the shrine of Cerne Obrien.

“Perhaps verbal tradition will keep his memory a living thing far into the future,” Hort said thoughtfully. “Perhaps even now, when no aliens are present, the children gather around a fire and listen to old tales of what the mighty Obrien did and said. But I agree. He deserves a far better fate. Maybe someday we can speak to Fornri about it.”

At the concealed entrance to the path, Talitha halted Hort and faced him. “Aric—now that we know what the Plan is, maybe we could help.”

Hort shook his head. “Absolutely not. Obrien ordered the natives not to tell anyone, not even their attorney, and he was right. In some ways it cost them, like not knowing the literacy requirements, but it also could be the reason the Plan has succeeded. If your uncle so much as suspected a crafty master plan behind the natives’ irrational actions, he’d figure out what it is.”

“Then the best way we can help is to know nothing at all and do nothing.”

“Right,” Hort said. “Let’s not tamper with a work of genius and give the natives a handicap of unnecessary assistance.”

“All right,” she said. “I know nothing. I’ll see Uncle tomorrow and beg for a nutritionist. More dratted acting.”

“I want you to know,” Hort said. “I wasn’t acting.” They embraced hastily, and then they hurried toward the Bower Hill.

Her uncle had forgotten the appointment. She cornered him in a plush conference room in the finished wing of the resort, and they had a brief conversation before his meeting started. Hirus Ayns was there, along with the entire staff of bright young people Wembling had recruited to build his resorts and run them. They sat around the circular table and talked and joked in low tones, with occasional outbursts of boisterous laughter, while Talitha tried to talk with her uncle.

“Tal,” he said firmly, “I wouldn’t even consider it.”

“You can’t be so calloused as to exterminate the entire population!”

“Tal, business is business. I gave the natives every chance, and they wouldn’t cooperate. They can have their ten per cent of the profits, I’ll stand by that, but only after my investment is amortized.”

Talitha faced him defiantly, hoping that she looked sufficiently pale and earnest. She said, “Surely—”

“Tal, I have a meeting here. If you want to stay, I’ll talk with you afterward.”

He got to his feet. “All right. All of you have read the verdict. The court allowed every claim we made. Some were so flimsy that I blushed to submit them, but the natives’ attorney was too stupid to object. So that’s settled.”

He pushed the subject aside with a gesture. “Now that we’re safe from further harassment, we can give some attention to long-range planning. We’re already recruiting and training the personnel we’ll need for this resort, and we’ll be ready to open the moment construction is completed. Today’s meeting was called to discuss our second resort—what sort of a resort we want and where we should put it. Hirus?”

Wembling sat down, and Hirus Ayns got to his feet. “If I may interpose a remark, I think the natives will give in eventually and work for us.”

Wembling shrugged, bit a smoke capsule, blew a smoke ring. “Perhaps. Except for the fact that we’d be able to pay them a twentieth of what imported labor will cost, I couldn’t care less. Put it this way: we made them a fair offer and got snubbed. If they change their minds they’ll have to come to us. Go ahead, Hirus.”

“I call your attention to Site Nine,” Ayns said. “By a most fortuitous coincidence, when we laid out this golf course we included a mountain smack in the middle of it.”

Laughter erupted around the table. Ayns waited, grinning, until it subsided. “A mountain resort would nicely complement this seaside resort, with the added advantage that a brisk walk or a brief ride down the mountain or inside the mountain will take our guests to the seashore. It’s a lovely site. Now then.”

He took some drawings from the portfolio that lay on the table in front of him. “We have sketches from three architects for a resort building on this site. Number one: a circular building constructed completely around the mountain.” He held up the sketch and then passed it to the young man on his right. “The architect has placed a pavilion on the mountaintop for dining and refreshments or just for the view. There’d be VM shafts inside the mountain for those who wanted the view without the climb. And, of course, shafts leading down to the beaches.”

He turned with a frown and directed a question at the doorway. “Yes? What is it?”

Wembling’s young secretary had dropped the door open, and he was waiting apologetically. He said to Wembling, “Sir—excuse me, sir—Fornri is here.”

“I haven’t time to talk with him now,” Wembling said. “Tell him to come back later.”

“Is that wise, Harlow?” Ayns asked. “After all, he is the President of Langri.”

“That doesn’t give him the privilege of interrupting me whenever he feels like it,” Wembling said.

“It isn’t a matter of privilege,” Ayns said. “It’s a question of courtesy.”

Wembling turned to his secretary. “Did he say what he. wanted?”

“No, sir.”

“Maybe he’s changed his mind about those land parcels,” a young woman suggested.

“Tell him he can’t have ’em back, and let’s get on with this,” another called.

Wembling said to Ayns, “I think you’re right, Hirus. It’s a question of courtesy. I’ll see him and make an appointment to talk with him later.” He turned to the secretary. “Send him in.”

All eyes were on the door when Fornri appeared. They were curious, Talitha thought, to see how he was taking his defeat. He entered smiling and came to a stop just inside the door.

“I’m extremely busy now, Fornri,” Wembling said. “Could we make an appointment for this afternoon?”

“That won’t be necessary, sir,” Fornri told him. “I only came to deliver your tax bill.”

Amidst the circle of blank faces, only Wembling managed a smile. “Tax bill? It only goes to show you—even in paradise!” His bright young assistants laughed, and Wembling went on, “All right, Fornri, but it isn’t necessary to deliver things like this to me personally. You can leave them with my secretary.”

“I thought perhaps you might have questions about it,” Fornri said.

He circled the table, giving Talitha a friendly nod, and handed the packet to Wembling. Wembling nodded his thanks and dropped it onto the table. Then, as he dismissed Fornri with a gesture, he glanced down at the summation.

He snatched it up, looked at it again, and leaped to his feet in rage. “Tax bill? That’s fraud! Extortion! Robbery! No court will permit such a thing!”

The assistant sitting next to him took the packet, stared at the summation, and leaped to his feet, and it passed around the table with the staff members in turn registering rage, astonishment, or indignation. While this happened, Wembling remained on his feet, orating.

“Just because you call yourself a government doesn’t mean you can come in here—go ahead, take a look at that. Just because you call yourself a government doesn’t mean you can come in here and confiscate—that’s what it amounts to, confiscatory taxation, why, that’s been outlawed for centuries! Here’s an entire world with only one taxpayer, Wembling and Company, and if you think for one moment you can come in here—did you ever see the likes of a tax bill like that? We’ll sue and demand damages, that’s what we’ll do!”

Fornri listened politely, and Talitha, occasionally stealing glances at him, thought his splendidly blank expression nothing less than a work of art. She fought to suppress her laughter while her uncle’s voice raged on.

“We’ll sue and demand damages. Confiscatory taxation, that’s the only way to describe it. Confiscatory and punitive taxation, and if you think for one moment Wembling and Company is going to play the sucker and let you get away with an illegal tax grab-”