Monument (novel)

7

Her next impression of Langri was of the peering eyes of children. Whenever she left the embassy there were native children watching her. They stared at her from behind bushes, they trailed after her, they anticipated her movements and were there ahead of her wherever she went. The only sounds they uttered were suppressed giggles.

On the morning following her arrival she lay drowsily on the beach, acquiring a first installment of sun tan, and already she was so accustomed to children slyly circling around her that when Aric Hort approached she did not even open her eyes until he spoke.

He told her good morning, and she answered politely and closed her eyes again.

He sat down beside her. “Do you like Langri any better than you did yesterday?”

“Worlds usually don’t change much overnight,” she murmured.

She was silent for a time, and when she looked up at him she found him grinning at her. She said testily, “The ocean is the nicest blue-green I’ve ever seen, except for the sky, and the forest colors are magnificent, and the flowers are wonderfully fragrant and lovely until you pick them, and if you take away this world’s blatant prettiness what have you got?”

“At least you’re enjoying the beach,” Hort observed.

She picked up a handful of sand and flung it aside. “I tried to go swimming, but there are things out there I don’t care to share an ocean with.”

“They feel the same way about you. If you know how to swim, the ocean is the safest place on Langri.”

She pushed herself into a sitting position. “Tell me,” she said seriously. “Just what is Uncle doing here?”

“Yesterday he was laying out a drainage system for a native village. I don’t know what he’s doing today. Let’s find him and see.”

He helped her to her feet, and they walked off along the beach. She looked back once and saw a group of children scurrying to keep up with them.

“I wanted to ask you something,” Hort said. “Yesterday your uncle said you’d been in medical school.”

“I had one year of medical school, and it was ten per cent physiology and ninety per cent electronics, and I’d rather not think about it. You’ll have to take your aches somewhere else.”

He grinned at her. “No, no—I’m not after free medical advice. I’m worried about the natives. They’re a healthy people, which is fortunate—they have no medical science at all. When one of them is sick or injured, he’s in deep trouble.”

“If I tried to look after him, he’d be in worse trouble. Anyway, nursing a bunch of ignorant savages wouldn’t appeal to me.”

He said sharply, “Don’t call them ignorant! On this world they’re much more knowledgeable than you are.”

“Then they’re knowledgeable enough to nurse themselves.”

They walked on in silence.

The shore curved into an inlet, and a native village came into view, built on a gently sloping side of a hill above the sea. The dwellings stood in concentric circles, with a broad avenue pointing straight up the hill to bisect the village, and other avenues radiating out from the central oval. Children were playing along the beach, and older children were swimming and spearing sea creatures. The moment they saw Hort all of them headed for him at a rush, the younger children flocking along the beach and the older ones quickly swimming to shore and chasing after them. All of them shouted, “Airk! Airk!”

The younger children made faces at him, and the contorted expressions he produced in return convulsed them. The older children circled around him playing some kind of complicated hitting game that he invariably lost, and his expressions and gestures of feigned pain dissolved all of them in hilarity. Even the quivering gloom of his scowl set them squealing with merriment.

Plainly they loved this man, and his very presence was a delight to them. Talitha looked at Hort with interest for the first time and found that he had the kindest eyes she had ever seen, and that his face, behind its ridiculous facade of beard, radiated compassion and good humor.

She also thought that something was troubling him deeply.

Hort picked up one small girl and introduced her. “This is Dabbi. My prize student. Dabbi, this is Miss Warr.”

Dabbi smiled charmingly and spoke an unintelligible greeting.

Hort answered her unspoken question. “They’re bilingual. It’s a very strange situation. They have a language that I can’t make anything of, and then many of them are quite fluent in Galactic and almost all of them understand it—some of the young people even use fairly up-to-date slang expressions.”

He put Dabbi down and directed Talitha’s attention to the sea.

A hunting boat was rapidly approaching shore below the village. The crew, which consisted of both men and women, was standing poised on the edges of the boat. Hort waved, and all of them waved back.

“Why do they call them hunting boats?” Talitha asked.

“Come and see what they catch, and you’ll understand.”

He took her hand, and they ran along the beach with the children trailing after them. When they reached the village, the crew already had dragged the boat ashore. Hort led her over to it.

She looked once, briefly, and felt a wave of revulsion and horror such as she never before had experienced. She reeled backward with averted face, not believing, not wanting to remember, trying not to be sick.

The koluf was an enormous creature that completely filled the boat. It had a double row of clawing legs and a hideous, mottled, threshing, multitudinously jointed body that swiveled obnoxiously and formed strangely contorted curves. The vast head was slashed from front to rear by a gaping mouth with huge, protruding, curved teeth that snapped viciously. It was held in place in the narrow boat by poles and lashings.

Talitha turned and looked out to sea, where the colorful sails were just visible on the horizon. “Did they come all that distance with that in the boat?”

“It makes for a lively ride,” Hort said with a smile, “but it’s the only way it can be done. If they tried to tow it in, either it would haul them out to sea, or its friends and relatives would tear it to pieces. They have to get it into the boat as quickly as possible.”

“What do the women do?” she asked.

“The same thing the men do. They hunt koluf.”

The natives were hauling the koluf from the boat. They dragged it far up onto the beach, pulling it by its long, stringy, lashing fins and deftly avoiding the slashing teeth, clawing legs, and threshing, knifelike tail. By the time the hunters had finished, men and women of the village were gathered about them. The hunters turned at once, launched their boat, reefed in the sail, and paddled away.

The koluf continued to twist and thresh violently, and the villagers began to push sand over it with long-handled scrapers. As they worked, they shouted a rhythmic song in the native language. The koluf’s violent movements increased and several times it broke free, but they continued to push the sand. Finally they built a mound from which it could not escape, though its struggle made the sand heave and jerk.

A few villagers remained, putting finishing touches on the mound and watching to make certain that the koluf did not break free. The others returned to the village.

Talitha said incredulously, “And Uncle says it’s the most delicious meat he’s ever eaten!”

“If there were pantheons of gods in the Langrian religion,” Hort said solemnly, “that creature would be their ambrosia. It’s delectable beyond mere human comprehension.”

“I wish I’d tasted it before I saw it,” Talitha said. She counted eight widely spaced mounds along the beach and shuddered.

They walked on, skirting the village but passing close to the outlying dwellings, and Talitha stopped to examine one of them. She ran a finger over the brilliant color design of the roof and then rapped on it. “What’s it made of?”

“It’s a segment of a gourd. Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“It is.” She rapped again. “A gourd? If this is only a segment, they must be huge.”

“Enormous,” Hort agreed. “And when the shell is soaked in sea water and dried it becomes as tough and durable as plastic. Did you notice the lovely symmetry these dwellings have? They’re a fitting ornament for a beautiful world, and they’re also the best sort of housing that could be devised for this climate. Look at the walls—they’re a fine mesh woven of fiber, and they not only keep out pests, but they also breathe. They’re incredibly durable. Interestingly enough, the fiber is made from threads extracted from gourd stems, and the natives also use it for a rope—”

Talitha had lost interest. She saw her uncle approaching the village, followed by his usual incongruous escort. One of his two secretaries, Sela Thillow, carried an electronic gadget for note taking. The other, Kaol Renold, seemed to be waiting to be told to do something. Hirus Ayns followed along at the rear, sharp-eyed as usual, saying little but missing nothing. What the natives were doing she couldn’t fathom at all.

“Here’s Uncle,” she said.

Hort turned off his lecture, and they went to meet him. As they approached, the grinning natives suddenly scattered in all directions, and Wembling shouted a final admonition after them. “Big logs, mind you!”

“What are you doing?” Talitha asked him.

“Trying to get the natives to build a raft,” he said.

“What do they need a raft for?” Hort demanded. Talitha turned and stared at him. Few men spoke to her uncle in that tone of voice.

Wembling seemed not to notice. “They need a raft to hunt with,” he said.

“They seem to be doing quite well without one,” Talitha observed.

Wembling shook his head. “Have you seen the way they hunt? Whenever they catch one of those monsters, a crew has to bring it all the way to shore. Every catch costs them up to an hour of prime hunting time. Look at that!” He was counting the mounds on the beach. “Six, seven, eight. That’s a good start on the day’s hunt, but it means the boats already have made eight round trips from the hunting grounds. That’s the loss of a boat and crew for eight hours of hunting, and while one boat is bringing a koluf to shore, the fleet is less efficient. It takes every crew available to haul one of those monsters out of the water. If they could anchor a big raft close to the hunting grounds they could transfer the koluf to the raft, and then in the evening they could tow in the day’s catch all at once. A village this size would save a couple of hundred man-hours of work a day and hunt much more efficiently. That would make it possible to catch more koluf and get off their subsistence diet. Got that, Sela?”

“Got it,” she said, fingers playing rapidly on the electronic keyboard.

“Did you say subsistence diet?” Talitha asked. “I’ve never seen a healthier-looking people.”

“They’re healthy enough now, but they have very little food reserve. Whenever the hunting falls off, they come close to starvation. It takes a lot of koluf to feed a world population, even when it’s a small population. I wanted to teach them some ways to preserve their surplus meat. Couldn’t get them to understand what I was talking about. Turned out the reason they couldn’t understand was because they have so little surplus. A raft would increase the daily catch and let them store an emergency reserve. Well, Hort?”

“I’ve told you what I think,” Hort said. “The natives lead a precarious existence in the ecology of a hostile environment. Any tampering at all might upset the balance and exterminate them.”

Wembling grinned at him and spoke in conversational tones. “Hort, you’re fired. You can’t see beyond your textbooks. Increased efficiency in hunting will put them on the safe side of that precarious balance.”

“Increased efficiency in hunting could change the koluf’s feeding habits or reduce the breeding stock. The result would be fewer koluf and starving natives.”

“Long before that happened, we’d think of something else. Here’s Fornri.”

A group of young natives approached them, and one, obviously their leader, strode up to Wembling and wasted no time in coming to the point. “Excellency, this raft. It could not be used.”

“Why not?” Wembling asked.

“The koluf must be buried in sand.”

Wembling turned questioningly to Hort. “Some religious quirk?”

“It’s probably vital,” Hort said. “Most things on this world are poisonous to humans. Burying the koluf in sand must do something to neutralize the poison.”

“It must be buried as soon as possible after it is caught,” Fornri said, “and it must be kept buried for a day and a night. Otherwise, the meat cannot be eaten.”

Wembling nodded thoughtfully. “I see. Couldn’t we load the raft with sand and bury the koluf there?”

“The sand must be dry. Would that be possible on a raft at sea? And burying the koluf is dangerous. Much room is needed for the burying.”

Wembling nodded again. He was bitterly disappointed and trying not to show it. “I’ll have to think about it. A dying koluf does thresh about a bit. As for keeping the sand dry—I’ll think about it.”

He turned and marched away, and his entourage formed up and followed him. Fornri and a young woman remained behind, and Hort performed introductions. “Fornri, this is Talitha Warr, sister-daughter of the ambassador.”

Fornri smiled and raised his arm in the native greeting. Talitha hesitated and then awkwardly tried to imitate him.

“And this is Dalla,” Hort said.

The native woman greeted her warmly.

Fornri said to Hort, “It is a very interesting suggestion. Is the ambassador angry?”

“Frustrated, perhaps. You might consider building a small raft just to show him that it wouldn’t work.”

“But then he would say the failure was because the raft was too small,” Fornri said with a polite smile. “And it would not work no matter how large the raft was. Every time a new koluf was taken onto this raft much water would go with it, and such a small amount of sand would quickly become wet even if it did not wash away. And the sand must be dry, or the koluf cannot be eaten. So I think we won’t build the raft.”

The two of them took their farewells with upraised arms and disappeared into the forest.

Hort said thoughtfully, “Among all the records of primitive peoples I can remember, it was the elders who ruled and made the decisions. Here it seems to be the young people who lead, but actually they’re doing what Fornri tells them to do. He reflects, he speaks, and that’s the law. If it’s really complicated he asks for time, and then he probably consults with others, but even so he carries an enormous responsibility for one so young.”

“They’re a handsome couple,” Talitha said. “Are they married?”

“That’s another mystery. They aren’t. Other youths Fornri’s age are married, and many of them have a child. I’d suspect that he’s a youthful high priest with a rule of celibacy if it weren’t for the fact that he and Dalla obviously are sweethearts. They behave like a betrothed couple.”

Wembling had been talking with a group of natives on the beach, and now he called to them, “We’re going back by boat. Want to come?”

Talitha turned questioningly to Hort.

“Go ahead,” he said. “I have a class of native children to teach.”

“Really? What are you teaching them?”

“Reading and writing.”

She stared for a moment and then burst into laughter. “What for? Once they’ve learned, what possible use could they have for it?”

“Who knows? They’re exceptionally bright children. Maybe someday Langri will create its own great literature. You go with your uncle. I’ll walk back after my class.”

She joined her uncle on the beach. He was finishing his conversation with the natives—something about drainage ditches—and while she waited she watched Aric Hort. The children were dashing to meet him, the girl called Dabbi in the lead. “Airk!” they shouted. “Airk!”

Hort knelt on a level stretch of packed sand near the village. “Proud,” he said. The children repeated the word. “Proud.”

He spelled it. “P-R-O-U-D. Proud.” They spelled it after him, and he wrote the word in the sand. Then he stalked about on his knees, nose in the air, acting out the word “proud.” The children, in convulsions of merriment, imitated him.

“Strong,” Hort said.

“Strong,” the children repeated.

Wembling patted Talitha on the arm. “Ready to go, Tal?”

He helped her into a boat, and the paddlers, young native boys, pushed off. Looking back, she saw Aric Hort, surrounded by his mob of children, acting out the word “strong.”

“What a dear man!” she exclaimed.

Wembling grunted skeptically. “I’d say he acts rather silly.”

She smiled. “Yes. He certainly does.”