Pallahaxi

by Michael Coney

  “Import emergency supplies.”

  I noticed Uncle Stance’s head snapping to and fro as he followed the discussion. His problem is, he can’t discuss. He’s great at speeches, but when it comes to the cut and thrust of negotiation, he’s lost.

  Mister McNeil said, “Be fair, Bruno. You’ve been to Devon Station and you’ve seen things you count as marvels, so you think of humans as some kind of magicians. We’re not. We’re just a species of galactic travelers, no better than kikihuahuas.”

  “Kikihuahuas?”

  “Forget it. They can’t help either. They’re very slow movers, the kikihuahuas. And even we humans can’t import supplies, just like that. It takes time and money. To be frank, it takes too long, and it takes money you haven’t got.”

  “I still think you could do something,” said Uncle Stance stubbornly.

  “Do what?”

  “You’re the expert. You tell me.” It was a typical Uncle Stance evasion.

  And it annoyed Mister McNeil. “All I can do is suggest you try Devon Station, Stance. I’ll tell them you’re coming, if you like. Maybe they’ll be able to explain better than I can.”

  “I always said we should have gone there first,” said Uncle Stance.

  I had a strange and disturbing private conversation with Mister McNeil before we left. I’ve noticed before that he seems to seek me out for the occasional chat. Flattering in its way, but also rather mystifying.

  “You’ll want to mull things over before you go home,” he said to the others, refilling their stuva mugs. “I’ll leave you alone for a minute or two. Hardy, you come with me. I have some new plants to show you.”

  Nobody thought this odd; they knew my interest in Mister McNeil’s Earth plants. Trigger might have wanted to join us, but this was outweighed by the status factor of taking part in a top-level discussion. I was perfectly happy because I knew the discussion was doomed anyway.

  Mister McNeil and I stood close beside the simmering motorcart, scanning the wreckage that the drench had wrought with the Earth flowers. Everything lay flat and rotting, the colors leached into the mud. The river roared below, lost in the mist. The drench had done its worst, and the freeze was around the corner.

  “I’ve saved the seeds,” said Mister McNeil. “Your year’s shorter than Earth’s, but most of the plants have adapted. I’ve even been able to develop some new varieties.” He loved his garden. I wondered if it was the only thing that made his life here worthwhile, because it was plain he loved Earth too.

  It was equally plain he couldn’t show me any new varieties right now, so what was he after? I said nothing.

  “Uh, watch yourself, Hardy,” he said abruptly.

  “What?”

  “Be careful. These are difficult times. Maybe dangerous times.”

  “You mean the food shortage?”

  “Not necessarily.” He was very hesitant; he was not supposed to interfere in stilk matters. “You father is a good man.”

  “I know.”

  “Stilk hierarchy is a funny thing. I’ve never quite grasped it — but then, I can’t stardream.”

  Was he trying to say Dad should be chief? I didn’t know, but it was a pleasant thought, if impossible. I said, “The two go together. The chief in any community is the one who can stardream the furthest back.”

  “But he may not be the best one for the job.”

  “He’s sure to be. He’s able to call on the greatest experience. They say our male line can dream right back to the beginning of things. That’s Dad and Uncle Stance and Trigger and I. People say we’re the only ones who can, anywhere in the world. Not that we’ve ever done it. It would take days and days of lying on your back, smoking hatch and concentrating. Sometime I’ll try, maybe. It’d be nice to find out how our civilization began. And how all those myths began. The Great Lox and Drove and Browneyes and all that stuff.”

  But he was still mulling over the chiefship thing. “Stance and your father are brothers. They must have the same ancestral memories.”

  “Uncle Stance is a year younger. That means he’s got an extra year of Granddad Ernest’s memories. So he’s chief. And Trigger will be the next chief when Uncle Stance dies.”

  “But Trigger’s a jackass. Even I can see that.”

  I presumed a jackass was something uncomplimentary. “Dad and I will be there to advise him.”

  He was watching me closely, gauging my reactions — but he was human, and inexperienced at following stilk trains of thought. “You four are very valuable people,” he said, almost to himself. “No written language… . And we only arrived a few generations ago. We know so little. We think in terms of human problems. Rock structure. Escape velocities. The father and son relationship must be very important to you.”

  “Of course. If a man doesn’t have a son his ancestral memories are lost forever. A daughter inherits only her mother’s memories. That’s how memories disappear. When a person doesn’t have a child of their own sex.”

  “Or when they die young.”

  Suddenly I shivered, feeling again the water creeping up my legs as the skimmer sank. What was Mister McNeil getting at? He was staring at me again.

  “Be careful, Hardy.”

  This was getting too weird. “I’m in danger? Are you saying someone might want to wipe out my memories? No, Mister McNeil. We venerate ancestral memories. And stilks don’t kill one another. Nobody could live with a memory like that.”

  “I’m told your grandfather was killed a few years ago.”

  “So it seems. At least he’d passed on his memories by then.”

  “But he was killed. Murdered. I’m saying it can happen. Anyone can get desperate, even a stilk. And there are desperate times coming.”

  It was nonsense, I tried to tell myself. And the skimmer sinking was just bad luck.

  But it was a strange and disturbing conversation.

  The mist turned to a fine snow and the world turned white. Hunting and farming were finished for the year. The domestic lox hibernated in the barns and the only creatures fool enough to venture outside daily were the lorin; heads down, shaggy coats white with snow, plodding through the countryside on Phu alone knows what errands. The rest of us gathered around our hearths to stardream, tell stories and wait out the freeze.

  And I dreamed of Charm.

  I tried to stardream instead. Winter is a great time for stardreaming; there’s little else to do and we can learn a lot of history that way, and broaden our experience. But every time I lit up my pipe of hatch and lay back on the cushions, that pretty face rose before me and those warm brown eyes watched me gravely. Mister McNeil tells me that human memories are faint things; just indistinct pictures that lack reality and sequence. So it may be difficult for you to understand the vivid nature of stilk memories, with all the colors and sounds, the smells and the emotions still there. When I thought of Charm, I relived that short time we were together, minute by minute, word by word.

  I wonder if Dad guessed what was going on it my mind. I couldn’t have explained it if he’d asked. It was different from our normal sex drive; it was somehow beyond that. It was going to be a long winter before I could see her again.

  And anyway, she was a flounder.

  Dad and I lived in the center of the men’s village in a small cottage passed down our male line for generations. Uncle Stance and Trigger lived next door in the big chief’s house. We saw all too much of them.

  The temple was still busy, its keeper holding frequent services to reassure the superstitious that summer would come again, one day. The Great Lox still guarded us from the ice-devil Rax. It was a peculiar metaphor for the sun and its dead companion, but it was what the people wanted to hear. That, and word that the unlikely Drove and Browneyes still waited in the wings ready to prance forth and deliver us, should matters take a further turn for the worse. I never visited the temple, but I did take a short walk to the big barn on the outskirts of the women�
�s village one day, well-armed with hot bricks. We were running short of flour.

  I found my mother, Yam Spring, in charge of the stores.

  Her face lit up when she saw me. “Hardy!”

  Embarrassing. There is a public heater in the barn and a handful of men and women lounged around it, chatting and drinking ale, and they all turned and looked. Most mothers have the commonsense to ignore their sons, particularly in public, but not Spring; oh, no. She’s a big woman with a round cheerful face and a loud voice, and her greeting had the kind of love in it that a fellow only wants to hear from his father. It rang around the barn and I’ll swear even the lox jerked out of their doze and opened curious eyes.

  “For Phu’s sake, Spring,” I muttered.

  But she’d advanced on me, inevitable as the grume and just as cloying, and seized me in fat arms, hugging me to gigantic, unthinkable breasts. Having done, she held me at arms’ length, clasping my elbows in a viselike grip. “You’ve grown. You’re quite a handsome young man! You look just like your father.”

  Rax, the shame of it! Nothing wrong in looking like dear old Dad, but her words reminded me — and everyone else — of the peculiar relationship the two of them had. I saw grins on faces, and knowing looks. There were about ten people there, including that young freezer Caunter, who would never let me forget this. Ten accurate stilk memories. This dreadful scene would go down in history tenfold, and be chuckled at countless times by countless future generations. My reputation was doomed.

  “Yeah,” I mumbled.

  She unclasped me. “So how is Bruno? I haven’t seen him for days. I was thinking maybe I’d drop round your place later.”

  “Not a good idea. Uncle Stance will be there. They’re arranging the trip to Devon Station.”

  “Oh. Devon Station? They’re not thinking of going until the freeze is over, are they?”

  “They’re talking about of going tomorrow. I’m going too.”

  “Oh, not both you and Bruno?” She looked stricken. “It’s dangerous, Hardy. I can’t bear the thought of losing you both!”

  “Look, Spring, would you mind keeping your voice down a bit? This journey’s confidential.”

  “How can it be confidential when everybody will see the motorcart setting off?”

  “Well, anyway, they’ll be arranging it all tonight.” Suddenly the sight of her plump — but kindly — face almost in tears moved some buried and shameful emotion in me, and impulsively I took her hand. “Don’t worry. We’ll be fine. Now, we need some flour. Dad miscalculated again.”

  She took my earthenware pot and measured several cupfuls of flour from a wooden bin, and that was it. No need to write anything down. She would remember. And so would the spectators, watching closely for signs of favoritism.

  “Bruno’s not the only one who miscalculated,” she said quietly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The flour ration’s going to have to be reduced. Wand will announce it tomorrow.”

  “We’ll have to eat more vegetables.”

  “They’re going on ration tomorrow too. It’s going to be a difficult freeze, Hardy. The meat situation is serious, too. If Noss hadn’t had a fish surplus we’d have been in bigger trouble by now.” She held onto my hand. “When things get bad, people tend to turn against their leaders. There was a winter, oh, eleven generations ago nothing like as bad as this, when people turned against their chiefs and stormed the barn, and the womanchief was killed.”

  “Murdered, you mean?” My conversation with Mister McNeil was very fresh in my mind.

  “No. They opened the trap on the grain hopper and it all spilled out over her. By the time they dug her out she’d suffocated. Her face was black as a snorter’s bottom.”

  I couldn’t help but chuckle and after a moment Spring began to laugh too, her ample flesh vibrating busily. “A good thing it wasn’t the manchief,” I managed to say, “otherwise I wouldn’t be here now.”

  The thought sobered her up. “Anyway, important discussion or not, I have to come over to see your dad later on. Particularly if you’re driving to the moors tomorrow.”

  It would look strange, a fat middle-aged woman visiting the men’s village. People just don’t do that kind of thing. “I don’t understand why you have to see him,” I said stubbornly.

  “Well, obviously. I love him,” she said, for all to hear.

  That night I dreamed a strange dream of the past, culled from the dormant memories of many ancestors. There was blood and death in this dream, and cold and fear as well. There was a girl, who was Charm and yet not Charm; pretty, brown-eyed, whose face swam through the interlinked pools of memory and brought sanity with her. Her face was with me, smiling, as I awakened to find it was still dark and Dad was grunting like a dozing loat in his bed across the room.

  I’d been thinking about Charm quite enough in my waking hours. Did she have to invade my dreams as well? She was only a flounder, for Phu’s sake. And she was female, yet the dream had hinted at lasting relationships.

  I thought about that the following day, as Spring waved to us from the door of her cottage. Dad waved back, showing no sign of shame. How could two people go on loving each other for seventeen years? It didn’t make sense to me, then. Love is a short-term thing we feel for the purpose of mingling limbs and having children. It’s not supposed to last. All right, so I know some of you humans see it differently. But I’m talking about your average stilk. The motorcart rumbled on, Uncle Stance at the helm. The safety parott swung in its cage, squawking at the rising sun.

  The rest of us sat on the side benches, close to the firebox. Dad, Trigger, Wand and her daughter Faun.

  Let me tell you something about Faun. She’s a nice girl, no doubt about that, and not bad looking either. About my own age. But — and it’s a big but — Wand wants Faun and I to get together one day. Have children, I mean. A boy would have my memories, supposedly right back to the Beginning, and a girl would have Faun’s, which go back twenty-three generations. It’s a heck of a lot of knowledge. If Trigger had no son — and I couldn’t imagine him ever getting around to the necessary actions — a son of Faun and I would be manchief one day. And a daughter would be womanchief. Wand thinks it’s all for the good of Yam.

  Well, to Rax with Yam. There’s insufficient spark between Faun and I — certainly not on my side — and any attempt to get together, as Wand puts it, would likely end in failure and embarrassment.

  It’s politically odd that Wand doesn’t want Faun to get together with Trigger. I can only assume she thinks it isn’t worth the risk of Faun having children who are jackasses, to use Mister McNeil’s expression. A jackass, he’d explained, is something like a lox with big ears, but even more stupid. Uncle Stance is all for a union between Faun and Trigger, naturally. Since Wand’s memories only go back twenty-two generations she should, in principle, have been deferring to Uncle Stance. In practice, however, it doesn’t always work that way. Wand has a powerful personality.

  At that point in my meditations, Uncle Stance dropped the left-hand front wheel into a pothole, throwing Faun against me. She grabbed my hand to steady herself and, under the approving eye of Wand, kept hold of it. I didn’t object. Her hand was warm and friendly, while outside the cab of the motorcart the world was sere and frigid, a dusting of white covering the scrub.

  A terrible color, white. The color of death. We wouldn’t have lasted more than a few moments out there before the insanity would get us and we’d go runabout, screaming across the crunching grass, soon to fall on our faces and freeze. Ahead of us, the empty moors rose in treeless hillocks against the pale sky, where Phu showed as a tiny ineffectual disc.

  When Uncle Stance had wrestled the motorcart back on course, Dad said, “We should run through our approach to the humans again, Stance.”

  “Yeah,” said his brother. “I notice you’re wearing the negotiating cloak that woman made for you. Must I remind you who’s in charge here?”
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  “It’s the warmest cloak I have,” said Dad, an unaccustomed edge to his voice. “You have your spear.” Uncle Stance’s hunting spear is unique, distinguished by a red tassel and serving as a badge of office as well as a weapon. “Now pull yourself together and let’s talk business. We’ll be at Devon Station before long.”

  “My feeling is, we should adopt a hard line,” said Wand. “After all, those people are sitting on stilk land.”

  “Which we leased to them,” Dad pointed out.

  “We can cancel the lease unilaterally,” said Uncle Stance. “It’s written into the agreement.”

  “Quite right, Stance,” said Wand. “We hold the whip hand.”

  The two fools continued in this vein for a while, mutually reinforcing their dream of power until I quite expected someone, probably Stance, to suggest throwing the humans off the planet by main force if they didn’t come across with massive aid.

  Eventually sensible old Dad put a stop to it. “For Phu’s sake,” he snapped, “they can stomp on us like drivets if they feel like it. We’re going to them cap in hand, don’t you understand? We’re begging for crumbs.”

  “I’ll be the judge of our approach,” said the wise man at the tiller frostily.

  “And I,” our esteemed womanchief added quickly.

  “Just don’t put their backs up, that’s all I ask,” said Dad.

  The negotiating team went into a sulk that lasted until we entered the Administration Dome at the entrance to Devon Station.

  They call it the Administration Dome, but it’s really a huge round barn. The big door hissed shut behind the motorcart and everywhere was suddenly warm. All our fears ebbed away; you’d be amazed what sudden warmth can do to a stilk. Even Trigger, who’d been whimpering quietly since we left Yam, perked up.

  “It’s big,” he said, voicing the obvious. It was his first visit to Devon Station. “Will it belong to us when you cancel the lease?”

  Uncle Stance’s jaw tightened, but nobody answered this typically Triggerlike question. Not for the first time I wondered what winter evening conversations were like in the manchief’s house. Probably the two of them sat playing circlets, an unusually mindless local game that excuses the obligation to talk.