Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Robert Abernathy

  In particular, he wanted to broach the advantages of trading with the zgi, taboo or no taboo. Only a week earlier, he had found by experiment that those bovine and none-too-bright creatures were willing to pay well for cured yuruk hides; they received synthetic fabrics as well as tools from the thagathla in return for their crop surpluses, of course, but furs were to them a novelty which in the past they had had only when they happened upon a carcass freshly slain by thrin or other predators. In a pouch slung about Morg’s neck burned the bit of iron he had received in exchange for just one hide; during the minutes past he had been on tenterhooks lest some second sight reveal it to Zilli. It would make a phenomenal arrowhead, but he had found that he would need also an iron hammer to work it into shape. If yuruk skins became valuable trade goods, Morg, the mighty hunter, would become the owner of much iron.

  He told his companions very seriously: “I am going to be a great man.”

  The farmer Morgus was rich. The fields worked by his numerous family and dependents stretched for miles around the big stone house that the present farmer’s grandfather had built when he first settled in that country; and members of his clan, the Morgusi, owned most of the land in these parts, so that as patriarch of the clan he was a recognized leader through all the countryside.

  Just now Morgus’ face, in its frame of iron-gray beard, was set in hard and stubborn lines. He looked down from the elevation of his front porch at the zgi, and said gruffly, “No. How often do I have to tell you?”

  The zgi—two stocky powerful creatures a head shorter than a man, like dwarfish and uncouth replicas of the thagaihla to which their species was closely related—blinked dully up at him. One of them said, in its broken jargon that was a mixture of its own and human language: “Me . . . good job. Run plow . . . yes? Watch barn . . . yes?”

  “No!” said Morgus. “For the last time—I’ve stopped using zgi. There are plenty of men who want to work, and they’re better hands. On down the road with you. I hear that in the valley to the west they’re still hiring your kind.”

  The zgi stared mournfully at him. Stupid as they were, they read the inflexibility of the farmer’s manner; they turned and shuffled disconsolately away toward the highway.

  Morgus watched their retreating figures suspiciously for a time, then turned to the door of his house. But then he became aware of a dust cloud approaching rapidly on the road from the east, and he halted with his hand on the latch.

  The vehicle slowed to a slop at Morgus’ gate, and swung cautiously, bouncing over tractor ruts, into the lane that led past the house to the barnyard. It was obviously one of the traveling machines of the thagathla, very different from the trucks which came to carry away the crop surpluses; this vehicle was long, sleek, and shiny beneath a fresh coating of dust. Its doors opened, and three of the ruling race climbed stiffly out.

  Morgus squared his homespun-clad shoulders and advanced with a slow and dignified gait to meet the visitors. “Welcome,” he rumbled. “To what do I owe—?”

  “I am. Ecological Coordinator Zilli,” said the leading thegethli curtly. “You are the farmer Morgus? . . . Good. I wish to talk to you.”

  “Will the great one enter my poor abode?” With specious humility Morgus indicated the rambling stone farmhouse.

  “Wait at the door,” Zilli commantled her two bodyguards.

  “But, Your Fertility—”

  “There is no danger.”

  Morgus, leading the way, gave no sign of having understood the exchange in the Thagathlan language; in fact he had picked up a fair smattering of the tongue in his contacts with the assistant coordinators who made periodic tours of inspection. But a full-fledged coordinator was an unprecedented guest. And her name was Zilli—the same as one of the principal household gods of the Morgusi. Morgus was not superstitious; he believed in what he could see and hear and in what his horny hands could grasp. But now, for quite unsuperstitious reasons, he was growing uneasy.

  They entered the living-room—spacious, low-ceilinged, dominated by a great stone fireplace above which hung crossed hunting spears. In the doorway that led to the kitchen a woman, one of Morgus’ daughters-in-law, stared round-eyed, clapped her apron over her mouth, and shrank from sight. From a sturdy table placed by the window where the light was best, a hollow-cheeked beardless youth looked up, rose to his feet like a startled animal, and eyed the thegethli uncertainly; on the table lay several thin slabs of wood covered with cryptic charcoal scrawls.

  “My youngest son,” said the farmer. Nervousness made him add with a loquacity unusual for him: “He is not strong enough for field work, so he keeps the records of the farm. He claims that with the system of marks he has invented it is possible to write our language as you thagathla write with your letters—and, to be sure, they seem to get mixed up less often than the old tallies used to.”

  Zilli was paying scant attention. “Morgus,” she said sadly, “my assistants have brought me disturbing reports about you.”

  Morgus stroked his iron-gray beard. “How so? Haven’t I and all my family amply fulfilled the produce quotas?”

  “Yes. But—”

  “We haven’t even made any demands on the thagathla for new machinery or other factory-made goods, except for fuel, recently. If my son’s bookkeeping isn’t badly awry, we should have a respectable balance of credit in our favor.” The boy looked embarrassed, but nodded vigorously.

  “Yes, yes,” Zilli admitted testily. “But that is beside the point. Be quiet and listen to me!”

  She gazed somberly at the humans. Zilli was already well past the midpoint of her race’s long life span; her crest was beginning to acquire a venerable patina, and she had risen to the coordinatorship once held by the now long-dead Mnigli, a position only three places removed in order of succession from the supreme post of senior coordinator. At times like the present she felt the weight of her six hundred years, and of the changes that time had wrought since she had been an eager young junior biologist.

  She demanded sternly, “Morgus, what were those animals I saw in a fenced field a little way down the road?”

  “Animals?” Morgus hesitated briefly before he decided there was nothing to be gained by pretended ignorance. “Oh, ah, yes. Those were merely some pnid I’ve been fattening on the upland pastures. The creatures are very little extra trouble; they become quite docile when tamed, and the boys look after them while they grazed.”

  “That cannot be permitted.”

  Morgus stared at the thegethli from under bushy gray brows. “Pnid are not taboo animals. The hunters kill them all the time.”

  “It is their domestication that we cannot allow. Formerly, when all the land here was cultivated by the zgi, there was no such problem,” said Zilli a bit ruefully.

  “We are not like the zgi—nor like the thagathla. We need meat!”

  “You can hunt, then, or trade with the forest men.”

  Morgus glanced out the west window, toward where the wooded mountains rose dark in the distance. He scowled; he did not care for dealing with the men who inhabited the woodlands as his own ancestors had done up to a few generations back. They were, in his opinion, backward, uncouth, and thievish. And above all—From the window he saw also the fertile sweep of the new-sown fields, the neat fence-rows, and beyond, the rolling highlands with their lush high grass. He said hotly, “You have no right to order me about like that! It is my land, and they are my pnid.”

  “It is not a question of property rights,” said Zilli patiently, “but rather one of . . . of the ecological balance.” Perforce she used a Thagathlan expression that conveyed nothing to Morgus save a hazy notion of “taboo.”

  “Very well,” said Zilli. “I will try to explain this matter to you as to a reasonable being. Suppose that you—and your neighbors following your lead—were to go on pasturing the grass-eating pnid on the slopes yonder. Under your care, their herds would increase greatly, made safe from predators other than men, and provided with food and shelter in th
e winters. Sooner or later—in your sons’ lifetime, perhaps, or your grandsons’—on the uplands denuded of grass by overgrazing, erosion would set in and increasing quantities of soil be washed away by every season of rains.

  “Here in the valley where you farm, the excessive runoff would cause floods and would leach valuable elements out of the soil. Nor would the damage end there; drought would follow flood, because of the rain water which would have flowed away instead of being held back, as at present, by the thick sod on the hillsides. A few dry summers would accelerate the process of erosion; and a vicious cycle would be established, which might end only in the drying-up and ruin of what are now first-class farmlands.

  “Now do you understand why you must not herd the pnid?”

  Morgus’ lined face was stony. “You talk,” he said, “about things that might happen a long time from now; or they might not, I am a practical man; I don’t understand your complicated Thagathlan theories.”

  “Exactly,” said Zilli. “If you did, you would be equal to the thagathla.”

  “I understand though that we need more flesh-food than we can get by trading with the shiftless forest-folk or by hunting in time we can ill spare from farm work. There can be no harm in keeping a few beasts for our own use, and I intend to do so!”

  Zilli drew herself up stiffly, eying the man with a coldness which covered a qualm of misgiving that she felt not for the first time in dealing with humans; this, though, was the first time she had met with open defiance. Zilli felt a sense of crisis, mingled with thankfulness that she still possessed a potent weapon, forged against just such an emergency by the provident foresight of the Psychological Division.

  “Morgus,” she said bleakly, “you forget yourself, and you forget what your race owes to us, the thagathla. You lay claim to reason, but your attitude belies the claim!”

  She paused to let that sink in, but if it made any impression on the obdurate farmer she was unable to see it. She reflected briefly, not without a tinge of vanity, on the gulf that after all separated her own species from the human; the latter was undoubtedly of a high order of intelligence—witness its rapid climb from its original stone-age culture to the use of metals and even some understanding of the agricultural machinery furnished by the thagathla—but it still looked on the world around it with the eyes of any other lower animal species, greedy to exploit its environment and multiply its own numbers without thought of consequences. The thagathla, on the other hand, were truly intelligent. They and they alone saw and understood and guided the whole, the all-embracing unity of field and forest, sea and desert, and the varied populations of plant and animal life which all together made up the single vast ecological community that covered Thegeth—that, biologically speaking, was Thegeth; the hierarchy of predators and prey, the network of more subtle interdependences among countless species—the ecological pyramid. At the summit of the pyramid stood the thagathla, the controlling intelligence of the planet-wide system, because they understood—understood that they themselves as a species were an integral part of that system, no less and no more than the lowliest soilboring worm or nitrogen-fixing bacterium.

  And the human population of Thegeth was equally a part of the pyramid. True, since their introduction they had extended their ecological functions; with remarkable adaptability they had supplanted the now almost-vanished thrin as forest predators, and were in process of pushing the zgi toward the brink of extinction by replacing them in their role of cultivators—displaying, unquestionably, more efficiency and ingenuity in that role than the zgi ever had. But those were developments within the system, affecting its essential integrity not at all. Whenever, as now, a situation threatened which would disrupt the total environment, the thagathla were at hand to intervene.

  Reluctantly, Zilli brought her not-so-secret weapon to bear. “Where is your title to the land, Morgus?” she inquired.

  The farmer’s weathered face went sallow-pale. Now that it was too late, he saw the blow coming, saw that he should have foreseen it, but there was nothing he could do.

  “Where is the title?”

  Morgus’ jaw muscles worked; veins swelled in his temples. His eyes peered huntedly from under their shaggy brows; they flicked furtively to the crossed spears over the fireplace, then swung slowly, unwillingly back to the motionless figure of the thegethli. Suddenly his shoulders sagged; he turned away, haltingly, like an old man. The silently watching boy stared at his father in fascinated horror.

  The Psychological Division of the Bureau of Ecology had planned shrewdly. When man had begun emerging from the woods and cautiously but purposefully shouldering the zgi out of the arable tracts, the Bureau had correctly anticipated that this change of habitat would produce correspondingly deep-going changes in mentality; the mechanisms of taboo and superstitious awe which had served to keep the primitive hunter within the bounds of permissible behavior would not hold up under the impact of a new way of life and of closer contact with the thagathia. The psychologists observed the spontaneous beginnings of an emotionally-charged system of properly relationships; they took those beginnings adroitly in hand, encouraged and shaped them to their own ends. The thagathla made the law, and under the law the right of ownership in land—symbolized by suitably impressive documents designed on the basis of psychometric data—stemmed exclusively from them and held good solely at their pleasure.

  The farmer Morgus felt the very foundations of his life crumbling.

  “One moment, coordinator,” he said thickly. “I . . . I will fetch the title—”

  “That will not be necessary,” said Zilli sharply; the scene was distasteful to her. “But you must get rid of the domesticated pnid.”

  Morgus looked briefly at her and dropped his eyes to the floor. “Yes, coordinator.”

  “And one more thing.” Conscientiously, Zilli turned at the door. “The Aerial Survey has reported evidence that some members of your clan have been seeding lands supposed to be lying fallow. That must be stopped.”

  “Yes, coordinator,” Morgus mumbled. He did not look up even when the grinding of wheels outside told him that the thagathla had departed.

  At Morgus’ side his son said breathlessly, “Do they take us for zgi?”

  “What does it matter?” Morgus lifted his gray head heavily. “Ring the bell and call your brothers. We’ll have to get ready to slaughter the animals.”

  The boy took a step to obey, then turned back hesitantly. “Father . . . I want to look at the title-deed the thegethli spoke of.”

  “What for?”

  “Perhaps it doesn’t really say all they claim it does.”

  “Suppose not—they have the power. And no man can tell what it says, anyway—it’s their writing.”

  The boy bit his lip; but he persisted, “Perhaps after a time I can make something of it. I think they use the principle of a mark for a sound.”

  “As you like,” said the father listlessly.

  The boy rang the summoning-bell outside; and while they waited for the others to come from the field, he stood on the porch looking into the east. At his back, behind the house and behind the forested hills where the skin-clad hunters roamed, the sun was near setting. The eastern sky was shadowy; and against that darkening backdrop, luminous with reflected sunlight, the white-towered city of the thagathla glowed only twenty miles away across the plain.

  Zilli left the automatic elevator and ambled slowly along the silent passage. Her old bones creaked, and she puffed with a shortness of breath that had troubled her during the last fifty years.

  This corridor, at least, was the same as it had always been—virtually unchanged since the time, so long past, when an enthusiastic young junior biologist named Zilli had been summoned for the first time in her life up to the rarefied heights of the top-floor offices of that exalted being the senior coordinator, to be informed of her designation as a member of the Second and last Earth Expedition.

  Now, on the door at the corridor’s end, the faintly shin
ing legend in flowing Thagathlan script read:

  SENIOR COORDINATOR ZILLI

  Beneath it the same indication was repeated in the angular graceless characters of the Human alphabet. This second inscription was brighter, because more recent.

  The door of Zilli’s office slid quietly open at her approach. In the roomy, well-lit chamber beyond, two men rose quickly to their feet from a paper-strewn desk by the great curved window that looked over the city.

  One of them was An tan Morgu, Zilli’s confidential secretary—a neatly barbered and manicured man of indeterminate age, dressed, as always, in conservative but expensive clothing of synthetic fabrics, and in a studiously affable expression. The other was a stranger, a large human who hugged a bulging pnidskin case as if fearful of being parted from it.

  On the window ledge, Morgu’s hamster sat up and watched the thegethli with a bright, beady stare.

  Zilli stiffened her erect forebody, ignoring rheumatic twinges, and straightened her front pair of legs, making herself as tall as possible. It was a reflex she had never been able to suppress during all her association with humans, an involuntary reaction to the curious impression of Unvering which these two-legged creatures gave.

  “Your Fertility!” the secretary greeted her in the Thagathlan language. “I wasn’t expecting you in so early. This is my cousin, Rodon Morgu, who dropped by for a moment to discuss a private matter. If you don’t mind, Rodon, you can wait in the next room till the current business is disposed of.”

  Cousin Rodon bowed awkwardly lo the ancient thegethli, and speechlessly let himself be ushered, hugging his leather case, through the door which led to the adjoining chamber. Antan Morgu slid the door shut behind him, leaving it open just a little. Then he returned to the desk and began sorting papers.

  Zilli waited silently. It was no news to her that her secretary led a double life. In his official capacity, he carried on most of the routine work of the senior coordinator’s office, and did so with an industry and efficiency which seldom left room for criticism, just as nowadays so many other humans were carrying on a multitude of important tasks formerly entrusted only to thagathla. At the same time, among his fellow-humans Morgu and other members of his family were highly regarded for reasons which Zilli had never thoroughly understood. Objectively, the thagathla had observed the existence and workings of an involved system of exchange and accumulation of value-tokens; these functioned, in interhuman relationships, as a sort of universal requisition-slip for goods and services, with the peculiar proviso that honoring them was not mandatory. But an intuitive grasp of the human enthusiasm for such activities was beyond an outsider.