You didn't answer that. You simply waited for me to go on. "So what I'd like to do," I said, "is open talks with you. Answer all your questions. Tell you everything you want to know. We can reason together, Merlin, and once we understand each other fully I'm confident we can get along."
Another lep—I didn't know his name—erected himself and shrilled, "Why do we wish to 'get along'? What is the purpose?"
I hadn't expected that kind of question. I said lamely, "Well, just because we're here, you know. It's better to be friends than not, isn't it?" Nobody responded to that one. I tried again, "Listen, there's one thing you have to be sure of. We're staying. The humans on Pava aren't going to fold their tents and go home. I'm sorry if you don't like the idea, but we're not going to go away."
"We can, however," the lep said. "There are many valleys, rivers and forests in other places."
I hadn't expected that, either. It had never occurred to me that you might simply move out because you didn't like what had happened to the neighborhood. I didn't have anything to say to it, but Alma did. "Please don't," she said. "Please. We'd like to be your friends."
There was a lot of talk about that—among yourselves—but not in English. Then you said, Merlin, "Is it correct to say that you believe that learning more about each other could make us all friends?"
"It's the best hope we've got," I said.
"And you wish to talk? At length? To answer all questions?"
"I do. Most of all I want to apologize for what happened to you—all of you—especially to—What was his name? Eric the Red? The one Becky hit?"
That produced a stirring and whistling among you, and you said, "That will not be possible. Ericthered has prematurely become dead."
"Oh, my God," I said. "So that was it."
I really hadn't known that. I guess nobody had. When they said Becky had "hit" the lep, I guess I was thinking of something like a slap, maybe at worst even a blow with a stick. That would have been bad enough, but it had happened before, once or twice anyway; it made a lot of trouble, but at least you hadn't all walked out.
I hadn't been aware that what she'd hit him with was the sharp blade of a shovel, and that he had then somehow managed to slither away into the woods, bleeding. No one had known that he had bled to death—well, no one but all of you. You could have said something, you know. Instead of just walking away the way you did.
Anyway, I mumbled, "I'm sorry. Really sorry."
"It is known that you are. Ericthered is nevertheless prematurely dead."
I clutched at straws. "Yes, but I know that somebody else killed a lep once; Madeleine Hartly told me what her brother-in-law did. And you forgave us for that."
"No. Not 'forgave,' Barrydihoa."
"But at least you got over it. . . ."
All the leps were clucking and cooing softly to each other by then, and I could see that you were getting impatient with me. You said, "No, we did not 'get over it,' Barrydihoa. A few of us chose to give you one more chance. Others did, too, later on; but no one has forgotten, and that second chance has been used up. Also there are other matters."
"I know there must be—"
"No, you do not know. There is more than you know about that is not understandable to us."
Naturally I asked what you were talking about, but you wouldn't listen anymore. Certainly you wouldn't let me ask any more questions. You hissed and twittered to Geronimo and Semiramis for a moment. Then you said:
"Go with them, Barrydihoa. See what they will show you. Then think how you can explain this. Then—perhaps—if you think it worthwhile, then you can come back and you will tell me all you think I should know." And that was all you would say.
Neither Geronimo nor Semiramis would say a word to us after that. They simply stretch-slid ahead of us down the hill to the car. It was only when we were in it that Geronimo said, "You must turn upstream when we ford the river. I will show you where to go."
Then he buttoned up again too. It was a silent drive. Alma, in the seat beside me, had nothing to say, and the leps behind us were not even speaking to each other.
Then, a couple of kilometers up along the left bank of the river, I felt some movement from behind. Semiramis was leaning forward, her great head coming cheek-to-cheek with mine, her sweet, grassy breath in my face.
"Turn right," she ordered.
"Why?"
"Turn right! Go on that trail, it is not far."
She was a bossy one. I did as commanded but asked Geronimo, "Won't you tell me why we're doing this?"
"There is a reason," he said. He left it at that, and nobody said anything until Semiramis hissed in my ear again.
"Stop here."
I stopped. Before I could ask any questions Geronimo had slid out of the car, beckoning us to follow.
I looked around. "This doesn't look right. We're nowhere near Freehold, are we?"
"We are not."
"Well, look, Geronimo, they'll be worrying about us. I want to go back to town."
"We will take you there. Not yet. There is the thing you are to see first."
As usual, he wasn't interested in offering explanations. By then both leps had begun slithering away into the woods ahead of us. Alma looked at me. I looked at Alma. I shrugged. We followed.
After five minutes of hard climbing up a hillside, I began to notice things I had seen before. We were somewhere near the glen where the Millenarists had held their retreat, I was pretty sure of that . . . and then I realized I was hearing something, too.
It was a human voice.
It was distant, definitely a voice, but so hoarse and cracked, so low-pitched it hardly registered as belonging to any human being right away.
When we came around a clump of strangler trees there was Friar Tuck, knelt by the side of the trail, his head bowed. It was his voice we were hearing. He was praying aloud, and it seemed he had been doing so for a long time. He didn't bother to look up as we approached. And just beyond him—
"Oh, my sweet little Jesus," Alma whispered.
But Jesus had nothing to do with it, though the man we saw was crucified, all right. He was nailed to a big water tree. Tiny springlets of water—clear to begin with, then tinctured with threads of red blood turning pale as they mixed—were trickling from the places where his hands were pinned to branches and his feet spiked to the trunk. His head was dangling to one side, his eyes were open and unseeing, but the face above his drenched body was radiant.
It seemed the late Captain Garold Tscharka wouldn't have to face any kind of a trial after all. He had reached the state every good Millenarist longed for. He was well and truly dead.
29
YOU have said, quite properly, that there are ways in which humans and leps do not understand each other. This is true. The incident of Garoldtscharka is a case in point. No lep would ever kill himself. The knowledge that humans sometimes do so—and do so in such terribly painful ways, for purposes that cannot be understood—still fills us with shock and repugnance.
Is that a question, Merlin?
No.
Because if it is I have to say that I don't really share your feelings.
Oh, I think Tscharka's crucifixion was really shocking, too. If he wanted to off himself there were certainly better ways—ways that would have seemed better to me, anyway, though I suppose Tscharka had his own ideas about that.
I worry a little about just what those ideas were, as a matter of fact.
But to tell the truth, I didn't give a hoot in hell about Tscharka killing himself. If I'd known he was all that apeshit to get himself crucified, I might have suggested other ways of doing it, but if that didn't go over I probably would have been happy to supply him with the nails myself. The only reason I sent Semiramis back to Freehold to get help was because I thought people would be pleased to hear Tscharka was dead.
I'm sorry if that just makes you feel even worse about the human race, but as I see it—in fact, as most of us see it—there are some people who are
just better off dead. That isn't for the sake of punishing them for their crimes, at least not as far as I'm concerned. Not even because that's a good solution to the problem of crime anyway, because I totally agree it isn't. The only reason why that is acceptable at all is just because we have never been able to figure out any better way of dealing with them.
Now, does what I have just said raise a question?
No. There are no more questions, Barrydihoa. You have answered all the questions that have answers of a sort comprehensible to us—answered them in great and fatiguing detail, over this long time. There is nothing left.
Yeah, thanks, but that's not good enough, Merlin. I need to know what you intend. Does that mean you will or won't lift the boycott?
Ah, Barrydihoa, do you not even now see how puzzling this is? There is no "boycott." There has never been a "boycott." If all of our people chose to shun all of yours it was not because of a "law." It was simply because too many of your people had behaved in ways that filled us with horror and disgust. Now you have been heard, and each of us will decide for himself what to do. It appears that some will still prefer to shun you. Some will be willing to visit you, even work with you. Geronimo will certainly be one such. So, sometimes, will I. So will others among us, perhaps an increasing number as time passes. So, you see, your people will no longer be deprived of their laborers.
Ah, Merlin, let me just play your own words back to you: You don't see how puzzling this is to us, either, do you? You've just got the wrong idea about what I'm trying to do.
It isn't for slave labor that we want your friendship, you see. It never was, really—well, not entirely, anyway—and now least of all. We have more human people to do the work now than we did, and it looks as though before long we'll have a lot of new machines to do much of it for us. What we want from you is to be our friends. Or at least our reasonably amicable neighbors, on this planet that we will be sharing for a long time to come.
But I'm glad to hear what you have said. And I'm grateful to you—to all of you—for letting me come up here and try to explain it all. That was a good way to start. I hope we can keep on that same way.
I also hope this. Then there is nothing more that troubles you, Barrydihoa?
Well, no, I wouldn't say that.
There is one other worry in my mind. It's not about you, and it's certainly not an immediately urgent problem. It can't possibly make any real trouble for a good many years. But it does bother me quite a lot. It's about why Tscharka had himself nailed to the wall, and about what Reverend Tuchman might do about it one day.
See, Tuchman isn't here anymore. When Captain Bennetton finally started his Buccaneer back to Earth, he had the Reverend Tuchman safely stowed away in his freezer.
It was the only thing that made sense. If Tuchman was going to have to face a murder charge—and there could be no doubt that he was certainly some kind of accomplice, because who else could have hammered the spikes into Garold Tscharka?—no Pavan wanted to have that trial here. No Pavan wanted Reverend Tuchman around at all anymore. We were all delighted to get rid of the sweet-talking old son of a bitch . . . but he had left some pretty hard questions behind.
I don't want you to think that I really believe in very much of this stuff. Whatever crazy notion Tscharka himself might have had, I don't believe for one minute that his self-inflicted crucifixion started that thousand-year clock ticking for Pava. Maybe he thought it would. Alma thinks he might have, and she's got a small guilty feeling that she might have put the idea in his head and thus led to his suicide. That doesn't make sense, though. That crucifixion doesn't even fit the scripture, does it?
Well, that's a rhetorical question, because you certainly wouldn't know whether it did or not, but actually, its circumstances aren't even close. Tscharka was a sort of martyr, okay, but he brought it on himself—I mean, Tuchman never could have nailed him up that way single-handed if Tscharka hadn't helped out. He certainly was no kind of a divine redeemer, except maybe in his own mind. I mean, nobody ever claimed that Garold Tscharka was the son of God, did they? And if Tscharka had ever had any revelations from on high, he had never mentioned them to me—or to anybody else, either, as far as anyone ever said. There was no Sermon on the Mount in Tscharka's resume, no cleaning out the Temple, no miracles. No nothing that fit the biblical pattern of a savior and redeemer. You never heard of Captain Garold Tscharka raising anybody from the dead, did you? (Well, unless you count defrosting the stiffs in Corsair's freezer. But I don't think even Friar Tuck could try to stretch it that much.)
The only thing is . . .
The only thing is, when you come to think of it, hardly anybody had ever heard any of those stories about Jesus himself during his lifetime.
Those stories—those scriptures—didn't get spread around until long after Jesus' death, when his disciples began roaming the world and writing all those epistles. Some of those stories didn't get told at all until long after the crucifixion, did they? Fifty years later, some of them. Maybe even later than that.
So I do have this question that lurks in the back of my mind.
It certainly isn't important right now. It probably couldn't matter to anyone until our grandchildren's time and maybe not even then.
But the feeling won't go away. I keep wondering about what will happen when, years and years from now and back on the faraway Moon, they finally defrost Friar Tuck.
He'll have a lot of legal questions to deal with, I'm pretty sure of that. But they'll take time, and while that time is passing he'll have opportunity to make his case. Whatever case he chooses to make. That's part of our constitutional guarantees, you see, and nobody would try to take that privilege away from him . . . and who can guess what kind of epistles Tuchman may be going to write then?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Frederik Pohl has been honored with both the Hugo and the Nebula awards for his science fiction, and he was just named Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America. In his long and successful career, he has been the editor of award-winning magazines such as Worlds of If and Galaxy. His novels Gateway and Man Plus marked him as one of the all-time great SF writers. He and his wife, Elizabeth Ann Hull, live in Chicago, Illinois.
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