Wherever
You Are
Poul Anderson
The monster laid a taloned hand on the girl’s shoulder. She jumped, startled, and whirled about to face bulging red eyes. The monster opened jaws full of teeth that glowed.
The girl wrenched free. “What the devil do you want?” she yelled.
“Eek,” said the monster, stepping back a pace. “Urgu aki, Zivar.”
The girl advanced threateningly. “The next time you forget your manners,” she snapped, “the next time you forget who I am, you peasant, may heaven protect you!”
The monster wailed and scuttled down the path, as if hoping the man would come along and save him from the girl.
Ulrica Ormstad added a few soldierly oaths and followed. She knew they were wasted; nobody understood any Terrestrial language for several thousand kilometers. (Unless, she thought scornfully, you counted Didymus Mudge. But a corpulent help he was!) Nevertheless, her emotions needed a safety valve, and she could barely speak Harakunye, let alone swear in it.
Far down underneath, she admitted her anger stemmed from loneliness. And even, it might be, fear. She was trained to face battle, or storm, or the sudden failure of human engineering under conditions never foreseen by man. The situation here, on this island, held some of those elements. But basically it was another sort of dilemma, involving a worse way to die.
Therefore Ulrica Ormstad fell back on pride. She was a major in the militechnic service of New Scythia, free-born to full rights in Clan Swenson. Let the universe beware!
Long strides carried her quickly through the jungle. Its leaves were stiff and reddish blue: vegetation on Epstein’s Planet photosynthesized, but the compound used was not chlorophyl. At first the pervasive smell had sickened her a little, but she soon grew used to it. Now, when she returned to her home world, or visited Mother Earth—if she ever did—their familiar biochemistry would stink for a while.
The native glowbugs, spectacularly clustered where thickets made a twilight, or the beautiful crystal flowers, or the delicate chiming of bellfruit, had ceased to interest her. She would swap it all for a chance to leave this hellhole.
The game trail ended and Ulrica stepped out onto a broad white beach. The ship Geyvadigur lay anchored inside a sheltered lagoon: for the hidden sun was close enough to raise considerable tides, even in the absence of a satellite. Boats were drawn up on the sand, where the crew had pitched conical pink tents. The sailor whom she had frightened waited timidly. Doubtless Captain Zalakun wished to question her.
Ulrica sighed. She had gone walking in the jungle just to get away from the endless struggle with Harakunye grammar. For one honest human conversation, in any human language, she would trade her soul. Make it Swedish, and she’d throw in her sidearm.
Didymus Mudge emerged from one of the tents. He had been playing with a silly-looking affair inside, wooden frameworks and inclined planes, as indeed he had done for a week now. The ship’s carpenter, who had been helping, squeaked at sight of Ulrica and tried to hide behind the man. Since Mudge stood only one hundred eighty centimeters tall, and even the smallest Epsteinian was three meters long including the tail, this was not very successful.
“Oh. Hello.” Mudge tried to smile. “What were you doing, Miss Ormstad?”
Ulrica put hands on hips and glared downward. Mudge was slender as well as short, with sandy hair, cowlick, an undistinguished freckled face, and large blue eyes nearsighted behind contact lenses. His tattered gray zipsuit did not make him more impressive.
“I will give you three guesses,” snorted the girl. “I have been making an atomic-powered aircraft with my bare hands? No. Then I have been weaving vines into a radio circuit, to call base and have them come get us? No. I have been practicing to swim all the way to Lonesome Landing? Still no. Kors i Herrans namn! And you are supposed to be bright enough to teach children!”
“I . . . er . . . yes,” said the Earthman meekly.
Ulrica looked him up and down. She herself had the big bones and powerful muscles of a human breed which had spent generations under the gee-and-a-half of New Scythia. It did not make her less graceful, in a full-hipped fullbreasted way; on her, a salt-stained tunic and clan kilt looked good. Thick, brown braids lay tightly around a face of high cheekbones, straight nose, broad firm mouth, and wide-set green eyes. Even beneath the perpetually leaden sky of this planet, her skin glowed tawny.
“And still Earth manages to be the leader of the League,” she murmured. “I do not understand it. I just plain do not.” Louder: “Well, what have you been tinkering with? Are you making an abstraction ladder in there, to teach semantics? Better you learn to talk with these lizards first!”
“That isn’t my forte,” said Mudge in a defensive tone. “You were trained from childhood to pick up languages fast, tone discrimination, mnemonics—You might as well expect me, at my time of life, to take up ballet, as learn Harakunye from scratch in a week!”
Ulrica laughed.
“What is it?” asked Mudge.
“The thought of you in tights,” she chortled, “doing a pas de deux with an Epsteinian.”
“Some people have a strange sense of humor,” grumbled Mudge. He rubbed his peeling nose. Enough ultraviolet had penetrated the clouds to give his untanned hide a bad sunburn.
“I have been so busy studying,” said Ulrica. Mirth had eased her, and she wanted to offer friendliness to this fellow castaway whom she had scarcely seen so far. “It was necessary I be able to talk with them. As soon as one sailor got restless, I let him go and started with another. I only stopped to eat and sleep. But you, what have you been working on?”
Mudge pointed to his wrist watch. “This was damaged,” he said. “It kept running, and I know the precise time when it was deranged. But now it’s either fast or slow, I’m not sure which. Checking it against my pulse suggests it is slow, but I have always had an irregular pulse. I—”
“What?” yelped Ulrica. “At this time you worry about your little tin watch?”
“It isn’t either,” said Mudge. “It’s a very good seventeen-jewel Swiss chrono. My mother gave it to me at graduation. My graduation, that is, not hers. Though she does have a degree herself, from the same place, Boston Uni—”
“On a desert island,” said Ulrica to heaven, “x thousand kilometers from the one human outpost on this entire planet, surrounded by natives of absolutely unknown culture and intentions, he worries about his graduation present. Du store Gud! Also lieber Gott, nom du Dieu, and Bozhe moi!”
“But wait,” bleated Mudge. “It’s important! Let me explain!”
Ulrica stalked down to the shore, trailing a string of remarks which ionized the air behind her.
The sailor stood patiently at a beached rowboat. He was a typical Epsteinian, which is to say he looked rather like a small slim tyrannosaur with a bulldog face and round cox-combed head. His scales were dark-blue on top, pale below, and zebra striped; his eyes were red and bulging, his teeth phosphorescent yellow. He wore merely crossed belts, one of which held a knife and one a pouch. The data book—thank a lifetime’s Amazonian training for the quickwittedness which had made Ulrica pocket that, along with a bottle of vitamin pills, when the spaceboat exploded—said the autochthones were not actually reptiles, being warm-blooded and placental. Neither were they mammals, lacking the appropriate glands as well as hair. They looked ferocious enough, but most of the Geyvadigur crew had shown Yes, Master personalities.
The officers, though, appeared to be something else again.
Ulrica entered the boat. The sailor launched it, jumped in, and rowed her out to the ship. Tension gathered within her. After the captain understood she was working on his language, he had turned the dull job of helping over to his crew. A few hours ago, one of the mates—Ulrica assumed that was their status—had interviewed her briefly and gone off wagging his tail. He must have reported she was now proficient enough to talk intelligently.
The ship loomed over her. Except for t
he ornate figurehead, it might at first glance have been an early Terrestrial steamer, with high stacks, monstrous sidewheels, and two schooner-rigged masts in case of emergency. Then you began to notice things. There probably wasn’t a door on all Epstein’s Planet, except at Lonesome Landing, likely to pinch a tail. Since the natives sat on those same organs, they had never invented chairs. The treads of all ladders, and the ratlines, were a meter apart. Ulrica had inspected the engines and been surprised to find them oil-burning steam turbines; why the craft then used paddles instead of screws could only be explained by the whimsical gods who, on Earth, had once put engines in the front of rear-wheel drive automobiles.
The Geyvadigur had both magnetic and spring-powered gyro compasses, but otherwise no hint of electromagnetic technology—which scuttled all hope of radioing for help. Quite likely the eternal damp atmosphere accounted for the Harakuni failure to study such phenomena, even though the nearby sun lit every night with fabulous auroras. Poverty of resources, or sheer historical accident, might explain the fact that there were no firearms aboard. The craft did, however, sport catapults, oil bombs, and flame throwers.
Ulrica would have felt better had her own pistol been of any use. But she had exhausted its charge against hungry sea snakes, as she and Mudge paddled their fragment of spaceboat toward this island; and when the vessel went, there hadn’t been time to grab extra clips.
The sailor helped her up a Jacob’s ladder. The decks were littered with his fellows, polishing, holystoning, splicing, the usual nautical chores. A mate stalked about with a barbed-wire whip, touching up an occasional back to encourage progress. Ulrica stamped as haughtily as possible to the captain’s cabin. (Another foreign detail. It was a thatch hut, its walls lined with a tasteful collection of weapons and Epsteinian skulls.)
Captain Zalakun bared his fangs politely as the girl entered. Beside him squatted a gaunt male with an eyeglass and a sash whereon a dozen medals tinkled together. A sawtoothed scimitar lay drawn on the table. Combats between Epsteinians, whose scales bounced back a mere slash, must be awesome.
“Ssss,” greeted the captain. “Coil your tail, Zivar.”
At least he used the aristocratic title. The only alternative Ulrica had found in Harakunye was Yaldazir, which seemed a contraction of a phrase meaning “Offal of an unspeakable worm.” If you weren’t addressed by one title, you necessarily had the other.
She hunkered and waited.
Zalakun turned toward the eyeglass. “Zxvar” he said, “this is the monster called Orumastat, which we took from the sea with its slave four days ago.” He meant Epsteinian days, of course, forty-six hours long. Turning to Ulrica: “Orumastat, this is the most glorious Feridur of Beradura, who heads our expedition. You have not seen him before because he was belowdecks playing karosi. Now that you can talk, Feridur of Beradura will let you know his magnanimous will.”
Ulrica struggled to follow the speech. She was by no means fluent in Harakunye. In this conversation, she often had to ask what a word meant; or sometimes the natives were baffled by her accent. But, in effect, she answered: “That would be very pleasant to know.”
The language barrier strained out sarcasm. Feridur lifted his monocle. “I say, captain,” he asked, “are you sure it is a bona fide warrior? It didn’t even sneer at me.”
“It claims to be, Zivar,” said Zalakun uncertainly. “And after all, if I may extrude a suggestion, your magnificent memory will recall tribes we have already encountered, prepared to fight bravely but given to soft female-type words on all other occasions.”
“True. Yes. True.” Feridur wiggled his tail tip. “And this creature is still more alien, eh, what? Great Kastakun, how hideous it is!”
“Hey!” bristled Ulrica. Then she sat back. Perhaps this was a compliment. She didn’t know.
According to the data book, all Epsteinians encountered so far by humans had been amiable fishers and farmers. In the archipelagoes fringing the Northeast Ocean they were neolithic; further west, they had begun to use iron; and cursory flights above one of the small continents beyond had shown areas where there were cities and square-rigged ships.
The Geyvadigur was from Harakun, still further west—perhaps at the antipodes—and, apparently, still more advanced in technology. The vessel must have been chugging eastward for months, exploring, refueling often from the planet’s many natural oil wells. Now it poised somewhere near the edge of the Northeast Ocean, with little but water ahead for half the world’s circumference.
In short, this region was as strange to Zalakun and Feridur as it was to Ulrica and Mudge. By the same token, you could no more conclude what the Harakuni were like from reports on local primitives than an eighteenth-century Martian visiting Hawaii could have predicted the character of Europeans.
It behooved her to gang warily. But gang she must.
“Well, don’t just sit there,” said Feridur. “Speak. Or do tricks, or something.” He yawned. “Great Kastakun! And to think I left my estates because I thought this wretched expedition would be an adventure! Why, I haven’t collected ten decent skulls since we weighed anchor!”
“Ah, but Zivar,” soothed Zalakun, “what an interesting skull Orumastat has.”
“True,” said Feridur, perking up. “Sensational. A collector’s item. That is, if Orumastat gives me enough of a fight.”
“Oh, but it is a guest,” objected Zalakun. “I didn’t mean Orumastat personally, but warriors of its tribe, after we contact them—”
“Quiet, you low creature,” said Feridur.
The captain looked distressed. He tried another approach: “Orumastat may be too soft to be worthwhile. No scales.”’
“The erkurna of Akhvadin lacks scales,” pointed out Feridur, “and yet if you meet one hand-to-hand and survive, its skull is jolly well worth fifty like yours.”
“True,” said Zalakun, banging his brow on the table. “I abase myself.”
Ulrica stood up. The conversation seemed to be getting out of hand. “Just a moment, just a moment!” she exclaimed. “I did not come here to fight.”
“No?” Feridur gaped idiotically and twiddled his eyeglass. “Not to fight? Whatever for, then?”
“It was shipwrecked, puissant one,” said Zalakun.
“Eh, what? Shipwrecked? Nonsense. We haven’t had any storms lately. Couldn’t be shipwrecked. I mean to say, that’s nonsense. Gome, come, now, monster, out with it. Why are you here?”
“Shut up, you knock-kneed son of a frog!” snarled Ulrica. She kept her fraying temper just enough to say it in English.
“Eh? What say? Don’t understand it. Terrible accent. If it’s going to learn Harakunye, why can’t it learn right? Answer me that.” Feridur leaned back sulkily and toyed with his scimitar.
Zalakun gave him a glance of frustrated exasperation, then said to the girl: “Suppose you explain yourself from the beginning.”
Ulrica had dreaded that request. The upper atmosphere of this planet was so thickly clouded that you never even saw its own sun, let alone the stars. She had learned without surprise that the Harakuni thought their world was flat. Even their boldest sailors never ventured more than a few-hundred kilometers from land, and that only in familiar seas where compass and log made (rude dead reckoning possible.
Briefly, she was tempted to say: “Mudge and I were coming down in a small terry from the regular supply spaceship. We were letting the autopilot bring us in on a radio beam, and know only that we were several thousand kilometers west of Lonesome Landing. I have no idea what number that word ‘several’ really stands for. Some freakish backblast caused the engine to explode, the jet stream seized us and flung us far off course, we came down in a torn-off section on a dying grav-unit with capricious winds blowing us about, and hit the sea near this island. Every scrap of our equipment is lost or ruined. Doubtless aircraft are hunting for us, but what chance have we of being found on an entire, virtually unmapped planet, before our vitamin pills give out and we die? For we can eat the nat
ive life, but unless it is supplemented with Terrestrial vitamins we will soon get scurvy, beriberi, pellagra, and every other deficiency disease you can name.”
But she didn’t have Harakunye words to say it.
Instead, she ventured: “We are of a race different from yours. All our tribe are mighty warriors. We two went far from the island where we live, exploring in a boat that flew. But it suffered harm in the air and we fell here, where you soon found us.”
“We spied your ruin descending and made haste to investigate,” said Captain Zalakun. “I have been looking at the wreckage. That material like unbreakable glass is interesting, but why do you use such soft light metal instead of wood or iron?”
Ulrica sighed. “That is a long story,” she answered. “There are many wonderful things we can show you, if you will only take us to our home.” She was quite confident the Geyvadigur could reach Lonesome Landing in time. The ship must be capable of averaging at least five knots, which meant some fifteen hundred kilometers an Earth-week. The station was certainly less than five thousand kilometers away. There were pills left for three weeks; and, if necessary, several days’more without vitamins would do no serious harm.
“We are anxious to know all the nations in your . . . er, in the world,” continued Ulrica persuasively. “We wish trade with them, and friendship.” No need to elaborate on the civilizing program of the League. They might not appreciate that idea without advance propaganda.
“Trade?” Feridur brightened. “Skulls?”
“Well—” temporized Ulrica.
“See here,” said Feridur in a reasonable tone, “either you want to fight and give a chap a chance to collect skulls, or else you’re not worth contacting. Eh, what? Isn’t that fair?”
“My splendid master,” said Zalakun with strained politeness, “we have already discovered that few foreign peoples share the interest of us and our neighbors in craniology. There are other things in life, you know.”
Bug-Eyed Monsters Page 11