“I don’t think anyone knew they were doing it until the job was nine-tenths completed,” remarked Sal in the same disinterested voice China had just used.
Zilia started a complaint with, “You can’t just let your children … ,” and Spiggy laid his hands on her shoulders, calming her down.
“Come on, Zil. No damage done. For heaven’s sake, girl! Make up your mind. The kid is right! This is exactly what the Native Matters Advisory would like to see done, isn’t it? Exactly what you’d like to have had the Ancient Monuments Panel doing. Quit screaming about it and take a look.”
“Come see the beautiful job they’ve made of it,” called Jamice from the temple doorway. “Look at these mosaics, Zilia. If you’d had artists sent in from Phansure, they couldn’t have done better. And see how neatly the children have laid the roof logs.” She went in, still talking, leaving the others to follow.
The children sat down where they were, watchful but quiet. After a time the visitors came out of the temple, trailed by their settlement escorts, the latter looking slightly puzzled though not at all concerned.
The children rose politely, as they had been taught to do in the presence of elders.
“Are you going to reconstruct another of the temples?” Jamice asked them, using her sweetest tone of voice. She was moved to make much of the children, partly by her scorn for Zilia Makepeace, and partly by her well-developed esthetic sense. The graceful complexity of the designs in the newly laid floors had impressed her greatly.
“No, Ma’am,” said Saturday in her most courteous voice. “We don’t plan to. It was very hard work, and we learned just about everything there was to learn about it.”
One of the men was watching her very closely, a rather ugly man. He smiled at her, and she blushed, suddenly realizing who he was. He wasn’t nearly as ugly as Africa had said.
“What are you going to do with it, now that it’s done?” the ugly man wanted to know. It was the same question Gotoit Quillow had asked, months before. Now, as then, no one answered it. Saturday looked at the questioner from beneath her lashes, shrugging. Jeopardy glanced at Willum R.
“Would you like to come to our Settlement Series tonight?” Willum R. asked Spiggy, with an ingenuous smile and a gesture indicating that all the visitors were included in the invitation. “We’re playing Settlement Three, and winner gets to play Settlement Four in the semifinals.”
• Guest quarters in Settlement One, as in all the settlements, were on the upper floor of the Supply and Administration building: half a dozen bedrooms with bath and sanitary facilities, a kitchen, and a comfortable room furnished with information stages, which could be used for relaxation or meetings or work. As was customary during visitations by CM staffers, a kitchen crew had been detailed to cook for the visitors.
The people from CM were served a plentiful and well-prepared supper, after which they separated: Horgy and Jamice going off to attend the game they’d been invited to by Willum R; Spiggy and Zilia announcing their intention of taking a walk out to see the place Sam had been attacked. Once Horgy and Jamice had left, however, the other two found reasons to put off their exercise, lingering over the cheese, sweet filled cakes, and dried fruits which had been served as “finishers.”
“What are these?” wondered Spiggy.
“Plum willow,” she said. “They grow here and over around Settlement Five.”
“Amazing,” Spiggy murmured. “I’ve been here for over fifteen lifeyears, the last six in management, and I’m still learning things every day. You know a remarkable amount to have been here such a brief time.”
“My father always said I was a fast learner. And it’s been almost two years, now.”
“You came from Ahabar, didn’t you?”
“How did you know that?”
“You used the word father. Hardly anyone does, unless they’re from Ahabar.”
“I was born on Ahabar, in the southern counties of Voorstod. A county called Green Hurrah. I grew up mostly in the Celphian Rings.”
“I’ve never been to the Rings.”
“Nobody with any sense would ever go there.”
“You must have had some reason for being there.”
“My father was sure he could find moon-gems where other people had failed. Father always had this conviction that he was destined to succeed where others couldn’t. He took other people’s failures as favorable omens. If they couldn’t do it, he’d try it. If other people were successful at a given endeavor, father wasn’t interested. He needed to succeed at something other people had failed at. It made his life, and ours, a succession of disasters and disappointments. In the Rings, we lived in a environment container unit with a faulty recycler. Father was out prospecting for fire opals most of the time, and he got food at the outpost, but Mother finally died, mostly from malnutrition. I was very sick, too.”
“Your family had a marriage tradition?”
“All the Voorstoders do, yes. Mother was from there.”
“How do you feel about that tradition?” he asked curiously.
“After watching Mother wither away among the Rings? I feel the same way I feel about slavery and genocide,” she snarled at him. “Which are also Voorstod traditions. Why do you ask? Were you going to propose a contract.”
He laughed shakily, set back by her sudden ferocity. “No, I was just curious. Cultures with marriage traditions are so much in the minority, I find them exotic, that’s all. I’m from Thyker, and Thykerites regard marriage as a kind of slavery. I know Voorstod has one of the old tribal religions that allows slavery.”
“That insists upon slavery,” she spat. “They have an interesting doctrine. According to the prophets, the only men who are free are those who do only what they want to. Doing what someone else wants you to is the sign of a slave. However, since there are always things that must be done, but that no one wants to do, a free man must have slaves to do those things. According to the Voorstoders, slavery is God’s signs of approval to his people. It isn’t allowed, it’s required.” She made an angry sound and rubbed her forehead, “Luckily, my father’s family wasn’t pure Voorstoder. In Green Hurrah there’s been intermarriage for generations.”
“So, how did you get away from the Rings?”
“After Mother died, Authority wouldn’t let my father leave me in the Environmental Containment Unit alone. Child endangerment, it’s called. At the time I thought that was pretty funny. Wife endangerment isn’t a crime under the Authority—or among the Voorstoders. Perhaps they see women as consumables—and if the child is with the wife, you can endanger them both and nobody cares. Once the mama dies leaving minor girl children, though, then the Authority gets very exercised. Some kind of incest taboo, probably, for the Authority certainly has no religion to move it in that direction. My father sent me back to Grandmother Makepeace, and I left as soon as I could. Fifteen years ago now.”
“That long.”
She fished in the neck of her blouse for the life-timer which hung between her breasts, flicked open the cover and read the numbers glowing at her. “This read almost sixteen when I got off the moons. It reads thirty now. Almost fifteen lifeyears.” She subsided, simmering.
He said nothing more but merely stood at the window, watching the darkness come down. Gradually she calmed as the quiet remained unbroken. In the kitchen, the settler crew finished cleaning up and left, one man poking his head through the door to ask what time they wanted breakfast.
“We said we were going walking,” Spiggy suggested, when the kitchener had gone.
She shook her head. “It occurs to me that going out in the dark to a place a settler was attacked by a large unknown predator may not be very intelligent.”
He nodded. “You have a point. Would you like a game of some kind? Chess, maybe. Or four-way?”
She shook her head, rose, and went to the window where she stood, looking out at the settlement. “What did you think of that temple. The one the kids rebuilt. Or say they rebuilt.”
“Do you really doubt they did it?”
She thought about it, trying to set her usual skepticism aside. “Not really, I guess. But I don’t believe they thought it up all by themselves.”
“Why is that?”
“Because of the amount of work involved. I looked at the ruined temples in the settlement. I estimate there’s somewhere between two thousand and twenty-five hundred square feet of mosaic in the floors with four or five hundred stones to the square foot. There’s over two thousand square feet of roof, with clay laid several inches thick over all of it. The labor involved …”
Spiggy shook his head at her, grinning.
“Why are you grinning at me?”
“When I was about eleven, back in Serena on Thyker, where I grew up, six of my friends and I built a clubhouse. We dug a tunnel over twenty feet long, shored it up and cased it with sponge panels we stole from a construction site. Then we dug a twenty-by-twenty cave, eight feet high. It took us one whole year, every spare minute we had. Nobody urged us to do it. Nobody even knew we were doing it. When we were finished with it, we used it half a dozen times, then we had some heavy rains and the thing collapsed, luckily not when we were in it. Kids do things like that. Of course, they’d think it was slavery if their parents wanted them to do it. Part of the attraction is that nobody knows, that it’s a secret.”
She shook her head at him. “I suppose that’s true, Spiggy, but the difference is that this temple isn’t going to collapse. Children can exert enormous amounts of energy, but when they build things, they usually do it as you and your friends did, not quite competently. They haven’t gained the experience and knowledge they would need to build competently. The temple we saw today couldn’t have been done better if the settlers had done it themselves under expert direction. I believe it’s exactly as it was originally. Where did the kids learn how?”
“Archives?” he suggested.
“Archives! When I knew we were coming to Settlement One, I looked up everything there is in the Archives about the God and the Departed and the ruins. There was never an architectural study done of the Bondru Dharm temple. It was occupied when the first settlers arrived, so Native Matters instructed that it not be disturbed. All Archives had were a few pictures of the outside, a sketchy floor plan and the verbal description given by the xenologists. Nothing else. Either there’s an unsung genius among the children, or …”
“Or the settlers are lying,” he suggested.
“Or the settlers are lying,” she agreed. “Someone helped the kids. Someone used the kids.”
“Are you sharpening your claws?” he asked gently. “Who are you out to get, Zilia?”
She turned to him, hands out and open, mouth making a lopsided grin. “I know what you all think of me, Spiggy. Everyone at CM thinks I’m crazy. Hell, everyone back at Native Matters thinks I’m crazy. Well, everybody thinks you’re crazy, too, with your ups and downs. And most people think Jamice has the terminal nasties. About the only sane one among us is Horgy, and he has this little satyriasis problem he keeps asking his friends and acquaintances to help him with.”
“And Dern,” grinned Spiggy. “Don’t forget Dern.”
“And Dern. Who is usually out in the settlements, running around in disguise, thinking no one knows who he is. Tandle actually runs CM, and anybody who doesn’t know that is blind, deaf, and has no sensation left in his extremities. So, we’re all mad in one way or another.”
“My question was, who are you out to get?”
“I learned growing up that people always exploit others if they can get away with it! My father exploited my mother and me. My grandmother exploited her sons and daughters and grandchildren; the Voorstoders exploit the Gharm. I was born a child and a girl and therefore a victim, and I didn’t like it. I want to stop there being other victims. So I go around accusing people of genocide and corporate torture and child-eating, watching to see if anybody turns pale. And no, I don’t believe what people tell me! Grandma always had a ready answer. My father always had a ready answer. In Voorstod, they’ve got a whole catechism of answers. I’m not ready to accept what people say. Almost always there could be some other answer, you know.”
“No, I don’t know. What other answer?”
“maybe not all the Departed died. Hobbs Land has been surveyed, but nobody claims it’s been thoroughly explored. Maybe some of them have shown up here at Settlement One, and the first thing they did was restore a temple for one of their Gods.”
“Farfetched, but possible.”
“Maybe the Departed didn’t show up here. Maybe they’re back in the hills, and some of the settlers have restored the temple to bait them in.”
“Bait them in?”
“To use as forced labor.”
“Equally farfetched. Have you seen the Owlbrit? You might as well try to get labor out of a cabbage.”
“That may be true. But it seems to me that restoring a Departed temple for no special reason is also farfetched, especially when I’m told children did it! There’s something else going on here, Spiggy. Count on it!”
“So what are you going to do about it.”
She shrugged again, widely, both arms out as wide as she could reach, as though some solution lay just beyond her fingertips. “What can I do? Make recordings. Ask the Native Matters Advisory for an engineer to do a structural study, or maybe even ask for an Ancient Monuments survey. There’s never been a survey done here.” She became thoughtful. “Actually, that’s a pretty good idea. It would at least tell us what we’re dealing with. They can’t survey the monuments without getting around most of the planet. There are ruins of villages scattered all over the escarpment.”
He sighed, shaking his head. She was being fairly reasonable, for Zilia. “So, do it then, and consider you’ve done your duty! Come on, Zilia. Let’s not waste a pleasant evening. If you’re afraid to go out among the beasts, let’s take a walk around the settlement.”
• The game was a doubleheader, the Settlement One first- and second-level teams against the first- and second-level teams of Settlement Three. Settlement One, with several very young players—including Willum R., who had just turned fifteen—on its first-level team, did not expect to do very well and was pleasantly surprised at ending with a tie score.
“You wouldn’t have if you hadn’t cheated,” sneered a frustrated Settlement Three player to Willum R. in the changing room. Settlements didn’t lean toward frills, and there was only one changing room for each sex, share and share alike, visitors and the home team.
“We didn’t cheat!” cried Willum R., stung by the accusation. “That’s a rotten thing to say.”
“Vernor Soamses,” snapped the Settlement Three coach, “that’s not sportsmanlike. You owe the player an apology.”
“Well they do something,” whined Vernor. “Settlement One always wins more than they ought to. They’ve always had that God-thing around, kind of a good luck charm. The rest of us don’t have one.” So his Uncle Jamel had always said, though nobody had seen Uncle Jamel for a good while now.
“The God died!” retorted Willum R. “It died a long time ago.”
“So you say,” sneered Vernor, almost silently.
“Vernor,” growled his coach.
“I apologize,” said Vernor, covertly displaying a bent index finger to turn around what he said, showing he didn’t mean the apology.
From the nearby toilets, Horgy heard the conversation and made mental note of it. So the other settlements thought Settlement One had an unfair advantage. Interesting. Perhaps Sam knew that. Undoubtedly, he knew that. Perhaps the pressure of being on top, and staying there, had cracked him. Thus far during the trip, Horgy had heard nothing but praise for Sam, but that could be loyalty talking. Now that Settlement One was doing no better than some of the other settlements, that loyalty might change.
And then, too, there was this odd business about this thing that had attacked Sam? Had anything really attacked him? Had he killed somet
hing, or seriously wounded something. Or someone. Horgy sat, ruminating. There was that man who had disappeared from Settlement Three. What had his name been?
Well, tomorrow they’d go look at the place the attack had taken place. They’d collect the bones. Then they’d go back to CM. Dern would be most interested. He’d keep it quiet, of course. Dern wouldn’t want biologists and zoologists from System flocking onto Hobbs Land to investigate this possible new life-form. It would upset production. No, Dern would keep it quiet. But Horgy himself intended to find out as much as he could.
• Technically speaking, Authority consisted of twenty-one members, appointed for life, who had final and irrevocable power over all the worlds and moons in System. Unofficially, however, the word Authority was used to mean the moon upon which these members were housed, as well as all the rest of its inhabitants, whether or not they were members of any official committee or Panel or Advisory. The official bodies included the Advisories of Defense, Intelligence, Science, Religion, and so forth, as well as the Native Matters Advisory with its four subordinate panels: Ancient Monuments, Linguistics, Interspecies Relations, and Advanced Studies. The latter was a catchall panel to which all matters were referred which pertained to indigenes and seemed to fit nowhere else.
The staff of the Native Matters Advisory was relatively small, inbred, almost incestuous. Great-great-grandchildren of early members now occupied offices their forebears had built and sat at desks their great-grandparents had ordered made by Phansuri craftsmen. Inbred though they were, Native Matters persons were sincere. When Phansure, Thyker, and Ahabar, worlds without native peoples, had filled up and spilled colonists into the Belt, where there were native peoples, the citizens of the sister worlds had reviewed their history, ancient and recent, and determined with rare unanimity that genocide and slavery, which had stained the skirts of humanity for millennia, would not take place in System. They had resolved that the prior inhabitants of the system were to be compensated for, or protected against, all human damages or harms which might already have taken place, which might be anticipated, or which might eventually and inadvertently occur.
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