Gillian made herself meet the serene loving stare that was levelled at her, a stare that tore at her heart, and she heard herself saying in a loud voice that she did not recognize as being her own: “But why, Larry, why, before you . . . before you threw him in . . . why in God’s name did you have to use a knife?”
THE CROSS
“He doesn’t look at all well,” said Chaora, “you can’t pretend that he does, Balton. He looks perfectly dreadful, and if I lose another one it really will break my heart.”
Her husband regarded the pet that lay trembling in one corner of the vast room, shivering in spite of being bathed in heat rays which came from a cone-shaped device positioned only a few feet away. His look was one of pretended concern overlaying an ill concealed distaste. “He’s certainly lost most of his hair,” he commented, “and is much too fat. I must admit he doesn’t seem too good.”
“I don’t know what to do,” Chaora said. “So very little is known about them, that’s the whole trouble. I’ve asked Dara, who pretends to be such an expert,” she went on acidly, “and all the advice she could offer was warmth and nursing and plenty of liquid; and he won’t eat or drink anything at all. I’ve done my best but he doesn’t seem to respond.”
Balton tried hard to look suitably worried and sympathetic. Secretly he would be relieved if the animal were to die, but he could scarcely say so. These dilazos, or “bibikis” as the women called them, were most unattractive to an adult male mind; they were feeble physically, had horrid habits and were thoroughly insanitary. La-li was the third of them that Chaora had chosen to introduce into their lives. He found them most tedious and embarrassing. Given the chance they copulated as shamelessly and as eagerly as insects, in the most repellent manner, were always clamoring for attention, and were possessed of the most rudimentary intelligence. He had no patience with those of his friends who claimed that they had even an embryonic intellectual capacity. It was whimsy of a nauseating character, degrading to its perpetrators, and done to bolster up their own egos. Suppressing a yawn he contemplated his own sleek and handsome appearance in the looking-glass which completely covered one wall. “I expect he’ll pull through,” he said, “but you must face the fact that he is, well . . . mature. And if he shouldn’t do so,” he offered generously, “I’ll try and find you a replacement.” This, he realized, would not be easy. The climate did not suit dilazos, they ailed and they became sluggish and they died, and very few of them were able to breed successfully, and even when they did so, normally they achieved only one offspring, the majority of which expired before they were even weaned, which was yet another of their repulsive habits.
“Perhaps his collar’s too tight,” said Chaora. She hurried across to her patient who was stretched prone on a miniature air-filled mattress. “I’ll take it off altogether. Oh, my poor darling!” She unbuckled the flexible collar, woven in a silvery metal and studded with huge sapphires, and laid it down on a low table. Her lovely eyes were tear-filled. “Oh, Balton,” she said, “we’ve only had him for two years and already he’s graying and senile and, as you pointed out he’s losing his elegant figure. Why don’t they live longer? It is so unfair.”
“To give your heart to animals,” Balton said pedantically, “is a great mistake, for they will break it every time. You should try to be more like Dara,” he advised, “have them, but resist growing too fond of them.”
“Dara!” said Chaora. “You wouldn’t like it one bit if I were like her! She’s ninety per cent masculine; and her dilazos are all fighters.” She shuddered. “That horrible Krask! He’s absolutely hideous. An awful mud color, so clumsy, and in every way unappealing.” She was working herself up, mounted on a favorite hobby-horse. “As far as Krask is concerned,” she went on, “Dara is a disgrace to her sex—if anyone has ever been able to discover what it is! Dilazo fighting should be prohibited by law,” she said vehemently. “They cut each other to pieces or else batter one another to death. It’s cruel and revolting. I can’t think how you can bear to attend one. You, who are supposed to be a civilized being!”
Balton laughed. “It’s quite amusing when you understand the technicalities,” he said.
“It’s loathsome and barbaric and bloody,” Chaora contradicted, “and I hate you for supporting it.”
Balton was standing by the windows gazing out over the expanse of plain, dotted with giant trees and patterned by a checker board of irrigation canals, many miles of which were his property. Soon he would have to go back to the laboratory, but he did not like to leave his wife while she was so distressed. He glanced over at the panting animal in the corner, wishing that he could have been moved by its sufferings so that he could have shared her anxiety. Dilazos came in three colors, off-white, black, and yellow. There were brown ones too, like Dara’s, but these were not so highly prized. Some people held a theory that dilazos had a language of their own, that they were able to communicate with one another, but personally he doubted it. They made gabbling and rather disagreeable sounds, those of the females being particularly shrill, but that was all. One day Dara and he had tried to carry out an experiment, using the swarthy Krask and a young yellow female, but there had seemed to be a complete lack of understanding between them. They had just stood there making unintelligible noises at each other, until Krask had flung himself on her, his intentions plainly discernible. Dara had sworn angrily and cuffed him and dragged him off and put him back on his lead.
Unselfishly Balton hoped that he would be able to obtain another of them for Chaora but they were becoming hard to come by; he’d been told that their numbers on Alogia had shrunk to less than five hundred, and one had to pay through the nose for one. A little while ago when they had been plentiful there had been a cult for clipping them, shaving the heads of the males, except for a few tufts, and leaving them with their beards only, which was, in its way, sensible, since they harbored vermin; while the hair of the females had been twisted into fancy plaits, which had made them appear even more fantastic and ridiculous. He could not say truthfully that he cared for dilazos, and he was certain that they were carriers of disease. Luckily they were only a passing fad.
“Well,” he said, “I must be going. I hope for your sake that La-li will recover. If he does not,” he added, fearing that he had sounded heartless, “contact me at the laboratory, not that there will be a great deal that I can do to help.”
He kissed her quietly, and when he had gone away Chaora settled herself by the invalid. She noticed that a scarlet rash had begun to spread over his entire body, the eyes were closed and pus was oozing from their corners, and his breathing had become laborious. She realized that she was being unreasonable by permitting herself to get into such a state of desperation, that it was unwise to try to cling on to a dilazo, and sheer madness to love one. Their life span was so short. They were unsuited to the environment, to extremes of heat and cold. It was like transplanting shrubs into a different and hostile milieu where they would have but a slender chance of flourishing or even of survival.
She looked down at La-li. He had, from the first, refused the vitamin pills, had chosen always to scavenge for himself, returning to the house after a foraging expedition with either vegetables, that he would eat raw, or with the mangled corpses of birds which he had managed to catch and kill, not that the latter was much of an achievement, since they were mainly vavos, which were unable to fly and which had been preserved solely for the brilliance of their plumage. She should have insisted on his swallowing the vitamin tablets, with their balanced diet, for they would have built up his resistance, she should have fed La-li forcibly when it had been necessary. And now, she thought, she had left it too late.
She felt a deep depression. She remembered when he had first come to her, how he had danced on his hind legs to please her, how he had embraced her knees and made humming noises as if he had been trying to sing, and how she had failed utterly to teach him to w
alk on all fours, which he had been quite clever enough to master, but about which he had been very obstinate.
She could not have explained why she found dilazos so endearing. They could be, and often were, disappointing pets, petulant and of uncertain temper, which she found easy to understand, for their pathetic interests were so limited, nor could she deny that it was a nuisance having to take them out continually for the purposes of exercise and so that they could fulfil their primitive natural functions. They dawdled along so slowly, which was insufferably tedious, and resolutely refused to be hurried. In many ways they were infuriating. She supposed that their delicate constitutions came from their having no built-in adaption to changes of temperature; they were like ozadozzas—those exotic flowers which had to be grown in thermostatically controlled caverns.
Some of her friends had tried sewing them into little coats of vavos feathers to keep them warm, garments which covered their bodies while leaving their limbs exposed for free movement, but they had been irked and ill at ease while wearing them and had clamored for them to be taken off.
The first dilazos to be imported had been used for biological study, but vivisection had shown them to be structurally uninteresting, and safe so far as alien contamination was concerned, and the next consignments that had arrived had been allocated to the various zoos, where they had been temporarily a novel attraction; then, when they were brought back in increasing numbers, they had been sold as pets and had become something of a craze, the black ones being held to be aesthetically the more pleasing, although they were more difficult to train.
Chaora sprayed La-li with a soothing lotion and wiped away the discharge from his red-rimmed eyes. Although he was so useless and tiny she loved to see him around when she came home. She was never lonely when he was there. Balton was unable to understand her love of animals. It was not a part of his make-up. She stroked the tufts on La-li’s head and gently pulled at his grizzled beard that so short a time ago had been golden. She tried again to make him take his vitamins and the medicine which Dara had recommended, but he shut his mouth tightly and turned away his
head and refused to eat or to drink from the dish of water which she held for him. She spent most of the day by La-li’s side, stroking and encouraging him, but there seemed to be no improvement in his condition. Once he opened his eyes and his lips parted showing a glimpse of white teeth, but he could only move weakly and his face was glistening with sweat.
She was still crouched down beside him when Balton returned. He looked at La-li and then at his wife. “I’m afraid it’s no use,” he said. “He can’t recover, and there’s no point in going on torturing yourself. Darling, he won’t feel anything, I promise you that. Please let me deal with it for you. Why don’t you go over and see Dara and leave La-li here with me? It would be much the kindest thing to do.”
Chaora nuzzled the little creature’s hot cheek. Presently she raised her head. “Very well, Balton,” she said quietly. She went out of the room without looking back.
When she had gone Balton pushed a button and a wall panel slid back. From the cupboard he took out his atomizer, which was similar in shape to a revolver. Going over to where La-li was lying he took careful aim. “Take it easy old man,” he said. He pressed the trigger and there was a sibilant hiss, and then all that remained was a heap of ashes. He looked round the room and found a bowl of engraved crystal and into this he spooned the residuum of La-li. Perhaps Chaora would want to bury the ashes in the corner of the copse where she had made the animals’ cemetery. She was so gentle and foolishly sentimental. Before he started on the work which he had brought home he pondered briefly on the mystery of dilazos, wondering what, if anything, went on in their minds, whether they were capable of coherent thoughts, and if La-li had realized what was going to happen.
Chaora came back as the long twilight began to close in. She saw the bowl immediately, and the jewelled collar which Balton had placed beside it. She picked them up without comment and left the room. After a while, from the window, he saw her crossing the garden. In one hand she held the bowl and in the other there was a slim metal excavating rod. He smiled tolerantly and watched her as she walked away until she disappeared into the spinney of scented flowering trees.
As she made the grave Chaora mourned for La-li. She could never bring herself to have another dilazo. Never. She had been told that there were not many of them left now, a few colonies remained in the more remote corners of their globe, little communities of tough survivors who had proved themselves resistant to the virus that had been used against them, and these had taken to the jungles and the inaccessible mountains.
She tried to recall what she had learned as a child about their remote planet. Their villages, or so she had read, had been built around spired temples where their dead were buried in the earth, left to rot in wooden containers, and marked by monuments of stone, usually in the shape of a short-armed cross, stark and simple. Why this was so she had no idea, but tomorrow she would have this strange device erected. She would have it fashioned out of the local purple stone from their quarry, which in the dark was faintly luminous. She knew that Balton would laugh at her, but La-li would have liked it, of that she was sure.
Inside the circular house Balton touched a switch and the room was flooded with concealed lighting. He pressed a second that worked the transparent shutters which contained also the source of heat against the arctic Alogian night, and while they were slowly closing he saw Chaora on her way back from her melancholy task. She was very beautiful, her silky azure fur set off to perfection against the banks of white flowers between which she walked, flowers that in a few hours would be blackened and cut down by searing frost.
Chaora told him immediately of what she intended doing, and Balton mocked her with a wry kindness and tolerance, as she had known would be the case. His unexpressed hopes were that when La-li was lying at rest beneath a symbol which, had Chaora only known it, had been largely meaningless in his own country, in future he himself would receive a greater quota of her devotion which previously had been squandered so abundantly on the well-being of the dilazo.
“It’s a delightful idea of yours, Chaora,” he said, “but why only for La-li? Won’t it make his predecessors feel rather neglected?”
“No, I don’t think so,” she said. “A thing of that sort must be done at once, or not at all. Oh, I shall miss him! Dreadfully. He was so sweet. It won’t be at all the same now that he’s no longer here.”
Balton held out his hand. “I trust,” he said cautiously, “that I did right in atomizing him, and that you had not perhaps planned on having him stuffed?”
Chaora, to his extreme dismay, began to shake with sobs. “Balton, how can you make such a nauseating suggestion! Why, I’d . . . I’d as soon plan to have you stuffed, as darling little La-li.” She half ran to the doorway. “I’m going to lie down,” she announced. “How could you be so beastly? How could you!”
Left by himself Balton shrugged his herculean shoulders. It was difficult indeed to know what was the right thing to say to a woman.
Before La-li, or Dimitri Protov as he was then, had been herded aboard the space ship, although his owners were naturally ignorant of that fact, he had been a dancer in the Russian Ballet. Balton was reckoning that if the proprietor of the animal dealer’s establishment had been correct, and it was well known that it was simple enough to determine a dilazo’s age from the condition of its bones and teeth, La-li must have reached twenty-seven or -eight terrestrial years, or about four by Alogian reckoning. After the necessary quarantine he had remained in Chaora’s pampered keeping for a further two years, which must total up, Balton thought, to some kind of a longevity record for their pathetic species.
Upon further deliberation he had decided against their embarking upon another dilazo. He would buy her a querante instead. They were less delicate, infinitely more attractive and amusing,
and altogether more biddable, but then, of course, they originated from a planet which was in a state of considerably greater advancement than that of Earth.
Querantes had fur, at least, and did not need to make discordant squeaks or growls whenever they wanted to make themselves understood. Dilazos, on the other hand, if one could bring oneself to study their intimate behavior, were really revolting. Evolution had made many mistakes on a multitude of planets, but surely a dilazo must have been one of the crudest?
Chaora would soon forget La-li.
The Smell of Evil Page 23