Strangers No More

by Isaac Asimov, Philip José Farmer,Marion Zimmer Bradley

  She looked stricken. “But what about the war here?” she asked.

  “There are a few men among the Landfolk who are capable of leading in wartime. It will take strong men, and there are very few like me, I admit, but—oh, oh, opposition!” He broke off at sight of the six guards who stood before the Earthman’s suite.

  Lusine helped, and within a minute they had slain three and chased away the others. Then they burst through the door—and Rastignac received another shock.

  The occupant of the apartment was a tiny and exquisitely formed redhead with large blue eyes and very unmasculine curves!

  “I thought you said Earthman?” protested Rastignac to the Giant who came lumbering along behind them.

  “Oh, I used that in the generic sense,” Mapfarity replied. “You didn’t expect me to pay any attention to sex, did you? I’m not interested in the gender of you Humans, you know.”

  There was no time for reproach. Rastignac tried to explain to the Earthwoman who he was, but she did not understand him. However, she did seem to catch on to what he wanted and seemed reassured by his gestures. She picked up a large book from a table and, hugging it to her small, high and rounded bosom, went with him out the door.

  They raced from the palace and descended onto the square. Here they found the surviving Amphibs clustered into a solid phalanx and fighting, bloody step by step, towards the street that led to the harbor.

  Rastignac’s little group skirted the battle and started down the steep avenue toward the harbor. Halfway down he glanced back and saw that nobody as yet was paying any attention to them. Nor was there anybody on the street to bother them, though the pavement was strewn with Skins and bodies. Apparently, those who’d lived through the first savage mêlée had gone to the square.

  They ran onto the wharf. The Earthwoman motioned to Rastignac that she knew how to open the spaceship, but the Amphibs didn’t. Moreover, if they did get in, they wouldn’t know how to operate it. She had the directions for so doing in the book hugged so desperately to her chest. Rastignac surmised she hadn’t told the Amphibs about that. Apparently they hadn’t, as yet, tried to torture the information from her.

  Therefore, her telling him about the book indicated she trusted him.

  Lusine said, “Now what, Jean-Jacques? Are you still going to abandon this planet?”

  “Of course,” he snapped.

  “Will you take me with you?”

  He had spent most of his life under the tutelage of his Skin, which ensured that others would know when he was lying. It did not come easy to hide his true feelings. So a habit of a lifetime won out.

  “I will not take you,” he said. “In the first place, though you may have some admirable virtues, I’ve failed to detect one. In the second place, I could not stand your blood-drinking nor your murderous and totally immoral ways.”

  “But, Jean-Jacques, I will give them up for you!”

  “Can the shark stop eating fish?”

  “You would leave Lusine, who loves you as no Earthwoman could, and go with that—that pale little doll I could break with my hands?”

  “Be quiet,” he said. “I have dreamed of this moment all my life. Nothing can stop me now.”

  They were on the wharf beside the bridge that ran up the smooth side of the starship. The guard was no longer there, though bodies showed that there had been reluctance on the part of some to leave.

  They let the Earthwoman precede them up the bridge.

  Lusine suddenly ran ahead of him, crying, “If you won’t have me, you won’t have her, either! Nor the stars!”

  Her knife sank twice into the Earthwoman’s back. Then, before anybody could reach her, she had leaped off the bridge and into the harbor.

  Rastignac knelt beside the Earthwoman. She held out the book to him, then she died. He caught the volume before it struck the wharf.

  “My God! My God!” moaned Rastignac, stunned with grief and shock and sorrow. Sorrow for the woman and shock at the loss of the ship and the end of his plans for freedom.

  Mapfarity ran up then and took the book from his nerveless hand. “She indicated that this is a manual for running the ship,” he said. “All is not lost.”

  “It will be in a language we don’t know,” Rastignac whispered.

  Archambaud came running up and shrilled, “The Amphibs have broken through and are coming down the street! Let’s get to our boat before the whole bloodthirsty mob gets here!”

  Mapfarity paid him no attention. He thumbed through the book, then reached down and lifted Rastignac from his crouching position by the corpse.

  “There’s hope yet, Jean-Jacques,” he growled. “This book is printed with the same characters as those I saw in a book owned by a priest I knew. He said it was in Hebrew, and that it was the Holy Book in the original Earth language. This woman must be a citizen of the Republic of Israel, which I understand was rising to be a great power on Earth at the time you French left.

  “Perhaps the language of this woman has changed somewhat from the original tongue, but I don’t think the alphabet has. I’ll bet that if we get this to a priest who can read it—there are only a few left—he can translate it well enough for us to figure out everything.”

  They walked to the wharf ’s end and climbed down a ladder to a platform where a dory was tied up. As they rowed out to their sloop Mapfarity said:

  “Look, Rastignac, things aren’t as bad as they seem. If you haven’t the ship nobody else has, either. And you alone have the key to its entrance and operation. For that you can thank the Church, which has preserved the ancient wisdom for emergencies which it couldn’t foresee, such as this. Just as it kept the secret of wine, which will eventually be the greatest means for delivering our people from their bondage to the Skins and, thus enable them to fight the Amphibs back instead of being slaughtered.

  “Meanwhile, we’ve a battle to wage. You will have to lead it. Nobody else but the Skinless Devil has the prestige to make the people gather around him. Once we accuse the Minister of Ill-Will of treason and jail him, without an official Breaker to release him, we’ll demand a general election. You’ll be made King of the Ssassaror; I, of the Terrans. That is inevitable, for we are the only skinless men and, therefore, irresistible. After the war is won, we’ll leave for the stars. How do you like that?”

  Rastignac smiled. It was weak, but it was a smile. His bracket-shaped eyebrows bent into their old sign of determination.

  “You are right,” he replied. “I have given it much thought. A man has no right to leave his native land until he’s settled his problems here. Even if Lusine hadn’t killed the Earthwoman and I had sailed away, my conscience wouldn’t have given me any rest. I would have known I had abandoned the fight in the middle of it. But now that I have stripped myself of my Skin—which was a substitute for a conscience—and now that I am being forced to develop my own inward conscience, I must admit that immediate flight to the stars would have been the wrong thing.”

  The pleased and happy Mapfarity said, “And you must also admit, Rastignac, that things so far have had a way of working out for the best. Even Lusine, evil as she was, has helped towards the general good by keeping you on this planet. And the Church, though it has released once again the old evil of alcohol, has done more good by so doing than . . .”

  But here Rastignac interrupted to say he did not believe in this particular school of thought, and so, while the howls of savage warriors drifted from the wharfs, while the structure of their world crashed around them, they plunged into that most violent and circular of all whirlpools—the Discussion Philosophical.

  * * *

  * Mucketeer is the best translation of the 26th century French noun foutriquet, pronounced vfeutwikey.

  THE WORLD THAT COULDN’T BE

  CLIFFORD D. SIMAK

  The tracks went up one row and down another, and in those rows the vua plants had been sheared off an inch or two above the ground. The raider had been methodical; it had not wandered about
haphazardly, but had done an efficient job of harvesting the first ten rows on the west side of the field. Then, having eaten its fill, it had angled off into the bush—and that had not been long ago, for the soil still trickled down into the great pug marks, sunk deep into the finely cultivated loam.

  Somewhere a sawmill bird was whirring through a log, and down in one of the thorn-choked ravines, a choir of chatterers was clicking through a ghastly morning song. It was going to be a scorcher of a day. Already the smell of desiccated dust was rising from the ground and the glare of the newly risen sun was dancing off the bright leaves of the hula-trees, making it appear as if the bush were filled with a million flashing mirrors.

  Gavin Duncan hauled a red bandanna from his pocket and mopped his face.

  “No, mister,” pleaded Zikkara, the native foreman of the farm. “You cannot do it, mister. You do not hunt a Cytha.”

  “The hell I don’t,” said Duncan, but he spoke in English and not the native tongue.

  He stared out across the bush, a flat expanse of sun-cured grass interspersed with thickets of hula-scrub and thorn and occasional groves of trees, criss-crossed by treacherous ravines and spotted with infrequent waterholes.

  It would be murderous out there, he told himself, but it shouldn’t take too long. The beast probably would lay up shortly after its pre-dawn feeding and he’d overhaul it in an hour or two. But if he failed to overhaul it, then he must keep on.

  “Dangerous,” Zikkara pointed out. “No one hunts the Cytha.”

  “I do,” Duncan said, speaking now in the native language. “I hunt anything that damages my crop. A few nights more of this and there would be nothing left.”

  Jamming the bandanna back into his pocket, he tilted his hat lower across his eyes against the sun.

  “It might be a long chase, mister. It is the skun season now. If you were caught out there . . .”

  “Now listen,” Duncan told it sharply. “Before I came, you’d feast one day, then starve for days on end; but now you eat each day. And you like the doctoring. Before, when you got sick, you died. Now you get sick, I doctor you, and you live. You like staying in one place, instead of wandering all around.”

  “Mister, we like all this,” said Zikkara, “but we do not hunt the Cytha.”

  “If we do not hunt the Cytha, we lose all this,” Duncan pointed out. “If I don’t make a crop, I’m licked. I’ll have to go away. Then what happens to you?”

  “We will grow the corn ourselves.”

  “That’s a laugh,” said Duncan, “and you know it is. If I didn’t kick your backsides all day long, you wouldn’t do a lick of work. If I leave, you go back to the bush. Now let’s go and get that Cytha.”

  “But it is such a little one, mister! It is such a young one! It is scarcely worth the trouble. It would be a shame to kill it.”

  Probably just slightly smaller than a horse, thought Duncan, watching the native closely.

  It’s scared, he told himself. It’s scared dry and spitless.

  “Besides, it must have been most hungry. Surely, mister, even a Cytha has the right to eat.”

  “Not from my crop,” said Duncan savagely. “You know why we grow the vua, don’t you? You know it is great medicine. The berries that it grows cures those who are sick inside their heads. My people need that medicine—need it very badly. And what is more, out there—” he swept his arm toward the sky—“out there they pay very much for it.”

  “But, mister . . .”

  “I tell you this,” said Duncan gently, “you either dig me up a bush-runner to do the tracking for me or you can all get out, the kit and caboodle of you. I can get other tribes to work the farm.”

  “No, mister!” Zikkara screamed in desperation.

  “You have your choice,” Duncan told it coldly.

  He plodded back across the field toward the house. Not much of a house as yet. Not a great deal better than a native shack. But someday it would be, he told himself. Let him sell a crop or two and he’d build a house that would really be a house. It would have a bar and swimming pool and a garden filled with flowers, and at last, after years of wandering, he’d have a home and broad acres and everyone, not just one lousy tribe, would call him mister.

  Gavin Duncan, planter, he said to himself, and liked the sound of it. Planter on the planet Layard. But not if the Cytha came back night after night and ate the vua plants.

  He glanced over his shoulder and saw that Zikkara was racing for the native village.

  Called their bluff, Duncan informed himself with satisfaction.

  He came out of the field and walked across the yard, heading for the house. One of Shotwell’s shirts was hanging on the clothesline, limp in the breathless morning.

  Damn the man, thought Duncan. Out here mucking around with those stupid natives, always asking questions, always under foot. Although, to be fair about it, that was Shotwell’s job. That was what the Sociology people had sent him out to do.

  Duncan came up to the shack, pushed the door open and entered. Shotwell, stripped to the waist, was at the wash bench.

  Breakfast was cooking on the stove, with an elderly native acting as cook.

  Duncan strode across the room and took down the heavy rifle from its peg. He slapped the action open, slapped it shut again.

  Shotwell reached for a towel.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “Cytha got into the field.”

  “Cytha?”

  “A kind of animal,” said Duncan. “It ate ten rows of vua.”

  “Big? Little? What are its characteristics?”

  The native began putting breakfast on the table. Duncan walked to the table, laid the rifle across one corner of it and sat down. He poured a brackish liquid out of a big stew pan into their cups.

  God, he thought, what I would give for a cup of coffee.

  Shotwell pulled up his chair.

  “You didn’t answer me. What is a Cytha like?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” said Duncan.

  “Don’t know? But you’re going after it, looks like, and how can you hunt it if you don’t know—”

  “Track it. The thing tied to the other end of the trail is sure to be the Cytha. We’ll find out what it’s like once we catch up to it.”

  “We?”

  “The natives will send up someone to do the tracking for me. Some of them are better than a dog.”

  “Look, Gavin. I’ve put you to a lot of trouble and you’ve been decent with me. If I can be any help, I would like to go.”

  “Two make better time than three. And we have to catch this Cytha fast or it might settle down to an endurance contest.”

  “All right, then. Tell me about the Cytha.”

  Duncan poured porridge gruel into his bowl, handed the pan to Shotwell. “It’s a sort of special thing. The natives are scared to death of it. You hear a lot of stories about it. Said to be unkillable. It’s always capitalized, always a proper noun. It has been reported at different times from widely scattered places.”

  “No one’s ever bagged one?”

  “Not that I ever heard of.” Duncan patted the rifle. “Let me get a bead on it.”

  He started eating, spooning the porridge into his mouth, munching on the stale corn bread left from the night before. He drank some of the brackish beverage and shuddered.

  “Some day,” he said, “I’m going to scrape together enough money to buy a pound of coffee. You’d think—”

  “It’s the freight rates,” Shotwell said. “I’ll send you a pound when I go back.”

  “Not at the price they’d charge to ship it out,” said Duncan. “I wouldn’t hear of it.”

  They ate in silence for a time. Finally Shotwell said: “I’m getting nowhere, Gavin. The natives are willing to talk, but it all adds up to nothing.”

  “I tried to tell you that. You could have saved your time.”

  Shotwell shook his head stubbornly. “There’s an answer, a logical explanation. It’s ea
sy enough to say you cannot rule out the sexual factor, but that’s exactly what has happened here on Layard. It’s easy to exclaim that a sexless animal, a sexless race, a sexless planet is impossible, but that is what we have. Somewhere there is an answer and I have to find it.”

  “Now hold up a minute,” Duncan protested. “There’s no use blowing a gasket. I haven’t got the time this morning to listen to your lecture.”

  “But it’s not the lack of sex that worries me entirely,” Shotwell said, “although it’s the central factor. There are subsidiary situations deriving from that central fact which are most intriguing.”

  “I have no doubt of it,” said Duncan, “but if you please—”

  “Without sex, there is no basis for the family, and without the family there is no basis for a tribe, and yet the natives have an elaborate tribal setup, with taboos by way of regulation. Somewhere there must exist some underlying, basic unifying factor, some common loyalty, some strange relationship which spells out to brotherhood.”

  “Not brotherhood,” said Duncan, chuckling. “Not even sisterhood. You must watch your terminology. The word you want is ithood.”

  The door pushed open and a native walked in timidly.

  “Zikkara said that mister want me,” the native told them. “I am Sipar. I can track anything but screamers, stilt-birds, longhorns and donovans. Those are my taboos.”

  “I am glad to hear that,” Duncan replied. “You have no Cytha taboo, then.”

  “Cytha!” yipped the native. “Zikkara did not tell me Cytha!”

  Duncan paid no attention. He got up from the table and went to the heavy chest that stood against one wall. He rummaged in it and came out with a pair of binoculars, a hunting knife and an extra drum of ammunition. At the kitchen cupboard, he rummaged once again, filling a small leather sack with a gritty powder from a can he found.

  “Rockahominy,” he explained to Shotwell. “Emergency rations thought up by the primitive North American Indians. Parched corn, ground fine. It’s no feast exactly, but it keeps a man going.”