“Humans sleep every night,” she informed him.
Reevers, maybe. Homans, yes.” The Gunner smiled. “Not Commanders. Sleep cycle, three-day. Skronk? Conscious cycle, ten-day. Skronk?”
The girl was frowning. “I heard that,” she said quietly. “I did not believe it. It is true then? You can go for ten whole days without sleeping?”
The Gunner solemnly nodded his head. “Is more efficient. In deepspace, night is day and day is night, is like same.”
The girl had moved very close to him. The nearness unaccountably bothered him. He pushed a hand into the long golden hair and thoughtfully caressed it.
“Hair is beautiful—” he said, “but inefficient.”
The girl’s musical laughter filled the hut, the heavy breasts swaying and jiggling in a most disconcerting manner. The Gunner released the golden hair and quickly back-stepped. A strange, dreamlike feeling was enveloping him.
The laughter had conjured visions of Paul Whaler, the long forgotten stranger-father-and Whaleman found himself once again staring at the suckler tips of the mammaries and wondering what had become of Joan Mannson. He wondered if those fantastic mammala were as uncomfortable for the girl as they appeared to be, and he wondered what those sucklers would feel like between a baby’s lips ...
The long-exiled Terran was full of wonderment. In just a short while, he would be wondering about the tie that could bind across a thousand years of human evolution. At the moment, he was wondering about the incomprehensible magnetism which seemed to be drawing him compellingly to this simple Reever. Sexual attraction Whaleman could understand, but this present feeling went far beyond such elemental biologies.
The girl had taken his hand and was tugging him through the doorway. “Come on,” she said, enunciating carefully, “I am going to show you something terribly inefficient. I want you to see our waterfall.”
Whaleman was trying to visualize falling water. He presumed that the girl was offering him a bath. He found his lips twisting into the strangely broad smile of the Reevers, and decided that he could learn to like these simple people. “Yes,” he said, going along unprotestingly, “water falling is good.”
“Zach, you’re a different item,” she declared, giggling and squeezing his hand. She led him across the compound and into the orchard.
The almost overpowering aroma of apple blossoms filled his nostrils and intensified the strange tugging at his psyche. He halted suddenly to pluck a blossom from a low branch and rolled it between his fingers then raised it to his nose for a deeper smell.
As Stel watched him, a tender expression moved into her face. Zach flashed her an almost guilty look, then knelt suddenly to plunge his fingers into the soft soil of earth at the base of the tree. Shaking inwardly with a strangeness which he was beginning to identify as emotion, the Gunner rubbed the dirt into his palms, tasted it, hastily spat it out, and grinned self-consciously at his companion.
“Come on,” she said, pulling at him with an almost pitying smile.
“Mother Earth,” he said, rising hastily. “First close view. Womb of life, home of man.”
Stel Rogers/Brandt was obviously affected by' the display of embarrassed emotion. She said, “Yes,” softly, and pulled him on to a small footbridge which spanned an irrigation canal.
They crossed over and swerved abruptly into a shallow ravine and began a gradual climb around the side of a hill. A growing roar in the air discouraged conversation, which neither seemed to be in the mood for, anyway. Their route brought them beside a rushing brook. The girl pulled Whaleman into the water, which was frigid and ankle-deep, and led him up the twisting bed of the rock-strewn stream.
The Gunner’s feet were squishing in his soft footgear and beginning to ache with the cold. He wondered vaguely if he was expected to actually bathe in the frigid water, and then they took another sharp turn and came onto a wide rock ledge beneath the most awesome view of the Gunner’s young life.
An endless torrent of crystal-clear water spilled down a 300-foot course in a nearly vertical fall, roaring with an unvarying intensity. Whaleman froze, unbreathing for a long moment, his head inclined in a rapturous gaze at the tumbling water, then he released his pent breath and a myriad of emotions played across his upturned face.
Stel moved her lips close to his ear to make herself heard above the roar of the falls and said, “Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Is more . . . feeling,” Whaleman replied, groping for words beyond his reach.
“A religious feeling,” Stel agreed.
Whaleman solemnly nodded his head and said, “Religious, yes. The feeling is religious.”
They stood there for long minutes while the spaceman soaked up the “religious feeling,” then Stel tugged him out of the stream and led him along a circular path to a small glade on the hillside. Sunlight was pouring through the trees and lighting the pastoral scene with a shimmering halo-like effect. Looking back toward the waterfall, she pointed out a rainbow hovering in the mist.
“I’ll bet you’ve never viewed one of those,” she told him.
“Mother planet has many beauties,” Whaleman replied in awed tones.
Stel dropped to her knees, then toppled over to lie on her back, twisting to one side from the hips down. The Gunner stared at her, his eyes flicking rapidly from heaving bosom to upflung hip. “Yes, many beauties,” he said.
She patted the soft turf invitingly. Whaleman knelt, gathered her in his arms, and kissed her, running a hand exploringly along the soft lines of the magnificently female body. She pushed his hand away and broke the kiss.
“Watch that,” she said half-angrily. “I’m not a social robot.”
The Gunner’s face was reflecting confused emotions. “Companions,” he said in a thickening voice. “You, me, sexual companions.”
Stel shook her head and replied, “It does not work that way here.” She pushed away from his embrace and rose to an elbow, staring steadily at the spaceman. “You have to be in love.”
Whaleman made himself comfortable beside her, carefully studied her face, and presently said, “Unskronk.”
“That’s your trouble,” she replied, sighing. “You don’t skronk anything but machines.”
“Skronk love,” Whaleman argued. “Love Solana. Love Terra. Love all mankind. Even Reevers. Love Stel Rogers/Brandt.”
“That isn’t the kind of love I mean,” the girl told him. She pointed to the waterfall. “You skronk the religious feeling?”
“Religious is feel different,” he said.
“Sex love is feel different, too,” Stel replied. “You have to love me like that, like religious feeling. Then maybe, we can be sex companions.”
Whaleman’s eyes were traveling slowly. “Skronk, like Joan Mannson. ”
“Who is Joan Mannson?”
“Joan Mannson is female parent. My mother.” He had never before audibly referred to Joan Mannson using that specific term. His voice was noticeably lower as he added, “Is religious like feeling love?”
Stel said hesitantly, “No, not exactly.”
The Gunner firmly nodded his head. “Is like Joan Mannson feeling. Plus sex feeling.” He tenderly fondled her breast and leaned over to gently kiss the swell.
The girl sucked in her breath, curled her fingers into a shock of red hair, and tugged his head clear. “You’re not going to seduce me, Zach,” she said firmly. “You have to understand. You have to love me like—like...”
Whaleman pushed her flat and nuzzled her throat, then drew back to gaze soberly into her eyes. “This is difference,” he said solemnly. “First view, Reevers. First view, Stel Rogers/Brandt. First view, Mother Earth. Religious, yes. like waterfall. Like Joan Mannson and Laney Furr-Roberts combined. Yes. Same, like dreaming, like strangeness inside.”
“Gosh that’s beautiful, Zach,” Stel whispered.
“Yes, also. beautiful. Zach loves Stel Rogers/Brandt like religious waterfall. Like Joan Mannson plus sex. Not like indoctrinator. Not like co-ed.
Not like robot companion. Zach loves Stel like Terra, like orchards, like soil, like waterfall. Plus sex.”
The girl draped a hand across her eyes and, forgetting to “slow speak,” murmured, “You big robot, go on back to your moon and your machines. They’re going to grind you up down here.”
The words came to Whaleman as an emotional blur. He understood only that he had somehow saddened her. Already he had begun to alter his opinion of the Reever mind. There was more there, he realized now, than a casual contact would reveal. He felt vaguely ashamed of himself without even understanding the cause of his discomfort. He raised to his knees, the bafflement showing plainly in his eyes. With laboring difficulty, he presented a halting apology.
“Unskronk Terra. Unskronk Reevers. Apology, apology, unskronk Reever sex.”
Stel uncovered her eyes. They were moist, adding to the Gunner’s discomfort. She said slowly, “Zach, you’re not really human—you know that. You might be a lord of the heavens, but you’re a helpless babe down here in these woods. Contrary to what you have been taught, Reevers are not idiots. Certainly not Tom Cole, and he—”
Whaleman interrupted with, “I am human. Not robot. Social speak is difficult... language is ... not usual—skronk? I learn speak social for Stel, we skronk together-each other.”
“I just want you to understand what you’re up against,” she declared hotly. “That’s all. You’re dealing with human beings here, not machines, not homans, but the absolute cream of humanity.”
“Unskronk,” Whaleman replied, smiling. “Things are not like you think they are,” she persisted. “Know thy enemy! The Reevers are not emotional children. Try to understand that!”
The Gunner was thinking about it. He smiled suddenly and said, “Stel is emotional child. This is difference. This is religious feeling.”
She scrambled to her feet. “Just remember, later, that I warned you!”
Whaleman was grinning, understanding only that she was no longer saddened.
“Companions later,” he said, “post-skronk. You help me think social. I help you skronk beauties.”
He waved his hand in a circle of the heavens. “. . . out there. Where man is, beauty is, even deepspace.”
“You don’t understand a thing I’ve told you,” she said.
“We have two days,” Whaleman told her. “Then I return to Terra 10.”
“That’s what I’m telling you,” Stel replied dismally. “When you return to Terra 10, you’ll be going back with a full escort.”
“Escort, yes. Ferry squadron, deepspace cruisers, tow gunship to Jovian envelope.”
“I’m not talking about the ferry squadron. I mean the Reevers.”
Whaleman gave her a blank look. “Reevers cannot leave Terra.”
“That’s what you think.”
“Unskronk,” Whaleman replied with a troubled frown.
“You’d better start skronking,” Stel said. “Tom Cole wants Terra 10, and if you don’t help him, he’ll grind you—”
“Slow speak,” Whaleman interrupted, grinning. “There’s not a thing you can do to stop it,” the girl replied, carefully enunciating, “but I want you to know what to expect. Tom Cole is going to steal Terra 10, and you’re going to help him—alive or dead. Do you skronk that? Alive or dead!”
Whaleman stared at her through a moment of thoughtful silence. Then he began to laugh, the sounds booming out in musical claps, and deep in his mind was an overlapping vision of Paul Whaler, also laughing, and a shadowy picture of Tom Cole seated at the control console of Terra 10. It was, for Whaleman, the first genuine laughter of a quiet lifetime.
“What’s so funny?” the girl asked, frowning.
“Yes, funny, this is funny,” the Gunner replied, dabbing with surprise at the moisture rolling down his cheeks. “Is funny, Tom Cole in Terra 10. This is funny, funny!”
“Watch it,” Stel said coolly. “You could die laughing.”
CHAPTER FIVE
A Genetic Difference
Over the centuries, genetic engineering had developed into a very precise science. Long before Zach Whaleman’s birth, the Solan Corporation’s medical administrators had become satisfied that all goals of the Genetically Programmed Conception plan had been fully met. The small percentage of failures, personified by the Reevers, was regarded as an unavoidable incidence and statistically unimportant. There were, after all, less than ten thousand living Reevers in a total Solan population of 17.3 billion.
A minority report, early in the program, had expressed fears that many more latent Reevers were enjoying the free society of Solana but no evidence had ever been presented to back up this assumption. As for the successes, these spoke for themselves. Crime no longer existed among the normal population. Gone, also, was aggressiveness except in specific and carefully directed areas of human activity. Practically all of the troubling and destructive aspects of mankind had been eliminated—greed, avarice, hatreds—all were relics of the past.
Zach Whaleman, during that first day of his enforced visit at AS 23, was beginning to realize something of the full price which the human race had paid for these “advances.”
One day with the Reevers was enough to produce troubling questions in the young Gunner’s mind, questions which were forcibly brought into the light of open discussion by his host.
“For generations beyond counting,” Tom Cole told Whaleman that first evening, “the corporation has been systematically dehumanizing the human race. What they call ‘progress’ is actually a programmed extinction of everything human.”
Gunner Whaleman did not wish to be disagreeable, nor did he wish to be cast into the unenviable position of debating matters of high policy with an unevolved member of his race. He was learning, moreover, that the Reever mind had been vastly underrated—at least, in his own thinking—and he was interested in determining the extent of Reever logic. He carefully pondered Coleman/Seville’s statement and formulated a non-argumentative reply.
“This could be true,” he said soberly. “Emphasis for evolution has been eradication of animal behavior. Goal is toward more man, less savage. Reason, not emotion. Dedication, not greed. Love, not hate.”
They were seated on plastic bubblechairs in the commune pavilion. A dozen or so couples were dancing in the moonlight to canned music. Stel Rogers/Brandt and a non-breasted beauty who was introduced as Sofia Scala/Lowen completed the foursome at the chieftain’s table. Sofia looked like any normal woman except for long black hair and extremely flared hips. Also, she wore apple blossoms in her hair. Whaleman thought the latter adornment extremely charming.
“There’s the rub,” Tom Cole said to Whaleman. “What happens to love when you’ve killed all the emotions? When you bland all the emotion out of love, what is left? Mars, an automat can be dedicated and loyal.”
“Why are they talking like machines?” the dark-haired girl blurred.
“Zach hasn’t had much experience with language,” Stel explained.
“Nor with apple fermentations, I’ll wager,”
Tom Cole added, laughing. He refilled the Gunner’s glass. “If that doesn’t untie his tongue, nothing will. I’ll have ’im talking like a GPC orator before the night’s through.”
Whaleman caught the gist of the exchange. He smiled at Stel and said, “Language is one of things losing to Solan progress. Language is making slow think, is making change from thing to symbol and back to thing before is thought complete.”
“What’s he mean by that?” Sofia blurted.
“He means he thinks in pictures, not in words,” Cole translated.
“Well gosh how d’you know what each other wants, I mean gosh what d’you read minds or something?” Sofia commented, the words tumbling out in an unbroken torrent.
Whaleman was staring at her lips, a frown of concentration marring his visually smooth features.
Stel translated—“She wants to know how you communicate without language.”
Whaleman nodded his head in under
standing. “I am start skronk your speech,” he announced. “Words do not begin and end, run in current, many words are excess. This is true?”
Tom Cole chuckled. “You’ve hit it, Zach. We like the sound of language. Maybe we pad it a bit.”
The Gunner nodded and turned back to Sofia. “At defense academy,” he explained laboriously, “we are taught language in early years, but emphasis is communication of thinking—of thoughts—not concealed by padded words. Work in defense command is more time alone—skronk?—or with automats. Emphasis is to think fast, communicate later. Speak to automats is with code language—skronk?—brief, phonetic precision, transfer thought with no error.”
“Skronk is one of those code words,” Stel added. “It’s even gotten into our language. It means ‘received and understood.’ Right, Zach?”
The spaceman’s eyes clouded momentarily, then he asked, “Right means correct?”
“Right!” Stel said, giggling. “See,” she said, turning to the other girl, “there’s a language barrier even when we speak slowly. So talk to Zach like he’s a robot, if you want to make sure you’re getting through.”
“I am human,” Whaleman declared.
Stel’s gaze flashed to Tom Cole. She observed, “He is picking up fast now.”
“And he’s right, too,” the Reever chieftain said. “Let’s have no more comparisons of our friend with a robot. You are our Mend, aren’t you, Zach?”
Whaleman touched his chest and replied, “Yes, friends. No speak also compare Reevers and normers. Skronk no difference, same, like—all one.”
Tom and Stel again exchanged glances. The big Reever said, “There is a difference, though, Zach. Oh, you’re right—we are all one big human family—but there’s a difference. People like me, and Stel, and Sofia—Board Island says that we are something less than human. That isn’t true. It’s the other way around. No offense to you, Zach, but it’s just the other way around. Do you skronk that?”
The Gunner was staring at Cole with a thoughtful expression. He smiled suddenly and replied, “Is difference in what you speak ‘dehumanizing.’ Now you speak, Reevers less dehumanized than Normers.”
Don Pendleton's Science Fiction Collection, 3 Books Box Set, (The Guns of Terra 10; The Godmakers; The Olympians) Page 4