Six Blind Men & an Alien

by Mike Resnick

  "You look like a monster," said the tallest leader. "But you think like a laibon or a mundumugu." He stared coldly at Bira. "Why did our own mundumugu never think of these things."

  Bira made no answer, but simply glared hatefully at B’narr.

  "I have a question," said Goru.

  "Yes?" said B’narr.

  "What will you want for all this?" said Goru. "Do you wish to be acknowledged the jumbe kwa kijumbe?"

  "The chief of chiefs?" repeated B’narr. He shook his head. "No, I have no desire to rule anyone. I am interested only in seeing justice done."

  "Truly?"

  "Truly."

  "You make it hard to think of you as a man," said Goru.

  The other leaders laughed at that, all except Bira.

  "We will meet again every day until we have every detail planned," said B’narr. "We must know exactly where to build the enclosure. We must make certain there are no impassable hazards for the pigs that are lower down the mountain. We must know which boys we are going to trust to be our runners. We must map out their routes not only on the mountain but on the plains beyond the mountain. We must be prepared for every eventuality. I have given you a lot to think about. I suggest you go back to your villages and consider what I have said, and we will meet here at the same hour tomorrow."

  The men left, and B’narr returned to the glacier. He considered building a hut-he’d seen them constructed in a matter of hours-and joining the village, but decided his voice would carry more authority if he was not a member of any particular village.

  They met the next day, and the day after that, and after that. They built the enclosure in such a spot that it could not be seen from more than a few hundred feet away, and then they practiced running the pigs up to it. The boys who had been chosen to be the runners were drilled over and over again.

  And then came the day they had been waiting for. A squad of German soldiers visited the mountain and demanded their porcine tax. Village after village explained that a disease had wiped out all the pigs.

  The Germans entered every hut, certain that the villagers were hiding pigs-and finally one of the Germans called the others over to a spot just beyond the village.

  "Look!" he said, pointing at a pile of dung. "That is fresh! These people are lying to us!"

  From his vantage point on the glacier B’narr saw that the Germans had reached the mountain. That didn’t surprise him. The whole plan depended on their coming sooner or later. But then he heard the rifle shots. That surprised him. There was a shot every ten minutes, from mid-morning to late afternoon.

  He decided to make sure the Germans were gone before he appeared, so he remained where he was until sunrise, when he made his way down to the Goru’s village. To his surprise he found all the leaders waiting for him.

  "How did it go?" he asked.

  "While you hid on your glacier, the Germans killed one child from every village!" snarled Goru, his face reflecting his rage and hatred.

  "We listened to you instead of to Bira," said the tall leader. "We will never make that mistake again."

  "What happened?" demanded B’narr.

  "What happened is our fault for listening to a creature that pretends to be a man. Instead, let me tell you what will happen. You will return to the snow and ice, and you will live out your life there. If any of us ever sees you below the snow after today, we will kill you, slowly and painfully."

  "But how did the Germans find out?" insisted B’narr. "Didn’t you move all the pigs?"

  "I will count to fifty," said the tall leader. "If you are still here when I am finished, I will kill you myself."

  B’narr looked from one face to another, and could find nothing but hatred and fury. He turned and began running up to the ice cap. There were no sounds of pursuit, and he slowed to a fast walk after a few minutes.

  As he reached the tree line, he found Bira waiting for him.

  "I told them you were a devil," he said. "In the end my magic was stronger than yours."

  "Magic had nothing to do with it," said B’narr wearily.

  "We will call it magic when I speak to my people," answered Bira. A nasty smile crossed his face. "Whether it was magic or something else that moved the pig’s dung to where the Germans could not help but find it, the result was the same."

  "But why?" asked B’narr, truly puzzled.

  "Because I am the mundumugu, and this mountain and this tribe do not need another."

  B’narr was about to answer when armed warriors approached at a run, and he had to retreat to the glacier.

  The next morning he was beginning to move past the tree line to go hunting for his breakfast when he found himself facing three young men armed with spears.

  "Go back, creature!" yelled one of them. "You are not allowed here!"

  He retreated to the glacier, and walked totally around it over the next five days. Whenever he thought he had gone far enough and tried to go down past the tree line he was confronted by armed warriors.

  He didn’t give up. He circled the entire glacier regularly, but every time he tried to climb down off it he found his path barred.

  Weak from hunger and exhaustion, he finally returned to his cave. This cannot be my fault, he thought. I have organized far more difficult and complicated protests. They messed it up. But how?

  He lay there for three days. He knew he was dying, and he found he didn’t mind that at all. If he was forbidden from doing what he was born to do, then life was meaningless anyway. But before he expired, he had to find out what had gone wrong.

  He got shakily to his feet, and was overwhelmed by dizziness and nausea. He leaned against a cave wall for a moment, then another, and finally he emerged onto the glacier. He walked laboriously for ten minutes, having difficulty balancing on the ice. The sun seemed exceptionally bright, and his eyes began tearing. He reached a hand up to wipe them off-and as he did so he lost his balance and fell heavily to the ice.

  He tried to get up and found that he couldn’t. He could feel his life ebbing away. Breathing became more difficult. He tried to focus his eyes, but everything remained blurry.

  It shouldn’t have come to this, he thought bitterly. It was a perfect plan. Whatever happened, I wasn’t the one who failed. You should have been cheering me and singing my praises by now.

  He knew he would be dead in another few seconds, and one final thought crossed his mind:

  I hope the Germans kill you all.

  2038 A.D.

  "I’m starting to think that Hemingway never got up this high," said Ray Glover. "After all, he was an out-of-shape boozer. I’m in great shape and I still can’t catch my breath."

  "He was a fiction writer," said Jim Donahue. "So it’s possible he made it up. After all, in The Green Hills of Africa, which is still being sold as non-fiction, he seems to run into someone who wants to discuss literature every time he’s hiding in a blind waiting for some animal to come by, and no one ever called him on that."

  "If you go up and down the Coast, you can still find half a dozen hotels that brag that ‘Hemingway Slept Here," said Gorman. "According to the stories that have been passed down, he mostly drank there and slept where he fell or passed out."

  "Still, wouldn’t it be something if we could find the leopard?" I said.

  "We’ve already found something a thousand times more important," replied Donahue. "Maybe ten professors of literature give a damn whether the leopard was real or not, but if this"-he indicated the frozen body-"is what we all think it is, everyone will care."

  "Could it have been a snow leopard?" asked Glover. "I remember seeing one in a zoo once. That wouldn’t be so hard to believe, would it?"

  "You find a snow leopard up here and you got a real story," said Gorman. "They only live in Asia."

  Glover turned to me. "Is that right, Professor?"

  "Doctor," I said. "Or just Tony. And yes, it’s right. There are no snow leopards in Africa."

  "Papa would never have bothered writing the sto
ry if there were," added Gorman.

  "I wonder," said Donahue. "Could he have seen this fellow from a distance and thought it was a leopard?"

  "Always assuming that it’s been on the mountain that long, if Papa was close enough to know it was a body why didn’t he walk the last couple of hundred feet and see what it was?" asked Gorman.

  "Too drunk?" suggested Donahue.

  "If he was that drunk, he wouldn’t have spotted it or remembered it," said Gorman.

  I noticed that Bonnie wasn’t paying any attention to the conversation (not that it was worth listening to), but instead was staring intently at the body.

  To be continued-

  ***

  They’re all wrong, she thought. The important thing isn’t what he was doing atop Kilimanjaro, but what he was doing on Earth at all. I don’t see any weapons, or any pouch or holster that might hold a weapon. Surely he didn’t come here just to see the top of a mountain-and if he did, then why not Fuji or Everest or even Pike’s Peak? Why this mountain? What secret was he trying to unearth? And no one else has remarked on the way his right hand seems to be reaching out. For what, I wonder? What could draw an unarmed alien to this place?

  Bonnie Herrington, despite her gender, was the fifth blind man.

  What the Camerawoman Saw

  His name was Quachama, and he had devoted his life to finding God. Not the way televangelists and born-again Christians do. No, they were no closer to God than the man on the street. In fact, if they misinterpreted His signs and signals and spread them to the masses, they were actually further.

  There was no mention ever made of God on his home planet. His race believed in self-sufficiency and hard work, they refused favors and had no use for sympathy or forgiveness, and somehow the notion of a Supreme Deity never took hold.

  It was when he was studying other worlds’ sentient races in school that Quachama first encountered the notion of God, and it fascinated him. If there was a God, why had He created the Universe, only to fill it with such suffering, so many hardships? Was it His purpose that each species would triumph over these obstacles? If it was, why did so many fail? And if it wasn’t, why had He put them there in the first place? Why had He allowed some races to split the atom, cure disease, and develop space flight, while other races remained planetbound, sick, and in primitive conditions?

  The most obvious question to ask the believers was: if He hasn’t truly manifested Himself, if your brethren still suffer and die, then why do you still believe in Him? But Quachama had progressed beyond that question. He found that he did indeed believe in God, or some manifestation of Him, and he wanted to confront God and ask why He allowed anyone to suffer, or to fail at anything, or to hunger, or to die.

  And he made it his life’s work to seek God out, confront Him face-to-face, and demand an answer.

  The first world he visited was Bellarnus, in the heart of the Nemacton Cluster. It was a water world, covered by an ocean, dotted with islands. The dominant race was a species of intelligent, mammalian seagoing creatures, not totally unlike dolphins, and their God was said to occupy an undersea castle two miles below the north magnetic pole. Quachama positioned his boat over the castle, donned his underwater gear, jumped into the ocean, and began swimming toward the castle. It took him four hours of careful descent, and when he reached the place where the castle was supposed to be, he found nothing but sand and rocks. It took him three times as long to reach the surface, to avoid the possibility of depth sickness, and when he was back in his boat he related his experience to a member of the dolphin-like race who was swimming alongside.

  "Ah!" was the answer. "God did not wish you to find Him. He can move his castle around the world at will."

  "But why didn’t He want me to find Him?" asked Quachama.

  "Only God can answer that," said the dolphin. "Remain here. I am sure once God decides you mean Him no harm He will return."

  "If He is God, then by definition I cannot harm Him," replied Quachama.

  "Then perhaps He had some other reason for moving His castle."

  "Have you personally seen this castle?" asked Quachama.

  "I am not religious. I have never had a reason to look for it."

  "Do you know anyone who has seen it?"

  "Probably. It is not something we talk about in polite company. After all, He is God."

  His mind made up, Quachama began climbing out of his diving gear. "Thank you for your trouble," he said.

  "You are not going to wait for God?" asked the dolphin.

  "No."

  "That’s all right. He will know how to find you."

  "We shall see," said Quachama.

  That was the first of twenty-seven worlds he visited, searching for God. He looked in the jungles of Selamun, the endless desert of Tilanbo, the underground caverns of Jebb, and always he concluded that God did not dwell on that particular world.

  His belief in God remained unshaken, but he became a lot more cynical about the claims made by God’s self-appointed spokesmen and worshippers. Still, he had no alternative but to continue his quest. He prayed every morning and every night, but God never acknowledged receiving the prayers, never once manifested Himself to Quachama, which simply made it more important than ever that the two of them should meet face-to-face, for that was the only way Quachama could be sure that God actually heard him.

  He almost died in the asteroid belt between the sixth and seventh planets of the Amatiro system. He thought he got a glimpse of God on Tzintrep, but he got lost in the maze of corridors and tunnels beneath the Great Temple, and by the time he got his bearings and made his way back to the Throne Room of the Almighty, the place was deserted, and it stayed deserted for the twelve days that he remained there.

  He realized that he was getting older, that he did not have an infinite amount of time in which to hunt for God on an infinite number of worlds. He determined that he would be more selective in his choice of venues, he would study each world more thoroughly, and he would visit the world only when he felt there was a reasonable chance that he had come at last to God’s world.

  For those reasons, Graetep, Promandios, Chovnost, and Litantia seemed very promising, but alas, none of the four delivered on their promises. He was getting desperate now, running low on money, low on energy, low on years remaining to him.

  And then he discovered Earth.

  He had long known about it, a gritty little world that was always going to war with itself, but remained isolated from the rest of the galaxy because its technology was in its infancy, a lovely green and gold world with an acceptable gravity and atmosphere.

  But the fascinating thing was that while every other world had but a single religion, or none at all, Earth had a plethora of religions, and many of them possessed first-hand accounts of meetings with God (and a major one had eyewitness accounts of God’s death by crucifixion). That was the key: how could so many religions believe God dwelt there if there was absolutely no truth to it?

  He spent a week pouring over the holy books of the various religions, and another studying the geography and culture of the planet. He knew he couldn’t pass for a member of the dominant race of man, but he learned that he could mask his features with a hooded robe and possibly some gloves, and he would be accepted as a religious acolyte and move unchallenged through most of the holy places.

  He captured some sound transmissions in the hope of learning the language, and was shocked to find there were hundreds of languages. His computer suggested that if he gained a rudimentary knowledge of English, French, Spanish, Arabic and Chinese, he could function in most venues. Fortunately languages came easily to him, and with the computer’s help he picked them up during his six-week journey to Earth.

  He had the locations listed by priority. He activated his ship’s cloaking device, landed in Sinai, donned the hooded robe he had prepared, traveled on foot by night and hid by day, and finally reached Golgotha.

  There was nothing to mark that this was the spot where s
o many people had seen their God, or His Earthly manifestation, but Quachama had done his research, and was able to pinpoint the spot on what was now known as Gordon’s Calvary where the cross had been planted. It was the middle of the night when he approached it, the only living being within fifty yards. He made sure no one was around to overhear, and then he spoke:

  "God, are You here?"

  There was no answer, and he realized he had spoken in his native tongue. He repeated the query in English and Arabic. Still no answer. He wondered if he was supposed to address God only in Aramaic, the ancient language that was used during the crucifixion, but decided that if that was the case, everyone would still be speaking it.

  He was disappointed, but not discouraged, and two days later he stood on slopes of Mount Olympus, addressing the Deity as both God and Zeus. Both, if they existed, ignored him.

  He next went to Rome. There seemed to be no consensus as to where Jupiter lived, so he went from ruin to ruin, addressing Him from the ruins of buildings that existed before Jupiter fell out of favor, to be replaced by Jesus in the hearts of his people.

  Two weeks and eleven more false starts brought him to Africa, the last continent on which he might find God. When he saw the size of the Egyptian ruins he had a feeling that he was getting close, that surely the temples at Karnak and Edfu and Kom Ombo had been built for God’s convenience. He went to each, imploring Ra, the Sun God, to speak to him. Ra remained silent, but rather than move on, Quachama also tried to converse with Anubis, Horus and Osiris, although with no better results.

  He could feel his body breaking down, and knew that this would be his last planet, his last chance to put forward those questions he had been waiting all of his adult life to ask. He tried his luck at Abu Simbel, got no response, and headed south.

  There were many variations of Islam, but he’d been to Mecca and other holy sites, and since he’d received no heavenly response there and time was becoming a consideration, he chose not to further pursue the God of Mohammed in Africa. But the computer uncovered some other religions, each with their own God, or their own interpretation of the same God, and he decided that they were different enough from those he had tried that they were worth his few remaining attempts.