Rork!
Page 17
Still no one spoke.
Then, from among the ranks of the as yet unspeaking, a huge old rork unfolded its legs and got up. Slowly it advanced towards the men, slowly, steadily, closer than any rork had yet come that day. It had something in its mouth. The crowd fell back from either side. It was not so much uneasy, not so much astonished, as waiting. And still the great creature went on.
And stopped perhaps five paces from Tarmi.
It lifted one foot and removed what it had been holding in its mouth, and, with that foot, so curiously like and yet so vastly unlike a longer, more dangerous human hand, it lifted the thing up slowly, that all might see what it was.
A redwing plant, fresh-pulled, by the looks of it. Slowly, but with effective blows, it beat the root-end of the stalk against the ground till the clods of earth were loosed from it. Slowly, as all looked on in wonder, crowding closer, it broke the plant into two pieces. And slowly it ate the stalk piece.
And then, still slowly, it offered the leaf piece to Tarmi.
• • •
The solution, then, was so obvious, that it had until then been missed. Men and rorks had no need to compete for redwing, now or ever, no matter what their numbers might be, for each species used a different part of the plant!
Talk went on, of course, by sheer momentum, but everything had really been settled in that few minutes of slow pantomime. And when it was at last and at length agreed that men would pull up no plants of redwing in Rorkland, but would instead go to gather the leaves which the rorks would leave behind for them, it seemed a wonder that this had not been clearly understood from the very start.
“Well, I’m very pleased,” Harb said, slowly. “I’m really very pleased. It all seems so neat that I keep thinking there must be some catch to it.”
“There are probably a million catches,” Ran said. “Sometimes they’re called by fancier names — ‘challenges,’ for example. We’ll face them when we come to them.”
The SO nodded, not quite convinced. “I can see one right now, before we even come to it. Surely the demand for redwing is not infinite. Not in the kind of frozen condition things are now, and have been for so long. Suppose the Rocks expand and increase and learn all kinds of needs and wants? They won’t be satisfied with old clothes and hack blades and sulphur forever, you know. What happens when they go on wanting to increase the market and the market isn’t going to increase?”
“That’s a long, long way from now,” Ran said. Harb brightened.
“Yes, it is. Of course it is. I won’t have to deal with it. I shall be eating lotos or something on a simpler and more complicated planet, nice old Harb, he spins such interesting yarns, eh? When I’m retired.”
Thus, his reaction to it all. Ran wasn’t sure yet what his own would be, or even should be. But Lindel was. “They will move you,” she told him. “There just isn’t any doubt about it.”
“Eh?” He looked at her, fondly, slightly bemused. His wild colonial girl! “Who? Move me where?”
“The Guild Directorate!” She seemed slightly impatient. “I know that they’ll confirm your provisional rating. You’ll be moved from three to seven. It’s inevitable, because you’ve got a record, now. They handed you an impossible assignment, and yet you did it. You can really have any place you want after this, you know. Seven! Which would you like best? Hercules, or Tarquín? Or Transfer Ten?”
“Well — ”
She babbled on, happier than he had ever seen her. “Is this what you want, really?” he asked, at last.
She broke off and looked at him in absolute astonishment. “Why, of course. It’s what I’ve always wanted — all I’ve ever wanted. To get away from here and out where things are alive! Civilized! A decent life, oh, Ranny!”
And he realized that it was true, and all she ever did want, really — marriage to someone of a higher Guild rank, and a soft and safe comfortable career — everything according to the book. “We might even go back to Old Earth,” she was saying. “You’ve got family and they have connections, naturally. Why, we could have an apartment in Rocky Mountain Complex. … In a few years you could be a ten!”
All she ever wanted. And all that he did not want Too bad. Too bad. Too bad for Lindel, anyway. Too bad, Lindel. The road through Rorkland would mean nothing to her, nor any of his own dreams. Because these dreams would now start coming true.
With men and men and men and rorks at peace, with the crippling fever wiped out, the continent could now start the work of building a new and decent life from its own resources. The people would not need to remain any longer a gang of errand boys for a fossilized oligarchy a world of light-years away. They had much to learn from the rorks, had barely begun to suspect how much, but the rorks might prove apt pupils, too. It was so very lucky that all this was happening now, now, with the rest of the human race still tired and frozen in its stodgy ways. No danger, this way, of the Tocks and rorks being overwhelmed by an exploitive technology from outside. They could go at their own pace until, eventually, they would outpace the others.
And Ran? What did he want? He knew, now. He wanted this. No other planet, no other world. Here was home and here he would stay and help. Only —
Only something seemed missing. Someone.
Norna.
He would find her, though. And tell her that he had made his choice.
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eISBN 10: 1-4405-4482-4
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-4482-8