“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Jerry held out a three-fingered hand. “A universe, Davidge. There is a universe out there, a universe of life, objects, and events. There are differences, but it is all the same universe, and we all must obey the same universal laws. Did you ever think of that?”
“No.”
“That is what I mean, Davidge. Not terribly profound.”
I snorted. “I told you, I’d heard this stuff before. So I imagine that shows humans to be just as profound as Dracs.”
Jerry laughed. “You always insist on making something racial out of my observations. What I said applied to you, not to the race of humans.”
I spat on the frozen ground. “You Dracs think you’re so damned smart.” The wind picked up, and I could taste the sea salt in it. One of the big blows was coming. The sky was changing to that curious darkness that tricked me into thinking it was midnight blue, rather than black. A trickle of ice found its way under my collar.
“What’s wrong with me just being me? Everybody in the universe doesn’t have to be a damned philosopher, toad face!” There were millions—billions—like me. More maybe. “What difference does it make to anything whether I ponder existence or not? It’s here; that’s all I have to know.”
“Davidge, you don’t even know your family line beyond your parents, and now you say you refuse to know that of your universe that you can know. How will you know your place in this existence, Davidge? Where are you? Who are you?”
I shook my head and stared at the grave, then I turned and faced the sea. In another hour, or less, it would be too dark to see the whitecaps. “I’m me, that’s who.”
But was that “me” who held the rock over Zammis, threatening a helpless infant with death? I felt my guts curdle as the loneliness I thought I felt grew claws and fangs and began gnawing and slashing at the remains of my sanity.
I turned back to the grave, closed my eyes, then opened them. “I’m a fighter pilot, Jerry. Isn’t that something?”
“That is what you do, Davidge; that is neither who nor what you are.”
I knelt next to the grave and clawed at the ice-sheathed rocks with my hands. “You don’t talk to me now, Drac! You’re dead!”
I stopped, realizing that the words I had heard were from The Talman, processed into my own context. I slumped against the rocks, felt the wind, then pushed myself to my feet.
“Jerry, Zammis won’t eat. It’s been three days. What do I do? Why didn’t you tell me anything about Drac brats before you…” I held my hands to my face.
“Steady, boy. Keep it up, and they’ll stick you in a home.” The wind pressed against my back, I lowered my hands, then walked from the grave.
I sat in the cave, staring at the fire. I couldn’t hear the wind through the rock, and the wood was dry, making the fire hot and quiet. I tapped my fingers against my knee, then began humming. Noise, any kind, helped to drive off the oppressive loneliness. “Sonofabitch.” I laughed and nodded. “Yea, verily, and kizlode va nu, dutschaat.”
I chuckled, trying to think of all the curses and obscenities in Drac that I had learned from Jerry. There were quite a few. My toe tapped against the sand and my humming started up again. I stopped, frowned, then remembered the song.
“Highty tighty Christ almighty,
Who the Hell are we?
Zim zam, Gawd Damn,
We’re in Squadron B.”
I leaned back against the wall of the cave, trying to remember another verse.
A pilot’s got a rotten life,
no crumpets with our tea;
we have to service the general’s wife
and pick fleas from her knee.
“Damn!” I slapped my knee, trying to see the faces of the other pilots in the squadron lounge. I could almost feel the whiskey fumes tickling the inside of my nose. Vadik, Wooster, Arnold—the one with the broken nose—Demerest, Kadiz. I hummed again, swinging an imaginary mug of issue grog by its imaginary handle.
“And, if he doesn’t like it,
I’ll tell you what we’ll do:
We’ll fill his ass with broken glass,
And seal it up with glue.”
The cave echoed with the song. I stood, threw up my arms and screamed. “Yaaaaahoooooo!”
Zammis began crying. I bit my lip and walked over to the bundle on the mattress. “Well? You ready to eat?”
“Unh, unh, weh.”
The infant rocked its head back and forth. I went to the fire, picked up a twist of snake, then returned. I knelt next to Zammis and held the snake to its lips. Again, the child pushed it away. “Come on, you. You have to eat.” I tried again with the same results. I took the wraps off the child and looked at its body. I could tell it was losing weight, although Zammis didn’t appear to be getting weak. I shrugged, wrapped it up again, stood, and began walking back to my mattress.
“Guh, weh.”
I turned. “What?”
“Ah, guh, guh.”
I went back, stooped over and picked the child up. Its eyes were open and it looked into my face, then smiled.
“What’re you laughing at, ugly? You should get a load of your own face.”
Zammis barked out a short laugh, then gurgled. I went to my mattress, sat down, and arranged Zammis in my lap. “Gumma, buh, buh.” Its hand grabbed a loose flap of snakeskin on my shirt and pulled on it.
“Gumma, buh, buh to you, too. So, what do we do now? How about I start teaching you the line of Jeriban? You’re going to have to learn it sometime, and it might as well be now.”
I looked into the kid’s eyes. “When I bring you to stand before the Jeriba archives, you will say this: Before you here I stand, Zammis of the line of Jeriba, born of Shigan, the fighter pilot.” I smiled, thinking of the upraised yellow brows if Zammis continued: “and by damn, Shigan was a helluva good pilot, too. Why, I was once told he took a smart round in his tail feathers, then pulled around and rammed the kizlode sonofabitch, known to one and all as Willis E. Davidge.”
I shook my head. “You’re not going to get your wings by doing the line in English, Zammis.” I began again:
“Naatha nu enta va, Zammis zea does Jeriba, estay va Shigan, asaam naa denvadar.”
For eight of those long days and nights, I feared the child would die. I tried everything—roots, dried berries, dried plumfruit, snakemeat dried, boiled, chewed, and ground. Zammis refused it all. I checked frequently, but each time I looked through the child’s wraps, they were as clean as when I had put them on. Zammis lost weight, but seemed to grow stronger. By the ninth day it was crawling the floor of the cave. Even with the fire, the cave wasn’t really warm. I feared that the kid would get sick crawling around naked, and I dressed it in the tiny snakeskin suit and cap Jerry had made for it. After dressing it, I stood Zammis up and looked at it. The kid had already developed a smile full of mischief that, combined with the twinkle in its yellow eyes and its suit and cap, make it look like an elf. I was holding Zammis up in a standing position. The kid seemed pretty steady on its legs, and I let go. Zammis smiled, waved its thinning arms about, then laughed and took a faltering step toward me. I caught it as it fell, and the little Drac squealed.
In two more days Zammis was walking and getting into everything that could be gotten into. I spent many an anxious moment searching the chambers at the back of the cave for the kid after coming in from outside. Finally, when I caught it at the mouth of the cave heading full steam for the outside, I had had enough. I made a harness out of snakeskin, attached it to a snake-leather leash, and tied the other end to a projection of rock above my head. Zammis still got into everything, but at least I could find it.
Four days after it learned to walk, it wanted to eat. Drac babies are probably the most convenient and considerate infants in the universe. They live off their fat for about three or four Earth weeks, and don’t make a mess the entire time. After they learn to walk, and can therefore make it to a mutually agreed upon spot, then they
want food and begin discharging wastes. I showed the kid once how to use the litter box I had made, and never had to again. After five or six lessons, Zammis was handling its own drawers. Watching the little Drac learn and grow, I began to understand those pilots in my squadron who used to bore each other—and everyone else—with countless pictures of ugly children, accompanied by thirty-minute narratives for each snapshot.
Before the ice melted, Zammis was talking. Its first word was aimed at the nasty weather. It said “Damnwind.” I could only guess where it picked up language like that.
I taught Zammis to call me “Uncle.”
For lack of a better term, I called the ice-melting season “spring.” It would be a long time before the scrub forest showed any green or the snakes ventured forth from their icy holes. The sky maintained its eternal cover of dark, angry clouds, and still the sleet would come and coat everything with a hard, slippery glaze. But the next day the glaze would melt, and the warmer air would push another millimeter into the soil.
I realized that this was the time to be gathering wood. Before the winter hit, Jerry and I working together hadn’t gathered enough wood. The short summer would have to be spent putting up food for the next winter. I was hoping to build a tighter door over the mouth of the cave, and I swore that I would figure out some kind of indoor plumbing. Dropping your drawers outside in the middle of winter was dangerous. My mind was full of these things as I stretched out on my mattress watching the smoke curl through a crack in the roof of the cave. Zammis was off in the back of the cave playing with some rocks that it had found, and I must have fallen asleep. I awoke with the kid shaking my arm.
“Uncle?”
“Huh? Zammis?”
“Uncle. Look.”
I rolled over on my left side and faced the Drac. Zammis was holding up its right hand, fingers spread out. “What is it, Zammis?”
“Look.” It pointed at each of its three fingers in turn.
“One, two, three.”
“So?”
“Look.” Zammis grabbed my right hand and spread out the fingers.
“One, two, three, four, five!”
I nodded. “So you can count to five.”
The Drac frowned and made an impatient gesture with its tiny fists. “Look.” It took my outstretched hand and placed its own on top of it. With its other hand, Zammis pointed first at one of its own fingers, then at one of mine. “One, one.” The child’s yellow eyes studied me to see if I understood.
“Yes.”
The child pointed again. “Two, two.” It looked at me, then looked back at my hand and pointed. “Three, three.” Then he grabbed my two remaining fingers. “Four, five?” It dropped my hand, then pointed to the side of its own hand. “Four, five?”
I shook my head. Zammis, at less than four Earth months old, had detected part of the difference between Dracs and humans. A human child would be—what—five, six, or seven years old before asking questions like that. I sighed. “Zammis.”
“Yes, Uncle?”
“Zammis, you are a Drac. Dracs only have three fingers on a hand.” I held up my right hand and wiggled the fingers. “I’m a human. I have five.”
I swear that tears welled in the child’s eyes, Zammis held out its hands, looked at them, then shook its head. “Grow four, five?”
I sat up and faced the kid. Zammis was wondering where its other four fingers had gone. “Look, Zammis. You and I are different… different kinds of beings, understand?”
Zammis shook his head. “Grow four, five?”
“You won’t. You’re a Drac.” I pointed at my chest. “I’m a human.” This was getting me nowhere. “Your parent, where you came from, was a Drac. Do you understand?”
Zammis frowned. “Drac. What Drac?”
The urge to resort to the timeless standby of “you’ll understand when you get older” pounded at the back of my mind. I shook my head. “Dracs have three fingers on each hand. Your parent had three fingers on each hand.” I rubbed my beard. “My parent was a human and had five fingers on each hand. That’s why I have five fingers on each hand.”
Zammis knelt on the sand and studied its fingers. It looked up at me, back to its hands, then back to me. “What parent?”
I studied the kid. It must be having an identity crisis of some kind. I was the only person it had ever seen, and I had five fingers per hand. “A parent is… the thing…” I scratched my beard again. “Look… we all come from someplace. I had a mother and father—two different kinds of humans—that gave me life; that made me, understand?” Zammis gave me a look that could be interpreted as “Mac, you are full of it.” I shrugged. “I don’t know if I can explain it.”
Zammis pointed at its own chest. “My mother? My father?”
I held out my hands, dropped them into my lap, pursed my lips, scratched my beard, and generally stalled for time. Zammis held an unblinking gaze on me the entire time. “Look, Zammis. You don’t have a mother and a father. I’m a human, so I have them; you’re a Drac. You have a parent—just one, see?”
Zammis shook its head. It looked at me, then pointed at its own chest. “Drac.”
“Right.”
Zammis pointed at my chest. “Human.”
“Right again.”
Zammis removed its hand and dropped it in its lap. “Where Drac come from?”
Sweet Jesus! Trying to explain hermaphroditic reproduction to a kid who shouldn’t even be crawling yet! “Zammis…” I held up my hands, then dropped them into my lap. “Look. You see how much bigger I am than you?”
“Yes, Uncle.”
“Good.” I ran my fingers through my hair, fighting for time and inspiration. “Your parent was big, like me. Its name was Jeriba Shigan.” Funny how just saying the name was painful.
“Jeriba Shigan was like you. It only had three fingers on each hand. It grew you in its tummy.” I poked Zammis’s middle. “Understand?”
Zammis giggled and held its hands over its stomach. “Uncle, how Dracs grow there?”
I lifted my legs onto the mattress and stretched out. Where do little Dracs come from? I looked over to Zammis and saw the child hanging upon my every word. I grimaced and told the truth. “Damned if I know, Zammis. Damned if I know.” Thirty seconds later, Zammis was back playing with its rocks.
Summer, and I taught Zammis how to capture and skin the long grey snakes, and then how to smoke the meat. The child would squat on the shallow bank above a mudpool, its yellow eyes fixed on the snake holes in the bank, waiting for one of the occupants to poke out its head. The wind would blow, but Zammis wouldn’t move. Then a flat, triangular head set with tiny blue eyes would appear. The snake would check the pool, turn and check the bank, then check the sky. It would advance out of the hole a bit, then check it all again. Often the snakes would look directly at Zammis, but the Drac could have been carved from rock. Zammis wouldn’t move until the snake was too far out of the hole to pull itself back in tail first. Then Zammis would strike, grabbing the snake with both hands just behind the head. The snakes had no fangs and weren’t poisonous, but they were lively enough to toss Zammis into the mudpool on occasion.
The skins were spread and wrapped around tree trunks and pegged in place to dry. The tree trunks were kept in an open place near the entrance to the cave, but under an overhang that faced away from the ocean. About two thirds of the skins put up in this manner cured; the remaining third would rot.
Beyond the skin room was the smokehouse: a rock-walled chamber that we would hang with rows of snakemeat. A greenwood fire would be set in a pit in the chamber’s floor; then we would fill in the small opening with rocks and dirt.
“Uncle, why doesn’t the meat rot after it’s smoked?”
I thought upon it. “I’m not sure; I just know it doesn’t.”
“Why do you know?”
I shrugged. “I just do. I read about it, probably.”
“What’s read?”
“Reading. Like when I sit down and read The T
alman.”
“Does The Talman say why the meat doesn’t rot?”
“No. I meant that I probably read it in another book.”
“Do we have more books?”
I shook my head. “I meant before I came to this planet.”
“Why did you come to this planet?”
“I told you. Your parent and I were stranded here during the battle.”
“Why do the humans and Dracs fight?”
“It’s very complicated.” I waved my hands about for a bit. The human line was that the Dracs were aggressors invading our space. The Drac line was that the humans were aggressors invading their space. The truth? “Zammis, it has to do with the colonization of new planets. Both races are expanding and both races have a tradition of exploring and colonizing new planets. I guess we just expanded into each other. Understand?”
Zammis nodded, then became mercifully silent as it fell into deep thought. The main thing I learned from the Drac child was all of the questions I didn’t have answers to. I was feeling very smug, however, at having gotten Zammis to understand about the war, thereby avoiding my ignorance on the subject of preserving meat. Uncle?”
“Yes, Zammis?”
“What’s a planet?”
As the cold, wet summer came to an end, we had the cave jammed with firewood and preserved food. With that out of the way, I concentrated my efforts on making some kind of indoor plumbing out of the natural pools in the chambers deep within the cave. The bathtub was no problem. By dropping heated rocks into one of the pools, the water could be brought up to a bearable—even comfortable—temperature. After bathing, the hollow stems of a bamboolike plant could be used to siphon out the dirty water. The tub could then be refilled from the pool above. The problem was where to siphon the water. Several of the chambers had holes in their floors. The first three holes we tried drained into our main chamber, wetting the low edge near the entrance. The previous winter, Jerry and I had considered using one of those holes for a toilet that we would flush with water from the pools. Since we didn’t know where the goodies would come out, we decided against it. I was glad we had.
Enemy Papers Page 14