Anywhen

by James Blish

  Blackness. Worse than blackness, for it was swimming with amoeboid purple after-images.

  I stood where I was, certain that by now I had sunk into the soil almost up to my waist. After I thought I might be able to see the PPI scope again. I tried to get a rebroadcast from the gig, though I was pretty sure most of the savages would now be protected from that kind of spotting by being in the lee of the hull. But as it turned out, I didn't even get a scanning sweep. Evidently they had shot off the antennae, too, the instant they had gotten close enough to see that they rotated. If it moves, shoot it!

  So I waited. There was nothing else to do. Roche had been right thus far, in general at least, and so the next step was to be dictated strictly by the clock. After the fury and beauty of the attack, this second wait seemed to go on forever. I have been in ground battles before, battles in which I was in more danger and had more to do, battles in which I had to defend myself, and did; but I have never seen anything like that attack on Savannah, and never hope to again.

  Inside one of the purple splotches, I saw the word CONESTOGA in wavering white letters. It made me grind my teeth. As Roche had said, there was such a thing as pushing an analogy too far. But the worst of it was, nobody on this mission had so pushed it. It had just been somebody else's feeble joke—and it turned out to be horribly, entirely appropriate.

  My clock went out. Time to start slogging back. It took an eternity, but at least I gradually got back my sight of the stars. At half a mile away from the gig, I reluctantly had to give that up again. I touched the gadget, and the gig responded with a fourth star shell.

  Most of the beasts were loose and grazing. There were two savages on guard outside the gig, holding their mounts, one at her needle nose, the other by the airlock. At this distance Sergeant Lea's men had no trouble gassing them both. When I touched the gadget still a third time, the gig let loose with a twenty-decibel, wavering honk which catapulted the remaining hexapods for the horizon as though they had never been domesticated at all. I resented it, a little. Dammit, couldn't Roche have been a little bit wrong?

  But he wasn't, not then. The other six savages were inside the gig, as soundly gassed at my signal as their two guards had been by the Marines' grenades. They had been wrecking things, but hadn't had time to get past the fragile, hyperactive dummies Roche had had us set up for them to wreck. Nor had they gotten beyond the dummy chamber into the sterile areas of the ship, where the business is conducted. We stacked them right there according to directions and sealed them in. Then we flamed each other off and sealed ourselves in.

  It didn't do us much good. There were no less than sixty-four crossbow-bolt heads sticking through the inner wall of the gig. Not one savage could have missed it more than twice. We seared them off and slapped patches over the remains of the holes, but we had to go back to the Chisholm inside our suits. The gig was airtight again; but gnotobiotically, she had been breached, and thoroughly.

  Roche had her destroyed, except for the dummy chamber where the sleeping savages were, before he would let any one of us back into the Chisholm and again, I think he had planned all along to do exactly that. It was all right with me; I hated the CONESTOGA. The trouble is, I can't forget her—or, rather, I can't forget her name. It's stupid to have the memory of a great affair marred by something so small—like the food, Captain Motlow would say—but I can't help that. It's the way I remember it.

  Besides, it wasn't so small, after all.

  We had lost all the rest of the night sealing up the holes the arrows had made, and damned near didn't make rendezvous at all; but Roche didn't seem to worry about that. When we had finally been flamed and destroyed clean enough to satisfy him, and Lea and I were let into the control cabin of the Chisholm, he barely groused at us at all. He was watching the films—not for the first time even this soon, I could see—and he looked sick, Captain Motlow was transparently puzzled, and also annoyed. Both of them were too busy to speak to us, which made me furious, and made Lea look more and more like the front side of the Mountains of Mitchell on Mars before the cap thaws.

  "There is something about this situation that's all wrong," Dr. Roche said at last, mostly to himself. "And yet I can't quite put my finger on it."

  "Everything was on schedule," Lea said shortly. I gathered that he felt he was being criticized.

  "Yes, yes, it's not that. They responded to the stimuli exactly as you'd expect people in this kind of a culture to do. The games equations fall only when you haven't enough data about the enemy to fill in the parameters."

  Sergeant Lea wore the expression of a Marine who suspects, quite rightly, that his own role in the action was being dismissed as also just part of the equations. Roche didn't notice.

  "No, this isn't a question of behavior. At least, I don't think it is. The trouble is, I don't know what it is a question of." He turned away from the screen as Bixby came in. "Ah. You were watching the action. Did you notice anything—peculiar? Would you like to see the films?"

  "No," Doc Bixby said. He too was wearing a very odd expression. "I know what you're talking about, and I know the answer too. I've just been examining the patients. They're conscious and in good shape, so whenever you're ready to talk to them—"

  "I'm ready now," Roche said, getting up. "But I'd better know what it is I'm missing. Please explain."

  "It's a question of evolution," Doc Bixby said. "By what possible course of selection and mutation can a four-limbed vertebrate occupy the same planet as a six-legged one?"

  Roche was stunned. He drew a long, slow breath.

  "That's it," he said finally. "That's what threw me. I was looking at it, but I wasn't seeing it. The long torsos! They've got vestigial middle limbs folded under their clothing! Is that it?"

  "Yes," Doc Bixby. "Only they aren't vistigial. They're functional."

  "Interesting. Well, I'm glad that's cleared up—I was afraid it was going to turn out to be something that made a difference."

  "It does," Doc Bixby said. His expression was still very strange. Roche shot him a quick glance and hurried out toward the recovery room. Lea and the surgeon followed.

  I stayed where I was for a while. I had to set up a departure orbit sooner or later, and it might as well be now. It would keep me occupied during the dry period of the interviewing, while Roche was perfecting his command of the language. Current heuristics can get a man through a language in about eight hours, but it's a deadly technical process, an ordeal to the student and absolutely unendurable to the bystander.

  Captain Motlow watched my admittedly unusual display of forehandedness with considerable suspicion, but for once I didn't care. Doc Bixby's discovery may have resolved what had been bothering Dr. Roche—though from Bixby's expression it looked like Roche was due another discombobulation sooner or later—but it hadn't gotten past what was bothering me. That was the CONESTOGA business, of course.

  As I have mentioned, the name came about by an accident unrelated to the Savannah affair. Ship's boats ordinarily aren't named at all, unless they bear the name of the parent ship. But when the Chisholm was on her shakedown cruise, some junior officer had made a joke about "hitting the Chisholm Trail"; and somebody else had remembered that the Conestoga wagon had been a machine with large, broad-rimmed wheels which had been specifically designed to ride well over soft soil.

  And that's what a ship's gig is: a vessel designed to ride well in an atmosphere, not in a hard vacuum. It's essentially an airplane, not a spaceship. So they named the gig CONESTOGA; and after a while they got tired of it, as anyone tires of a joke that comes up again every time you look at a commonplace object, and forgot about it. But here it was back again.

  Why did this bother me? I couldn't say. Partly, I suppose, because the Chisholm herself wasn't named after the Chisholm Trail, but after the first director of the World Medical Association, and perhaps the greatest. But that wasn't all; there was something else. And like Dr. Roche, I couldn't put my finger on it.

/>   And even if I could, there would be nothing I could do about it. I was only an astrogator—and even if I had been Dr. Roche, the thing I was bothered about was too far in the past to be corrected, even by the theory of games.

  So I thought; but like most people, I underestimated the viability of the past, the one thing the poets have been trying to pound into our corporate pinheads since words were invented:

  We learn from words, but never learn much more

  than that from time to time the same things happen.

  But I wasn't then thinking about The Folded and the Quiet; the quotation didn't become attached to the Savannah affair in my mind until long afterward, when I encountered the poem during one of my dead-space reading jags. Now, I didn't really know what was the matter, and so all I could do was to continue to set up the tab board.

  I missed the chow whistle too. Captain Motlow had to send up an orderly to fetch me.

  Dr. Roche's patience was phenomenal, especially when you remembered the pressure of urgency under which he was laboring. Once he was able to talk to his eight charges with some facility, he did try at once to explain the situation to them. But it turned out that they were not in any mood to listen.

  Nor could I blame them. After all, they were in the tank, which, provided though it was with every need Roche had been able to anticipate, was still utterly unlike any environment they had ever imagined, let alone encountered. As for Dr. Roche himself, he was to them a grossly magnified face on a wall—a face like those of the demons who had brought the plague in the first place, but huge and with a huge, disembodied voice to go with it. Roche was careful not to let any of the rest of us—the subsidiary demons—go drifting across the background of the screen, but it seemed to be too late for such precautions. The savages had already decided that they had been taken into the Underworld. They stood silently with their visible pairs of arms folded across their narrow chests, looking with sullen dignity into the face of the archdemon, waiting for judgment. They would not respond to any question except by giving their names, in a rapid rattle which went right around the circle, always in the same direction:

  "Ukimfaa, Mwenzio, Kwa, Jua, Naye, Atakufaa, Kwa, Mvua."

  Dr. Roche spoke briefly, was greeted by more silence, and turned the screen off, mopping his brow. "A stubborn lot," he said. "I expected it, but—I can't seem to get through it."

  "Two of them have the same names," Doc Bixby noted.

  "Yes, sir. They're all related—a clan, which is also a squad. 'Kwa' means `if-then'; signifies that they're bound to each other, by blood and duty. That's the trouble."

  "Do all the other names mean something too?" I asked.

  "Yes, of course. Standard for this kind of society. The total makes up the squad, the functional fighting unit. But I don't have nearly enough data to work out the meanings of the connections. If I did, I could figure out which one of them is senior to the others, and concentrate on him. As it is, all I'm sure of is that neither Kwa can be; that's obviously a cousin-cousin crossover."

  I almost didn't ask the next question. After all, I didn't know the language, and Dr. Roche did. But since he was obviously stumped, I couldn't see what harm it would do to introduce a little noise into the situation.

  "Could it be grammatical? The connection, I mean?"

  `What? Certainly not. No culture of this . . . Uh. Wait a minute. Why did you ask that, Hans?"

  "Well, because they always name themselves in the same order. I thought just maybe, if the names all mean something, it might make up a sentence."

  Roche bit his lip gently. After a few seconds, he said: "That's true, dammit. It does. It's condensed, though. Wait a minute."

  He pulled a pad to him and wrote, very slowly and with the utmost effort, and then stared at what he had written.

  "It says: RAINY SEASON/SOMEONE/HELP/HIM/IF-THEN/DRY SEASON/MAYBE/YOU. By God, it's—"

  "The Golden Rule," Doc Bixby said softly. "Games theory; non-zero-sum theorem one."

  "More than that. No, not more than that, but more useful to us right now. All these words are related, you see. You can't show that in English, but Savannahan is a highly inflected language; each of these eight words stands in a precise hierarchical relationship to all the other seven. The only grammatically unique word is `help'; the others are duplicates, either in meaning or in function."

  He took a deep breath and snapped the screen back on. "MWENZIO!" he shouted into the tank.

  One of the tall tubular torsos stood abruptly as straight as a ramrod and came forward, the bullet head exalted. "Mpo-kuseya," the savage cried, and waited.

  "What's that mean?" Bixby whispered, offstage. It was a gross violation of Roche's rules, but Roche himself could not resist whispering back.

  "It means: I cannot fail."

  The savage and the U.N.R.R.A. man stared at each other, as intently as though they were face to face, instead of watching images of each other. Then Roche began to speak once more, and now his urgency showed through at last.

  I doubt that I could have followed him and Mwenzio even if I'd known the language; but I know now how it went, from the transcripts:

  "Warrior, I charge you hear me, for the love of your children who may be kings. We have not come into the world to condemn. We have come to help."

  "That is my name, demon."

  "Then I bind you by it, for your children's sake."

  "I am conquered," Mwenzio said. "Sorcery is sorcery; I bow the head. But my children are not yours to command, nor ever shall be."

  "I promise you, in the name of your name, that I seek no such thing. It is the ill that I brought before that I come here to undo. To this I bind myself by my own name."

  Both Captain Motlow and Doc Bixby stiffened at Roche's assumption of blame for what the first expedition had done, but Roche sensed it at once and drove them back with a slashing gesture, just below the level of the screen. Mwenzio said:

  "What may I call your

  "Mbote." ["Life."]

  "Lokuta te?" ["This is no lie?"]

  "Lokuta te, Mwenzio."

  There was a long silence. Mwenzio stood still, with head bowed. Finally he said:

  "Notice me, Mbote, your servant."

  "Then it is this. I have told you of the plague and what needs to be done to combat it. Credit me now, for the time is very short. We will release you and all your clan, and you must carry the word to all the tribes and kingdoms. You must persuade your kings and chieftains that those who brought the plague have come back with the cure, but only if all do exactly as we say it must be done. Above all, it must start at once, before the children are born. It would be best if all the mothers in the area where we put you down, all that can reach it by hard riding, should come to us."

  "As we have done," Mwenzio said. "But then it is already too late."

  "No, it can't be. Not for everyone. If we make haste—"

  "No one can make haste backwards," Mwenzio said, and with a quick motion the short arms crossed above the bullet head, pulled the rough shirt up and off, and threw it to the floor of the tank. Without any visible signal, the other seven warriors shucked their shirts too, at the same moment.

  In the cradle of each middle pair of arms, held low and flat across each narrow ventrum, six to eight Savannahan cubs squirmed over each other in a blind, brainless fury of nursing. They were about the size of chipmunks.

  "We are the mothers," the warrior said. "And here are our children. They are already born. If it is not too late, then we give them to you, Mbote; cure them."

  Nobody can know everything. The data about the Savannahans which the remains of the first expedition had brought back were reasonably complete—good enough to let Dr. Roche fill the parameters of his equations almost completely. But only almost. The first expedition hadn't been on Savannah long enough before the explosion to find out that the savages were six-limbed, let alone that the women were the warrior caste. As for us, we were culpable
too—Doc Bixby most of all, for he had known the essential biological facts before Roche did, and had been keeping them to himself for the simple stupid pleasure of seeing Roche's face turn grey when the truth came out. I had felt that impulse myself now and then on Savannah, as I've already confessed, but I never did understand why the surgeon let it drive him —and all of us—so close to the rim of disaster. Roche only irritated me by being so knowing; but Bixby must really have hated him.

  Bixby isn't with us any more, so I can't ask questions. Luckily for him, he had a great deal more up his sleeve than a simple surprise; otherwise he might have lost his licence, as well as been transferred, when the Chisholm got home. He took only a moment or so to savour Dr. Roche's shock and despair, and then said, loud enough for the savages to hear him ( though not to understand him, because he said it in English):

  "It's all right. The cubs are born as far as the savages are concerned, but medically they won't be born for another month yet."

  "What do you mean?" Roche said. "Dammit, Clyde, you'll pay for this. If you'd spoken earlier—"

  "I spoke soon enough," Doc Bixby said, but he retreated a little from the savagery in Roche's voice. "The cubs are embryologically immature, that's all. From the point of view of development, they're still foetuses. They seem to get born as soon as they can control their muscles, and then they crawl up into the dam's arms to be nursed the rest of the way to `term'—like marsupials on Earth. I knew it would be that way as soon as I realized that these creatures had to have two functional pelvic girdies. If those bones are to be in balance well enough to serve as fulcrums for two pairs of hind limbs—and you can see that that's what the original situation was by looking at the 'horses'—then neither of them could simultaneously be flexible enough to pass a full-term cub. It was much more likely that they littered very early and maintained the whelps outside the womb until they reached term. They probably have many more children than they ever manage to raise; the weak ones just don't manage to make it into the nursing arms, and fall off to die. A good system for selecting out weak sisters—brutal for the spawn, but kind to the race. That's evolution for you every time."