Alas for the hopes of Pan! When the time came for the young sloths to leave their mothers, they made their way to the underside of the branches, hung there for a while, then began to move confidently about. Their upside-down brain was perfectly suited to this form of locomotion. Certainly their mothers were puzzled for a while—and so were the gnomes—but everyone soon realized that this was the ideal solution. Not only were the sloths now safe from the jaguars, but the condors, swooping down, could no longer pick them off the branches from above.
And that is why—so the gnomish legend goes—the sloth always walks upside down.
It is remembered that there was a time when the air of Earth was very still. Clouds filled the atmosphere, a continuous drizzle fell, and the winds were very light and constant; and because there was no sunshine, there were no updrafts or downdrafts. New kinds of creatures evolved: creatures suited to existence at different altitudes. Both predators and prey became so specialized that they could not exist outside their own barometric niche. Into this world came the flutterbye.
Part insect, part bird, part vegetable: the exact makeup of this strange creature is not specified in the legends. It is said that it measured a meter across and had wings like gray crepe and a soft, hairless body. Its flight was ungainly: a series of fluttering swoops and zigzags as it fed on small insects. Its barometric niche was between seven hundred and seven hundred twenty meters above sea level. It happened that no predators existed at those levels, so the flutterbyes multiplied prodigiously.
It also happened that a small gnome colony existed in the borderland between forest and savanna, on a plain in what was later called Africa, and that this location was six hundred ninety-seven meters above sea level.
“I’m getting a little tired of those flutterbyes,” said a gnome one day.
“It’s unnatural that they should have no predators,” said another, as a flutterbye died in midair and fell messily into the cooking pot. The flutterbyes were swarming a mere four metres above, picking off the insects that rose with the hot air from the fire, but frequently giving themselves an overdose of low pressure and exploding, or singeing their wings, falling and imploding.
“There are more of them than ever this year,” somebody said. “They’re turning me off my food.” This was a serious matter, for a gnome. “Perhaps we should create a predator. Some kind of hawk suited to the same altitude.”
“Would it be ethical? Birds can spread far beyond our own territory. We never know what problems we might be creating elsewhere.”
“It needn’t be a bird,” said the local Miggot, the light of inspiration in his eyes.
So the gnomes created an animal of extreme specialization. It had to be tall, so that its head would reach the altitude inhabited by the flutterbyes. It needed long legs; but they could not be too long otherwise it would be top-heavy and unable to escape from the big cats which hunted at ground level. So they gave it a disproportionately long neck, a sloping, muscular body, and long but nimble legs. In due course they surveyed the creature which the Sharan brought forth. Its body was dappled and it had blunt horns on its head, but its most obvious characteristic was its great size. It towered over the gnomes like a tree.
“It’s not going to … topple over, is it?” said one.
“Of course not,” said the Miggot. “It’s a very logical and well-thought-out animal.”
And the creature was certainly successful, and multiplied, and within a few years a herd of them circled the gnomes’ settlement, their great height lifting their heads into the levels occupied by the flutterbyes. Their necks whipped this way and that as they snapped up the flying food, and the savanna rang with their bellows of pleasure, day and night. …
“The length of that neck is a problem,” said one gnome. “It acts like a trumpet.” He covered his ears with his hands.
“It can’t be shortened,” said the Miggot. “I tried that.” He pointed to an okapi standing at the edge of the forest, unable to reach the delectable flutterbyes and miserably feeding on leaves. “There’s only one solution—but I hate to do it to such a magnificent animal.” And he went to see Pan. …
And that is why—so the gnomish legend goes—the giraffe, for all the length of his neck, has no voice.
Fang explored the animal memories of the gnomes, and although at times he felt he was coming close—particularly when once he came across a kind of flying horse—he could not find a creature in fact or legend that could fly high enough to carry gnomes to their spacebat.
“I don’t know where to look next,” he said to the Princess one evening in spring.
“What about the kikihuahua who was frightened of the Wrath of Agni? Where did he go, when he left the gnomes in the forest? He must have gone to get a ride back to the spacebat. Can’t you … kind of follow him?”
“Not unless a gnome did, and remembered it.”
“Why doesn’t the first group of gnomes remember?”
“The first thing the most ancient Memorizer in Mara Zion remembers is waking up in the forest. They must have been drugged with batmilk when they were brought to Earth. It was probably a very long flight.”
The Princess thought about it. “I don’t understand why the kikihuahua didn’t leave clear instructions with the Memorizer. It seems the obvious thing to do.”
“They were probably scared that gnomes would leave Earth before the job was finished. I expect they implanted directions in our memory lobes which won’t be triggered until some future happening. And now something’s gone wrong and we’ve got to get out of here before our time, so the memory isn’t going to be triggered.”
“So we’re trapped on Earth. I can’t say that bothers me very much, Fang. I like it here.” She leaned forward and held his hand.
“There’s real danger, Princess,” said Fang gruffly, resisting the unnatural temptation to take her into his arms. “It’s my duty to find a way out.”
So it was that in the end Fang visited the fables, having exhausted all the real memories and all the legends. The fables were a most unlikely source of information, it seemed. They were mostly cautionary tales told by mothers to their children, ending in a moral of elephantine significance. They usually featured talking animals. As a child, Fang had detested them; there was a ruthless inevitability in the way the good characters won and the bad ones lost. This had the effect of putting him on the side of the baddies and making him feel guilty.
So Fang, his face creased with distaste, re-entered the world of his childhood through the minds of the ancient Memorizers. Pompous horses and crafty foxes stalked his thoughts. Diligence was rewarded, laziness punished. It was surprising, he thought, that anyone should have bothered to memorize all this rubbish. It was self-perpetuating, like a genetic defect, and hardly needed the formal assistance of Memorizers.
Fable by fable he worked his way back, until he came to the story of the Bat and the Grasshopper. Here his mind balked. He vaguely remembered the story. More vividly he remembered his annoyance at the sledgehammer moral. He had no desire to relive that particular childhood memory, so he allowed his mind to drift into pleasanter avenues of thought.
And that, incredibly enough, caused a major branching of Earth’s happentracks, and two utterly different futures for both gnomes and humans.
In the end, Fang fell asleep in his chair. When morning came, something had happened which seemed a lot more important to Fang and his Princess than nebulous happen-tracks.
Their wild warts had flown.
* * *
Fang stared in disbelief. All winter he’d kept his pants leg rolled up above his knee in the hope of this moment. Now the vile black shape was gone, leaving nothing worse than a patch of faint redness. Opposite him, the Princess still slept, her dress slipped down from one shoulder. Her skin bore a similar pink mark. Overcome with joy and tenderness, Fang stood, gathered her into his arms and carried her to the bedroom. He laid her on the bed and covered her, intending to return to the bench in the livin
g room, where he had been sleeping. She sighed and her eyelids fluttered open.
“Fang … what are you doing?”
“Putting you to bed. You fell asleep in your chair. The warts have flown.”
“They have?” Incredulously, the Princess felt her smooth shoulder, sighed, smiled, And lay back on her pillows. “It’s been so long,” she murmured. “I thought it would never go. Thank you for being so nice to me, Fang.”
“It was a pleasure,” he said, his throat feeling curiously thick and congested. He’d never seen anything so beautiful as the Princess lying there in bed. Except when he’d seen her with no clothes on. He expected to feel shame at that memory yet again, but didn’t. Somehow it seemed all right now. He relived the experience, enjoying it, watching her. “This is a nice room,” he said absently, glancing around at the embroidered comforter and the carvings on the wall. In all those months they’d been together, he’d never dared to look into the Princess’s bedroom. His eyes returned to her as if hypnotized.
She had gone quite pink. “I … I suppose you’ll be going home soon, then?”
“Well … yes. Not just yet, though. We must make sure the warts don’t suddenly come back. We must search for them, and make quite sure they’ve gone.”
“We must. It could take a couple of days. But we won’t do it just yet, will we?”
“No. We should rest for a while. They say you should always rest after warts have flown.”
“Absolutely,” agreed the Princess, nodding. “Why were you watching me bathing that time, Fang?” The question popped out unexpectedly and the Princess shut her mouth quickly, as though to stop anything following it.
Fang went crimson and croaked.
“Fang,” said the Princess determinedly, “I really feel quite weak now the wart’s gone. “I’m much too tired to undress myself, and I can’t lie in bed with all my clothes on. You must help me.”
Fang croaked again.
“I hate to put you to this trouble.” she sat up. “Undo my buttons, please, Fang.”
Hands trembling, Fang fumbled at her dress and, instructed by the Princess, peeled off various layers of traditional gnomish clothing until her top half was bare. Like most young female gnomes, the Princess had large breasts, high and bouncy. They seemed to keep getting in the way of his hands.
“Now the rest of me,” commanded the Princess, fully in control of the situation. She braced her hands on the bed and raised her bottom.
“I … I …” Her breasts were quite enough. Anything more, and Fang felt he might lose control in the most disgraceful fashion.
“Pull my skirt off, Fang. Go on. … That’s right. Fold it and put in on that chair, please. Why are you all stooped over like that? Now my underskirt … Fine. And my pants. Get on with it, Fang. That’s better,” Naked, she lay back on the bed. “Thank you, Fang,” she said with a little smile.
Fang slumped back in a chair, staring at her dumbly. All the strength had gone from his arms and legs and had become concentrated in one place. His mind was a whirl of dirty thoughts which he could not control; neither did he want to control them. He enjoyed them. He’d always suspected something like this might happen, living so long with such a beautiful gnome. What had his venerable father said? The period of enforced juxtaposition had maddened the gnomes, and caused them to act in a manner contrary to nature.… The Gooligog had been right. He, Fang, should have known better. He was a disgrace to gnomedom. He—
“For heaven’s sake hurry up and get your clothes off, Fang,” said the Princess sharply.
“Of course,” he muttered, fumbling frantically with his belt. “I’ll be right with you, Princess.”
Much later, their joy was replaced by a short period of mutual recrimination and guilt.
“What have we done?” moaned Fang, dressing. “I love you, Princess, and what we did seemed wonderful, so why should it be so wrong? And why did it seem wonderful?”
“Maybe we’re different from other gnomes,” said the Princess.
“We’re filthier-minded, for sure,” said Fang sadly. “And I haven’t learned my lesson, because I want to do it again.”
“I have to tell you something, Fang,” said the Princess. “And I don’t want to tell you, because you might not love me any more afterward.”
“Nothing will ever stop me loving you.”
She bit her lip. He was such a dear, innocent fellow. “Just listen to this then. But promise you’ll stay for a while after you’ve heard it, and not walk straight out of here.”
“I promise.” Realizing she was very serious, he stopped dressing and sat on the bed, holding her hand.
“Well, then. Do you know why I’ve lived alone for so long? It’s because my mother and father were thrown out of the forest for doing something disgusting, and I was taken away from them and raised by stepparents.”
“What did they do?” asked Fang, interested.
“The same as we did, and they weren’t married either, just like we’re not. They wouldn’t have told anyone, but then my mother found she was pregnant and it all came out. The other gnomes threw them out, and nobody ever spoke of it again. That’s Mara Zion’s terrible secret, and I’m it.”
“It doesn’t seem so terrible to me, not now,” said Fang honestly. “My father told me about it, but he didn’t say you were the … the, er …”
“Result. Yes, I am.”
“I’d imagined somebody much smaller and younger.”
“I grew up.”
“How did you find out?”
“My real parents told me.”
Fang frowned. “I thought they were banished.”
“They sneak back every so often to visit me. But this is the point, Fang. The older they get, the less sure they are that they did anything wrong. They say it’s a genetic defect, the way sex seems to be a fetish to them, and that’s nobody’s fault, they say. And Fang—I’m their child. You see what that means? They’ve passed it on to me!”
“But who passed it on to me? Certainly not my father.” Fang tried to visualize the Gooligog grunting in ecstasy, and failed.
“Just after we’d … done it, I had a thought. It all seemed so natural and nice, that I wondered: perhaps it’s supposed to be this way. And I put it together with what you said, about our purpose here on Earth, and I wondered if perhaps sex was naturally enjoyable. You’ve noticed the way the giants seem to enjoy it, and animals, too?”
“Nyneve tells me it’s the best thing in the galaxy. She can’t understand why gnomes don’t think so.”
“Well, then—suppose she’s right? Suppose sex is wonderful, but our creators—what did you call them?—the kikihuahuas put a mental block in us, just like the one you said stopped us all from being Memorizers—”
“Don’t ever tell anyone I told you that!”
“—and stopped us all from enjoying sex. Because they were scared that if we did enjoy it, we’d fill the whole world with gnomes, and there’d be no room for anything else.”
Fang stared at her. “That makes a lot of sense.”
“Doesn’t it?” said the Princess, pleased. “And it makes me feel a lot better, too. Perhaps we’re not abnormal after all, Fang. Perhaps everyone else is. Wouldn’t that be fun! It’d be an example of Hayle, and you and I would be the only ones laughing. Everyone else would go on feeling terribly serious about sex, and their duty to the race, and so on, and meanwhile you and I would be doing it all the time, and loving it!”
“You mean …” Fang hesitated. “You mean we’re going to stay together now? For always?”
“Well, you do want to, don’t you?”
“Of course I do.”
“Well, then.”
“I didn’t expect this to be so easy. I expected I’d have to court you for fifty years or so, like my father did with my mother.”
“The warts speeded up that process for us.”
“We should really make sure they’ve gone,” said Fang. “It would be terrible if they were st
ill lurking somewhere, waiting to fasten on to us again, and their children, too.”
“I expect they went up the chimney.”
Reluctantly, Fang let go of her and stood. “I’ll check the front tunnel and you have a look around the house.” He pulled on the rest of his clothes, lit a candle and went into the tunnel. Once out of sight of the Princess, however, a gnomish urge for contemplation took hold of him. He had a lot to contemplate. He sat on the floor of the tunnel, his back against the wall and the candle beside him, and closed his eyes.
He was a married gnome, in everything but name!
He couldn’t wait to break the news to the other gnomes. There would be a wedding and gnomes would come from all over the forest, gnomes whom they rarely saw. A gnomish wedding was such an unusual and exciting event that every gnome for miles around would crawl from his burrow and attend. There would be feasting and singing until dawn. …
And he would be not merely a married gnome, but an established gnome. A respectable gnome. People would listen to what he had to say. The loss of the Sharan would be forgotten and the legend of the daggertooth would be resurrected.
And if the woodypecker happened by, it wouldn’t matter. It would be a good excuse to do it again and again.
Thinking gently of sex, Fang allowed his mind to drift gently back into the past—and this time, without effort, he found himself in the mind of a furry ancestor, floating far out in space. …
The Kikihuahuas
I will not kill any mortal creature.
I will not work any malleable substance.
I will not kindle the wrath of Agni.
—The Kikihuahua Examples
Afah had been unable to hibernate for some time. Every so often he would visit the hibernation pouch to see a variety of life-forms asleep at the nipples. In addition to the kikihuahuas, the pouch of the marsupial spacebat contained many strange creatures which had been picked up during the odyssey. He would lie down on the soft flesh and suck at the soporific milk; but in vain. Sleep would not come.
Fang, the Gnome (Song of Earth) Page 29