Blish,James - Midsummer Century

by Midsummer Century (lit)

  They spent that night on a sort of natural platform halfway up what proved in the morning to be a tree as contorted as an apple tree, but which bore fruits like walnuts. These Tlain casually crushed open in one hand two at a time, reminding Martels incongruously of an Italian dirty joke twenty-three thousand years old. After this breakfast, Tiam dropped to the ground and resumed their journey, but he was no longer run­ning; he seemed to be in familiar territory and nearing his goal.

  And then they were there. Before Martels’ eyes lay what had to be a village, but like none he had ever seen before, even in pictures. Though the clearing which it occupied was quite large, a quincunx of ancient trees had been left standing in it, so that it was still covered by the densely matted roof

  of the rain forest. Placed regularly upon the open ground were heavy wooden shields, each of which was perhaps fifteen feet in diameter, face down and with their edges held up no more than six inches from the soil by thick wooden wedges which had been driven first through their rims and then solidly into the earth. The rims were circular, but the curvature of the shields, the mathematical part of Martels’ mind noted auto­matically, was so nearly flat that were one to try to derive a value for pi over the convexity of one of them, it would probably come out to be exactly three point zero, just as the Babylonians had measured it.

  Vines and lianas had been woven all over these very slightly bulging surfaces, and every strand bore thorns ranging from about the size of blackberry prickles to formidable spears nearly a foot long. Wherever possible, too, turf was exposed under the network, from which grew things like mutated net­tles. The whole arrangement, from ground to jungle roof, was obviously a defense against attack from the air. Had Martels been in any doubt about that, it would have been dispelled at once by the Bird—each one some sort of hawk, from chick to monster—impaled upon the central spike of each shield, and by the stains at the tips of all the longer thorns, some of which were obviously dried blood, but the majority of different colors strongly suggesting painted poisons.

  Considering what all this implied about the Birds, Martels was suddenly none too sure but that he would have been happier back in the brain-case. There, Qvant’s comment that the Birds were dangerously intelligent had been only an ab­straction. Here, there was living evidence that Tlam’s tribe of Hawkburrow expected at any time a concerted attempt by Birds of all sizes—not just hawks—to be unshelled like a clam, or uncapped like a beer bottle.

  There seemed to be nobody about, but 11am paused at the edge of the clearing and gave a great shout. After what

  seemed to be a very long while, there was a scrambling noise and a semielliptical bite out of the edge of the nearest hut lid lifted cautiously like the door to the tunnel of a trap-door spider, and a face peered upward.

  “Welcome alive, Tiam,” the face said in a high voice, its eyes squinted against the light, though its bald head was still in shadow. The body that belonged to the head wriggled out into the clearing and stood up. The villager turned out to be a sturdy young woman, also naked, but also clean; evidently the floors of the burrows were covered, not bare earth.

  Tiam said: “My thanks go with yours. I must see the Elders at once.”

  The girl looked dubious. “They are sleeping after a night hunt. Is the answer of the Qvant so grave that it cannot wait?”

  The Qvant. So it was a title. The discovery seemed to be of no use—but there was no predicting when or if it might be.

  “The matter is very grave, and will not keep. Rouse them. That is my order.”

  “Very well.” The girl dropped to her hands and knees and slithered back into the hut again, not without a display that reminded Martels that he once more had a body—and had always had pretty bad luck with women. He forced his thoughts back onto the main track. The girl’s instant obedience suggested that Tlam swung some weight here—might, perhaps, even be some kind of chieftain. That could be helpfuL Or did the tribesmen keep slaves? That had never been men­tioned, and it seemed extremely unlikely; the jungle would have made escape too easy.

  While Tlam waited, apparently at ease, Martels wondered also about the night hunting. Slinking about with one’s eyes upon the ground, in the dark, unable to see any swooping Birds, struck him as an extremely bad idea; and Tiam had

  always carefully taken cover at dusk during their journey here. To be sure, almost all the birds of his own time that he knew anything about slept at night, but there had been nocturnal raptors, too; and one of Qvant’s (the Qvant’s) peti­tioners had mentioned owls. What a 250th century owl might be like was not a pleasant thought. But the fact that Tiam had not known that the Elders would be sleeping argued that night hunting was only an occasional and perhaps rare undertaking.

  The girl appeared again, partway, and beckoned; then dis­appeared. Tlam crouched down promptly and crawled through the door.

  The bowl under the shield proved to be surprisingly deep and roomy, and, as Martels had guessed, was carpeted, with what seemed to be stitched together hides, some with the fur still on them. They had been well tanned, for the only odor was the faintest of human pungencies, like that of slight and recent sweat. There was no light but the filtered daylight which leaked under the shield, but that was more than ade­quate—rather dim, but even, and not at all gloomy.

  Seven men were in the process of arranging themselves into a circle, and settling themselves into something very like the lotus position of Yoga. Despite their collective title, they did not look to be very much older than Tlam himself, as had probably been predictable among people whose life spans were short—though not, as far as Martels could judge, either nasty or brutish. Though they had only just been awakened, all seven looked completely alert, though several also looked annoyed.

  11am went to the center of the circle and sat down himself. From this station, all the Elders were looking down upon him. Chief or not, he seemed to find this normal.

  “What was the Qvant’s answer, Chief Tlam?” one of them said, without preamble, “and why is it so urgent?”

  “There was no answer, Elders, nor did I ever ask the ques­tion. The moment after I was allowed to obtrude myself upon the Qvant’s attention, I found myself attacking him.”

  There was a murmur of astonishment.

  “Attacking him?” the first speaker said. “Impossible! How?”

  “With two objects from the museum floor, which I used as clubs.”

  “But—why?” another speaker said.

  “I do not know. It simply happened, as though I were possessed.”

  “That is no excuse. No one is ever unwillingly possessed. Did the Qvant retaliate?”

  “Not in any way,” 11am said. “Nor, of course, did I do him any harm. As soon as I realized what was happening, I ran— and he did not even attempt to prevent me.”

  “Of course you did the Qvant no harm,” the second speaker said, with heavy emphasis. “But what harm you have done the tribe may be irrevocable. We do not know what would happen to us, were the Qvant to send his powers or spirit to seek us out! Even if he does not, we cannot petition him again while you live!”

  “That is also my belief,” 11am said, with a serenity surpris­ing until Martels remembered how death-oriented these people were. “And that is why I hurried to submit myself to your sentence.”

  11am bowed his head, and after that there was a silence which went on and on and on. Martels had unthinkingly anticipated some sort of discussion among the Elders, but instead not a word was spoken. Were they communing with their ancestors? That seemed to be the only likely answer. Martels would have liked to have looked around for the girl, but evidently she had remained by the entrance, and no help could be expected from her anyhow. It had been only an impulse—Martels was life-oriented.

  At long last, the first of the Elders said, in a remote and sing-song voice:

  “Chief 11am, will you have blade or Bird, execution or exile?” It was purely a ritual question, and in this culture could have only one answer.
Instantly, Martels moved in on 11am and suppressed it. He did not attempt to dictate another answer, but simply paralyzed Tiam’s speech center entirely, as the Qvant had so often done Martels’. Distantly, he could sense Tlam’s shock as the tribesman again felt himself possessed by something unknown and alien at a crucial moment.

  There was another long silence, though not quite so long as the first. Finally, the first Elder said, in a voice dripping with contempt:

  “How could we have been so mistaken as to have made you a chief? Our ancestors grow feeble, and our judgment as well. Your courage is less than a boy’s. Let it be exile, then . . . and the memory, as the Birds tear you to pieces, that you were the first of all our tribe to fear the mercy of the blade. The punishment is far graver than the crime—but you yourself chose it.”

  In a moment of pity which he knew might be foolhardy, Martels promptly released Tlam to see if the deposed chieftain would enter any plea. But 11am was obviously too shocked, humiliated, and completely confused to say anything, even had he wanted to. He crawled silently up the slope and out of the burrow. As he raised the thorn-edged flap, the girl spat on the back of his neck.

  After that, he lacked the dignity even to hold the door up. The thorns raked him as it fell; he did not seem to care, or even to notice.

  Standing, he looked about the clearing, blinking, tense, uncertain. It was plain that the situation was unprecedented— something that he had never even thought about in all his life. Under these customs, no other tribe would accept him;

  he could not live long off the land by himself; he had in-explicably opted for exile—and had no place to go.

  Should Martels take him over now? Martels would need the tribesman’s instinctive knowledge and experience of how to live in the jungle; on the other hand, given his head, and given his attitudes, Tlam might well commit hara-kiri, or at best lapse into suicidal apathy. It was Hobson’s choice.

  11am himself decided against remaining any longer to await and face the contumely of the awakening village. He drifted despondently off into the bush. There arose in Martels’ mind the verses of Goethe about the misanthrope which Brahms had set in the Alto Rhapsody: “The grasses rise behind him; the waste receives him.” But it was not Tiam who had re­jected men, but they him, and it was entirely Martels’ fault.

  And there was no help for it. At this point, to a vocal cry of horror and despair from Tlam, Martels set him to marching south, toward Terminus. . . and the country of the Birds.

  At long last, the real journey had begun.

  7

  As they moved south, 11am gradually seemed to become more fatalistic, so that Martels was warned by a sudden though slight increase in the tribesman’s muscle tone when they actually crossed into what Tlam considered to be Bird coun­try. But for several days thereafter, they saw no Birds at all; the pattern of marching, concealment, sleep, foraging, and marching again settled back into a routine which Martels allowed Tlam to dictate. No one observing the tribesman from outside could have guessed the dialectical tension between Tiam’s dulling despair and Martels’ increasing urgency which was the unspoken central fact of their inner life.

  Then they saw a Bird. It was a little, dun-colored creature, disarmingly like a sparrow, but 11am went into instant tetany at the sight, like a rabbit freezing at the sight of a snake. The Bird in turn bobbed up and down, its claws clinging to the outermost end of a low branch, cocking its head and flirting its feathers, and occasionally interrupting its regard to groom itself. Its gaze seemed to be virtually mindless, and after a while it gave an indifferent chirrup and shot up and away into the dimness of the rain forest like a feathered bullet.

  It was hard to believe that such a thing could be dangerous, but cancer viruses also came in small packages. TIam re­mained frozen for several minutes after it had vanished, and

  thereafter moved with still greater caution, constantly shoot­ing glances from side to side and up and down with a quick­ness which was in itself almost birdlike. Nor was he wrong; for the next day they saw three more of the sparrowlike Birds, and the next day, five. And the morning after that, they emerged from their sleeping burrow to find a smoke-black thing like an enormous crow looking down upon them, just out of club’s reach, its head bent, its neck extended until it seemed almost snakelike, its eyes glassy and unblinking.

  Memories of Macbeth and Edgar Allan Poe would have made Martels shudder had he been in his right body, but Tlam was still nominally in charge, and he froze again. For very disparate reasons, neither of the two minds was sur­prised when the Bird’s beak parted, its throat ruffled and pulsed, and it said in a voice like fingernails on a blackboard:

  “Go home.”

  “I have no home any more,” 11am said hopelessly. “I am an outcast from my tribe, and all the tribes of men.”

  “Go home,” the sooty thing said. “I lust for your eyes. The King has promised them to me if you do not go.”

  Curiously, this did not seem to frighten 11am any further; perhaps it was a standard threat—or perhaps, if he had never been here before, he had already reached the limits of his terror. A line from James Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night came back to Martels: “No hope can have no fear.” The tribesman said only:

  “I cannot.”

  “The King hears.”

  “So be it.”

  “Go home.”

  “I cannot.”

  This exchange was threatening to turn into a ritual, and certainly was producing no more information. In growing im­

  patience, Martels broke through Tlam’s paralysis and set him to walking again, though not without allowing the tribesman substantial residues of his caution. The Bird did not move, let alone follow, but somehow Martels could feel its unblinking gaze drilling into the back of Tlam’s neck.

  After a while, however, Martels began to feel a surprising resistance to further travel—surprising not only because he had assumed that Tiam would have been as glad to get away from the Bird as he was, but for the unexpected strength of it. With some interest, he released control almost com­pletely; if there was a reason for this much resistance, it was probably urgent for Martels to know what it was.

  11am backed carefully into a bower where there was a huge tree at his back and a great deal of cover on all sides, plus a good deal of free space in front and above. His movements were more tentative than ever, as though he were suspicious of the degree of his new freedom, and expected to be taken over again at any moment. Martels let him settle himself to his own satisfaction without any interference whatsoever.

  For a while, the tribesman simply rested; but at last he said in an almost voiceless whisper:

  “Immortal Qvant, or spirit sent by Qvant, hear me.”

  Martels said nothing, though he had a deep, uneasy feeling that he ought to respond, if only to encourage the tribesman to continue. But apparently silence was no more than Tiam had expected. After repeating the invocation, he went on:

  “I know not at all why you have had me driven from your presence, or caused me my exile from my tribe. Still less do I know why you have harried me like a sacrifice deep into the country of the Birds. I have done nothing to earn your hatred; my very madness in your temple can have been caused by none other than your immortal self, for surely my ancestors would never have countenanced it. Tell me what you want.

  What have I done, that I should die for it? What is the doom that you have put upon me? How may I fulfill your wishes? Answer, immortal Qvant, answer, answer!”

  The speech was not without dignity, but there was no answer that Martels could have given him, nor any hope for justice. In the light of Martels’ own purposes, Tiam was even closer to being a sacrificial animal than he suspected himself to be. Neither of them had much future, but nothing that Martels could explain would make it seem brighter to Tlam. He could do nothing but remain silent.

  “Immortal Qvant, answer me, answer me! What shall I do that you should be assuaged? Soon the Birds will hear my mind, an
d perhaps yours—or that of your creature. Then their King will have me, and he will question me to the death. What answers shall I give? What is the purpose of this possession? Must I die unknowing? I have not, I have not, not done anything to die for!”

  That cry had been old when it had been torn from the throats of the hoi polloi at the sack of Syracuse. There was an answer—You were born—but there would be no point in offering it. It was too fatalistic to advance Martels’ own quest one step, let. alone to satisfy 11am; better not even to confirm, at this juncture, Tlam’s well-founded suspicion that he was possessed, by so much as one word.

  Some patterns, however, never change. Tiam cried out, al­most at full voice, for the ritual third time:

  “Immortal Qvant, or spirit sent by Qvant, grant me your attention! Answer me, your petitioner!”

  Martels continued to stand mute . . . but there was a slow stirring at the back of his brain, like the sensation of awaken­ing slowly from a repetitious dream; and then his lips stirred, his chest rose, and his heart sank as he heard himself saying in an all too familiar voice:

  “I am with you, tribesman . . . and your demon is not

  of my sending. Press forward to its urging, nevertheless, and fear not the Birds. Our hour is yet to come.”

  The triple-minded man rose, and moved somnambulistically southward once more.

  8

  Martels did not need to have been an ornithologist to know that the formation flying, the migrations, and the homing in­stincts of birds had always been a mystery. His father, like many bottom-class Englishmen of his time, had raced pigeons, and had occasionally eked out his other income from the foot­ball pools, the darts, shove ha’penny, the betting shop (more politely known as “turf accountants”), and (when all else failed) the Labour Exchange by selling a favorite bird to another fancier. Back then, there had been a good many fanciful theories advanced to account for why homing birds behaved as they did, one of the most fanciful of which had been that the creatures had the equivalent of iron filings in their inner ears—or in their hollow bones—which enabled them to navigate directly along the Earth’s magnetic lines of force.