I should, of course, have realised before I began.
‘Oh, the hell with the lot of you,’ I said, with feeling. ‘Give me that gun.’
‘No.’
‘Look,’ I said, adopting the wrong approach as a matter of course, ‘you aren’t fit to be trusted with a bucket and spade. Give me the gun.’
‘Go to hell,’ he said.
I shook my head in tired despair. ‘We very probably will,’ I said. ‘All of us. And sooner than you think.’
Which dire prediction closed the conversation.
I could count two things on my side—experience and the wind. Apart from those, I would have to place my meagre faith in the Anacaona and blind chance. What I didn’t know about what could go wrong would have filled an encyclopaedia. I only hoped that Danel’s years as a spiderhunter had given him all the expertise he needed. Somehow, I doubted it. He wasn’t that old. I wondered how many spiders he had chopped to death with his trusty axe. He, at least, was appreciative enough of danger to carry a beamer to back him up in the event of unforeseen circumstance.
I couldn’t relax.
I was concerned for Eve even more than for myself. She hadn’t done anything to deserve this. She was going to be more uncomfortable than I. She was going to get a lot more tired than I. And she was in quasi-blissful ignorance of how bad it all was, which might keep her from being scared, but sure as hell wouldn’t keep her from being careless. If anyone was fated to die on this crazy joyride, she was the number one candidate. I didn’t like that. My life had already been sufficiently plagued by dying Lapthorns.
I found the excess of fellow-feeling an embarrassment.
We walked all day, and we sat still all night. So much for optimism.
When it began to get dark—and darkness in the forest was as black as the caves of Rhapsody—we lit lamps and set about industriously clearing a space to pitch our tents in. The clearing was easy, because the plants which made up the bulk of the undergrowth were soft-structured and not attached to their roots with any degree of intimacy. For the first time, however, we were able to appreciate the multitudinous size of the creepy-crawly population. Though the insects here could grow as big as they wanted, most of them obviously found it convenient to stay small. The bugs looked offensively like bugs everywhere else. Shake a bush on virtually every populous world in the known galaxy, and the living detritus which falls to the ground will look pretty much the same. I’ve known bugs awaken quite a sense of nostalgia in some spacemen on worlds where everything else was noticeably unearthly. Not me, of course.
The kindly authorities who had been prevailed upon to supply our little expedition had seen fit to supply only three tents. We were obviously going to be crowded. Somewhat against my will, I was persuaded to share with Max.
The one good thing about our source of supply was that they didn’t make us eat gruel. This was one advantage to their being so wilfully primitive. They just didn’t realise how unusual it was for us to go such a long time without encountering either gruel or masquerading synthetics.
After supper, Max called up the base we’d left that morning and chatted amiably to the people who were theoretically looking after us. We didn’t need a drop so soon, of course, but Max let them fix our beep so that they knew where we were. Just in case. I was surprised by this hint of caution—although it would have been matter-of-course under slightly different circumstances.
I wondered how much information about our progress was being reported back to Titus Charlot at the port. If any. It also occurred to me to wonder whether Charlot and Johnny were being cut in to the local superabundance of real food, or whether they were forced to eat out of ship’s supplies. I would still have been happy to swap places with either one of them.
CHAPTER NINE
The next day was a carbon copy of the first except that we were all very stiff. We’d walked for over eight hours on the first day (real hours, not local) with only a couple of short breaks for rest and food to tide us over to supper. None of us was fit enough not to feel that kind of exertion. The wind undoubtedly helped to take a lot of the bite out of my stiffness, but I was still aware of my limbs and their protests. I could well imagine that the others—especially Eve—were really feeling themselves. Eve wouldn’t complain, of course, and Max wouldn’t even admit it. But Linda, though she was probably fittest of the three, wasn’t ashamed to confess discomfort.
We’d all been spending too much time in trains and hovercrafts. Not to mention cars, beds and spaceships.
The Anacaona, however, were stepping just as sprightly as they had the previous day, and they seemed to be easily capable of coping with what was asked of them. But their limbs were naturally a good deal more flexible anyhow. They were probably equipped with far better natural shock and strain absorbers. The joys of a nomadic heritage.
Danel still led the way, plugging on with such a fierce and determined tread that those of us with shorter legs—all of us—were forced to call him back occasionally or ask him to pause while we caught up. We could hardly break into a canter while we were wading through sticky vegetation all the time.
I suspected that Danel was deliberately exploiting his own toughness to make us aware of our relative inadequacies. Showing off, in short.
Danel was a strange person. As he was an alien, it stood to reason that I was going to find him strange, but he was an apparent oddity even when compared to his companions. There seemed to be something significant in his total withdrawal from us. The fact that he didn’t speak English wasn’t quite adequate to explain his lack of attempt to communicate. He never spoke to Linda, though she had a working knowledge of his tongue. Nor did he pass on remarks via Micheal or Mercede. His answers to relayed questions were always sharp and strictly to the point. He just didn’t want to know about us. And yet he was our guide—his brother and sister were just along for the ride. His attitude seemed to me to be one of dumb hostility—passive protest. But Linda evidently took it for granted that he was guiding us conscientiously and competently. I decided eventually that he was trying to make evident some kind of contempt for humanity, in his own chosen fashion.
I didn’t like to talk about the Anacaona to Linda while they were in earshot, and I’d missed my opportunity to get comprehensive information about them while we were en route from the capital. The best immediately available source of information was obviously Micheal, so I dropped back in line to join him, letting Eve and Mercede bunch up in front of me while Linda walked with Max some distance behind the big-striding Danel.
Micheal carried a larger pack than either Mercede or Danel. He seemed to be having no difficulty with it, but the distribution of labour seemed odd to me.
‘You’ve got a lot of weight there to be carrying all day,’ I said, to open conversation.
‘It’s no trouble,’ he said.
‘Is this how you usually travel?’ I asked him. ‘When you come out here hunting, with Danel?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Danel likes to be able to move very quickly.’
‘The spiders are that dangerous, then?’ I probed.
‘Not really,’ he said. ‘But we seek them out rather than avoiding them.’
‘What exactly do you hunt spiders for?’ I asked him. ‘What good are they?’
‘No good at all,’ he replied. ‘We use them—for clothes, sometimes to make other things. Sometimes to eat. But there is nothing we can get from the spiders that the people of the Zodiac cannot give us.’
‘And you’d rather use the stuff from the Zodiac than get your own?’
‘It’s better,’ he said.
‘But Danel hunts spiders,’ I said. ‘He wears that breastplate thing, which is presumably spider hide, or spider shell, or whatever you call it.’
‘Danel likes to hunt spiders,’ Micheal explained.
‘Danel doesn’t like the people of the Zodiac?’
‘Perhaps not.’
I observed the diplomatic ‘perhaps.’
�
��And you like to hunt with him,’ I said amiably. ‘And carry the bulk of the load. And you don’t even carry a gun to protect yourself.’
‘Danel needs someone to hunt with him,’ said Micheal flatly, as though that were the sum total of the explanation.
‘Rather you than me,’ I said drily, though it was an extremely pointless remark. I was eyeing his pack and estimating how much heavier than mine it was. He was a strong man. My capabilities, though, had declined since the days before Lapthorn’s Grave. Even with the help of the wind I wasn’t able to make quite as much use of myself. My semi-fascination with the size of Micheal’s load was only a reflection of my own realisation of my decline. Age had rubbed a bit of my capability right out. Two years on that black mountain had reversed the direction of my life’s progress. If I didn’t fight tooth and claw to retain myself, my days as a crack pilot would be over in seven years and I’d have to take up engineering or liner-jockeying or renew a long-abandoned intimacy with the ground. The two years which I owed Charlot might be two of the last of my best, and that wasn’t going to make them pass any faster or any easier. Lapthorn’s Grave had set me on the downhill ride.
But that wasn’t what I wanted to talk to Micheal about, and I cleared my mind of it. I talked a little about the forest, but as soon as I managed to actually involve him in the conversation, we had to talk a little more about me. He was interested in me. I told him a few irrelevancies about my personal history and my way of life. Finally, I gained the confidence to touch on certain subjects which might have proved offensive if introduced without care.
‘That spiel you were pouring out night before last,’ I said. ‘It was mostly for show, wasn’t it?’
‘Spiel?’ he queried.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘The conversation we all had in your house. It was an exhibition, wasn’t it? It was faked.’ It wasn’t a very friendly thing to say, but I thought that the Anacaon conception of good manners paid a lot more respect to the truth than ours does.
‘Why do you say that?’ he asked. I glanced ahead. Linda was too far ahead to overhear, and Eve and Mercede weren’t listening.
‘It was a show for Linda,’‘ I said. ‘For the people of the Zodiac. You’ve never said a word on your own behalf, have you? Your whole dealings with the humans are conditioned by what the humans want from you, aren’t they?’
‘Of course,’ he said. I wondered just how inevitable that was. Attitude is always affected by what people expect, but the Anacaona seemed to have adapted with remarkable enthusiasm and facility to their human-defined role in the Promised Land. It didn’t seem natural to me.
‘Why do you capitulate to such an extent so easily?’ I asked him directly.
‘I can’t answer that,’ he said. ‘It’s a question that I can only define in your terms, and in those terms it’s a question which doesn’t need to be asked.’
‘I don’t see that,’ I said.
‘It’s a human question,’ he said. ‘I can only give a human answer. And once I can give a human answer, the question is already settled. There can’t be a reason, in your terms, and the reason in our terms can’t be put into human terms.’
I tried to follow all that.
‘What you’re saying,’ I decided finally, ‘is that in order to communicate with the people of the Zodiac, you’ve found it necessary to develop a personality with which they can communicate, because they couldn’t communicate with you as you are. The basis you’ve established for communication has been almost exclusively dictated by their angle of the communication, right?’
‘I think so.’
‘And Danel won’t communicate because he doesn’t want his mind polluted.’
‘No. Not at all. Danel does not communicate directly. He has not acquired many human attributes. The relationship between these two things is not deliberate.’
I tried to follow that. I tried to estimate its importance, and couldn’t quite manage it. What Micheal was telling me was that the Anacaon mind was so alien that in order to communicate with the people of the Zodiac, they had had to manufacture a human mentality. Danel had not manufactured such a mentality. But could he avoid being affected, if all his own people were so busy being human? How could a mind so alien as the Anacaon mind have such a facility for co-adaptation to the human mind? Why did it have such a facility?
Micheal wasn’t talking to me as a member of an alien race. He was talking to me as a part of the Promised Land.
Instant humanity. Just add...what?
‘You could have killed them all,’ I said. ‘You still could. Sheer force of numbers. Wipe them out. Your people didn’t have to be enslaved. They could have reacted, and remained themselves.’
‘Why?’ he asked.
Why indeed? It wasn’t a question. He didn’t mean ‘Why?’ at all. He meant that I was off the track again. He couldn’t answer except in human terms, and once he had human terms to answer with, the question became redundant. There was a communication block between us. I could only talk to the human in him, but I wanted to talk to the Anacaon.
‘Don’t you find it a hell of a way to be?’ I asked him. ‘Doesn’t it offend you, having to be what someone else says you must be?’
‘No,’ he said. Which struck me as being very odd. If his identity was willing to be moulded so easily, how come he had an identity in the first place? And how was I supposed to explain Danel?
‘What about Danel?’ I asked.
‘It’s the same,’ he said, with a shrug of his shoulders. A very human shrug.
For a minute or two, I didn’t understand. Then inspiration struck.
‘It’s a different role in the same play,’ I said. ‘He’s Linda Petrosian’s alien. An ersatz noble savage. You’re all too good to be true, so....’
It was a deceptively simple thought. The Anacaona had a very highly developed talent for mimicry. But how come? What could it possibly have been used for before the Zodiac landed? How could it have evolved? And what was it for? Moths pretend to be dead leaves or vile-tasting cousins so that they won’t get eaten by predators. Praying mantises pretend to be twigs for precisely the reverse reason. But neither could be applicable to the Anacaona by any stretch of the imagination.
The idea of a race living behind masks for the benefit of other races wasn’t new to me. Colonised planets often result in that sort of effect. Humans are notoriously intolerant people, and the rule on a lot of worlds is ‘pretend, or suffer,’ no matter what the Law of New Rome may have to say on the subject. But the Anacaona were a step beyond that. The other races wore their masks obviously. Their resentment was often an integral part of the mask. But the Zodiac people obviously trusted the Anacaona implicitly and that trust had never been betrayed. Was there any Anacaon left behind Micheal’s mask? Was there even any behind Danel’s?
Micheal was impressively bland about the whole thing. I continued to ask him leading questions. I tried to be devious, and employed a few trick questions to try and reach something in him that was beyond his fake, frail humanity. But he was open and apparently honest, and he knew what I was asking him, and there was no help he could give me. To all the most awkward questions, his blanket answer was that in human terms they were redundant, in other terms meaningless.
It occurred to me then that if Charlot was having acute difficulties with the Anacaona in the colony, then my feeble mind had no chance at all to sort out the mystery.
I was sure that Micheal was telling me the truth, but I was also fairly sure that it was a special kind of truth. I had to be content in the meantime with wary ignorance. Perhaps I would never get beyond that.
‘Is the colony on New Alexandria a success?’ asked Micheal.
‘I don’t know much about it,’ I told him. ‘I only found out about it a few weeks ago—indirectly. But I guess it can’t be an unqualified success if people are running away from it. You can hardly pass off a kidnap as behaviour expected of the colonists. The woman who escaped with the child must have had reasons, and
I can’t see that they would be human reasons.’
‘What is a kidnap?’ asked Micheal.
That gave me pause to think.
‘The stealing of one person by another,’‘ I told him. It didn’t sound to me like the Anacaon style at all. I had suspected that Charlot wasn’t telling us all he knew, and might be deceiving us to some extent, but I hadn’t really thought that he might be spinning us a complete lie. He had been insistent enough about the kidnapping to make it look very definite indeed. And his expectation of New Rome backing was obviously real.
‘What do you think about that possibility?’ I asked Micheal. ‘Why would an Anacaon do something like that?’
‘No Anacaon would.’
‘But it did happen,’ I said. ‘Believe me, Titus Charlot isn’t the sort of man who runs prisons. And why should he, with a people as co-operative as yours. I suppose it’s possible that the girl went with the woman of her own free will, but why would they leave New Alexandria illegally? Why would they want to leave?’
‘Ask the Zodiac people whether any Anacaon has ever committed a crime of any kind,’ suggested Micheal.
‘I don’t have to,’ I said. ‘I accept your assurance, believe me. So the Anacaona aren’t very human at all. Committing crimes is virtually universal among humans.’
‘We aren’t human,’ he assured me. And, of course, that was true. The Anacaona were in no way human beings. They were merely living up to human expectations. Moths don’t become dead leaves. They remain moths. But they live up to all the eye’s expectations of a dead leaf. Until they fly away. Was what the woman had done the single Anacaon action that I had been searching for? If so, what had inspired it? What could possibly have overridden the adaptive compulsion?
I decided that it had to be a compulsion. I couldn’t imagine a whole race whose dearest wish was to be the perfect slave race. I looked forward to meeting the ‘wild’ Anacaona. Perhaps that would reveal something.
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