by Brian Aldiss
Thigh-deep in clacking caymen-heads, who kept them en-circled, the PEST men advanced towards the settlement, which lay in patchy tones of blue sunshine and blue shade ahead. As far as they could tell, this manoeuvre was resented by the pigmies, whose noise redoubled. When they spoke, their grey tongues wagged up and down in their long mouths. They backed away without offering opposition. Following Craig’s lead, Barney and Tim kept their hands above their sidearms, in case of trouble.
So they moved slowly into the village. The strange aspect of the place now became apparent. Bounded on one side by the cliff face, the village stood under trees which grew straight out of the dark soil. Up in the thick blueish foliage of these trees, an immense colony of gay-coloured birds, evidently a sort of weaver, had plaited a continuous roof out of lianas, climbers, leaves and twigs. Under this cover, on the dropping-bespattered ground, the pigmies had their rude huts, which were no more than squares of woven reed propped at any angle by sticks, to allow an entrance. They looked like collapsed bivouacs.
Tethered outside these dismal dwellings were furry animals, walking in the small circles allowed by their leashes and calling dolefully to each other. Their mewing cries, the staccato calls of the birds, and the croaking of the caymen-heads, made a babel of sound. And over everything lay the ripe stench of decaying fish.
‘Plenty of local colour,’ Barney remarked.
In contrast to this squalid scene was the cliff face, which had been ornately carved with stylised representations of foliage mingled with intricate geometrical forms. Later, the ecologists were to find that this work was crude in detail, but from a distance its superiority to the village was most marked. As they came nearer, they saw that the decorated area was actually a building hewn in the living rock, complete with doors, passages, rooms and windows, from the last of which pigmies watched their progress with unblinking curiosity.
‘Impressive! Their claws can be turned to something else than attack.’ Tim observed, eyeing the patterns in the rock.
‘Dangerfield,’ Craig called, when another attempt to communicate with the pigmies had failed. Only the whooping birds answered him.
Already the pigmies were losing interest. They pressed less closely round the men. Several scuttled with lizard speed back into their shelters. Looking over the knobby heads of the crowd, Barney pointed to the far side of the clearing. There, leaning against the dun-coloured rock of the cliff, was a sizeable hut, built of the same flimsy material as the pigmy dwellings, but evidently containing more than one room. As they regarded it, a man appeared in the doorway. He made his way towards them, aiding himself along with a stout stick.
‘That’s Dangerfield!’ Barney exclaimed.
A warning stream of excitement ran through Tim. Daddy Dangerfield was something of a legend in this region of the inhabited galaxy. Crash-landing on Kakakakaxo nineteen years ago, he had been the first man to visit this uninviting little world. Kakakakaxo was off the trade routes, although it was only fifteen light years from Droxy, one of the great interstellar centres of commerce and pleasure. So Dangerfield had lived alone with the pigmies for ten standard years before someone had chanced to arrive with an offer of rescue. Then the stubborn man refused to leave, saying the native tribes had need of him. He had remained where he was, a God of the Great Beyond, Daddy to the Little Folk - as the sentimental Droxy tabloids phrased it, with their usual affection for titles and capital letters.
As he approached the team now, the pigmies fell back before him, still maintaining their clacking chorus. Many of them slid away, bored by affairs beyond their comprehension.
It was difficult to recognise, in the bent figure peering anxiously at them, the young, bronzed giant by which Dangerfield was represented on Droxy. The thin, sardonic face with its powerful hook of nose had become a caricature of itself. The grey hair was long and dirty. The lumpy hands which grasped the stick were bespattered with liver marks. This was Dangerfield, but appearances suggested that the legend would outlive the man.
‘You’re from Droxy?’ he asked eagerly, speaking in Galingua. ‘You’ve come to make another film about me? I’m very pleased to see you here. Welcome to the untamed planet of Kakakakaxo.’
Craig Hodges put out his hand.
‘We’re not from Droxy,’ he said. ‘We’re based on Earth, although most of our days are spent far from it. Nor have ws come to make films; our mission is rather more practical than that.’
As Craig introduced himself and his team, Dangerfield’s manner became noticeably less cordial. He muttered angrily to himself about Droxy.
‘Come along over and have a drink with us in our wagon,’ Barney said. ‘We’ve got a nice little Aldebaran wine you might like to sample. You must be glad to see someone to talk to.’
“This is my place,’ the old man said, making a move in the direction of the overlander. ‘I don’t know what you people are doing here. I’m, the man who beat Kakakakaxo. The God of the Crocodile Folk, that’s what they call me. If you had pushed your way in here twenty years ago as you did just now, the pigmies would have torn you to bits. I tamed ‘em! No living man has ever done what I’ve done. They’ve made films about my life on Droxy - that’s how important I am. Didn’t you know that?’
Tim Anderson winced in embarrassment. He wanted to tell this gaunt relic that Dangerfield, the Far-Flung Father, the Cosmic Schweitzer, had been one of his boyhood heroes, a giant through whom he had first felt the ineluctable lure of space travel; he wanted to tell him that it hurt to have his legend destroyed. Here was the giant himself - bragging of his past, and bragging moreover, in a supplicatory whine.
They came up to the overlander. Dangerfield stared at the neat shield on the side, under which the words Planetary Ecological Survey were inscribed in grey. After a moment, he turned pugnaciously to Craig.
‘Who are you people? What do you want here?’ he asked.
‘We’re a fact-finding team, Mr Dangerfield,’ Craig said levelly. ‘Our business is to gather data on this planet. Next to nothing is known about ecological or living conditions here. We are naturally keen to secure your help; you should be a treasury of information -‘
‘I can’t answer any questions! I never answer questions. You’ll have to find out anything you want to know for yourselves. I’m a sick man - I’m in pain. It’s all I can do to walk, I need a doctor, drugs. . .. Are you a doctor?’
‘I can administer an analgesic,’ Craig said. ‘And if you will let me examine you, I will try to find out what you are suffering from.’
Dangerfield waved a hand angrily in the air.
‘I don’t need telling what’s wrong with me,’ he snapped. ‘I know every disease that’s going on this cursed planet. I’ve got fiffins, and all I’m asking you for is something to relieve the pain. If you haven’t come to be helpful, you’d best get out altogether!”
‘Just what is or are fiffins?’ Barney asked.
‘None of your business. They’re not infectious, if that’s what’s worrying you. If you have only come to ask questions, clear out. The pigmies will look after me, just as I’ve always looked after them.’
As he turned round to retreat, Dangerfield staggered and would have fallen, had not Tim moved fast enough to catch his arm. The old fellow shook off the supporting hand with weak anger and hurried back across the clearing. Tim fell in beside him.
‘We can help you,’ he said pleadingly. ‘Please be reasonable.’
‘I never had help, and I don’t need it now. And what’s more, I’ve made it a rule never to be reasonable.’
Full of conflicting emotion, Tim turned and caught sight of Craig’s impassive face.
‘We should help him.’ he said.
‘He doesn’t want help,’ Craig replied, not moving.
‘But he’s in pain!’
‘No doubt, and the pain clouds his judgement. But he is still his own self, with his own ways. We have no right to take him over against his expressed wishes.’
‘
He may be dying,’ Tim said. He looked defiantly at Craig. Then he swung away, and walked rapidly off, pushing past the few caymen-heads who still remained on the scene. Dangerfield, on the other side of the clearing, disappeared into his hut. Barney made to follow Tim, but Craig stopped him.
‘Leave him,’ he said quietly.
Barney looked straight at his friend.
‘Don’t force the boy,’ he said. ‘He hasn’t got your outlook to life. Just go easy on him, Craig.’
‘We all have to learn,’ Craig observed, almost sadly. Then, changing his tone, he said, ‘For some reason we have yet to discover, Dangerfield is uncooperative. From first impressions, he is unbalanced, which means he may soon swing the other way and offer us help; that we should wait for: I am interested to get a straight record of his nineteen years here.’
‘He’s stubborn,’ Barney said, shaking his head.
‘Which is the sign of a weak man. That’s why Tim was unwise to coax him; it would merely make him more obdurate. If we ignore him, he will come to us. Until then, we work on our own here, studying the local life. Firstly, we must establish the intelligence status of the pigmies, with a view to rinding out how much opposition they will offer colonists. One or two other odd features may also prove interesting.’
Thrusting his hands in his pocket, Barney surveyed the tawdry settlement. Now that it was quieter, he could hear a river flowing nearby. All the pigmies had dispersed; some lay motionless in their crude shelters, only their snouts showing the blue light lying like a mist along their scales.
‘Speaking off the cuff, I’d say the pigmies are subhuman,’ Barney remarked, picking from his beard an insect which had tumbled out of the thatched trees above them. ‘I’d also hazard they have got as far, evolutionwise, as they’re ever going to get. They have restricted cranial development, no opposed thumb, and no form of clothing - which, means the lack of any sexual inhibition, such as one would expect to find in this Y-type culture. I should rate them as Y gamma stasis, Craig, at first blush.’
Craig nodded, smiling, as if with a secret pleasure.
‘Which means you feel as I do about the cliff temple,’ he said, indicating with his grey eyes the wealth of carving visible through the trees.
‘You mean - the pigmies couldn’t have built it ?’ Barney said. Craig nodded his large head.
“The caymen-heads are far below the culture level implied by this architecture. They are its caretakers, not its creators. Which means, of course, that there is - or was - another species, a superior species, on Kakakakaxo, which may prove more elusive than the pigmies.’
Craig was solid and stolid. He had spoken unemphatically. But Barney, who knew something of what went on inside that megacephalous skull, realised that by this very way-Craig had of tossing away an important point, he was revealing a problem which excited his intellectual curiosity.
Understanding enough not to probe on the subject, Barney filed it away for later and switched to another topic. For such a bulky specimen of manhood, he possessed surprising delicacy; but the confines of a small spaceship made a good schoolroom for the sensibilities.
‘I’m just going to look at these furry pets the cayman-heads keep tied up outside their shelters,’ he said. “They’re intriguing little creatures.’
‘Go carefully,’ Craig cautioned. ‘I have a suspicion the cayman-heads may not appreciate your interference. Those pets may not be pets at all; the pigmies don’t look like a race of animal-lovers.’
‘Well, if they aren’t pets, they certainly aren’t cattle,’ Barney said, walking slowly among the crude shelters. He was careful to avoid any protruding pigmy protruding snouts, which lay along the ground like fallen branches. Outside most of the shelters, two different animals were tethered, generally by their hind legs. One animal, a grey, furry creature with a pushed-in face like a pekinese dog, stood almost as high as the pigmies; the other animal, a pudgy-snouted little creature with brown fur and a gay yellow crest, was half the size of the ‘peke’, and resembled a miniature bear. Both pekes and bears had little black monkey-like paws, many of which were now raised as if in supplication as the ecologists approached.
‘Certainly they are more attractive than their owners,’ Craig said. Stooping, he extended a hand cautiously to one of the little bears. It leapt forward and clutched the hand, chattering in appealing fashion.
‘Do you suppose the two species, the pekes and the bears, fight together?’ Barney asked. ‘You notice they are kept tied just far enough apart so that they can’t touch each other. We may have found the local variation on cockfighting.’
‘Bloodsports might be in accord with the looks of the pigmies,’ Craig said, ‘but not with the character of these creatures. Even their incisors are blunt. They have no natural weapons.’ ‘Talking of teeth, they exist on the same diet as their masters,’
Barney commented. The little animals were sitting disconsolately on decaying piles of fish bones, fish heads and scales, amid which iridescent beetles scuttled, busy almost beneath Barney’s feet. “I’m going to try taking one of these pekes back to the overlander,’ he announced. ‘It should be well worth examining.’
From the corner of his eye, he could see a pigmy snout sticking out of its shelter not three yards away; keeping it under observation, he bent down to loosen the tightly-drawn thong from the peg in the ground. The tethered creatures nearby, large and small, set up an excited chatter as they perceived what Barney was attempting. At the same time, the watching pigmy moved.
Its speed was astonishing. One second it was scarcely visible in its shelter, its nose extended along the ground; the next, it confronted Barney with its claws resting over his hand, its ferocious teeth bared in his face. Small though the reptile was, undoubtedly it could have snapped his neck through. Its yellow eyes glared unblinkingly up at Barney.
‘Don’t fire or you’ll have the lot on us,’ Craig said, for Barney’s free hand had gone immediately for his gun.
Almost at once, they found themselves surrounded by pigmies, all scuttling up and clacking excitedly. They made their typical noises by waggling their tongues without moving their jaws. Though they crowded in, apparently hostile, they made no attempt to attack Craig and Barney. Then one of them thrust forward and waving his small upper arm, commenced to harangue them.
‘Some traces of a primitive speech pattern,’ Craig observed coolly. ‘Let me try a little barter for your pet, Barney, while we have their attention.’
Dipping into one of the pouches of his duty equipment, he produced a necklace in whose marble-sized stones spirals of colour danced, delicate internal springs ensuring that their hues changed continually as long as their wearer moved. It was the sort of bauble to be picked up for a few minicredits on almost any civilised planet. Craig held it out to the pigmy who had delivered the speech.
The pigmy leader scrutinised it briefly, then resumed his harangue. The necklace meant nothing to him. With signs, Craig explained the function of the necklace, and indicated that he would exchange it for one of the little bears; but abundant though these animals were, their owners showed no sign of intending to part with one. Pocketing the necklace, Craig produced a mirror.
Mirrors unfailingly excite the interest of primitive tribes - yet the pigmies remained unmoved. Many of them began to disappear, speeding off with the nervous, lizard movements. Putting the mirror away, Craig brought out a whistle.
It was an elaborate toy, shaped like a silver fish with an open mouth. The pigmy leader snatched it from Craig’s hand, leaving the red track of its claws across his open palm. It popped the whistle into its mouth.
‘Here, that’s not edible!’ Craig said, instinctively stepping forward with his hand out. Without warning, the pigmy struck. Perhaps it misinterpreted Craig’s gesture and acted, as it thought, in self-defence. Snapping its jaws, it lunged out at Craig’s leg. The ecologist fell instantly. Hardly had he struck the ground when a blue shaft flashed from Barney’s blast-gun. As the noise
of the thermonuclear explosion rattled round the clearing, the pigmy topped over and fell flat, smoking.
In to the ensuing silence broke the terrified clatter of a thousand weaver birds, winging from their homes and circling high above the tree tops. Barney bent down, seized Craig round the shoulders, and raised him with one powerful arm, keeping the blaster levelled in his free hand. Over Craig’s thigh, soaking through his torn trousers, grew a ragged patch of blood.
“Thanks, Barney,’ he said. ‘Let’s get back to the overlander.’
They retreated, Craig limping painfully. The pigmies made no attempt to attack. They mostly stood still, crouching over the smoking body and either staring fixedly or waving their snouts helplessly from side to side. It was impossible to determine whether they were frightened by the show of force or had decided that the brief quarrel was no affair of theirs. At last they bent over their dead comrade, seized him by his hind feet, and dragged him briskly off in the direction of the river.
When Barney got Craig on to his bunk, he stripped his trousers off, cleansed the wound, and dressed it with antiseptic and restorative powder. Although Craig had lost blood, little serious damage had been done; his leg would be entirely healed by morning.
‘You got off lightly,’ Barney said, straightening up. ‘It’s a deep flesh wound, but that baby could have chewed your knees off if he had been trying.’
Craig sat up and accepted a mescahale.
‘One thing about the incident particularly interested me,’ he said. “The cayman-heads wanted the whistle because they mistook it for food; fish obviously is the main item of their diet. The mirror and necklace meant nothing to them; I have never met a backward tribe so lacking in simple, elementary vanity. Does it connect with the absence of any sexual inhibitions which you mentioned?’
‘What have they to be vain about?’ Barney asked. ‘After five minutes out there, I feel as if the stench of fish has been painted on me with a brush.’
Five minutes later, they realised Tim Anderson was nowhere in the overlander. Craig pursed his lips.