Equator & Segregation

by Brian Aldiss

  ‘Go and see if you can find Mm, Barney,’ he said. ‘I don’t like to think of him wandering about on his own.’

  The afternoon was stretching the blue shadows across the ground. In the quiet, you could almost hear the planet turn on its cold, hard axis. Barney set out towards the distant murmur of water, his face anxious. He turned down a narrow track among the trees, then stopped, unsure of himself. He called Tim’s name.

  An answer came almost at once, unexpectedly. In a minute, Tim emerged from the bushes ahead and waved cheerfully to Barney.

  ‘You had me worried,’ Barney confessed. ‘It’s wiser not to stroll off like that without telling us where you are going to. What have you been doing?’

  ‘Only taking a preliminary look round,’ Tim said. “The river’s just beyond these bushes, wide and deep and fast-flowing. Do you think these cayman-heads could be cold-blooded by any chance?’

  They are,’ Barney confirmed. ‘One of them put a paw on my hand, and I observed a complete lack of heat in it.’

  ‘Just as well for them,’ Tim remarked. ‘That river water is ice cold. It must flow straight down off the glaciers. The pigmies are superb swimmers, very fast, very sure; they look altogether more graceful in the water than they do on land. I watched them diving and coming up with fish the size of big salmon in their mouths.’

  Barney told him about the incident with the fish-whistle.

  ‘I’m sorry about Craig’s leg,’ Tim said. ‘Perhaps you can tell me why he’s got his knife into me, and why he jumped at me when I went after Dangerfield?’

  ‘He hasn’t got his knife into you. When you’ve been on this team a little longer, Tim, you’ll see that Craig Hodges doesn’t work like that at all. He’s a neutral man. At present he’s worried because he smells a mystery, but is undecided where to turn for a key to it. He probably regards Dangerfield as that key; cer­tainly he respects the knowledge the man must have, yet I think that inwardly he would prefer to tackle the whole problem with a clean slate, leaving Dangerfield out of it altogether.’

  ‘Why should Craig feel like that? PEST H.Q. instructed us to contact Dangerfield.’

  ‘Quite. But Craig probably thinks the old boy might be - well, misleading, ill-informed ...’.

  They turned and began to make their way back to the settle­ment, walking slowly, enjoying the mild air uncontaminated by fish.

  ‘Surely that wasn’t why Craig was so ragged about helping Daddy Dangerfield?’ Tim asked.

  Barney sighed and tugged at his beard.

  ‘No, that was something else,’ he said. ‘You develop a certain outlook to things when you’ve been on the PEST run for some years because a way of life induces an attitude to life. PEST teams are the precursors of change, remember. Before we come, the planets are in their natural state - that is, unspoiled .or undeveloped, whichever way you phrase it. After us, they are going to be taken over and altered, on our recommendation. However cheery you feel about man’s position in the galaxy, you can’t help a part of you regretting that this inevitable mutilation is necessary.’

  ‘It’s not our business to care,’ Tim said, impatiently.

  ‘But Craig cares, Tim. The more planets we survey, the more he feels that some mysterious - divine - balance is being over­thrown. I feel it myself; you’ll grow to feel it in time; directly you land on an unmanned planet, an occult sense of secrecy comes up and hits you. . . . You can’t avoid the idea that you are confronting an individual entity - and your sworn duty is to destroy it, and the enigma behind it, and turn out yet another assembly-line world for assembly-line man.

  “That’s how Craig feels about planets and people. For him, a man’s character is sacrosanct; anything that has accumulated has his respect. It may be simpler to work with people who are mere ciphers, but an individual is of greater ultimate value.’

  ‘So that’s what he meant when he said Dangerfield was still his own self, I suppose.’

  ‘More or less,’ Barney agreed.

  ‘Hm. All this business about attitudes to life seems a bit mystical to me,’

  ‘Not a bit of it!’ Barney said emphatically. ‘It’s damn practical. You take it from me, that when we’ve eventually taken Kakakakaxo to bits to see what makes it tick, we shall have nothing but a lot of integrated attitudes to life on our hands!’

  ‘And a stink of fish,’ Tim said sceptically.

  ‘Even a stink of fish has -‘Barney began, and broke off. The silence was torn right down the middle by piercing screams. The two ecologists looked at each other and then ran down the trail, bursting full tilt into the clearing.

  Under the spreading thatch of the treetops, a peke creature was being killed. An excited rabble of pigmies milled everywhere, converging on a large, decaying tree stump, upon which two of their kind stood in full view, the screaming peke held tightly between them.

  The furry prisoner struggled and squealed, while to its cries were added those of all the others tethered nearby. The screaming stopped abruptly. Without fuss, cruel talons came up and ripped its stomach open. Its entrails were scooped steaming, into a crudely shaped bowl, after which the ravaged body was tossed to the crowd. With delighted cries, the pigmies scrambled for it.

  Before the hubbub had died down, another captive was handed up to the executioners, kicking and crying as it went. The crowd paused briefly to watch the fun. This time, the victim was one of the little bear-like animals. Its body was gouged open, its insides turned into a second bowl. It, too, was tossed to the cayman-headed throng.

  ‘Horrible!’ Tim exclaimed. ‘Horrible!’

  ‘Good old Mother Nature!’ Barney said angrily. ‘How many more of the little blighters do they intend to slaughter?’

  But the killing was over. The two executioner pigmies, bearing the bowls of entrails clumsily in their paws, climbed from the tree stump and made their way through the crowd, which ceased its squabbling to fall back for them. The vessels were carried to­wards the rear of the village.

  ‘It almost looks like some sort of a religious ceremony,’ Craig said. Barney and Tim turned to find him standing close behind them. The screaming had lured him from his bed; in the tumult, he had limped over to them unobserved.

  ‘How’s the leg?’ Tim asked.

  ‘It’ll be better by morning, thanks. I can feel it beginning to heal already.’

  “The fellow who bit you - the one Barney killed - was thrown into the river,’ Tim said. ‘I was there watching from the bank when the others turned up with his carcass and slung him in.’

  “They’re taking those bowls of guts into Dangerfield’s hut,’ Barney said, pointing across the clearing. The two cayman-headed bearers had disappeared; a minute later they emerged, empty-handed, from the hut by the cliff, and mingled with the throng.

  ‘I wonder what the old boy wants guts for,’ Tim said.

  ‘Good God! The hut’s on fire!’ Craig exclaimed. ‘Tim, quick and fetch a foam extinguisher from the vehicle. Run!’

  A ball of smoke, followed by a licking flame, had shown through Dangerfield’s window. It died, then sprang up again. Craig and Barney ran forward as Tim dashed back to the overlander. The pigmies, some of whom were still quarrelling over the pelts of the dead peke and bear, took no notice of them or the fire as the men pelted past.

  Arriving at the hut first, Barney burst in. The interior of the first room was full of smoke. Flame crawled among the dry rushes on the floor. A crude oil lamp had been upset; lying among the flames, it was clearly the cause of the outbreak. Only a few feet away, flat on his bed, lay Dangerfield, his eyes closed.

  ‘He’s fainted - and knocked over the lamp in doing so,” Craig said. Pulling a rug from the other side of the room, he flung it on to the fire and stamped on it. When Tim arrived with the extinguisher, a minute later, it was hardly needed, but they soused the smouldering ashes with it to make doubly sure.

  ‘This might be an opportunity to talk to the old boy,’ Craig said. ‘Leave me here with him, will you,
and I’ll see what I can do.’

  As Tim and Barney obeyed, Craig saw the two bowls of entrails standing on a side table. They were still gently steaming.

  On the bed, Dangerfield stirred. His eyelids flickered.

  ‘No mercy from me,’ he muttered, ‘you’ll get no mercy from me.’

  As Craig bent over him, his eyes opened. He lay looking up at the ecologist. Blue shadows lay like faded inkstains over the planes of his face.

  ‘I must have passed out,’ he said tonelessly ... ‘Felt so weak.’

  ‘You knocked over your oil lamp as you went,’ Craig said. ‘I was just in time to save rather a nasty blaze.’

  The old man made no comment, unless the closing of his eyes was to be interpreted as an indifference to death.

  ‘Every afternoon they bring me the bowls of entrails,’ he muttered. ‘It’s a ... rite - they’re touchy about it. I wouldn’t like to disappoint them. . . . But this afternoon it was such an effort to stand. It quite exhausted me.’

  Craig fetched him a mug of water. Dangerfield accepted, drinking without raising his head, allowing half the liquid to trickle across his withered cheeks. After a minute, he groaned and sat up, propping himself against the wall. Without comment, Craig produced a hypodermic from his emergency pack and rilled it from a plastic phial.

  ‘You’re in pain,’ he said. “This will stop the pain but leave your head clear. It won’t hurt you; let’s have a look at your arm, can I?’

  Dangerfield’s eyes rested on the syringe as if fascinated. He began to shake slowly, until the rickety bed creaked.

  ‘I don’t need your help, mister,’ he said, his face crinkling.

  ‘We need yours,’ replied Craig indifferently, swabbing the thin palsied arm. He nodded his head towards the bowls behind him. ‘What are these unappetising offerings? Some sort of religious tribute?’

  Unexpectedly the old man began to laugh, his eyes filling with tears.

  ‘Perhaps it’s to placate me,’ he said. ‘Every day for years, for longer than I can remember, they’ve been bringing me these guts. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, Hodges, that one of the chief problems of my life is biding guts, getting rid of guts. . .. You see, the pigmies must think I swallow them or something, and I don’t like to disillusion them, in case - well, in case I lost my power over them.’

  He laughed and groaned then at the same time, hiding his gaunt beaky face in his hands; the paper-thin skin on his fore­head was suddenly showered with sweat. Craig steadied his arm, injected the needle deftly, and rubbed the stringy flesh afterwards.

  Standing away from the bed, he said deliberately. ‘It’s strange the way you stay here on Kakakakaxo when you fear these pigmies so much.’

  Daddy Dangerfield looked sharply up, a scarecrow of a man with a shock of hair and a sucked-in mouth. Staring at Craig, his eyes were suddenly very clear, as if he realised for the first time that he was confronted by someone with an awareness of his own. Something like relief crept into his expression. He made no attempt to evade Craig’s statement.

  ‘Everyone who goes into space has a good reason driving them,’ he said; ‘you don’t only need escape velocity, you need a private dream - or a private nightmare.’ As always he spoke in Galingua, using it stiffly and unemphatically. ‘Me, I could never deal with people; it’s always been one of my troubles; perhaps that was one of the reasons why I was touchy when you arrived. Human beings - you never know where you stand with them. I’d rather face death with the pigmies than life with humanity. There’s a confession for you, Hodges, coming from Far-Flung Father Dangerfield.... Maybe all heroes are just escapees, if you could see into them, right into the core of them.’

  The injection was taking effect. His words were coming more slowly.

  ‘. . . So I stay on here, God of the guts,’ he said. His laugh wrecked itself on a shoal of wheezes; clutching his chest, he lay back.

  He hunched himself up in a foetal position, breathing heavily. The bed creaked, and in a moment he was asleep. Craig sat quite still, his face expressionless, integrating all he had learnt or guessed about Dangerfield, without entirely realising what he was doing. At last he shrugged, rose, and slipped the PEST harness from his shoulders; unzipping a pouch, he extracted two speci­men jars. Standing them on the table, he poured the bloody contents of the mud bowls one into one jar, one into the other. He set down the bowls, stoppered up the jars, and returned them to his pack.

  ‘That solves his worry about disposing of the tribute for today,’ Craig said aloud. ‘And now, I think, a little helminthology.’

  As he returned through the village, he noticed that several pigmies lay motionless on the ground, glaring unwinkingly at each other over the two lacerated heaps of fur. Circling them, he entered the overlander. It was unexpectedly good to breathe air free from fish.

  ‘I think I’ve broken the ice with Dangerfield,’ he announced to Barney and Tim. ‘He’s sleeping now. I’ll go back over there in a couple of hours, to try and treat his “fiffin”, and get him in a proper frame of mind for talking. Before that, let’s eat; my stomach grows vociferous.’

  ‘How about exploring the temple in the cliff, Craig?’ Tim asked.

  Craig smiled. ‘If it is a temple,’ he said. ‘We’ll let it keep till the morning. We don’t want to upset the locals more than possible: though I admit they’re a pretty phlegmatic lot, they might well take umbrage at our barging in there. And by morn­ing, I’m hoping Dangerfield will have given us more to go on.’

  Over the meal, Barney told Craig of two weaver birds he and Tim had snared while Craig was with Dangerfield.

  “The younger one had about one thousand six hundred lice on it,’ he said. ‘Not an unusually large number for a bird living in a colony, and a youngster at that, not yet expert at preening. It goes to show that the usual complex ecological echelons are in full swing on Kakakakaxo.’

  When they had eaten, drunk some of Barney’s excellent Aldebaran wine and were lingering over the coffee, Tim volun­teered to go over and sit with Dangerfield.

  ‘Excellent idea,’ Craig agreed, gratefully. ‘I’ll be over to relieve you when I’ve done some work here. On your way, take a look at what the pigmies in the clearing are up to. And be careful -night’s coming.’

  Collecting his kit and torch Tim went out. Barney returned to his birds. Craig closeted himself in the tiny lab with his jars of entrails.

  Outside, curtains of night drew across the sky with sad finality. Tim zipped up his jacket. Striking through the grass a yard away from him passed a lithe serpent resembling the fer-de-lance, that deadly snake with the beautiful name. It ignored Tim. Cassivelaunus was sinking below the western horizon. Beneath the sheltering trees, darkness was already dominant: a fish scale gleamed here and there like a muddy star. The weavers were settling to roost, making a perpetual uneasy noise overhead. Kept apart by their tethers, peke and bear lay staring at each other in disconsolate pairs, indifferent to day and night. Hardly a pigmy moved; joylessly they lay beneath their crude shelters, not sleeping, not watching.

  Five pigmies lay in the open. These were the ones Craig had noticed earlier. As he made his way across the clearing, Tim saw that they were waiting, two round one body, three round the other body of the two creatures who had recently been sacrificed.

  They crouched tensely about the two little bundles of battered fur, glaring at one another, not moving as Tim skirted them.

  In Dangerfield’s hut, he found the overturned oil lamp and a jar of fish oil to refill it with. He trimmed the wick and lit it. Though it gave off a reek of fish, he preferred it to the glare of his own atomic torch. Dangerfield was sleeping peacefully. Tim covered the old man with a blanket, settling down beside him.

  Over him moved a feeling of wonder, or perhaps it was what Barney had called ‘the occult sense of secrecy’ emanating from an unknown planet. Tim experienced it with the strange sense man still does not officially recognise and the vast barriers of space, the glacie
rs of Kakakakaxo, and the old hermit sleeping with a head stuffed full of untapped knowledge were all part of it. He experienced nothing of Craig’s dislike of altering the nature of a planet, but suddenly he felt impatient for the morning, when they would integrate and interpret the riddles they glimpsed around them.

  A succession of leathery blows sounded outside, rousing him from his reverie.

  Jumping up, seizing his blaster, Tim stared out into the fishy shadows of the clearing. In the thick silence, the noises were crude and startling.

  The three cayman-heads who had crouched over one of the mutilated pelts were fighting. They fought voicelessly, with terrible skill. Though they were small, they battled like giants. Their main weapons were their long jaws, which they wielded as deftly as rapiers, parrying, thrusting, slashing, biting. When their jaws became wedged together in temporary deadlock, they used their barbed paws. Each fought against the other two.

  After some five minutes of this murderous activity, the three fell down again, collapsing with their faces on the ground, to eye each other motionlessly once more over the body of the sacrificed bear.

  A little later, the two pigmies crouched over the dead peke rose and also did battle, a ferocious duel ending with a sudden reversion into immobility. However much any of the five pigmies suffered from any wounds they received in the engagements, they gave no sign of pain.

  “They are fighting over the gutted bodies of their slaves.’

  Tim turned from the window. Dangerfield had roused, woken by the thumping outside. He spoke tiredly, without opening his eyes. By a quirk of the dim lighting, his eye sockets and the hollows of his cheeks looked like deep holes.

  ‘What are they fighting for?’ Tim asked, instinctively dropping his voice.

  ‘Every night they fight in the same way.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Tenacity . . . fight to the death. . . . Sometimes goes on all night,’ the old man muttered. His voice trailed off.

  ‘What does it all mean?’ Tim asked, but Dangerfield had drifted back into sleep, and the question faded unanswered into the darkness. For an hour, the old man slept undisturbedly. Then he became restless, throwing off his blanket and tearing open his shirt, although it had grown chilly in the room. Tossing on the bed, he clawed repeatedly at his chest, couching and groaning.