by Brian Aldiss
Bending over him anxiously, Tim noticed a patch of discoloured skin under one of the sick man’s ribs. A small red spot was growing rapidly in size, reddening perceptibly and lopping at the surrounding grey flesh. Dangerfield groaned and cried; Tim caught his wrist helplessly, steadying him against a crisis he could not understand. The growing patch formed a dark centre like a storm cloud. It oozed, then erupted thick blood, which trailed round the circumference of the ribs to soak into the blanket below. In the middle of the tiny, bloody crater, something moved.
A flat, armoured head appeared. It belonged to a small brown larva which now heaved itself into the light, lying exhausted on the discoloured flesh. Overcoming his disgust, Tim pulled a specimen jar from his pack and imprisoned the maggot in it.
‘I don’t doubt that that’s what Dangerfield calls a fiffin,” he said. He discovered his hands were shaking. Sickly, he forced himself to disinfect and dress the hermit’s wound. He was still bending over the unconscious man when Craig came in to relieve him, carrying a tape recorder. He was glad to leave before he fainted.
Outside, in the darkness, the five cayman-heads still fought their intermittent, interminable battle. On every plane, Tim thought, endless, meaningless strife continues; he wanted to stop trembling.
The dead hour before the dawn: the time, on any planet in the universe, when the pulse of life falters before once more quickening its beat. Craig, walking a little stiffly, entered the overlander with the tape recorder under his arm. Setting it down, he put coffee on the hotpoint, rinsed his face with cold water, and roused the two sleepers.
‘We shall be busy today,’ he said, patting the recorder. ‘We now have plenty of material to work on - very dubious material, I might add. I have recorded a long talk with Dangerfield, which you must hear.’
‘How is he?’ Tim asked as he slipped on his tunic.
‘Physically, not in bad shape. Mentally, pretty sick. He’s a manic-depressive type, I should say. Suddenly he is chummy and communicative, then he’s silent and hostile. An odd creature . ..’.
‘And the fiffin?’
‘Dangerfield thinks it is the larval stage of a dung beetle, and says they bore through anything. He has had them in his legs before, but this one only just missed his lungs. The pain must have been intense, poor fellow. I gave him a light hypalgesic and questioned him before its effects wore off.’
Barney brought the boiling coffee off the stove, pouring it expertly into three beakers.
‘All set to hear the play-back,’ he said.
Craig switched the record on. The reels turned slowly, recreating his voice and Dangerfield’s. Barney and Tim sat down to listen: Craig remained standing.
‘Now that you are feeling a little better,’ Craig-on-tape said, ‘perhaps you can give me a few details about life on Kakakakaxo. How much of the language of these so-called pigmies have you been able to pick up? And just how efficiently can they communicate with each other?’
A long silence followed before Dangerfield replied.
“They’re an old race, the pigmies,’ he said at length. “Their language has gradually worn down, like an old coin. I’ve picked up all I can in twenty-odd years, but you can take it from me that most of the time, when they sound as if they’re talking, they’re just making noises. Nowadays, thek language only expresses a few basic attitudes. Hostility. Fear. Hunger. Determination ...’.
‘What about love?’ Craig prompted.
‘I never heard one of them mention the subject. . . . They’re very secretive about sex; I’ve never seen ‘em doing it, and you can’t tell male from female. They just lay their eggs in the river mud.... What was I saying? ... Oh yes, about their manner of speech. You’ve got to remember, Hodges, that I’m the only human - the only one - ever to master this clicking they do. When my first would-be rescuers asked me what the natives called this place, I said “kakakakaxo”, and now Kakakakaxo it is; that’s the name on the star charts and I put it there; it used only to be called Cassivelaunus 1. But I made a mistake, as I found later, “Kakakakaxo” is the pigmy answer to the question “Where is this place?”; it means “where we die, where our elders died”.’
‘Have you been able to explain to them where you came from?’
“That’s a bit difficult for them to grasp. They’ve settled for “Beyond the ice”.’
‘Meaning the glaciers to the north and south of this equatorial belt?’
‘Yes; that’s why they think I’m a god, because only gods can live beyond the ice. The pigmies know all about the glaciers. I’ve been able to construct a bit of their history from similar little items -‘
That was one of the next things I was going to ask you about,’ Craig-on-tape said, as Barney-in-the-fiesh handed round more coffee to the other two listeners.
‘The pigmies are an ancient race,’ old Dangerfield said. ‘They’ve no written history, of course, but you can tell they’re old by their knowing about the glaciers. How would equatorial creatures know about glaciers, unless their race survived the last Ice Age? Then this ornamented cliff in which many of them live ... they could build nothing like that now: they haven’t the skill. Their ancestors must have been really clever. These contemporary generations are just decadent.’
After a brief silence, Craig’s voice came sceptically from the loudspeaker: ‘We had an idea that the temple might have been built by another, vanished race. Any opinions on that?’
‘You’ve got the wrong end of the stick, Hodges. The pigmies look on this temple as sacred; somewhere in the middle of it is what they refer to as “the Tomb of the Old Kings”, and even / have never been allowed in there. They wouldn’t behave like that if the place hadn’t a special significance for them.’
‘Do they still have kings now?’
‘No. They don’t have any sort of rule now, except each man for himself. These five of them fighting outside the hut, for instance; there’s nobody to stop them, so they’ll go on until they are all dead.’
‘Why should they fight over the pelts?’
‘It’s a custom, that’s all. They do it every night; sometimes one of them wins quickly, and then it’s all over. They sacrifice their slaves in the day and squabble over their bodies at night.’
‘Can you tell me why they attach such importance to these little animals - their slaves, as you call them? The relationship between pigmies and slaves has its puzzling aspects.’
‘Oh, they don’t attach much importance to the slaves. It’s just that they make a habit of catching them in the forest, since they regard the pekes and bears as a menace to them; certainly their numbers have increased noticeably since I’ve been here.’
‘Hm. Why do they always keep the two groups separated? Anything significant in that?’
‘Why should there be? The pekes and bears are supposed to fight together if they are allowed to intermingle, but whether or not that’s true, I can’t say. You mustn’t expect reasons for everything these pigmies do ... I mean, they’re not rational in the way a man is.’
‘As an ecologist, I find there is generally a reason for everything, however obscure that reason may be.’
‘You do, do you?’ The hermit’s tone was pugnacious. ‘If you want a reason, you’d better go and find one. All I’m saying is that in nineteen years here, I haven’t found one. These pigmies just go by - well, instinct or accident, I suppose.’
Craig reached forward and switched the recorder off. He lit .a mescahale and looked searchingly at Barney and Tim. Outside, beyond their heads, he could see the first light pencilling in outlines of trees.
“That’s about all that’s relevant,’ he said. “The rest of Danger-field’s remarks were mainly autobiographical.’
‘What do you make of it, Craig?’ Barney Brangwyn asked.
‘Before Dangerfield crashed on Kakakakaxo, he was a salesman, a refrigerator salesman, I believe, hopping from one frontier planet to another. He was untrained as an observer.’
‘
That’s so,’ Barney agreed. ‘You obviously feel as I do: that he has misinterpreted just about everything he has seen, which is easy enough to do on a strange planet, even if you are emotionally balanced. Nothing in his statement can be trusted; it’s useless.’
‘I wouldn’t go so far as to say that,’ Craig remarked, with his usual caution. ‘It’s untrustworthy, yes, but not useless. For instance, he gives us several leads -‘
‘Sorry, but I’m adrift,’ Tim Anderson said, getting up and pacing behind his chair. ‘Why should Dangerfield be so wrong? Most of what he said sounded logical enough to me. Even if he had no anthropological or ecological training to begin with, he’s had plenty of time to learn.’
True, Tim, true,’ Craig agreed. ‘Plenty of time to learn correctly or wrongly. I’m not trying to pass judgement on Dangerfield, but as you know there is hardly a fact in the universe which is not open, at least superficially, to two or more interpretations. Dangerfield’s attitude to the pigmies is highly ambivalent, the classical love-hate relationship. He wants to think of them as mere animals, because that would make them less something to be reckoned with; at the same time, he wants to think of them as intelligent beings with a great past, because that makes their acceptance of him as their god the more impressive.’
‘And which are the pigmies in reality, animals or intelligent beings?’ Tim asked.
Craig smiled mysteriously.
‘That is where our powers of observation and deduction come in,’ he said.
The remark irritated Tim. Both Craig and Barney could be very uninformative. He turned to leave the overlander, to get away from them both and think things out Jor himself. As he went out, he remembered the jar with the fiffin lava in it; he had forgotten to place it in the overlander’s tiny lab. Not wishing to give Craig cause for complaint, Tim slipped it in now.
Two jars already stood on the lab bench. Tim picked them up and examined them with interest. They contained two dead tapeworms; by the labels on the jars, he saw that Craig had extracted them from the entrails of the animals sacrificed the afternoon before. The cestodes, one of which came from the peke, one from the little bear, were identical: white tapes some twenty-four inches long, with suckers and hooks at the head end. Tim stared at them with interest before leaving the overlander.
Outside, dawn was seeping through the thick trees. He drew the cold air down into his lungs: it was still flavoured with fish. The weaver birds were beginning to eall or preen drowsily overhead. A few pigmies were about, moving sluggishly in the direction of the river, presumably in search of breakfast. Tim stood there, shivering slightly with the cold, thinking of the oddity of two diverse species harbouring the same species of tapeworm.
He moved into the clearing. The night-long fight over the dead animals was ended. Of the five pigmies involved, only one remained alive; it lay with the gutted bear in its jaws, unable to move away on account of its injuries. Three of its legs had been bitten off. Tim’s horror and compunction dissolved as he saw the whole situation sub specie aeternitatis, with cruelty and kindness as mere facets of blind law, with pain and death an inevitable concomitant of life, perhaps he was acquiring something of Craig’s outlook.
Possessed by a sudden inspiration, Tim picked up three of the dead pigmies, shouldered them, and staggering slightly under their combined weight, carried them back to the overlander. At the door, he met Craig about to take some breakfast over to Dangerfield.
‘Hello,’ Craig exclaimed cordially. ‘Bringing home the lunch?’
‘I thought I’d do a little dissection,’ Tim said guardedly. ‘Just to see how these creatures work.’
But once in the lab with his burden, he merely donned rubber gloves and slit open the pigmies’ stomachs rapidly one by one, paying attention to nothing else. Removing the three intestinal sacs, he found that two of them were badly damaged by worms. Soon he had uncovered half a dozen roundworms, pink in colouration and still alive; they made vigorous attempts with their vestigial legs to climb from the crucible in which he placed them.
He went excitedly into Barney Brangwyn to report his findings. Barney was sitting at the table, manipulating metal rods.
‘This contradicts most of the laws of phylogeny,’ Tim said, peeling off his gloves. ‘According to Dangerfield, the pekes and bears are both recent arrivals on the evolutionary scene here; yet their endoparasites, which Craig has preserved in the lab, are well adapted to then: environment inside the creatures, and in all respects resemble the ancient order of tapeworms parasitic in man. The roundworms from the pigmies, on the other hand, bear all the marks of being recent arrivals; they are still something more than virtual egg-factories, they still retain traces of a previous more independent existence - and they cause unnecessary damage to their host, which is always a sign that a suitable status quo has yet to be reached between host and parasite.’
Barney raised his great bushy eyebrows approvingly and smiled at the eagerness on the young man’s face.
‘Very interesting indeed,’ he said. ‘What now, Doctor Anderson?’
Tim grinned, struck a pose, and said, in a creditable imitation of Craig’s voice, ‘Always meditate upon all the evidence, and especially upon those things you do not realise are evidence.’
‘Fair enough,’ Barney agreed, smiling. ‘And while you’re meditating, come and give me a hand on the roof with this patent fishing rod I’ve made.’
‘You have some crazy ideas, Barney; what are you up to now?’
‘We’re going hunting. Come on! Your worms will keep.’
Getting up, he produced a long, telescopic rod which Tim recognised as one of their spare, collapsible aerials. The last and smallest section was extended, and to it Barney had just finished tying a sharp knife.
‘It looks like a gadget for shaving by remote control,’ Tim commented.
‘Then appearances are deceptive. I’m still hankering after catching myself one of the local pets, without getting bitten into the bargain.’
Climbing up the stepped pole which led into the tiny radio room, Barney undogged the circular observation dome which gave an all-round view of their surroundings. With Tim following closely, he swung himself up and on to the roof of the overlander. He crawled forward on hands and knees.
‘Keep down,’ he muttered. ‘If possible, I’d like this act of folly to go unobserved.’
Under a gigantic tree which spread its boughs over them, they were well concealed. Cassivelaunus was only just breaking through low cloud, and the clearing below was still fairly empty. Lying flat on his stomach, Barney pulled out the sections of aerial until he had a rod several yards long. Steadying this weapon with Tim’s aid, he pushed it forward.
The end of it reached to the nearest pigmy shelter. Outside, the two captive animals sat up and watched with interest as the knife descended. The blade hovered over the bear, shifted, and began rubbing gently back and forth across the thong which secured the little animal. In a moment, the thong was severed.
The bear was free. It looked owlishly about, hardly daring to move, and obviously undecided as to what it should do. It scratched its yellow poll in a parody of bewilderment. The neighbouring peke clucked encouragingly at it. At that minute, a procession of pigmies appeared among the trees some distance away, spurring it into action.
Grasping the aerial in its little back hands, the bear swarmed nimbly up it. It jumped on to the overlander roof and stood facing the men, apparently without fear. Barney retracted the aerial as Tim made coaxing noises. Unfortunately, this manoeuvre had been seen from below. A clacking and growling started as pigmies emerged from their shelters and moved towards the overlander.
The alarm had been given by the line of pigmies just emerging from the forest. They wore the look of tired hunters, returning with the dawn. Over their shoulders, trussed with crude thongs, lay freshly caught bears or pekes defeated by their opponent’s superior turn of speed. When these pigmies saw what Barney and Tim were about, they dropped th
eir burdens and scuttled at a ferocious pace to the PEST vehicle.
Alarmed by the sudden commotion, the weavers poured from their treetop homes, screeching.
‘Let’s get in,’ Barney said hastily.
Picking up the little bear, which offered no resistance, he swarmed down inside the overlander, closely followed by Tim.
At first the creature was overcome by its new surroundings. It stood on the table and rocked piteously from side to side. Recovering, it accepted milk and chattered to the two men vivaciously. Seen close, it bore little resemblance to a bear, except for its fur covering. It stood upright as the pigmies did, attempting to comb its bedraggled fur with its fingers. When Tim proffered his pocket comb, it used that gratefully, wrenching diligently at the knots in its long coat.
‘Well, it’s male, it’s intelligent, it’s quite a little more fetching than its overlords,’ commented Tim. ‘I hope you won’t mind my saying so, Barney, but you have got what you wanted at considerable cost. The wolves are at the door, howling for our blood.’
Looking through the window over Tim’s shoulder, Barney saw that the pigmies, in ever-growing numbers, were surrounding the overlander, waving their claws, snapping their jaws. Undoubtedly their ire was roused. They looked, in the blue light, at once repulsive, comic and malign. Barney thought to himself, ‘I’m getting to hate those squalid bastards; they’ve neither mind nor style!’
Aloud he said, ‘Sorry we roused them. We seem to have offended against a local law of property, if not propriety. Until they cool down, Craig’s return is blocked; he’ll have to tolerate Daddy Dangerfield for a while.’
Tim did not reply; before Craig returned, there was something else he wished to do. But first he had to get away from the overlander.
He stood uncertainly behind Barney’s back, as the latter lit a mescahale and turned his attention to his new pet. A moment later, Tim climbed up into the radio nest unobserved, opened the dome and stood once more on the roof of the overlander. Catching hold of an overhanging bough, he pulled himself into the big tree; working his way along, screened from the clacking mob below, he got well away from them before dropping down from a lower branch on to clear ground. Then he walked briskly in the direction of the cliff temple.