by Brian Aldiss
‘The helminthological evidence supports this theory.’ Tim said eagerly. ‘The cayman-heads are too recent to have developed their own peculiar cestodes; they were almost as much harmed by interior parasites, the roundworms, as was Daddy by his fiffin. As you know, in a long-established hostparasite relationship, the amount of internal damage is minimal.’
‘As was the case with the peke and bear cestodes I uncovered,’ Craig agreed.
‘Directly I saw these roundworms, I realised that Dangerfield’s claim that the pigmies were the ancient species and their “pets” the new might be the very reverse of the truth. I came over here at once, hoping to find proof: and here it is.’
‘It was a good idea, Tim,’ Barney said heartily, ‘but you shouldn’t have done it alone - far too risky.’
‘The habit of secretiveness is catching.’ Tim said.
He looked challengingly at Craig, but the chief ecologist seem not to have heard the remark, striding grimly over to the door and putting an ear to it. Barney and Tim listened too. The noise was faint at first; then it was unmistakable, a chorus of guttural grunts and croaks. The cry gas had dispersed. The pigmies were pressing back into the temple.
Almost visibly, this sound took on depth and volume. It rose to a sudden climax as claws struck the outside of the door. Craig stood back. The door shook. A babel of noise revealed that the pigmies had arrived in strength.
“This is not a very good place in which to stay,’ Craig said, turning back to the other two. ‘Is there another exit?’
Hastily, they moved down the long room. Its walls were blank. Behind them, urging them on, the wooden door rattled and groaned dangerously. At the far end, a screen stood. Behind it, two steps up to a narrow door. When Barney tried it, it would not open. With one thrust of his great shoulders, Barney sent it shattering back. Rusted hinges and lock left a red, bitter powder floating on the air. Climbing over the door, they found themselves in a steep and narrow tunnel, so small that they were forced to go one ahead of the other.
‘I should hate to be caught in here,’ Tim said. ‘Do you think the pigmies will actually dare to enter the tomb-room ? They seem to regard it as sacred.’
“Their blood’s up. A superstition will hardly bother them,’ said Barney.
Still Tim hesitated.
‘What I still don’t understand,’ he said, ‘is why the pigmies care so much for the temple if it has nothing to do with them.’
‘You probably never will,’ Craig said. ‘The temple must be a symbol of their new dominance for them and one man’s symbol is another man’s enigma. I can hear that door splintering; let’s get up this tunnel. It looks like a sort of priest’s bunk-hole - it must lead somewhere.’
One behind the other, Barney leading, they literally crawled along the shaft. It bore steadily upwards at an angle of forty-five degrees for what seemed like miles. They seemed to crawl for ever. On all sides, the mountain made its presence felt, dwarfing them, threatening them, as if they were cestodes working their way up a vast alimentary canal.
The shaft at last turned upwards still more steeply. They had climbed at this new and more difficult angle for some while when Barney stopped.
‘The way’s blocked!’ he exclaimed.
In the confined space, it sounded almost like a death sentence.
Tim shone the torch. The tunnel was neatly stoppered with a solid substance. ‘Rock fall!’ he whispered.
‘We can’t use a blaster on it in this space,’ Barney said, ‘or we’ll cook or suffocate.’
Craig passed a knife forward.
‘Try the blockage with this,’ he said, ‘and see what it’s made of.’
The stopper flaked reluctantly as Barney scraped. They examined the flakes; Tim recognised them first.
‘This is guano - probably from bats!’ he exclaimed. ‘We must be very near the surface. Thank goodness for that!’
‘It’s certainly guano,’ Craig agreed, ‘but it’s almost as hard as stone with age. Look, a limestone shell has formed over the bottom of it: it must be thousands of years old. There may be many feet of guano between us and the surface,’
‘Then we’ll have to dig through it,’ Barney said.
There was no alternative. It was an unpleasant task. The ill-smelling guano rapidly became softer as they dug, until it reached the consistency of moist cake. They rolled lumps of it back between their knees, sending it bounding back, down into the mountain. It clung stickily to them, and emphasised the parallel between their situation and a cestode in an alimentary canal. They stuck at it grimly, wishing they had kept their respirators.
Twenty-five feet of solid guano had to be tunnelled through before they struck air. Barney’s head and shoulders emerged into a small cave. A wild dog-like creature backed growling into the open and ran for safety. It had taken over this cave for a lair long after the bats had deserted it. When Barney had climbed out, the other two followed, standing blinking in the intense blue light. They were plastered with filth. Hardly uttering a word to each other, they left the cave and took great breaths of fresh air.
Trees and high bushes surrounded them. The ground sloped steeply down to the left, so they began to descend in that direction. They were high up the mountainside; Cassivelaunus gleamed through the leaves above them.
“Thank goodness there’s nothing else to keep us any longer on Kakakakaxo,’ Barney said at last. ‘We just file our report to PEST HQ, and we’re off. Dangerfield will be glad to See the back of us. I wonder how he’ll like the colonists? They’ll come flocking in in no time once HQ gets our clearance. Well, there’s nothing here the biggest fool can’t handle.’
‘Except Dangerfield,’ Craig added.
“The man with the permanent wrong end of the stick!’ Tim said, laughing. ‘He will probably see out his days selling the colonists signed picture postcards of himself.’
They emerged from the trees suddenly. Before them was a cliff, steep and bush-studded. The ecologists went to its edge and looked down.
A fine panorama stretched out before them. Far in the distance, perhaps fifty miles away, a range of snow-covered mountains seemed to hang suspended in the blue air. Much nearer at hand, winding between mighty stetches of jungle, ran the cold, wide river. On the river banks, the ecologists could see the lumpy bodies of pigmies, basking in the sun; in the water, others swam and dived, performing miracles of agility.
‘Look at them!’ Craig exclaimed. “They are really aquatic creatures. They’ve hardly had time to adapt properly to land life. The dominating factor of their lives remains - fish!’
‘And they’ve already forgotten all about us,’ Barney said.
They could see the crude settlement was deserted. The over-lander was partially discernible through the trees, but it took them an hour of scrambling down hazardous paths before they reached it. Never had the sight of it been more welcome.
Craig went round to look at the severed cry gas hose. It had been neatly chopped, as if by a knife. Obviously, this was Danger-field’s work; he had expected to trap them in the temple. There was no sign of the old man anywhere. Except for the melancholy captives, sitting at the end of their tethers, the clearing was deserted.
‘Before we go, I’m setting these creatures free,’ Barney said.
He ran among the shelters, slashing at the thongs with a knife, liberating the pekes and the bears. As soon as they found themselves loose, they banded together and trotted off into the jungle without further ado. In a minute they were gone.
‘In another two generations,’ Barney said regretfully, ‘there probably won’t be a bear or a peke on Kakakakaxo alive outside a zoo; the colonists will make shorter work of them than the cayman-heads have. As for the cayman-heads, I don’t doubt they’ll only survive by taking to the rivers again.’
‘There’s another contradiction,’ Tim remarked thoughtfully, as they climbed into the oyerlander and Barney backed her again through the trees. ‘Dangerfield said the peke and bear peop
le fought with each other if they had the chance, yet they went off peacefully enough together - and they ruled together once. Where does the fighting come in?’
‘As you say, Dangerfield always managed to grab the wrong end of the stick,’ Craig answered. ‘If you take the opposite of what he told us, that’s likely to be the truth. He has always been too afraid of his subjects to go out and look for the truth.’
‘And I suppose he just doesn’t use his eyes properly,’ Tim remarked innocently.
‘None of us do,’ Craig said. ‘Even you, Tim!’
Barney laughed.
‘Here it comes,’ he said. ‘I warn you, the oracle is about to speak, Tim! In some ways you’re very transparent, Craig; I’ve known ever since we left the Tomb of the Old Kings that you had something up your sleeve and were just waiting for an appropriate moment before you produced it.’
‘What is it, Craig?’ Tim asked curiously.
Barney let Fido out of the overlander the little creature hared off across the clearing with one brief backward wave, running to catch up its fellows.
‘You were careless when you opened those three pigmies in the lab, Tim,’ Craig said gently. ‘I know that you were looking for something else, but if you had been less excited, you would have observed that the cayman-heads are parthenogenic. They have only one sex, reproducing by means of unfertilized eggs.’
Just for a minute, Tim’s face was a study in emotion, then he said in a small voice. ‘How interesting! But does this revelation make any practical difference to the situation?’
Barney had no such inhibitions. He smote his forehead in savage surprise.
‘Ah, I should have seen it myself! Parthenogenic, of course!, Self-fertilising! It’s the obvious explanation of the lack of vanity or sexual inhibition which we noticed. I swear I would have hit on the answer myself, if I hadn’t been so occupied with Fido and Co.’
He climbed heavily into the driver’s seat, slamming the door. The air-conditioning sucked away the invading smell of fish at once.
‘Yes, you have an interesting situation on Kakakakaxo,’ Craig continued. ‘Try and think how different it would be for such a parthenogenic species to visualise a bi-sexual species like man. The concept would probably be beyond them; it is easier for us to visualise a four-dimensional race. Nevertheless, the pigmies managed to do something of the sort - they’re not so foolish as you may have thought, for all their limitations. What is more, they grasped the one fatal weakness of the bi-sexual system: that if you keep the two sexes apart, the race dies out. So without quite realising what they were doing, they did just that, separating male and female. That is how they manage to hold this place. Of course, no scheme is perfect, and quite a few of both sexes escaped into the forest to breed there.’
Barney revved the engine, moving the overlander forward, leaving Tim to ask the obvious question.
‘Yes,’ Craig said. ‘As Fido tried to explain to us, the “bears” are males, the “pekes” the females of one species. It just happens to be an extremely dimorphous species, the sexes varying in size and configuration, or we would have guessed the truth at once. The pigmies, in their dim way, knew. They tackled the whole business of conquest in a new way that only a parthenogenic race would think of - they segregated the sexes. That is how they managed to supercede the intellectually superior peke-bear race: by applying the old law of “Divide and conquer” in a new way! I’m now trying to make up my mind whether that is crueller or kinder, in the long run, than slaughter. ...’
Tim whistled.
‘So when Dangerfield thought the pekes and bears were fighting,’ he said, ‘they were really making love! And of course the similar cestodes you found in their entrails would have given you the idea; I ought to have twigged it myself!’
‘It must be odd to play God to a world about which you really know or care so little,’ Barney commented, swinging the big vehicle down the track in the direction of their spaceship.
‘It must be indeed,’ Craig agreed, but he was not thinking of Dangerfield.
The old man hid behind a tree, silently watching the overlander leave. He shook his head sadly, braced himself, hobbled back to his hut. His servants would have to hunt in the jungles before he got today’s offering of entrails. He shivered as he thought of those two symbolic and steaming bowls. He shivered for a long time. He was cold; he was old: from the sky he had come; to the sky he would one day return. But before that, he was going to tell everyone what he really thought of. them.
Going to tell them how he hated them.
How he despised them.
How he needed them.
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