Nova 1

by Anthology

  Now he was moving and thrusting with a wholeness of being that had to be shared—it was too big for any one person—and he moved and thrust at her all the more willfully, trying to push his sharing all the deeper into her. Marsha too seemed to be arching, thrusting, giving—as if she too had something overwhelming to give.

  It was as if they were both doing the right thing at the right time and at the right place—and for one brief bright flash it reminded him of what it had been like when they had been young, and when nothing else had existed but each other and the bright surging world.

  They forgot the wires, the bands, the guidance module on the dresser. Their external beings had disappeared and they immersed themselves in their lovemaking. It was a surging climbing wave, a bright crashing thing that built ever higher. Ever higher.

  And it was very good.

  He smiled at her. She smiled back, and they kissed. It wasn’t until the next morning they discovered the guidance module had not been connected.

  JEAN DUPRES

  by Gordon R. Dickson

  Anything that man can imagine is theoretically possible. We have made the first giant-step of space flight to the moon. The planets will be next and then—the stars? We have the feeling that, unreasonable as it appears to be in the light of present knowledge, this voyage will someday be possible. What will we find there? What kind of life forms? These are classic science fiction questions that have been answered in exhausting detail down through the years. Yet very rarely is the more important question asked: What will happen when our culture brushes up against an alien culture? “Jean Dupres” is a well-considered, moving answer to that question. For there will be people who will form a bridge between ours and theirs.

  The way I met Jean Dupres for the first time, I was on independent patrol with a squad of six men, spread out, working through the green tangle of the Utword jungle. I came up to the edge of a place where the jungle was cut off sharp, and looked through the last screen of scroll-edged, eight-foot ferns at a little room of pounded earth, the vestibule of a larger, planted field I could see beyond. Near the opening in the larger field sat a riding macerator with no one in its saddle; and right before me—not five feet beyond the ferns—a boy not more than four years old stood leaning on a rifle that was such a good imitation of the real thing that I could hardly believe that it was a fake.

  Then I saw it was not a fake.

  I went through the last screen of ferns with a rush and took the gun away from the boy even as he tried to swing it to his shoulder. He stood staring at me, blinking and bewildered, trying to make up his mind whether to cry or not; and I looked the rifle over. It was a DeBaraumer, capable of hurling out anything and everything, from a wire-control rocket slug to any handy pebble small enough to rattle through its bore.

  “Where did you get this?” I asked him. He had decided not to cry and he looked up at me with a white face and round, desperate eyes.

  “My daddy,” he said.

  “Where’s your daddy at?”

  Without taking his eyes off my face, he half-turned and pointed away through the opening into the larger field.

  “All right,” I said. “We’ll go see him about this.” I unclipped the handmike from my belt and told my six men to close up and follow me in. Then I set my telemeter beacon and turned to go with the boy to find his daddy—and I stopped dead.

  For there were two of the K’ahari young men standing just inside the edge of the small clearing about twenty feet off. They must have been there before I stepped through the last ferns myself, because my scanner would have picked them up if they had been moving. They were seniors, full seven feet tall, with their skins so green that they would have been invisible against the jungle background if it hadn’t been for the jewels and weapons and tall feather headdresses.

  When you were this close it was obvious that they were humanoid but not human. There were knifelike bony ridges on the outer edge of their fore and upper arms, and bony plates on their elbows. Their hands looked attenuated and thin because of the extra joint in their fingers. Although they were hairless their greenish-black crests were rising and quivering a bit. Whether from alarm or just excitement I couldn’t tell. They were nothing to bother me, just two of them and out in the open that way—but it gave me a shock, realizing they’d been standing there listening and watching while I took the gun from the boy and then talked to him.

  They made no move now, as I nudged the boy and started with him out of the clearing past them. Their eyes followed us; but it was not him, or me either, they were watching. It was the DeBaraumer. And that, of course, was why I’d jumped like I had to get the weapon away from the boy.

  We came out on to a plowed field and saw a planter’s home and buildings about six hundred yards off, looking small and humped and black under the bright white dazzle of the pinhole in the sky that was Achernar, old Alpha Eridani. The contact lenses on my eyes had darkened up immediately, and I looked at the boy, for he was too young to wear contacts safely—but he had already pulled a pair of goggles down off his sun-cap to cover his eyes.

  “I’m Corporal Tofe Levenson, of the Rangers,” I said to him as we clumped over the furrows. “What’s your name?”

  “Jean Dupres,” he said, pronouncing it something like “Zjon Du-pray.”

  We came finally up to the house, and the door opened while we were still a dozen paces off. A tall, brown-haired woman with a smooth face looked out, shading her eyes against the sunlight in spite of the darkening of her contacts.

  “Jean . . . she said, pronouncing it the way the boy had. I heard a man’s voice inside the house saying something I could not understand, and then we were at the doorway. She stood aside to let us through and shut the door after us. I stepped into what seemed to be a kitchen. There was a planter at a table spooning some sort of soup into his mouth out of a bowl. He was a round-headed, black-haired, heavy-shouldered type, but I saw how the boy resembled him.

  “Corporal—?” he said, staring at me with the spoon halfway to the dish. He dropped it into the dish. “They’re gathered! They’re raiding—”

  “Sit down,” I said, for he was half on his feet. “There’s no more than four K’ahari young men for ten kilometers in any direction from here.” He sat down and looked unfriendly.

  “Then what re you doing here? Scaring a man—”

  “This.” I showed him the DeBaraumer. “Your boy had it.”

  “Jean?” His unfriendly look deepened. “He was standing guard.”

  “And you in here?”

  “Look.” He thought for a minute. “Corporal, you got no business in this. This is my family, my place.”

  “And your gun,” I said. “How many guns like this have you got?”

  “Two.” He was out-and-out scowling now.

  “Well, if I hadn’t come along, you’d have only had one. There were two K’ahari seniors out by your boy—with their eyes on it.”

  “That’s what he’s got to learn—to shoot them when they get close.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Mr. Dupres, how many sons have you got?”

  He stared at me. All this time, it suddenly struck me, the woman had been standing back, saying nothing, her hands twisted up together in the apron she was wearing.

  “One!” she said now; and the way she said it went right through me.

  “Yeah,” I said, still looking at Dupres. “Well, now listen. I’m not just a soldier, I’m a peace officer, as you know. There’s laws here on Utword, even if you don’t see the judges and courts very often. So, I’m putting you on notice. There’ll be no more letting children handle lethal weapons like this DeBaraumer; and I’ll expect you to avoid exposing your son to danger from the K’ahari without you around to protect him.” I stared hard at him. “If I hear of any more like that I’ll haul you up in Regional Court, and that’ll mean a week and a half away from your fields; even if the judge lets you off—which he won’t.”

  I understood him all right. He was up
out of the chair, apologizing in a second; and after that he couldn’t be nice enough.

  When my squad came in he insisted we all stay to dinner and put himself out to be pleasant, not only to us, but to his wife and boy. And that was that, except for one little thing that happened, near the end of dinner.

  We’d been comparing notes on the K’ahari, of course, on how they’re different from men; and the boy had been silent all through it. But then, in a moment’s hush in the talk, we heard him asking his mother, almost timidly . . .

  “Mama, will I be a man when I grow up?—or a K’ahari?”

  “Jean—” she began, but her husband—his name was Pelang, I remembered and hers was Elmire, both of them Canadian French from around Lac St. John in Quebec, Canada, back home —interrupted her. He sat back in his chair, beaming and rubbing the hard fat of his belly-swell under his white glass shirt, and took the conversation away from her.

  “And what would you like to be then, Jean?” he asked. “A man or a K’ahari?” and he winked genially at the rest of us.

  The boy concentrated. I could see him thinking, or picturing rather, the people he knew—his mother, his father, himself, struggling with this macerated earth reclaimed from the jungle—and the K’ahari he had seen, especially the senior ones, slipping free through the jungle, flashing with jewels and feathers, tall, dark and powerful.

  “A K’ahari,” Jean Dupres said finally.

  “K’ahari!” His father shouted the word, jerking upright in his chair; and the boy shrank. But just then Pelang Dupres must have remembered his guests, and caught himself up with a black scowl at Jean. Then the man tried to pass it off with a laugh.

  “K’ahari!” he said. “Well, what can you expect? He’s a child. Eh? We don’t mind children!” But then he turned savagely on the boy, nonetheless. “You’d want to be one of those who’d kill us—who’d take the bread out of your mother’s mouth—and your father’s?”

  His wife came forward and put her arms around the boy and drew him off away from the table.

  “Come with me now, Jean,” she said; and I did not see the boy again before we left.

  As we did leave, as we were outside the house checking equipment before moving off, Pelang was on the house steps watching us, and he stepped up to me for a moment.

  “It’s for him—for Jean, you understand, Corporal,” he said, and his eyes under the darkened contact glasses were asking a favor of me. “This place—” he waved an arm at cleared fields. “I won’t live long enough for it to pay me for my hard work. But he’ll be rich, someday. You understand?”

  “Yeah. Just stay inside the law,” I said. I called the men together and we moved out in skirmish order into the jungle on the far side of the house. Later, it came to me that maybe I had been a little hard on Pelang.

  I didn’t pass by that area again that season. When I did come by at the beginning of next season I had a squad of green recruits with me. I left them well out of sight and went and looked in from behind the fringe of the jungle, without letting myself be seen. Pelang was seeding for his second crop of the season, and Jean, grown an inch or so, was standing guard with the De-Baraumer again. I went on without interfering. If Pelang would not give up his ways on the threat of being taken in, there was no point in taking him in. He would simply pay his fine, hate me, and the whole family would suffer, because of the time he was absent from the planting and the place. You can do only so much with people, or for them.

  Besides, I had my hands full with my own job. In spite of what I had told Pelang, my real job was being a soldier, and my work was not riding herd on the planters, but riding herd on the K’ahari. And that work was getting heavier as the seasons approached the seventeen-year full-cycle period.

  My squad had broken out mealpaks and were so involved in eating that I walked up on them without their being aware of it.

  “And you want to be Rangers,” I said. “You’ll never live past this cycle.”

  They jumped and looked guilty. Innocents. And I had to make fighting men out of them.

  “What cycle?” one of them asked. All of them were too young to have remembered the last time it came around.

  “That and more. You are going to have to understand the K’ahari. Or die. And not just hate them. There is nothing evil in what they do. Back on Earth, even we had the Jivaros, the headhunting Indians of the Amazon River. And the Jivaro boys were lectured daily while they were growing up. They were told that it was not merely all right to kill their enemies, it was upstanding, it was honorable, it was the greatest act they could aspire to as men. This code came out of the very jungle in which they were born and raised—and as it was part of them, so the way of the K’ahari young men is out of their world and part of them, likewise.

  “They were born outside of this jungle, well beyond the desert. They were raised in cities that have a civilization just above the steam-engine level, boys and girls together until they were about nine years old. Then the girls stayed where they were and started learning the chores of housekeeping the cities. But the nine-year-old K’ahari boys were pushed out to fend for themselves in the desert.

  “Out there, it was help one another or perish. The boys formed loose bands or tribes and spent about three years keeping themselves alive and helping each other stay alive. Their life was one of almost perfect brotherhood. In the desert, their problem was survival and they shared every drop of water and bite of food they could find. They were one for all and all for one, and at this age they were, literally, emotionally incapable of violence or selfishness.

  “At about twelve or thirteen, they began to grow out of this incapability, and look toward the jungle. There it was, right alongside their sandy wastes with nothing to stop them entering it—nothing except the older K’ahari from age thirteen to seventeen. At this stage the young K’ahari males shoot up suddenly from five to about six and a half feet tall, then grow more gradually for the remaining four years in the jungle. And, from the moment they enter the jungle, every other K’ahari boy is potentially a mortal enemy. In the jungle, food and drink are available for the reaching out of a hand; and there is nothing to worry about—except taking as many other lives as possible while hanging on to your own.”

  “K’ahari lives,” a worried Ranger protested. “Why should they trouble us?”

  “Why shouldn’t they? It’s eat or be eaten. They even join into groups of up to a dozen, once they get older and more jungle-experienced. In this way they can take single strays and smaller groups. This works well enough—except they have to watch their backs at all times among their own group-members. There are no rules. This jungle is no-man’s-land. Which was why the K’ahari did not object to humans settling here, originally. We were simply one more test for their maturing young men, trying to survive until manhood, so they can get back into the cities.” They digested this and they didn’t like it. Jen, the brightest in the squad, saw the connection at once.

  “Then that makes us humans fair game as well?”

  “Right. Which is why this squad is out here in the jungle. Our job is simply that of a cop in a rough neighborhood—to roust and break up K’ahari bands of more than a half-dozen together at once. The young K’ahari know that their clubs, crossbows and lances are no match for rifles, and there has to be at least a half dozen of them together before they are liable to try assaulting a house or attacking a planter in his fields. So the arrangement with planters, soldier squads and K’ahari is all neat and tidy most of the time—in fact all of the time except for one year out of every seventeen that makes up a generation for them. Because, once a generation, things pile up.

  “It’s the five-year K’ahari that cause it. Post-seniors some people call them, as we call the younger K’ahari freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors, according to the number of years they have been off the desert and in the jungle. Post-seniors are K’ahari who are old enough to go back to the cities and be allowed in— but are hesitating about it. They are K’ahari who a
re wondering if they might not prefer it being top dog in the jungle to starting out on the bottom again, back in the cities. They are K’ahari toying with the idea of settling down for life in the jungles and their impulse to kill any other K’ahari is damped by maturity and experience. They, unlike those of the first four years of jungle experience, are capable of trusting each other to gather in large bands with a combined purpose—to seize and hold permanently areas of the jungle as private kingdoms.”

  They were listening closely now—and no one was smiling.

  “In the old days, before we humans came, this process once a seventeen-year generation would end inevitably in pitched wars between large bands largely composed of post-seniors. These wars disposed of the genetic variants among the K’ahari, and got rid of those who might have interrupted the age-old, cities-desert-jungle-cities-again pattern of raising the K’ahari males and eliminating the unfit of each generation. Before we came, everything was tidy. But with us humans now in the jungle, the post-seniors in their bands every seventeen years turn most naturally against us.”

  My talk had some good effect because the ones who stayed on made good Rangers. They knew what they were doing—and why.

  One season followed another and I had my hands full by the time I saw young Jean Dupres again. My squad of six men had grown by that time to a platoon of twenty, because we were now closing the second and final season of the sixteenth year of the cycle and we were having to break up K’ahari gangs of as many as fifty in a group. Not only that, but we had the cheerful thought always with us that, with the post-seniors running things, most of the groups we broke up were re-forming again, the minute we’d passed on.

  It was time to begin trying to hustle the planters and their families back into our Regional Installations. Time to begin listening to their complaints that their buildings would be burned and leveled, and half their cleared land reclaimed by the jungle when they returned—which was perfectly true. Time to begin explaining to them why it was not practical to bring in an army from Earth every seventeen years to protect their land. And time to try to explain to them once again that we were squatters on a K’ahari world, and it was against Earth policy to exterminate the natives and take over the planet entire, even if we could—which we could not. There were millions of the mature K’ahari in the cities, and our technical edge wasn’t worth that much.