Nova 1

by Anthology

  “K’ahari tomagna, manoi . . .”—or that at least was what it sounded like to my human ear. I sat back, staring at him through my binoculars, for his face was as white as if all the blood had drained out of it; and suddenly, without warning, tears began to brim out of his eyes and roll down his cheeks—silent tears that did not interfere with the violence of his words but continued to roll as if he were being secretly tortured all the while he was speaking. The words poured out of him to the listening natives below—and suddenly I was understanding him perfectly.

  For a second I thought it was some kind of a miracle. But it was no miracle. He had simply broken into English, without apparently realizing it. It was English geared to the rhythm of the K’ahari speech:

  “. . . I am a man. This is a terrible place and my mama did not want to stay here. My daddy did not like it here, but he was making me rich. Nobody works harder than my daddy, Pelang. I don’t want to stay here. I will go home and be rich with the old people above Lac St. John; and never see any more K’ahari and the jungle. And the K’ahari will go back to the jungle because a man don’t let himself be pushed from his crops. No, you don’t get away with that, and you don’t come into this Strongpoint, because I am a man and I don’t let the K’ahari in . . .”

  He went back into their tongue, and I lost him. He went on standing there with the tears rolling down his face, no doubt telling them over and over again in K’ahari that he would not surrender the fort to them. He wound up at last with the same phrase I had heard before; and finally, this time, I understood it, because it was so simple and because of what he had said.

  “K’ahari tomagna, manoil”—“l am no brother to the K’ahari, but a man!”

  He turned with that and jumped down off the top of the wall to the catwalk inside and crouched there, immediately. But no crossbow bolts or lances came over the wall. He went crouched over to the steps at the point where the walls made a comer and went down the steps to back before the awning. There, he pulled the scanners showing the outside views of all four walls into a battery facing him, and sat down on a camp chair with his rifle over his knees, looking at them.

  On his scanners as on mine, the K’ahari were fading back into the jungle. After they had all gone, there was silence, and after a little he wiped his eyes, laid down his rifle, and went to get himself some food. As if he knew that since they had not attacked immediately, they would not attack again for some little time. I sat back in my treetop with my head spinning.

  I remembered now how I had seen the boy walking his own plowed fields as a K’ahari walks. I remembered how his reaction to being under possible attack alone at the place, and even his reaction to the killing of his mother, had baffled me. I understood him better now. The jungle with its K’ahari was something he took for granted, because it was the only world he had ever known. Not Earth, the place he had only heard about, but this all around him was the real world. Its rules were not human rules, but K’ahari rules. Its normal shape was not the grass and sun of home, but the searing white light and fern and macerated earth of Utword. He believed his father and the rest of us when we talked about how alien Utword, and its people were—but they were not alien to him and it was the only world he had.

  Now the K’ahari had come calling on him as a brother to take up his birthright, by joining them and opening the Strongpoint to them. So that they could destroy it and move on against the rest of the human outposts. He had refused to do so, and now he was down there, alone. The thought of his aloneness abruptly was like a hard shock all through me. Alone—down there with the body of his father and the other men, and the K’ahari outside, ready to attack again. I told myself that I had to get him out of there, whether I got myself killed trying or not.

  The only reason I did not start down the tree trunk right then in broad daylight was that I wanted some kind of a plan that had at least a faint chance of success. I was not concerned about saving myself, but I did not want to waste myself—for Jean’s sake. I got up and paced my comfortable, safe perch, two paces each way, swing, and back again . . . thinking hard.

  I was still at it, when the K’ahari assault came. An explosion of yells and noise almost right under me. I jumped for the scanners.

  Jean was standing with his back to the west wall of the watch-tower, his own bank of scanners before him, handling all the rifles in all the walls on remote automatic. If the rifles had not been self-loading, as they were, not a half-dozen years before, he never could have done it. But as it was, he stood holding the Strongpoint alone, a faint frown of concentration on his face, like a boy back home running a model train around its track at speeds which come close to making it fly off on the curves. Two of the attackers made it over the wall hidden from him by the watchtower at his back; but still it seemed as if he had eyes in the back of his head, because he abandoned his scanners, turned and crouched with a rifle in his hands, just as they came together around the side of the watchtower after him. The lance of the second one he shot thudded against the wall of the watchtower just above his head before the native fell dead. But Jean’s face did not change.

  The assault failed. The natives drew off, and Jean abandoned his scanners to go to the heavy task of dragging the two dead

  K’ahari back around the comer of the tower out of his way. He could not have dragged grown men that way, but the K’ahari are lighter-boned and -bodied than we, and by struggling, he got them cleared away.

  There was another, lighter assault just before sundown that evening, but none of the natives got over the walls. Then darkness covered us—and still I had worked out no plan for getting the boy out of there.

  My general idea was to get him away, and then leave the gates of the Strongpoint open. The K’ahari would enter, ravage the interior and move on—to points better equipped than we to continue the fight with them. Perhaps, with the Strongpoint taken, they would not look around for Jean—or me.

  But I was helpless. I raged in my treetop. Up here and unnoticed, I was safe as I would have been at home on Earth. But let me descend the tree trunk, even under cover of darkness and I would not live thirty seconds. It would be like coming down a rope into an arena jammed with several thousand lions. Dawn came . . . and I had thought of nothing.

  With it, came the post-dawn attack. Once more, Jean fought them off—almost more successfully than he had the attack of the evening before. It was as if his skill at anticipating their actions had been sharpened by the pressure on him to defend the Strongpoint alone. He even walked away from his automatic rifle controls in the heat of the battle to shoot a K’ahari just coming over the north wall.

  There was a noon attack that day. And an evening one. Jean beat all of them off.

  But that night I heard him crying in the darkness. He had crawled back under the awning, not far from the body of his father, and in the gloom next to the ground there, I could not pick out where he lay. But I could hear him. It was not loud crying, but like the steady, hopeless keening of an abandoned child.

  When dawn came I saw his face seemed to have thinned and pinched up overnight. His eyes were round and staring, and dusted underneath with the darkness of fatigue. But he fought off the dawn attack.

  A midday attack was beaten back as well. But I had not seen him eat all day, and he looked shadow-thin. He moved awkwardly, as if it hurt him; and after the midday attack was beaten off, he simply sat, motionless, staring at and through the scanners before him.

  Just as the afternoon was turning toward evening, the K’ahari calling from the jungle came again. He answered with a burst of automatic fire from the wall facing toward the location of the voice in the jungle. The voice ceased as abruptly as if its possessor had been hit—which he could not have been.

  The evening attack came. A full eight K’ahari made it over the walls this time, and although Jean seemed to be aware of their coming in plenty of time to face them, he moved so slowly that two of them almost had him.

  Finally, this last and hardest assa
ult of the day ended, with the dropping of the sun and the fading of the light. The lights inside the Strongpoint came on automatically, and Jean abandoned his scanners and controls to crawl under the awning. As with the night before, I heard him crying, but after a while the sounds ceased, and I knew that he had gone to sleep at last.

  Alone, safe in my treetop, still without any plan to save the boy, I drifted off to sleep myself.

  I woke suddenly to the sounds of the dawn assault. I sat up, rubbed my eyes—and threw myself at the scanners. For on the screen of the one with its view under the awning, I could see Jean, still stretched in exhaustion-drugged slumber.

  Already, the K’ahari were at the walls and clambering over them. They poured into the open area before the watchtower as Jean woke at last and jerked upright, snatching up his rifle. He looked out into a semicircle of dark, staring faces, halted and caught in astonishment to find him unready for them. For a second they stood staring at each other—the K’ahari and the boy.

  Then Jean struggled to his feet, jerked his rifle to his shoulder and began firing at them. And a screaming wave of dark bodies rolled down on him and bore him under . . .

  Behind them, more K’ahari warriors all the time were swarming over the walls. The gates of the Strongpoint were tom open, and a dark, feathered and bejeweled river of tossing limbs and weapons poured into the open area. Soon, smoke began to rise from the buildings and the flood of attackers began to ebb, leaving behind it the tom and tattered refuse of their going.

  Only in one area was the ground relatively clear. This was in a small circle around the foot of the watchtower where Jean had gone down. Among the last of the K’ahari to leave was a tall, ornamented native who looked to me a little like the third of those who had spoken to Jean before the wall. He came to the foot of the watchtower and looked down for a moment.

  Then he stooped and wet his finger in the blood of Jean, and straightened up and wrote with it on the white, smooth concrete of the watchtower wall in native symbols. I could not speak K’ahari, but I could read it; and what he had written, in a script something like that of Arabic, was this:

  —which means: “This was one of the Men”

  After which he turned and left the Strongpoint. As they all left the Strongpoint and went back to their jungles. For Jean’s last two days of defending the place had held them just long enough for the season to end and the year to change. At which moment, for the K’ahari, all unsuccessful old ventures are to be abandoned and new ones begun. And so the threat that had been posed against all of us humans on Utword was ended.

  But all ends are only beginnings, as with the K’ahari years and seasons. In a few weeks, the planters began to return to their fields; and the burned and shattered Strongpoint that had been besieged by forty thousand K’ahari was rebuilt. Soon after, a commission arrived from Earth that sat for long talks with the mature K’ahari of the cities and determined that no new planters would be allowed on Utword. But those that were there could remain, and they with their families would be taboo, and therefore safe from attacks by young K’ahari attempting to prove their jungle manhood.

  Meanwhile, there being no other heirs on Utword, the Dupres property was sold at auction and the price was enough to pay for the shipping of the bodies of Pelang and Elmire home for burial, in the small Quebec community from which they had emigrated. While for Jean, a fund was raised by good people, who had been safe in the Regional Installations, to ship his body back along with his parents’.

  These people did not believe me when I objected. They thought it was all I had been through, talking, when I said that Jean would not have wanted that—that he would have wanted to have been buried here, instead, in his father’s fields.

  IN THE POCKET

  by K. M. O’Donnell

  Here is the story of the Messengers and their work. Of disease and death and the fight against them. And a new concept of fighting the war against the old enemy cancer that is as horribly fascinating as Stephen Leacock’s proposal to pull the spinal column out of meningitis sufferers, wash it clean, then slip it back . . .

  I will go into the core and, striking, take the sickness out. I will do this with humility because I am merely a messenger. My enemy is metastases, my cause their expulsion, my sin is the vanity of pride, my future the casting of burdens. I am a messenger.

  THEIR OATH

  Yeah, they fill you full of that crap. Oaths, pledges, procedures, the mask of spirituality. By the time you get out of the institute, if you’re lucky, you can’t think, much less feel. I’m one of the unlucky ones, of course. I don’t believe a word of it.

  No sir, I don’t, and I challenge anyone to tell me that this is anything other than a menial job, mere hand-labor, and to hell with the pretensions. It’s a vocational skill but, being the way they are outside, the less important you are, the more self-important they try to make you. It’s a question of social control. The hell with them.

  When I got through with lower school I had nothing to do, no mind to think with, no money to pay the difference. It was either the forces, of course, or tech training. I was wild for the forces— there’s a whole incendiary MOS opening up which fascinates me—but my old man opted for the tech training. Cure cancer, he said. You don’t have to be a slob all our lives; you can make something of yourself. You’ll he a professional, if you’re lucky enough to get into the Institute.

  Lucky enough to get into the Institute! The Institute has a full-time recruiting staff doing nothing but scouring the inner cities for people like me; the Institute offers an enlistment bonus, no less, as my old man would have known perfectly well if he was, unfortunately, not literate. He found out, though. He appropriated the bonus himself, and took off. There is some moderate justice in the world, however. He died of cancer not six months ago and due to my manipulations he was refused treatment. I hear that it was an agonizing death. Although we are manual laborers, messengers have their small prerogatives to exercise.

  So I went to the Institute. For two years, emerging with a drill and a diploma. Learned to stand the reduction of the Hulm Projector, learned to move with cunning, a minuscule hidden dwarf in the alleys of the veins, arteries, muscles, organs themselves. Learned how to bum it out, learned the strange quiescent beauty of the islands of metastases. Even took a little rhetoric and a little composition so that I could express myself decently. (But all the messengers, when they quit, are selling the rights to their stories. There’s just no future in it, too much competition.)

  The technical aspects were easy to master. On the psychology they fell down a little. I didn’t learn until I went into the practice myself about the depersonalizing effects of cancer, the way the victim becomes merely an extension of the tumor, and the burning out is often an excision of self. When I told this to one of the interns he gave me a numb look, began to talk about my sticking to my function. A messenger is only a certain kind of orderly.

  But when you get down in the pocket, you begin to think. How can you not think?

  Listen: I know them, I know their scars and souls, I know what afflicts them. Body in their blood, form in their viscera, I have touched their dreary secrets, their dark possibilities, have wounded and restored them with the drill, have felt their convulsions, seen their thoughts swimming past me, clotted in the swollen blood. I know all there is to know about humanity: I wander into its intestines two or three times a day and, chuckling, dissemble it. How can I not think? And the projection hurts, the reduction pains. One does not go to two inches easily. The body needs space to contain the soul, this is a theory I have developed. How can one have a soul in tissue the component size of a small guppy? This too I think about.

  This is the introduction to my story, the opening to my secret. Stay with me; stay with me. You will purchase rights to my story yet. I am an unusual messenger. I know all about the transference of guilt.

  I want to tell you about Yancey, if I may. Listen to me. Yancey is eighty-three, eighty-four years old, as shri
veled without as he is porous within and three days ago, I myself burned the metastases out of him, incurring the usual risks, the standard humiliations. I am entitled, therefore, to tell you about him; far more entitled than Yancey is to tell me about me. I have suffered. I am no usual messenger. But Yancey talks interminably, irresistibly, the drenching flow making almost impossible the clean incision of silence.

  The bastard. He is full, full of statements, platitudes, small explosions of pique and all he must share with me. Mostly, they have to do with the newfound purity of his body (which, monstrously, he equates with a purification of soul). When he came in last week, he had neither soul nor body but lay staring at the ceiling with eyes the shape of doors, working out the slow beat of his mortality, ignorant of what I was going to do for him. Those were the good times, of course, although I was not permitted to know that. I was his orderly as well, of course, and chose to ask him how he was and all he would say was terrible, just terrible, son; leave me sleep, leave the flesh crumble. But I woke up that morning in September and went before the projector, dwindled and went inside his inert form to clean him out right proper. It was in his liver, yellow and orange, busy as death. I took care of it; I took out the lovely metastasis, clutching it to my tiny chest, and dropped it in the intern’s tray. Now Yancey is full of rhetoric. What does this prove?

  It must prove something. This is what I hold to myself tighter than metastases: there is some purpose in this beyond what I see. But what can it possibly come to? He comes in, like all of them, even the women, riddled cheek-through-jowl and I take care of him nicely and all of a sudden I become an object of his reformation. As if an impure man could possibly perform my tasks!