The 13th Science Fiction MEGAPACK®: 26 Great SF Stories!

by Lake, Jay

  Burd took three steps toward Eona and looked at me inquiringly. I caught up and from there we walked side by side like equals, with his spear-carrier named Shay trailing. As we went, I pointed first to the sky and spoke its name, then to the river, then to the grass and trees. Each time Burd dutifully repeated what I had said. His willingness to learn was a good sign, I decided, and boded well for the future of both our villages. He’d speak my language like a civilized man in a few moons.

  As we neared, Eona and the other men stopped their work and stared at us warily. There was recognition in Eona’s eyes, I thought; he had seen Burd’s kind before.

  Burd and I stopped at the river’s edge.

  “This is my friend Burd,” I said in a loud voice. “He is headman of the white-skinned people up the river.” I pointed toward their strange tree. “The other man is called Shay, and he is Burd’s spear-carrier.”

  Eona approached, wading out of the river. “We don’t want anything to do with the white-skinned men,” he said in a low but serious voice. “They are dangerous.”

  “Why?” I asked, my voice low also.

  “I have seen white-skins like Burd before. They came to live in the forest not far from my village. All the time they talk-talk-talk of their white goddess, Virgin Mary, and make us worship her as chief of all the spirits.” He spat. “They gave presents to make us worship Virgin Mary—knives with blades that shine like the sun, bright beads, cloths like they wear, and bowls and cups that do not break.”

  “Do you speak their language?” I asked.

  “A few words, no more. Others here may speak it, though. A great many people went to worship Virgin Mary and live among the white-skins as their slaves.”

  I frowned. This was bad news indeed; instead of a friends and allies perhaps I had brought spiders into our midst. From the corner of my eye I studied Burd, who was staring at the men digging clay with an unreadable expression on his face. What did he see in us ... slaves? Allies? Something else entirely?

  “We must keep away from them,” I decided.

  Eona nodded. “That is wise.”

  “Unless,” I continued, “they choose to join us and live among us as people.”

  “They will not,” he said.

  “We shall see.”

  The other clay-diggers had gone back to piling clay on the riverbank while we spoke, and Maraga and most of the other women were coming back from their scout-work with colored berries and leaves. The women sat and began working with the clay. Some chewed berries and leaves, spitting them out when they were pulped; others ground up maggots and other insects with little reed sticks. Maraga herself mixed berries, leaves, insects, and clay together with well-practiced fingers, producing first red and blue, then also green and yellow paints, which she spread out on more broad green leaves.

  I brought Burd and his spear-carrier over to the women, squatted, and gestured for Burd to do the same. After a moment’s hesitation, he did so, and his spear-carrier followed suit.

  Using the first two fingers of each hand, I took dabs of red and blue and began painting circles and lines on Burd’s cheeks, arms, and chest. He made no movement until I was done, and then just nodded once.

  When I moved toward his spear-carrier, though, Shay leaped to his feet, making fists of his hands. A burst of angry words came from him. I stared, puzzled. Did he not want to be human again?

  I looked at Burd, and Burd spoke sharply to his spear-carrier. The spear-carrier shook his own head, took a step back, and set his feet defiantly.

  One of the women—little more than a girl, really, with small budding breasts and narrow hips, perhaps a year into the bleeding that marked entry into the female mysteries—leaned forward and caught my eye.

  “Pardon for interrupting, headman,” she said, eyes down as was proper. “The white man says, ‘Keep your filthy hands off me, you savage.’”

  “You understand their talk?” I said.

  “Yes, headman.”

  “What is your name?”

  “Nonu, headman.”

  “Come sit beside me.” I patted the ground to my right. She moved up and crouched there, still staring at the ground. “How did you learn the white-skin’s language?”

  “I was born in their hospital.”

  The word meant nothing to me. That must be what they call their village, I thought.

  “You tell him this,” I said. “If he is not an animal, he must paint himself to prove it. If he is an animal, he must leave.”

  She spoke the words, and I watched Shay’s face turn red as the sun at sunset. He snarled something to Burd, turned, and stalked off toward the strange silver tree. I grunted at his back, then spat after him: “Animal.” What kind of spear-carriers did Burd choose? They would be useless in a fight, with so little discipline.

  Burd said something to me, which Nonu translated as: “Do you know what has happened to us?”

  “We are in the spirit-world,” I said, and from then on, with Nonu translating, we managed to have a conversation of sorts.

  Burd and most of the other white-skins, it turned out, were from a village far to the east of ours, a place called New Zealand. The name meant nothing to me. He, too, thought the gods had brought us here—one named Jeezuz in particular—but for what purpose he did not know.

  Our thoughts were much in agreement, it seemed. When I told him my plans for building a walled village, he agreed it was a good idea: neither of us knew what animals prowled the nearby forests. He offered help from the white-skins, and I accepted. Any of the white-skins could share our village, I promised, as long as they learned our language, decorated themselves as people, and accepted me as headman. He agreed quickly.

  “I will tell my people,” he told me. Rising, he backed away, then turned and walked toward the strange silver tree.

  “Follow after him,” I whispered to Nonu. “Listen to all they say, then come back and tell me.”

  “Yes, headman,” she said, and she crawled into the waist-high grass on her hands and knees. I saw a few stalks move, and then she was gone.

  Maraga knelt beside me. She had used berries to stain several stalks of grass red and blue, and as I watched, she braided the strands together around my upper arm. I had been the first to paint myself now I was the first to wear a badge of bravery.

  “You have made it well,” I said, studying her work.

  “My husband is not here,” she said. “I need a man to look after who can protect me. I work hard, Hiwyan, as you know.”

  “I do know that,” I said, puzzled.

  “Make me your wife,” she said. “We are both old enough not to play games with ceremony. We need each other.”

  “What about your husband Kotabi, who is my best friend?” I asked. “How can I steal my best friend’s wife?”

  “Kotabi died a year after you died. He has not been reborn in the spirit-world; I have looked. Therefore why should you not make me your wife?”

  What she said made sense. “It shall be so,” I said. “Henceforth you are my woman.”

  “And you are my man.”

  I nodded, and that was our marriage. We spent the next hour decorating ourselves. Maraga painted my head and back; I painted hers. Around us, the one hundred and twenty-two members of my new village did the same.

  Nonu returned as quietly as she had left and came at once to report to me. She had done exactly as instructed, she said, creeping through the grass until she was within spitting distance of Burd and the other white men. None of them had so much as looked in her direction. As she sat before me to tell me what she’d overhead, Maraga began to paint blue and red circles on the girl’s face, neck, and head.

  “Byrd told them of your offer,” Nonu said, “and they argued much about it. The women and men do not want to paint themselves�
�truly, headman, it is not their way!—but Byrd argued that they needed our protection from animals. ‘What animals?’ some wanted to know. They have seen nothing but a few rats scurrying in the grass, and one of the men caught a fish. Most of them have decided not to come. Byrd and a few of the men want to join you. They say our people know how to survive in the wilderness and they need to learn what we know.”

  Eona had also been listening. “They are a danger,” he said. “We should accept none of their kind!” Several others echoed his words: many here had heard of the white-skins and their spirit Virgin Mary, it seemed, but only Nonu spoke their language.

  “I am headman here,” I said. “It is my decision. We can use more strong arms to help build our village. If they do not become people like us, we will drive them out.”

  On that, they agreed. Even so, I felt an undercurrent of resentment toward the white-skins, and anger toward my decision. Still, I was headman, and my decision would stand.

  Burd and five other white-skins—three men and two women—showed up not long after that. Two of the men held poorly made reed spears and shifted nervously from foot to foot as everyone gathered around to look them over. They all wore mats of woven grass to cover their genitals, which made Maraga and the other women giggle in amusement. I was not so amused.

  “Tell them to remove their mats,” I told Nonu. “If they are to join us, they must dress as we do. They cannot be better than us and hide behind grass.”

  When Nonu repeated my message, Burd immediately removed his mat. The other three men did so more slowly, almost reluctantly. The women did not.

  “Maraga,” I said softly, “take the women and decorate them.”

  She called to the other women of our new village, and as one they moved forward, taking the two white-skinned women by the arms and leading them away from us men. Maraga would get rid of their mats, I knew: she was already making a good headwife. Nonu hesitated, looking at me, but I shooed her after the rest. She should stay with the women; if I needed her to translate for Burd and the others, I would call her.

  The white men looked very uneasy. One of them was half-aroused and trying to hide it behind his hands without much success. I snorted; they were like children, I thought, ignorant of the world around them and how it worked. We would make people of them.

  “Do not frighten them,” I called to the men around me. “Move slowly. They are animals now, but we can make them into people with time and patience. First we must paint them. Who will help me?”

  “It is a mistake, but I will help,” Eona said. He picked up a leaf covered with blue paint and came to stand at my side, and together we began to paint the rest of Burd’s body. More slowly, the rest of my village took up leaves of paint and began to decorate the three remaining white-skins.

  When we finished and stood back to admire our handiwork, I had to admit it helped: Burd looked almost civilized with a pattern of black dots running down his arms and cheeks, set off by bold red and blue lines. His scalp was painted blue, like mine. Later, after the village walls were up, I knew we would have time to make penis sheaths and braid more grass and animal-hair into decorative ropes for arms, legs, and necks; then we would be truly civilized again. For now, though, we had to concentrate on the basics of survival.

  Next I led all the men into the reeds. There I could see signs of my hunters’ passage: using stones, they had cut down reeds, then sharpened them to make spears. Eona picked up stones from where the hunters had left them, passed them out, and we began breaking down the tallest and heaviest old-growth reeds for our village’s walls. Every so often I glanced out toward the grassy field, where most of the women—including the two decorated and now matless white-skins—were busily gathering grass and knotting it into rope. Others were searching the field for edible plants and insects to supplement whatever the hunters brought back. Still others were gathering up the wooden sticks that had been attached to our wrists when we woke, which I decided was a good idea, since we might yet find a use for them.

  It would take half a day to put up a wall around our village site, I knew, and several months to get everything else comfortably arranged. We had a lot of work before us. Still, it had to be done, and the sooner we started the sooner we would finish.

  I began hauling hard, heavy old reeds as big around as my arm and twice my height from the grove, piling them not far from where the women worked. Our village would circle the place the women now sat, I decided.

  Pausing, I squinted up at the sky. The sun was beginning to settle to the west; soon it would paint the skies with bright reds and yellows and oranges. With a start I realized there were two suns in the sky, the bright one lighting the land and a smaller, paler one beside it. The smaller sun was too tiny and too bright to be the moon. We truly were in the land of spirits, I thought, awed.

  Eona carried more reed poles out and threw them down with mine, and suddenly there was a small army hauling reeds out. As Eona headed back for more, I joined him. It was good to work, to stretch strong young muscles in arms grown used to being old and weak. The white-skins worked alongside us, and though they said nothing to anyone, their work was as good as any other’s. When I pointed that out to Eona, he merely frowned.

  We had just begun to set up the stockade walls when a huge noise like thunder came. I looked back toward the white-skins’ camp and saw blue lightning flicker around the huge silver tree where the white-skins gathered, but then it vanished just as quickly as it had appeared.

  Everyone else had paused, too, and in the distance I could hear the white-skins shouting—though whether they were joyful or angry, I couldn’t tell. I glanced around, spotted Nonu, and told her to take Burd and Eona to see what had happened. She translated quickly, and the three of them ran toward the tree.

  “Back to work!” I ordered, and everyone resumed their duties, the men raising huge reed poles while the women tied them in place with grass rope. The women still worked in the field, gathering armfuls of grass for beds and roofs, weaving more rope, making hammocks and sleeping mats.

  We had just finished the outer wall and were tying the village’s gate in place when Burd and Eona returned. Nonu was carrying one of the strange wooden sticks that had been attached to everyone’s wrist when we awoke, only this one’s end had been removed, revealing a hollow interior. It was full of colorful objects.

  Nonu set the contained upright in the center of the village, and everyone gathered around to see.

  “This one was Byrd’s,” Nonu told me. “He set it into the giant stone tree before coming to stay with us, and after the lightning came, it filled itself with food and treasures!”

  “They aren’t sticks, but spirit-boxes,” Eona said. “All of the white-skins’ spirit-boxes were filled!”

  Everyone murmured with excitement.

  Burd was talking to the other white-skins, and they all turned and ran toward the silver tree. I didn’t blame them; if my spirit-box had filled up with food, too, I would also want it ... but was wise to eat food given by spirits?

  I thought of our own spirit-boxes then, but Maraga had already thought to check them. “They are empty,” she reported, showing me one she had managed to open. “The spirits did not fill ours.”

  At that there were grumbles around me, but when I glared they stopped.

  Byrd sat cross-legged before his spirit-box and began pulling out object after object. He seemed to recognize many of them though I did not. One was a small stick with a silver tip on one end. When he flipped his thumb across it, a little flame appeared.

  I took a step back. “What magic is this?” I demanded.

  “It is not magic,” Nonu said. “The white-skins call them lighters and use them to make fire. A little stone rubs sparks, which catch fire on a bit of oil-soaked cloth.”

  “It has been sent by the spirits,” I said with a confidence I
did not feel. A little stick that made fire! A miracle! “We will dine well when our hunters return!”

  That seemed to cheer everyone up. Then Burd pulled a strange-looking brown food from the spirit-box, smelled it, smiled, and offered it to everyone near him. Nobody would take it. Shrugging, Burd bit into it himself. The spirits had also filled a cup inside his spirit-box with a steaming dark brown liquid. He sipped cautiously. When I leaned forward to smell it, he offered it to me, but the bitterness of its scent made my eyes water. I waved it away.

  The other white-skins were returning with unhappy expressions and empty spirit-boxes. They muttered something to Burd, who shrugged, then passed them some of the food from his own spirit-box. They divided it and devoured it within the space of a few heartbeats.

  “They say the other white-skins stole their food and treasures,” Nonu told me.

  Maraga bent to whisper in my ear, “Must we tolerate thieves, who steal food and treasures from our villagers?”

  “The food was not in our village,” I said. “How were the white-skins to know these white-skins would return? We would have taken the food and treasures, too, if we had the chance.”

  She had to admit I was right.

  Burd had finished his meal and begun pulling objects from his spirit-box again. At the bottom he found large squares of red and green cloth. Maraga moved forward, fingered the cloth wonderingly, and looked at Burd.

  “Mine?” she asked. Nonu translated.

  Byrd smiled and handed it to her, and then everyone in the village rushed forward, grabbing and saying, “Mine! Mine!” in loud voices.

  When one of the youngest boys emerged from the scramble with Burd’s fire-stick, I pulled it from his hand. “Only the headman can make fires,” I told him. He looked like he was going to cry, but instead dove back in and soon emerged with another treasure, Burd’s cup, which was now empty.