Footfall

by Larry Niven

  "We're Americans, not monsters!"

  "If the jumbos find you here, they'll kill us all. Do your worst, Colonel. You're not as bad as them."

  "Ah, shit," Carter said. "You know damned well I can't just shoot you."

  "If you're going to stay here, it would be better if you did. Shoot me and put my body where the jumbos will find it," Chisholm said, dropping his voice conspiratorially. "Maybe then they'll blame you and not everyone here."

  "Shit." Carter couldn't keep it up. "We won't hurt you. But man, we need help. We worked our way up from the coast—"

  "Bad down there?"

  "It's bad. It's worse than you can think. Buzzards everywhere." Buzzards and bugs and everything dead and smashed. Rotting corpses left by the waves. New corpses too. We brought the guns as far as we could. Now we have to find somebody willing to go get them and use them, and there's nobody left with guts. "All right, we'll move out. Can I leave Corporal Allington with you?"

  "Yes. Take all his equipment. Take his uniform too. What's wrong with him?"

  "We shot up a Snout patrol, and they called in their lasers. He's burned over almost half his body."

  "Okay. We'll take care of him as best we can. If they ask, I'll say he was burned in a motor accident. They probably won't. As long as we bring in the crops they pretty well leave us alone."

  "I guess it's pretty rough for you, too," Carter said.

  "Rough? Yes, you could say that. I'd head for the bush, but what would happen to the wife and kids? Let me tell you, Yank, a man with four small children doesn't have a lot of choices."

  "Sure." What would I do?

  "Brant! Magtig, commandos—" A tall blond woman rushed into the room. She stopped when she saw Carter. "Magtig! Here, in our house!"

  Chisholm spoke briefly in Afrikaans. Despite the lessons he'd taken while aboard Ethan Allen, Carter didn't understand any of it

  "My wife, Katje," Chisholm said. "Colonel Carter of the United States Army."

  "I see that he is. Colonel, do you understand the danger you cause here?"

  "Yes, ma'am. I didn't have a choice. One of my soldiers is hurt—"

  "Where is he?"

  Carter waved toward the barn.

  "And what do you wish to do?"

  "Leave him with you, I guess," Carter said. "Then we'll go back in the bush."

  "And what will you do there?"

  "Whatever we can to hurt the snouts."

  "Och, I could wish to go with you. That is impossible. Let us bring your soldier into the house, and get your commando away into the bush. Three miles north from here you will find a deep ravine, filled with brush. Go into it and wait. I will send Mvubi. You must speak with him."

  "Mvubi?"

  "Our Zulu headman. He will help you. Go now. Go and hurt them. But in the name of God, go far from here."

  Mvubi was old, and darker than an American ever gets. Carte guessed him to be sixty. He squatted to make drawings in the dirt "Here. Kambula. White soldiers. They do not speak English o Afrikaans. Jantji says they are Russian. They hide. They wish to fight. They ask Zulu to help them. Some go to join them."

  Russians. They must have come south, through Mozambique Hell of a long way to come.

  "Do you know any Zulu who wan to fight?" "Yes."

  "Take me to them."

  Mvubi rocked back and forth on his heels. Finally he stood

  "I will."

  * * *

  The airlock door swung ponderously outward, and the smell of Winterhome hit him in the snout. Fookerteh flinched, then sniffed. Mustiness. Alien plants, quite different from the life of Kansas.

  A tastelessness: the buildup of biochemical residues in Message Bearer was missing here. Over all, the smell of the funeral pit.

  Lesser ranks waited behind him, but Fookerteh paused at the top of the ramp to examine the spaceport. It was large, with hard, paved strips set within other strips of close-cropped green vegetation.

  Strange winged craft, man-built and large enough to hold eight-squared fithp, were parked at one end of the field. Humans were loading them. Other machines guided by humans moved across the field to the digit ship, and a human crew began loading boxes and baggage from the digit ship onto their vehicles.

  Orderly and proper. Koothfektil-rusp has not stretched his domain with words. The humans work for us.

  There were tall thin columns in the distance. Smoke trailed from their tops. Wind blew much harder than comfort demanded. Water fell in fat drops. The sky was a textured, uneasily shifting gray, vast and far.

  And everywhere was the faint but unmistakable smell of the funeral pit.

  Fookerteh went down the ramp to where Birithart-yamp waited. They clasped digits. "Your presence wets my back."

  "Welcome to my domain, companion of my youth," Birithart-yamp said formally. Then he lifted his digits. "I am truly glad to see you. When they told me you would come down, I arranged to greet you myself. Come, I will take you to the mudrooms."

  "I thank you." They walked across the hard surface. Gravity pulled at Fookerteh. The sky was so big, stretching distances he had not seen since he left the war in Kansas. "Can you not-is there no way to bury the dead?" -

  Birithart-yamp sniffed. "I had nearly forgotten. You will not notice the smell after a few days. Perhaps at night, or when you come from the clean air of the mudrooms. Fookerteh, we have buried the dead within our domain. Beyond—" He swept his digits in a wide arc toward that endlessly distant sky. "The waves drowned numbers you cannot hold in your head. When the wind blows from that way or that, it is strongest. Today the smells are faint."

  Fookerteh shuddered.

  "It will pass. In a season, in two seasons." They had left the hard-surfaced spaceport. Soft loam sank under their feet, and a new smell was in the air. Spiral plants stood as tall as their knees. Winter-flowers were just visible as loops of vine above the soil. In a year they would be blooming.

  "See, death makes the land fertile. The flying scavengers—they are called aasvogel in the dominant language, vultures in English. They do their work, as do the running creatures, and the worms and insects. They do their work, that the Garden will be green. Is it not always so?"

  "You sound like a priest," Fookerteh said.

  Birithart-yamp flailed digits across his friend's shoulder. "Mocker! Here is the mudroom. My officers await us inside, all but one who will join us presently. You know him. Chintithpit-mang."

  "Yes." Chintithpit-mang was a dissident; Fookerteh had avoided him.

  "Before we go in—why are you here?" Birithart-yamp asked urgently.

  "It is as you suspect. My mother's mate wishes to smell through my nostrils and feel through my digits. He trusts Koothfektil-rusp but he wishes another view. I was sent."

  "Good. It is as I hoped. The Herdmaster will sniff your thoughts and believe. We are winning, Fookerteh. The path is long and twisted, but we can follow it-and the domain is endless!"

  The mudroom had a random, primitive look. Of course it lacked the curve of spin gravity; but it was shapeless, a mere hole dug in the dirt, filled with water, churned and heated. It was twice the size of Message Bearer's communal mudroom. On the far side was an endless cascade of water plummeting into a separate pool.

  This was the way a mudroom should be! Fookerteh sagged in the warmth, resting muscles strained by Winterhome gravity, eyes half-closed, his snnfp just above the surface. He was glad to be out of the stinking wind. "We were told of an animal. Large, resembling the fithp—"

  "They call it elephant," Birithart-yamp said. "Imagine a tremendous fi' with only a single digit. These creatures are truly enormous. I will show you one that masses more than eight times your weight."

  Fookerteh snorted incredulity.

  "I agree, but it is true."

  "And these are not the dominant species of this planet?"

  "They are not. Many humans believe them to be the most intelligent of all species living on the Earth, save for themselves."

  "Of cou
rse. Even a single digit may manipulate tools."

  "Yes, but badly. Their digit is primitive compared to ours, and our digits are—"

  "Yes?"

  "It is not important. They are large and powerful, but the human called Botha said that unless these elephants were protected, they would all be killed."

  "Killed? By what?"

  "By the lesser humans, for food. By those we fight in the wild areas. Fookerteh, we win, but you do not yet know the valor of their warriors, and ours."

  Fookerteh let warm mud flow along his sides. A creature that massive should be unstoppable . . . yet humans killed them. Technology?

  He sensed a mass above him, and reached up to clasp digits with Chintithpit-mang.

  "Well met, companion of my youth." There was a strangeness, a distance in Chintithpit-mang's voice. The fi' bore new scars. He was armed, and wore the harness of an eight-cubed leader. Infrared night-seeing goggles, and other equipment Fookerteh did not recognize, hung from his harness. He stood like a wall in the gravity that had Fookerteh sagging. His look made Fookerteh uneasy.

  "Well met," Fookerteh responded. "Will you not join us?"

  Birithart-yamp said, "Chintithpit-mang is one of the elite jungle warriors. Most of them are sleepers. You've seen reports—"

  "I have. Chintithpit-mang, have you seen these elephants?"

  "I have. They are large."

  "And fearsome?"

  "Not so fearsome as the humans, who kill elephants and fithp alike."

  Machines speak with as much warmth as you.

  "The reports say that we have lost many fithp in the jungles. Many more simply refuse to fight there. Why?" "Death and madness wait in the jungle," Chintithpit-mang said. "Winterhome is strange enough to fithp who know only the closed spaces of Message Bearer."

  Two young warriors came to take their leader's weapons, and aid him in removing his harness. Fookerteh recognized members of the Year Zero- fithp. They looked like each other, but not like the Year Zero dissidents that Fookerteh had just left on Thuktun Flishithy.

  Chintithpit-mang might not have seen his subordinates. His eyes looked past the walls of the mudroom. "We are warriors, and our enemies find us all too conspicuous in the open. The jungles — you haven't seen them, Fookerteh, but you've seen the spiral plant in the Garden. Picture that as average size, and eight to the eighths of them growing, and smaller plants swarm at their feet—"

  It sounded strange and terrible. But Chintithpit-mang was saying, "At first the jungle felt safe. We couldn't see that terrible infinity of sky and landscape. We could hide from human rogue snipers among these huge plants." He snorted, a sound like a gun going off. "In the jungles the humans move where we stand fast, tangled, trapped. There is a strangling creature like a length of rope. The plants hide human snipers far more easily than they hide us. They use arrays of pointed sticks planted butt down, angled, and smeared with poisonous substances. Throw yourself out of the path of a spray of missiles, and you will find yourst impaled on pungi sticks hidden in the low vegetation.

  "We learned. There came revolts among warriors who refusd to enter a jungle. We ended with the elite jungle-warrior fithp. But most spaceborn simply cannot find the right mind-set. Fookerteh, you may Inform your father that sleepers will eventual hold the highest ranks among the African warriors."

  "But you adjusted."

  "I did. Do you notice anything strange about me, Fookerteh', "You have surely changed." Fookerteh had been avoiding it he thought. Now he could not: Chintithpit-mang behaved like incipient rogue.

  "Some warriors hunt alone. We move through the jungles as on the plains, seeking human rogues. When we find them we call down laser fire from the digit ships. An octuple would find the rogues. The best hunters are those who go alone or in pain Without those we must needs cede the jungles to the humans, yet I fear what it does to our minds. Fithp minds are not geared for such wholesale killing. We don't speak of the numbers of the dead, not among ourselves and not to the lesser warriors. Rumor spreads, and there is always the stink. We are always aware of what our foothold here has cost both humans and ourselves.

  "The wholesale killing of whole human tribes due to the rogue behavior of one or two members has been forbidden by your father and the Attackmaster both. It continues nonetheless, for it is effective. Day by day the humans become more submissive. Many now cooperate with us."

  "And so we are winning," Fookerteh mused.

  "We win. There are costs. Many deaths were caused by difficulties in perception. Our lives aboard Message Bearer haven' prepared us to recognize what we see. Fithp have wandered of cliffs, or broken their legs in holes, or shied from something harmless into real danger. The human enemy finds the simples of hiding places indecently effective. In spotted green clothing they seem to vanish. Many have guns, yet even without guns they kill us. Pointed sticks fly from the greenery—" Chintithpit-mang's voice trailed off, and his eyes focused on Fookerteh, as if seeing the mudroom for the first time.

  "Fookerteh, I have applied to return to Message Bearer for mating season."

  Well you might.

  "You shall. I was told." "Good." Chintithpit-mang walked into the mud, bringing a bow wave with him. He sank, eyes half-closed, and it seemed he would not speak again. Then, "I fear the paths my mind would walk if I missed mating season. I have already walked too far from the life I knew."

  "I came to learn such things." The Attackmaster had never spoken of such. "Can you tell me how Pheegorun died? I'm told you were there."

  "I was there." Chintithpit-mang was deep in the mud, eyes fully closed now, only his head protruding. "We were not even in danger. I cannot think — we behaved stupidly. Nonetheless we did not understand Africa as we do now.

  "You must see the jungle. I will show you. We had tamed it when I arrived, though the cost was high. When I stepped off the float-fort I found Pheegorun examining what might have been a primitive digging tool . . .

  Chintithpit-mang spoke without body language. His voice was almost a monotone. It was as if the emotions raised by his terrible tale had long since been burned away, by time or by worse to come.

  * * *

  Pheegonin said, "Here, Eight-cubed Leader, you can see that there's a blade moored to one end. The native throws the stick and hopes the blade-end hits one of us hard enough to penetrate skin."

  Were Pheegorün a friend, Chintithpit-mang would have swatted him across the shoulders. Mocker! But this was a subordinate, a sleeper, a stranger- "Are you in fact joking?"

  "No. They make it work. They kill us with these. Why doesn't it turn end for end? How- can they throw it so hard?"

  Chintithpit-mang considered. A long, thin mass would have the proper moment of inertia if it could be thrown straight. But how? "Perhaps if you hold it properly? At the end, perhaps?"

  "Lead me."

  Chintithpit-mang picked up the long shaft with just the tips of his digits. He raised it into place, above and behind his head, point foremost, and threw it. It traveled some four srupkithp and landed sideways.

  Pheegorun tactfully said nothing. Chintithpit-mang said, "Pause. Maybe if I- —" He retrieved the spear. This time he carefully wrapped all eight segments of his trunk the same way round. "Now when I let go, it should spin, right?"

  "Lead me, Eight-cubed Leader."

  The spear traveled four srupkithp and landed sideways.

  "Take it," said Chintithpit-mang. "Give it to a prisoner and let him demonstrate."

  Chintithpit-mang, who had been seeing nothing at all, was abruptly staring Fookerteh in the eye. "Of course Pheegorun must have tried this already. He had seen the spear kill, and he had studied it longer than I. He must have perceived me as a talkative novice an interloping fool. He was a good fi', a good officer. He might have been one of the elite."

  "What happened?"

  "He followed my orders."

  The man was very black and very tall and nearly naked of clothing and hair. The hair of his head formed a huge puffbal
l. There was paint on his face and patterns and ridges in his skin, carefully applied scars. Of the prisoners he was the only one unwounded. He had stood up from the bush with a spear in his hand, too close to the column. A soldier in the rear had knocked him flat with a swipe of a gun butt, rolled him over, and taken his surrender.

  He wore strange harness. Ancient fur pieces encircled his ankles and wrists. Once splendid but now bedraggled feathers hung about his neck. His head was circled by a green furred band. All of his harness was old and brittle, stained with earth and sweat.

  They had seen many dressed that way.

  The man listened to his orders. He looked about at his audience of a hundred fithp warriors. Then, without answering not so much as nodding, he strode to the spear and picked it up, holding it in the middle.

  Chintithpit-mang felt he would never get used to the sight. It made his belly queasy, as while a spacecraft was involved in a finicky docking. Why didn't the man fall over? He was tall and narrow even by the standards of men, and if he fell he ought to break his neck. But he didn't fall. He stood almost motionless, weaving slightly, as Pheegorun pointed to the target.

  "Put it as close to the dot as possible," he called. He was standing a safe eight srupkithp away. Would this work as he expected? Pheegorun must know how closely his Eight-cubed Leader -was watching.

  The man raised the spear, level with the ground, aimed at the target. He raised himself-on his toes, and still didn't fall. He slapped the spear haft with his free hand; the spear turned ninety degrees, and so did the man, and Pheegorun was looking straight down the halt.

  Pheegorun turned to run. Eight srupkithp distant or not, he turned to run, and half his soldiers were raising their weapons. The spear flew.

  It thudded deep into Pheegorun's side. Pheegorun froze. Chintithpit-mang glimpsed the black man standing calmly, arms at his sides, in the instant before the guns tore him apart.

  Pheegorun took his surrender. They don't think like us . . . never mind. It flew straight. I saw it.