by John Brunner
Giuseppe outstripped the others on his young legs, and called, “Dr Lem! A terrible thing has happened!”
“There are going to be plenty of terrible things happening,” Dr Lem said. “So how has the sequence begun?”
“It’s Warden Chevsky! He’s beaten up his wife! Right out in the open where everyone could see—caught her by the hair and just hit her!”
“That’s right!” his father confirmed, catching up. “Never saw anything so disgusting—like something out of the Dark Ages! Seems he was drunk last night, and slept clear through the show in the sky, everything. Blames her for not waking him up!”
“Harriet’s tending Sidonie now,” Pedro Phillips supplemented. “But he cut her lip open, blacked her eye… Ach!”
“And we’d better get you away from here,” Ducci muttered. “He’s furious because you were invited on board. Thinks he ought to have been the first to greet Chart— Say! What did you talk about?”
“It’s not so much what we talked about,” Dr Lem answered. “It’s more who he has with him.”
“Staff?” Ducci frowned. “You mean a lot of them—?”
“No, there’s just his mistress and himself. The brain of that ship is so far in advance of anything else I’ve seen I can scarcely believe it. He said his last contract was with Tubalcain, so I guess he took it in part-payment.” Dr Lem rubbed his eyes. The sun, despite its halo, was very bright out here.
“But it’s his mistress’s name. Hector, you may not remember her, but I’m sure Pedro does. Morag Feng?”
“She came back?” Phillips said in disbelief, and his jaw hinged open and hung foolish-wide.
IX
Red-eyed from lack of sleep, his belly rumbling with indefinable apprehension, Marc Simon wandered across the rough ground beyond the spaceport, clutching the dictyper which he invariably carried so that he could note down things he saw or promising turns of phrase which occurred to him. Shyalee had insisted that they come out of town, along with everybody else, to look at the giant ship resting on its bed of yellowish crushed rock like the egg of some impossible dinosaur, so he had complied, and they had duly stood around with everybody else watching it do nothing, until she grew bored and tried to persuade him to join the cluster of apes surrounding Rayvor-Harry and Alice Ming. The latter was holding forth with authority about Chart’s work, though Marc was sure she had never actually seen any.
So he had left Shyalee to her own devices and set off at random in the direction of the Mutine Mandala. After he had gone some distance, he had heard a blast of music from behind him, and glanced back to see that there was at long last something happening around the ship… but he had decided to keep going.
He had also noticed that the go-board was active; that, though, was nothing extraordinary. It was, after all, spring again, and every spring a handful of people wandered across the board to Yan to escape winter on their own planet, or perhaps a winter state of mind which lasted the year around.
That chubby stranger he and Shyalee had encountered rising from the shelter of a bush, for example, with some kind of salve newly dried on his bare brown legs. Marc frowned. He had been so preoccupied he had scarcely noticed the fellow. Freelance drug-tester, hadn’t he said? In that case, if he was here after a sample of sheyashrim, someone ought to warn him off… or perhaps not. Perhaps he should be left to find out for himself. Marc didn’t much care for the scouts who toured the worlds looking for new ways of hiding reality from people. On the other hand, one must be tolerant; it was a big galaxy, as the saying went, with room for all types.
And he was not the one to criticise, not after what he had nearly done last night at Goydel’s.
The path he followed took him along the meeting-line of Blaw and Rhee; one side of him were inhospitable rocks, the other gardens and orchards, both stretching for hundreds of kilometres. Trees here and there stood proud to the sun, and there were numerous brooks, miniature tributaries of the Smor. He came to one and followed it absently, a narrow pebbly stream fringed with plants like blue moss and populated by organisms neither plant nor animal, which spent most of the year as sessile flowers but with the advent of spring drew up their roots and set off, snail-slow, in search of more favourable locations.
In a while he chanced on a smooth rock overlooking the stream and sat down on it, his back firmly to the direction he had come from. For a long time—he had no idea how long—he stared at the sun-glint on the water so fixedly that when he blinked he saw it again with colours reversed inside his lids.
Abruptly he started the dictyper and spoke to it. An uncritical machine was the only audience with which he could share his present doubts.
“How is it that I feel this visit of Chart’s to be both inevitable and disastrous?
“Well, I guess it was inevitable that he would ultimately feel the attraction of performing for an alien species. I’ve never seen him at work, but I’ve seen the impact his performance on Hyrax had left half a century later, so I have a clear idea of the scale he operates on. I don’t know if he’s what some people call him—the greatest artist of all time—but there’s no disputing one of his achievements. He’s carved out a whole new medium of expression, and instead of what usually happens, someone coming up from behind almost at once and improving on the pioneer’s experiments, he’s kept ahead of everyone else including the competitors who studied under him.
“Which seems to make people working in other fields feel insecure. I know I’ve been hearing patronising remarks about him all my life. I guess it must be the same kind of thing as you’d have found when the first person cast a statue in bronze and other sculptors realised what was wrong with stone, or when fixed images on tape and—oh, what’s the word? Not layer, not skin… Got it! Film! I mean when stage-directors found tape and film competing with the disposition of live actors on a set.
“So here he is, a galaxy-wide public figure, who only needs to set course for an inhabited system and the news runs ahead of him and—and provokes debates in the planetary congress! So the temptation to perform for a non-human audience must be a terrific challenge for him.
“But that’s not why I think of his arrival on Yan as being inevitable. More…”
Marc hesitated, wondering whether what he was about to record would sound silly, then ploughed on doggedly.
“More, his very existence is a Yannish kind of idea. He is, I guess, a dramatist. But he’s so much more than just that. He’s about as near as we humans have ever come to realising the implications of that term which they introduced, long before I reached here, to translate the epithet given to the—the heroes, the protagonists, the whatever-the-hell, who dominate the Mutine Epics. Like them, Gregory Chart is a dramaturge.”
And what does that mean? Having the word is very useful; it’s pregnant with associations and I’m obliged to whoever coined it. But—!
He sighed and shut off the machine. Coming back to the real world, after an absence much longer than he had intended, he glanced about him and discovered how short the shadows were.
Why, it must be almost mid-day. And here he was practically on the threshold of the Mutine Mandala!
Thought and action coincided, almost in panic. It had been months, more than a year perhaps, since he had seen the Mutine Flash from this close. And he had meant to experience it a second time from inside the mandala, having worked his way back to it by slow daily degrees, and somehow…
He thrust that memory aside, and all the recollected sins of omission which trailed behind it, and considered the hill he had been breasting as he followed the course of the brook upstream. Near its crest stood a substantial ghul-tree, whose nuts formed a staple of the Yannish diet. Its branches were broad and evenly spaced, a natural ladder. He headed for it promptly. Up there, fifteen or twenty metres above the ground, he ought to be able to see clear across the Blaw Plateau to the point where the back of the land broke and began its five-hundred-kilometre slide, imperceptibly gradual, to the shore of the Gheb Salt L
ake. There were other towns and cities in that direction, some of them larger than Prell, but none having so handsome a location on so broad a river.
He stretched up to take hold of the first foliage-shaded branch, and something stabbed at his fingers.
He cried out and leapt away, a trickle of blood running over his knuckles. Staring up into the twilight among the branches, he made out something moving, heard rustling sounds.
A bird? But this is Yan! There are no birds!
Then, from behind him, a voice called, “Oh, I’m sorry! Did he hurt you?”
Hurrying up the rise with a swish of boots came a woman in skin-tight green, nearly as tall as himself, hair the shade of beaten copper drawn back from her long face with a clip of jet. On one wrist she wore a leather cuff decorated with diamonds.
Marc stared at her stupidly, not wondering why he hadn’t seen her before—if one person had wandered across the go-board to Yan today, so might another have—but why he hadn’t seen her before. Being that tall, she would have had to lie down and grovel in order to…
Oh. On her hip: the golden glint of an anti-see unit—expensive, and on many planets illegal. But not uncommon.
She asked again, with a hint of impatience, “Are you hurt?”
“I…” He looked at his hand, shook the blood away to expose the injury, and found a mere scratch. “Uh—no, I guess not badly.”
“If it was his beak, not to worry. It’s his talons that may cause infection. Though every time he perches on my wrist they’re automatically cleaned, of course. Home, you evil creature, home, home! So-o-o! Home, home, home!”
She reached up into the dimness of the tree. With a muttered complaint the bird flapped towards her wrist, and she dexterously hooded him.
“There!” she said, turning back to Marc. “He won’t apologise on his own behalf, so I’d better. He always resents the first flighting on a new planet, and thinks it and everything about it is out to persecute him. Very paranoid creatures, these!”
“But beautiful,” Marc said, having stripped a leaf from the tree to wrap around his cut finger. Ghul-leaves were useful to assist clotting, if you were among the lucky five per cent of humans who were not allergic to them. “What is he?”
“Oh, a Salvadoran merlin. Away back when, someone had the bright idea that hawking would be valuable on underdeveloped planets without roads or tracks, not only for hunting but for herding and guarding stock. So he started tinkering with the genetics of all the hawks he could get hold of. One line escaped and bred in the wild, and this one’s ancestors were among them. Owing to which he’s inherited an exaggerated sense of his own importance—haven’t you, you vicious brute?” She jogged her wrist, and the merlin clacked his beak.
Marc had continued to stare, more at her than the bird, while she was speaking. There was something vaguely familiar about her, as though he had seen a picture of her long ago, but he couldn’t place it. He had had time to form an impression of her as a person now, and for some reason he could not express clearly to himself he found he didn’t care for the reaction she provoked in him. Her voice was brittle, the words coming over-quickly, and there had been impatience in her tone when she asked the second time if he was hurt… He chided himself. He was over-reacting. He had spent so long here on Yan, first in the already leisurely environment of the enclave, then among the Yanfolk whose life had a stately, predetermined quality, that he was probably out of the habit of dealing with people from tenser backgrounds.
He was on the point of asking where she was from, and whether she had come across the board simply to find a place where she could fly her merlin, when he realised that she was in her turn staring at him.
“I—am—a—cretin,” she said deliberately. He started.
“Two kinds of cretin. Three!” She took a pace closer to him. “Damnation, you’re wearing a heyk and welwa, and it’s taken me this long to register the fact!”
“I…” Marc put his hand up to the breast of the Yannish cape.
“And unless a tattoo-artist or a skin-grafter has moved in here and given those apes what they most want, got rid of their dark patches—in which case you would not be wearing that outfit—you’re an Earthsider.”
Her eyes were very dark green, Marc saw, with the same piercing quality as those of her merlin.
“In which case there’s only one person you can be. You’re Marc Simon.”
It took a very long time to play the article on Chart. Partway through, Erik was so fascinated, he forgot about the risk of someone coming in and disturbing him; he pulled up a chair and sat down before the screen, almost gaping. No-wonder they’d gone to look at the starship!
He had never been much interested in the creative arts. His tastes lay more in the direction of the subjective ones—those which came in a pill, a powder, a gas or an injector. But it looked as though when this character Chart set to work, the mind got blown to shreds right out on the objective level!
And, he thought as the article concluded with a reference to a contract on Tubalcain which specified that if you wanted to view a tape of the performance there you had to pay a separate fee, that word “blown” reminded me of a point I wanted to check on. How does one get a Yannish girl and is it worth it?
After some cogitation, he tapped out the article “Yan,” sub-category “Inter-species relations”, sub-sub-category “Sex”. The informat was capable of selecting the proper title if he’d guessed wrong. But all he got was a blank screen, and it dawned on him that, living right here on Yan as they did, the people of the human enclave probably didn’t need to find that sort of information through the communet.
“I—uh…” Marc’s voice sounded creaky in his own ears. “How did you know?”
“I’m Morag Feng—mistress of Gregory Chart.” That name rang a faint chord in memory, like the face, but he still could not identify it. “I’ve read your translation of the Mutine Epics. I was the one who gave it to Gregory, and that’s what brought him here—your book!”
Marc felt dazed. He said, “Chart—uh—Chart liked my work?”
“Liked it!” With a harsh laugh. “It’s the only real translation anyone’s ever done of a non-human poem! Here, come on back to the ship with me, right away! I’ll call Gregory and tell him I’ve run into you. He’ll be delighted. You’re the person he most wants to talk to on this planet… Is something wrong?”
She checked in the act of lifting a communet extension to her mouth, a miniature one which hung at her waist on the side opposite her anti-see unit.
“I’m—I’m just overwhelmed,” Marc said faintly. “Especially since that translation is terrible. I rushed into it when I’d hardly had time to settle down here. Thought I knew everything about Yan and the Yannish language. It wasn’t until I moved out of the enclave that I realised how crude, how clumsy, how superficial it all was!” He clenched his fists in frustration.
“Well, it brought Gregory here,” Morag said tartly. “And that’s something to your credit, isn’t it? Come on!”
“Actually, I…” Marc glanced over his shoulder. The sun was very close to the zenith now. “I was hoping to wait and see the Mutine Flash at noon. That’s—”
“Yes, I know about the Flash,” she interrupted. “But you’ll have lots more chances to see it. And if all goes well, before long you’ll understand what it is, what it’s for.”
“What?” That took Marc’s breath away completely.
“You heard me!” She seized his arm and began to hurry him along beside her, towards the ship. “What do you think Gregory came here to do?”
X
“Morag Feng?” said Giuseppe in a baffled tone. “I guess I heard the name somewhere, but—”
“Hey! Lem’s out! Let me get at him!”
A roar in the unmistakable voice of Chevsky. The little group swung to face the direction it had come from, and they saw the warden forcing his way between the close-packed ranks of those who had reverted to an ancient habit-pattern and gathered
around Sidonie while Harriet Pokorod was ministering to her wounds.
Chevsky’s expression was halfway between sheepishness and arrogance, and he was doing his best to make the latter come out on top. Directly on his heels six or eight other people followed. As the community’s psychologist, Dr Lem was strict in not permitting himself likes and dislikes; if he had been able to indulge such luxuries, though, these were the ones he would have detested. Just as Chevsky craved the trappings of authority so much that he had come to what he regarded as a backwater purely because he could hold down a job with a title that he would never have been considered for elsewhere, so these compensated for the smallness of their puddle by trying to be big frogs. In particular, he noticed Dellian Smith and his wife, who were so ashamed of their jobs as sewage and purifications experts—no matter how indispensable, how valuable, their specialty—that they had become intimate cronies of Chevsky and would barely associate with the rest of the enclave.
Oh, why do human beings have to be so touchy and pompous?
With heavy menacing strides Chevsky closed the gap and confronted Dr Lem. Pompy, sensing that he intended her master harm, rose up on all her many feet, hoisted her fur into the extreme defensive mode which made it as stiff and prickly as a porcupine’s quills, and opened her mouth to display her fangs. But she was old, and the fangs were blunt and unimpressive.
“Warden!” A cry from behind Chevsky, and here, following him and his companions, came Harriet Pokorod, trying to re-pack her medical bag as she hastened along.
Chevsky ignored her. He planted his hands on his hips and rasped, “Well, at least you’re not trying to dodge me—not that you could! I know you like to take our heads apart behind the scenes, work out our weak points, tinker with us until we can’t call our brains our own, but this time you’ve gone too far!”