A Century of Science Fiction

by Damon Knight

  “I . . . LIGHT . . . YOU . . . YOU . . . LIVED . . . DARK . . . LIFE ...”

  The natives sat on the green grass and listened with an air of patient wonder.

  “Revent Winton.” Harry tried to attract his attention.

  Winton leaned toward the attentive natives, his face softened with forgiveness. “No, say to yourselves merely: I have lived in error. Now I will learn the true path of a righteous life.”

  The machine in the box below him translated words into its voice of muted thunder. “SAY YOU . . . I . . . LIVED . . . I . . . PATH . . . LIFE . .

  The natives moved. Some got up and came closer, staring at the box, and others clustered and murmured to each other, and went away in small groups, talking.

  Henderson decided not to tell the Revent what the machine had said. But this had to be stopped.

  “Revent Winton!”

  The preacher leaned over and looked down at him benevolently. “What is it, my son?” He was younger than the engineer, dark, intense and sure of his own righteousness.

  “MY SON,” said the translator machine in its voice of muted thunder. The sound rolled and echoed faintly back from the nearby woods, and the natives stared at Henderson.

  Henderson muttered a bad word. The natives would think he was Winton’s son! Winton did not know what it had said.

  “Don’t curse,” Winton said patiently. “What is it, Harry?”

  “Sorry,” Henderson apologized, leaning his arms on the edge of the crate. “Switch off the translator, will you?”

  “WILL YOU . . thundered the translator. The preacher switched it off.

  “Yes?” he asked, leaning forward. He was wearing a conservative suit of knitted dark-gray tights and a black shirt. Henderson felt badly dressed in his shorts and bare hairy chest.

  “Revent, do you think it’s the right thing to do, to preach to these people? The translator isn’t finished, and we don’t know anything about them yet. Anthropologists don’t even make a suggestion to a native about his customs without studying the whole tribe and the way it lives for a couple of generations. I mean, you’re going off half cocked. It’s too soon to give them advice.”

  “I came to give them advice,” Winton said gently. “They need my spiritual help. An anthropologist comes to observe. They don’t meddle with what they observe, for meddling would change it. But I am not here to observe, I am here to help them. Why should I wait?”

  Winton had a remarkable skill with syllogistic logic. He always managed to sound as if his position were logical, somehow, in spite of Henderson’s conviction that he was almost always entirely wrong. Henderson often, as now, found himself unable to argue.

  “How do you know they need help?” he asked uncertainly. “Maybe their way of life is all right.”

  “Come, now,” said the preacher cheerfully, swinging his hand around the expanse of green horizon. “These are just primitives, not angels. I’d be willing to guess that they eat their own kind, or torture, or have human sacrifices.”

  “Humanoid sacrifices,” Henderson muttered.

  Winton’s ears were keen. “Don’t quibble. You know they will have some filthy primitive custom or other. Tribes on Earth used to have orgies and sacrifices in the spring. It’s spring here—the Great Planner probably intended us to find this place in time to stop them.”

  “Oy,” said Henderson and turned away to strike his forehead with the heel of his hand. His passenger was planning to interfere with a spring fertility ceremony. If these natives held such a ceremony—and it was possible that they might— they would be convinced that the ceremony insured the fertility of the earth, or the health of the sun, or the growth of the crops, or the return of the fish. They would be convinced that without the ceremony summer would never return and they would all starve. If Winton interfered, they would try to kill him.

  Winton watched him, scowling at the melodrama of his gesture.

  Henderson turned back to try to explain.

  “Revent, I appeal to you, tampering is dangerous. Let us go back and report this planet, and let the government send a survey ship. When the scientists arrive, if they find that we have been tampering with the natives’ customs without waiting for advice, they will consider it a crime. We will be notorious in scientific journals. We’ll be considered responsible for any damage the natives sustain.”

  The preacher glared. “Do you think that I am a coward, afraid of the anger of atheists?” He again waved a hand, indicating the whole sweep of the planet’s horizon around them. “Do you think we found this place by accident? The Great Planner sent me here for a purpose. I am responsible to Him, not to you or your scientist friends. I will fulfill His purpose.” He leaned forward, staring at Henderson with dark fanatical eyes. “Go weep about your reputation somewhere else.”

  Henderson stepped back, getting a clearer view of the passenger, feeling as if he had suddenly sprouted fangs and claws. He was still as he had appeared before, an intense brunet young man, wearing dark tights and dark shirt, sitting cross-legged on top of a huge box, but now he looked primitive somehow, like a prehistoric naked priest on top of an altar.

  “Anthropology is against this kind of thing,” Henderson said.

  Winton looked at him malevolently from his five-foot elevation on the crate and the extra three feet of his own seated height. “You aren’t an anthropologist, are you, Harry? You’re an engineer?”

  “That’s right,” Henderson admitted, hating him for the syllogism. .

  Winton said sweetly, “Then why don’t you go back to the ship and work on the engine?”

  “There will be trouble,” Henderson said softly.

  “I am prepared for trouble,” the Revent Winton said equally softly. He took a large old-fashioned revolver out of his carry case and rested it on his knee.

  The muzzle pointed midway between the engineer and the natives.

  Henderson shrugged and went back up the ramp.

  “What did he do?” Charlie was finishing his check of the fuel timers, holding a coffee cup in his free hand.

  Angrily silent, Harry cut an exit slit from the plastic coating. He ripped off the gossamer films of plastic, wadded them up together and tossed them in a salvage hopper.

  “He told me to mind my own business. And that’s what I am going to do.”

  The preacher’s impressive voice began to ring again from the distance outside, and, every so often, like a deep gong, the translator machine would speak a word in the native dialect.

  “The translator is still going,” Charlie pointed out.

  “Let it. He doesn’t know what it is saying.” Sulkily, Henderson turned to a library shelf, and pulled out a volume, The E. T. Planet: A Manual of Observation and Behavior on Extraterrestrial Planets, with Examples.

  “What is it saying?”

  “Almost nothing at all. All it translated out of a long speech the creep made was ‘I life path.’ ”

  The younger engineer lost his smile. “That was good enough for others. Winton doesn’t know what the box is saying?”

  “He thinks it’s saying what he is saying. He’s giving out with his usual line of malarky.”

  “We’ve got to stop it!” Charlie began to climb the ladder. Henderson shrugged. “So go out and tell him the translator isn’t working right. I should have told him. But if I got close to him now, I’d strangle him.”

  Charlie returned later, grinning. “It’s O.K. The natives are scared of Winton, and they like the box; so they must think that the box is talking sense for itself, and Winton is gibbering in a strange language.”

  “He is. And it is,” Henderson said sourly. “They are right.” “You’re kind of hard on him.” Charlie started searching the shelves for another copy of the manual of procedure for survey teams. “But I can see what you mean. Anyhow, I told Winton that he was making a bad impression on the natives. It stopped him. It stopped him cold. He said he would put off preaching for a week and study the natives a little. But he sai
d we ought to fix up the translator so that it translates what he says.” Charlie turned, smiling, with a book in one hand. “That gives us time.”

  “Time for what?” Henderson growled without looking up from his book. “Do you think we can change Winton’s mind? That bonehead believes that butting into people’s lives is a sacred duty. Try talking any bonehead out of a Sacred Duty! He’d butt into a cannibal banquet! I hope he does. I hope they eat him!”

  “Long pig,” Charlie mused, temporarily diverted by the picture. “Tastes good to people, probably would taste foul to these natives, they’re not the same species.”

  “He says he’s planning- to stop their spring festival. If it has sacrifices or anything he doesn’t like, he says he’ll stop it.”

  Charlie placed his fists on the table and leaned across toward Henderson, lowering his voice. “Look, we don’t know even if the natives are going to have any spring festival. Maybe if we investigate we’ll find out that there won’t be one, or maybe we’ll find out that Winton can’t do them any harm. Maybe we don’t have to worry. Only let’s go out and investigate. We can write up reports on whatever we find, in standard form, and the journals will print them when we get back. Glory and all like that.” He added, watching Henderson’s expression, “Maybe, if we have to, we can break the translator.”

  It was the end of the season of dry. The river was small and ran in a narrow channel, and there were many fish near the surface. Spet worked rapidly, collecting fish from fish traps, returning the empty traps to the water, salting the fish.

  He was winded, but pleased with the recollection of last night’s feast, and hungry in anticipation of the feast of the evening to come. This was the season of the special meals, cooking herbs and roots and delicacies with the fish. Tonight’s feast might be the last he would ever have, for a haze was thickening over the horizon, and tomorrow the rains might come.

  One of the strangers came and watched him. Spet ignored him politely and salted the fish without looking at him directly. It was dangerous to ignore a stranger, but to make the formal peace gestures and agreements would be implying that the stranger was from a tribe of enemies, when he might already be a friend. Spet preferred to be polite, so he pretended not to be concerned that he was being watched.

  The haze thickened in the sky, and the sunlight weakened. Spet tossed the empty trap back to its place in the river with a skillful heave of his strong short arms. If he lived through the next week, his arms would not be strong and short, they would be weak and long. He began to haul in another trap line, sneaking side glances at the stranger as he pulled.

  The stranger was remarkably ugly. His features were all misfit sizes. Reddish brown all over like a dead leaf, and completely bald of hair at knees and elbows, he shone as if he were wet, covered all over with a transparent shininess, like water, but the water never dripped. He was thick and sturdy and quick-moving, like a youngling, but did not work. Very strange, unlike reality, he stood quietly watching, without attacking Spet, although he could have attacked without breaking a peace gesture. So he was probably not of any enemy tribe.

  It was possible that the undripping water was an illusion, meant to indicate that the stranger was really the ghost of someone who had drowned.

  The stranger continued to watch. Spet braced his feet against the grass of the bank and heaved on the next trap line, wanting to show his strength. He heaved too hard, and a strand of the net gave way. The stranger waded out into the water and pulled in the strand, so that no fish escaped.

  It was the act of a friend. And yet when the net trap was safely drawn up on the bank, the brown stranger stepped back without comment or gesture, and watched exactly as before—as if his help was the routine of one kinfolk to another.

  That showed that the brown one was his kin and a member of his family. But Spet had seen all of his live kinfolk, and none of them looked so strange. It followed reasonably that the brown one was a ghost, a ghost of a relative who had drowned.

  Spet nodded at the ghost and transferred the fish from the trap to the woven baskets and salted them. He squatted to repair the broken strand of the net.

  The brown ghost squatted beside him. It pointed at the net and made an inquiring sound.

  “I am repairing the trap, Grandfather,” Spet exclaimed, using the most respectful name for the brown ghost relative.

  The ghost put a hand over his own mouth, then pointed at the ground and released its mouth to make another inquiring noise.

  “The ground is still dry, Grandfather,” Spet said cordially, wondering what he wanted to know. He rose and flung the trap net out on its line into the river, hoping that the brown ghost would admire his strength. Figures in dreams often came to tell yoir something, and often they could not speak, but the way they looked and the signs they made were meant to give you a message. The brown ghost was shaped like a youngling, like Spet, as if he had drowned before his adult hanging ceremony. Perhaps this one came in daylight instead of dreams, because Spet was going to die and join the ghosts soon, before he became an adult.

  The thought was frightening. The haze thickening on the horizon looked ominous.

  The brown ghost repeated what Spet had said, almost in Spet’s voice, blurring the words slightly. The ground is still dry, Grandfather. He pointed at the ground and made an inquiring noise.

  “Ground,” said Spet thinking about death, and every song he had heard about it. Then, he heard the ghost repeat the word, and saw the satisfaction of his expression, and realized that the ghost had forgotten how to talk, and wanted to be taught all over again, like a newborn.

  That made courtesy suddenly a simple and pleasant game. As Spet worked, he pointed at everything and said the word, he described what he was doing, and sometimes he sang the childhood work songs that described the work.

  The ghost followed and helped him with the nets, and listened, and pointed at things he wanted to learn. Around his waist coiled a blind silver snake that Spet had not noticed at first, and the ghost turned the head of the snake toward Spet when he sang, and sometimes the ghost talked to the snake himself, with explanatory gestures.

  It was very shocking to Spet that anyone would explain things to a snake, for snakes are wise, and a blind snake is the wise one of dreams—he who knows everything. The blind snake did not need to be explained to. Spet averted his eyes and would not look at it.

  The ghost and he worked together, walking up the river-bank, hauling traps, salting fish and throwing the traps back, and Spet told what he was doing, and the ghost talked down to the snake around his waist, explaining something about what they were doing. Once the brown ghost held the blind silver snake out toward Sept, indicating with a gesture that he should speak to it.

  Terrified and awed, Spet fell to his knees. “Tell me, Wisest One, if you wish to tell me, will I die in the hanging?”

  He waited, but the snake lay with casual indifference in the ghost’s hand and did not move or reply.

  Spet rose from his knees and backed away. “Thank you, O Wise One.”

  The ghost spoke to the snake, speaking very quietly, with apologetic gestures and much explanation, then wrapped it again around his waist and helped Spet carry the loads of salted fish, without speaking again or pointing at anything.

  It was almost sundown.

  On the way back to his family hut, Spet passed the Box That Speaks. The black gibbering spirit sat on top of it and gibbered as usual, but this time the box stopped him and spoke to him, and called him by his own name, and asked questions about his life.

  Spet was carrying a heavy load of salted fish in two baskets hung on a yoke across one sturdy shoulder. He was tired. He stood in the midst of the green meadow that in other seasons had been a river, with the silver hut of the ghosts throwing a long shadow across him. His legs were tired from wading in the river, and his mind was tired from the brown ghost asking him questions all day; so he explained the thing that was uppermost in his mind, instead of discussing fishin
g and weather. He explained that he was going to die. The ceremony of hanging, by which the almost-adults became adults, was going to occur at the first rain, five younglings were ready, usually most of them lived, but he thought he would die.

  The box fell silent, and the ghost on top stopped gibbering, so Spet knew that it was true, for people fall silent at a truth that they do not want to say aloud.

  He made a polite gesture of leave-taking to the box and went toward his family hut, feeling very unhappy. During the feast of that evening all the small ones ate happily of fish and roots and became even fatter, and the thin adults picked at the roots and herbs. Spet was the only youngling of adultbeginning age, and he should have been eating well to grow fat and build up his strength, but instead he went outside and looked at the sky and saw that it was growing cloudy. He did not go back in to the feast again; instead he crouched against the wall of the hut and shivered without sleeping. Before his eyes rested the little flat-bottomed boats of the family, resting in the dust behind the hut for the happy days of the rain. He would never travel in those boats again.

  Hanging upside down was a painful way to become an adult, but worth it, if you lived. It was going to be a very bad way to die.

  Hurrying and breathless with his news, Revent Winton came upon the two engineers crouched at the riverbank.

  “I found out . . .” he began.