West Of The Sun, Edgar Pangborn [world of reading txt] 📗

almost like a Charin, Arek said, "They'd better."

They strolled up the hill; the other giants' labor had ceased. The building was a sturdy oblong, intended as storehouse and temporary communal dwelling for them all, including (Wright hoped) some of Pakriaa's people. Rafters were not yet in place. For that, Rak needed the strength of another like himself: chubby Muson tired easily. Someday a road would climb from the beach, traversing the ridge which was the backbone of the northern half of the island. Here, where spring water filled the pond and rushed on down to carve a small harbor below the beach, would be Jensen City, and the three races of Lucifer would learn to live there in good will and pleasure under a government of laws. So Wright said—peering at photographs, teasing his gray beard, tapping thin fingers on the map drawn on the paper of Earth, on the new maps of whitebark. Paul could see it too—sometimes; glimpse the houses, gardens, open places. South of the pond, a wheat field, for on Lucifer the wheat of Earth grew to four feet and bore richly. Near the field, perhaps the house for Dorothy and himself, with no doorway lower than ten feet.

At other times he could see only defeat—the arrogance and blind drive of genus Charin, species Semisapiens beating against the indifference of nature, the resentment of other life. He could see his people destroyed, by accident or anger, the giant friends adrift with only hints of the new life and spoiled for the old. Then he would stop trying to foresee and would make his mind's ear listen to Wright insisting: "Give protoplasm a chance. Patience is the well-spring...."

The walls were eleven feet in height. Rak and Muson rested on the coolness of bare ground within; Rak pointed at the top of the walls where rafters would rest. "Slow," he said, "and good." Rak could not be sure how old he was. When Mijok had first persuaded him to the camp ten months ago, Rak had won his English with the grave precision of a mason selecting fieldstone. His language had none of the flexibility and scope that Mijok and others had[86] achieved, but it served him. After absorbing basic arithmetic, Rak had deliberated on the problem of his age—squatting at the gate of the stone fortress by Lake Argo, spreading out rows of colored pebbles to indicate years, rainy seasons, episodes of hunting or fear or passion too keen to forget. At last he had come up with the figure of 130 years. "But," he said, "there are two times. In here"—he patted an ancient scar on his belly—"and there." He pointed at the red crescent moon.

"I'll cook supper," Arek said. Muson bubbled and shadowboxed with her daughter. Muson would laugh at anything—the flutter of a leaf, a breath of breeze on her red-brown fur. Paul followed to help Arek trim the carcass of an asonis killed the night before. Hornless, short-legged, fat, the bovine animal was abundant on the island; its one enemy here was what Arek called usran, a catlike carnivore the size of a lynx, which could tackle only the young asonis or feeble stragglers. Rak hunted in the old way. Bow, club, spear, even rifle, had been explained to him, but the stalk, the single rush and leap, the grasp of a muzzle and backward jerk that snapped the neck before the prey could even struggle—these were Rak's way still. In the old life, Rak's age would have led him eventually to a few dim years with a band of women, who would have fed him until he chose to wander into deep jungle, preventing any from following. When far away, he would have sat in the shadows to wait—for starvation or the black marsh reptiles or a great mainland cat, uskaran, which never attacked a giant in the prime of strength. Rak would have taken no harm from the young men in this weakness: his own territory would have been inviolate, and he would have joined the women, in a taciturn farewell to life, only when teeth and arms had failed. ("We're gentle people," Mijok said, puzzled at it himself. "In the Red-Moon-before-the-Rains we only play at fighting. It's not like what we see the other creatures do at that time. How could one 'possess' a woman? Do I possess the wind because I like to run against the touch of it...?")

The meat hung from a makeshift tripod; Arek jumped back, startled, as a furry thing scampered down. It was like a kinkajou except for the hump on the back (a true[87] hindbrain in the spine: Sears had long ago verified that guess of Wright's). "Little rascal," Paul said. "Let's tame it."

"What?" Arek was bewildered. "Do what?"

"Do these live on the mainland?"

"I never saw one till I came here. Too small to eat. Tame it?"

"Watch." Paul tossed a bit of meat. The visitor's chatter changed to a whistling whine; it elongated itself, grabbed, sat back on stubby hind legs to eat in clever paws; it washed itself with a squirrel's pertness. Arek chuckled, examining the idea, and went on with her work; she had become a hypercritical cook, under Dorothy's guidance. "Jocko, biologist, stand by: I propose to name an animile. Genus Kink, species quasikinkajou." Genus Kink did not retreat at Sears' quiet approach, but wriggled a black nose.

Rak asked in solemn curiosity, "For what is it good?"

"To make us laugh," Paul said, "so long as we're kind to it."

"Ah?" Rak moved his fingers to aid the patient mill of his mind.

"Dance-Nose," said Muson, who already understood. She shook all over. "Come, Funny-Nose." It would not—yet, but Muson could be patient too.

Sears whispered in his beard, "Less homesick?"

"Yes...."

After the meal Arek wanted Paul to come out on the cliffs. Though there seemed no danger from the omasha, she carried a long stick and Paul took his pistol. The slope leveled out to the bare rock of the headland; the ocean voice was the humming of a thousand giants. The way was easy, with no crevasses, no peril while the wind was mild. Arek had often been out here alone. Yesterday Paul had seen her standing for an hour, watching the west where unbroken water met a sun-reddened horizon. In her earlier years there might have been dim mention of the sea by her almost wordless people, but no true knowledge: the mainland coast was steaming vine-choked jungle, or tidal marsh, and shut away by the kaksma hills. Paul wondered what member of his race could stand for an hour in contemplation[88] like a thinking tree, not shifting a foot nor raising an arm...?

"Paul, why did you leave Earth?" Arek patted the rock beside her.

Below the troubled water laughed, endlessly defeated and returning. Cloud fantasies gathered below a lucid green, and the wind was a friend. "I have doubted sometimes whether we ought to have done so."

"That wasn't my meaning. We love you. Didn't you know? But I've wondered what sent you away from such a place. Ann says it was beautiful."

"A—drive of restlessness. We took boundaries as a challenge. I used to think that a great virtue. Now I call it neither good nor evil."

"I think it is good."

"Everywhere, we carry good and evil."

"What you do here is good. You teach us. You do kind things."

"We can be bad. But for Doc Wright and his dreams that Ed Spearman finds so impractical, we'd have done you harm." Helpless at her innocence, Paul saw she did not believe him. "On Earth, we fought each other. We hunted for lies to make ourselves feel big. We created great institutions built on vanity—tickling lies: imperialism, communism—most of the isms you find so puzzling when we talk of Earth history. The anger of Charins rarely focused itself on the actual causes of unhappiness or injustice. Instead we hunted for scapegoats, easy solutions. We wouldn't study ourselves. Always we itched for something external to take the blame for our own follies and crimes."

"I don't understand."

"As if you stumbled on a root, Arek, and then banged your fist on the tree that grew it, to blame it for your own clumsiness."

"But Paul—only a very small child would act like that."

"Darling, let's watch the sunset." She felt his pain, touched his knee, and was silent until he said, "A poor naughty child...."

"There was a thing Ed Spearman said to me—what I wanted to talk to you about. I've never gone to Pakriaa's[89] village. You know, even Mijok won't go there except with one of you. I asked Ed if Pakriaa still kept that stockade for drugging and fattening prisoners—in spite of her agreeing to the laws. He said yes, she did. I said it was not right. I said we made a law against slavery too. He said, 'Forget it, baby—one thing at a time.' I am not a baby. How can the laws govern us unless all obey them?"

"Ed—meant no harm, Arek. He only meant it does take time. The pygmies have more to unlearn. You—started clean. And—well—with the army of Lantis likely to come back at any time—we can't afford—"

Yet it seemed natural that this giant child, who had herself done murder in the old days, should answer his troubled evasions not only with reproach but with command: "If the laws are to govern us they must be respected by everyone. I wish I had gone to that village and torn down the stockade with my hands."

"And they would have killed you with a hundred spears and Pakriaa's people would hate us forever, learning nothing but more hatred."

Arek cried a little, rubbing at the unfamiliar wetness. "Maybe I begin to see, how difficult.... The sun's going." But they sat quietly in the warm and undemanding wind until the first sapphire glint of fireflies dotted the slope where Jensen City might one day shine. Arek stood, reaching down an affectionate hand.

[90]

2

Paul glanced down at sunrise-tinted snow on the highest peak of the coastal range, thirteen thousand feet above the sea. Prairie spread for thirty miles east of its base; then came a region of forest and small lakes fed by the outlet of Lake Argo, which was the core of the empire of Lantis, Queen of the World.

Pakriaa's information on Lantis was a murky blend of truth and fantasy. Lantis claimed birth from Ismar-Creator-and-Destroyer. Pakriaa had different theories. Originally ruler of a single village, Lantis consolidated by conquest. Instead of annihilating defeated villages she took their populations captive, sorting out three categories: potential followers, slave laborers, and meat. Many in the first class became fanatically converted; those in the second provided a year or so of work before dying of whippings and other abuse; captives of the third class were forced to eat the green-flowered weed that numbed the brain and were bled out at the right stage of fatness. In fifteen years one riverside village had swollen to a city of sixty thousand, fed by expeditions far to the east, and Lantis named her city Vestoia—Country of Freedom and Joy. "Got anything new in the 'scope?"

Sears groaned: "There are more boats above the falls."

The boats, they knew, were broad canoes roofed like sampans against the omasha, but with no sail. "Not moving, are they?"

"No—anchored maybe." Sears mopped his round face.

Without the telescope, Paul could see brownness on the water of Lake Argo's southern end, near the spot where the outlet tumbled over a high falls to a smaller lake. It meant that hundreds more must have been portaged past[91] the falls from Vestoia during his two days on the island....

The fifty red-green flowing miles became a pain of delay. Sears too would be aching for the gray square of their "fortress" to claim the eye in the north, touched by early sunlight, a brave structure twelve feet high, fifty square, built of split stone by the labor of giant friends. Outside it ran a moat twenty feet wide, ten deep, with a drawbridge of logs, bark matting, grass-fiber ropes, the bottom flooded with lake water. There was room within for living quarters, a supply of smoked meat, dried vegetables.

Lantis understood scaling ladders, Pakriaa said. Lantis had patience for a siege. There was no defense, Pakriaa said, in these measures. The only defense was to attack, to retreat, and attack again. It had always been so in the old wars. It was still so with this Lantis and her Big-Village-Vestoia, this bastard begotten of a red worm and Inkar, goddess of kaksmas. It would always be so—at least, until.... Paul remembered Dorothy, cherishing Helen at her brown breast, asking neutrally, "Until what, Abro Pakriaa?"

Pakriaa had studied the giants' walls with contempt. "Until I shame this worm spawn Lantis into meeting me alone. She must respect custom. Her first answer is a—what