Pet Farm, Roger D. Aycock [best book club books of all time TXT] 📗

than patricide," Farrell pointed out. "No group would practice decimation from the top down. It's too difficult to enforce."

Stryker answered him with a quotation from the Colonial Reclamations Handbook, maliciously taking the pontifical classmaster's tone best calculated to irritate Farrell.

"Chapter Four, Subsection One, Paragraph Nineteen: Any custom, fixation or compulsion accepted as the norm by one group of human beings can be understood and evaluated by any other group not influenced by the same ideology, since the basic perceptive abilities of both are necessarily the same through identical heredity. Evaluation of alien motivations, conversely—"

"Oh, hell," Farrell cut in wearily. "Let's get back to the ship, shall we? We'll all feel more like—"

His right foot gave way beneath him without warning, crushing through the soft ground and throwing him heavily. He sat up at once, and swore in incredulous anger when he found the ankle swelling rapidly inside his boot.

"Sprained! Damn it all!"

Gibson and Stryker, on their knees beside the broken crust of soil, ignored him. Gibson took up a broken length of stick and prodded intently in the cavity, prying out after a moment a glistening two-foot ellipsoid that struggled feebly on the ground.

"A chrysalid," Stryker said, bending to gauge the damage Farrell's heavy boot had done. "In a very close pre-eclosion stage. Look, the protective sheathing has begun to split already."

The thing lay twitching aimlessly, prisoned legs pushing against its shining transparent integument in an instinctive attempt at premature freedom. The movement was purely reflexive; its head, huge-eyed and as large as a man's clenched fist, had been thoroughly crushed under Farrell's heel.

Oddly, its injury touched Farrell even through the pain of his injured foot.

"It's the first passably handsome thing we've seen in this pesthole," he said, "and I've maimed it. Finish it off, will you?"

Stryker grunted, feeling the texture of the imprisoning sheath with curious fingers. "What would it have been in imago, Gib? A giant butterfly?"

"A moth," Gibson said tersely. "Lepidoptera, anyway."

He stood up and ended the chrysalid's strugglings with a bolt from his heat-gun before extending a hand to help Farrell up. "I'd like to examine it closer, but there'll be others. Let's get Arthur out of here."

They went back to the ship by slow stages, pausing now and then while Gibson gathered a small packet of bone fragments from the mudflats and underbrush.

"Some of these are older than others," he explained when Stryker remarked on his selection. "But none are recent. It should help to know their exact age."

An hour later, they were bathed and dressed, sealed off comfortably in the ship against the humid heat and stink of the swamp. Farrell lay on a chart room acceleration couch, resting, while Stryker taped his swollen ankle. Gibson and Xavier, the one disdaining rest and the other needing none, used the time to run a test analysis on the bones brought in from the lakeside.

The results of that analysis were more astonishing than illuminating.

A majority of the fragments had been exposed to climatic action for some ten years. A smaller lot averaged twenty years; and a few odd chips, preserved by long burial under alluvial silt, thirty.

"The older natives died at ten-year intervals, then," Stryker said. "And in considerable numbers; the tribe must have been cut to half strength each time. But why?" He frowned unhappily, fishing for opinion. "Gib, can it really be a perversion of religious custom dreamed up by the Hymenops to keep their slaves under control? A sort of festival of sacrifice every decade, climaxing in tribal decimation?"

"Maybe they combine godliness with gluttony," Farrell put in, unasked. "Maybe their orgy runs more to long pig than to piety."

He stood up, wincing at the pain, and was hobbling toward his sleeping cubicle when Gibson's answer to Stryker's question stopped him with a cold prickle along his spine.

"We'll know within twenty-four hours," Gibson said. "Since both the decimations and the winter darkness periods seem to follow the same cycle, I'd say there's a definite relationship."

For once Farrell's cubicle, soundproofed and comfortable, brought him only a fitful imitation of sleep, an intermittent dozing that wavered endlessly between nightmare and wakefulness. When he crawled out again, hours later, he found Xavier waiting for him alone with a thermo-bulb of hot coffee. Stryker and Gibson, the mechanical said blandly, had seen no need of waking him, and had gone out alone on a more extensive tour of investigation.

The hours dragged interminably. Farrell uncased his beloved accordion, but could not bear the sound of it; he tried his sketch-book, and could summon to mind no better subjects than drab miasmic bogs and steaming mudflats. He discarded the idea of chess with Xavier without even weighing it—he would not have lasted past the fourth move, and both he and the mechanical knew it.

He was reduced finally to limping about the ship on his bandaged foot, searching for some routine task left undone and finding nothing. He even went so far as to make a below-decks check on the ship's matter-synthesizer, an indispensable unit designed for the conversion of waste to any chemical compound, and gave it up in annoyance when he found that all such operational details were filed with infallible exactness in Xavier's plastoid head.

The return of Stryker and Gibson only aggravated his impatience. He had expected them to discover concealed approaches to the maze of bridging overhead, tunnelings in the cliff-face to hidden caverns complete with bloodstained altars and caches of sacrificial weapons, or at least some ominous sign of preparation among the natives. But there was nothing.

"No more than yesterday," Stryker said. Failure had cost him a share of his congenital good-humor, leaving him restless and uneasy. "There's nothing to find, Arthur. We've seen it all."

Surprisingly, Gibson disagreed.

"We'll know what we're after when darkness falls," he said. "But that's a good twelve hours away. In the meantime, there's a possibility that our missing key is outside the crater, rather than here inside it."

They turned on him together, both baffled and apprehensive.

"What do you mean, outside?" Farrell demanded. "There's nothing there but grassland. We made sure of that at planetfall."

"We mapped four Hymenop domes on reconnaissance," Gibson reminded him. "But we only examined three to satisfy ourselves that they were empty. The fourth one—"

Farrell interrupted derisively. "That ancient bogey again? Gib, the domes are always empty. The Bees pulled out a hundred years ago."

Gibson said nothing, but his black-browed regard made Farrell flush uncomfortably.

"Gib is right," Stryker intervened. "You're too young in Colonial Reclamations to appreciate the difficulty of recognizing an alien logic, Arthur, let alone the impossibility of outguessing it. I've knocked about these ecological madhouses for the better part of a century, and the more I see of Hymenop work, the more convinced I am that we'll never equate human and Hymenop ideologies. It's like trying to add quantities of dissimilar objects and expressing the result in a single symbol; it can't be done, because there's no possible common denominator for reducing the disparate elements to similarity."

When Farrell kept silent, he went on, "Our own reactions, and consequently our motivations, are based on broad attributes of love, hate, fear, greed and curiosity. We might empathize with another species that reacts as we do to those same stimuli—but what if that other species recognizes only one or two of them, or none at all? What if their motivations stem from a set of responses entirely different from any we know?"

"There aren't any," Farrell said promptly. "What do you think they would be?"

"There you have it," Stryker said triumphantly. He chuckled, his good-nature restored. "We can't imagine what those emotions would be like because we aren't equipped to understand. Could a race depending entirely on extra-sensory perception appreciate a Mozart quintet or a Botticelli altar piece or a performance of Hamlet? You know it couldn't—the esthetic nuances that make those works great would escape it completely, because the motives that inspired their creation are based on a set of values entirely foreign to its comprehension.

"There's a digger wasp on Earth whose female singles out a particular species of tarantula to feed her larvae—and the spider stands patiently by, held by some compulsion whose nature we can't even guess, while the wasp digs a grave, paralyzes the spider and shoves it into the hole with an egg attached. The spider could kill the wasp, and will kill one of any other species, but it submits to that particular kind without a flicker of protest. And if we can't understand the mechanics of such a relationship between reflexive species, then what chance have we of understanding the logic of an intelligent race of aliens? The results of its activities can be assessed, but not the motivations behind those activities."

"All right," Farrell conceded. "You and Gib are right, as usual, and I'm wrong. We'll check that fourth dome."

"You'll stay here with Xav," Stryker said firmly, "while Gib and I check. You'd only punish yourself, using that foot."

After another eight-hour period of waiting, Farrell was nearing the end of his patience. He tried to rationalize his uneasiness and came finally to the conclusion that his failing hinged on a matter of conditioning. He was too accustomed to the stable unity of their team to feel comfortable without Gibson and Stryker. Isolated from their perpetual bickering and the pleasant unspoken warmth of their regard, he was lonesome and tense.

It would have been different, he knew, if either of the others had been left behind. Stryker had his beloved Reclamations texts and his microfilm albums of problems solved on other worlds; Gibson had his complicated galactic charts and his interminable chess bouts with Xavier....

Farrell gave it up and limped outside, to stand scowling unhappily at the dreary expanse of swampland. Far down under the reasoning levels of his consciousness a primal uneasiness nagged at him, whispering in wordless warning that there was more to his mounting restlessness than simple impatience. Something inside him was changing, burgeoning in strange and disturbing growth.

A pale suggestion of movement, wavering and uncertain in the eddying fog, caught his eye. A moment of puzzled watching told him that it was the bedraggled young woman they had seen earlier by the lake, and that she was approaching the ship timorously and under cover.

"But why?" he wondered aloud, recalling her bovine lack of curiosity. "What the devil can she want here?"

A shadow fell across the valley. Farrell, startled, looked up sharply to see the last of the Falakian sun's magenta glare vanishing below the crater's southern rim. A dusky forerunner of darkness settled like a tangible cloud, softening the drab outlines of bramble thickets and slime pools. The change that followed was not seen but felt, a swelling rush of glad arousal like the joy of a child opening its eyes from sleep.

To Farrell, the valley seemed to stir, waking in sympathy to his own restlessness and banishing his unease.

The girl ran to him through the dusk on quick, light feet, timidity forgotten, and he saw with a pleasant shock of astonishment that she was no longer the filthy creature he had first seen by the lakeside. She was pretty and nubile, eyes and soft mouth smiling together in a childlike eagerness that made her at once infinitely desirable and untouchably innocent.

"Who are you?" he asked shakily.