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

us raw meat this morning before he went to sleep, something like a deer haunch. The fire bothers him—he evidently didn't go near it last night after the others collapsed."

"Ed tried to show him about fire," Dorothy said. "I remember. Mijok was scared, and Sears told Ed to let it wait."

"Meat was good too." Wright smirked. "We got the fire going, and Mijok did try some cooked and liked it. You and Dorothy can have some tomorrow if I don't turn purple."

"Not guinea-pig," said Dorothy. "Just pig."

"Hungry?" Wright tossed Paul a ration package.

"Gah!" But he opened it. "Learned any more of Mijok's words?"

"No. He won't have many. Nouns, simple descriptives. Must have some continuing association with his own breed, or he'd have no words at all. A hunter—with only nature's weapons, I think. That haunch was torn, not cut—some hoofed animal smaller than a pony, fresh-killed and well bled. He must have got it while Dorothy slept. It may have strayed into the camp during the night. I think Mijok lives in the woods, maybe not even a shelter or a permanent mate. Anthropology IA." said Wright, and bowed in mimic apology to the sleeping giant. "Those pygmies will be something else again—Neolithic. Wish I understood that bulge between the shoulder blades. All the creatures we've seen have it—even that damn black reptile, I believe, though things were too mixed up to be sure."

Mijok woke—all at once, like a cat. He stretched, extending his arms twelve feet from wrist to wrist. He smiled down at Paul. He studied the helpless ones, peering longest at Ann Bryan; the black-haired girl was breathing harshly, fidgeting. Now and then her eyes flickered open and perhaps they saw. Softly as smoke Mijok stepped into the shadow of the trees and listened. Wright remarked,[45] "Speaking of that reptile, we should set up a monument to it. Nothing luckier could have happened than that chance to lend Mijok a hand." His gray eyes fixed on Paul, lids lowered in a speculative smile. "I'm not the only one who remembers, Paul, that you were the first to go to his help. He hasn't forgotten.... Dot, you're sure Ed understood that we have a friend there?"

"He seemed to, Doc. I watched them. They got along—practically buddies."

Paul saw the bandage was still on Mijok's arm, earth-stained and with fragments of gray moss, but not disarranged; the bandage on his own shoulder had been removed. The flying beast's attack had left only a heavy scratch, which looked clean; there was no pain, only an itching. The meadow was empty of brown wings. The dead fish were gone from the lake. Perhaps other scavengers had been busy in the thirteen-hour night. The water was an innocent blue, a luminous stillness under the sun.

Mijok stole out into the grass, gazing westward along the line where meadow met jungle. Returning, he squatted by Wright and muttered, "Migan." He spread a hand three feet above the ground; two fingers drooped and indicated the motion of walking legs. Paul suggested: "Pygmies?"

"Could be." Mijok stared eloquently at Wright's rifle then crouched at the barrier of branches, complaining in his throat. Taking up his own rifle, Paul joined him. Dorothy hurried to the lifeboat and came back with field glasses for him and Wright and herself. In spite of the great planet's heavy pull, her body moved with even more light easiness than it had shown in the unreal years of Argo. With the glasses, vague motion a quarter mile away in the meadow leaped shockingly into precision.

The pygmies were not approaching but heading out from the edge of the forest, a group of nine, barely taller than the grass, bald red heads and shoulders in single file. The rearmost had a burden: seven others carried bows, with quivers on the right hip. "Left-handed," Paul observed aloud. The leader was the tallest—a woman, with a long spear. All were sending anxious glances at the sky and toward the human shelter; their motions suggested a fear so deep it must be pain, yet something drew them out there in spite of it. The pygmy with the burden, a[46] rolled-up hide, was also a woman. The leader was bald as the others, slender, muscular, her head round, with prominent forehead and thin nose, tattooed cheeks. The bowmen had only simple loincloths, and belts for their arrow quivers. The women's knee-length grass skirts were like the Melanesian, but the leader's was dyed a brilliant blue. Her two little pairs of breasts were youthfully firm and pointed. Dorothy murmured, "American civilization would have gone mad about those people."

"What a girl!" Wright sighed. "I mean Dorothy—the Dope."

"Even a dope can be jealous. Do you s'pose Mrs. Mijok has—Oh! Oh, poor darling! Not funny after all, gentlemen——"

The pygmy leader had turned full face, as the nine paused at trampled grass. She wore a necklace of shell. These had no glitter, but their yellow and blue made handsome splashes against the red of her skin. Reason told Paul that she could see at most only dazzling spots where sunlight might be touching the glasses he had thrust through wilted leaves. It made no difference: she was staring directly into him, making her grief a part of his life. A still-faced grief, too profound for any tears, if she knew of tears. The green cat eyes lowered; she stabbed her spear into the ground and lifted her arms, a giving, yielding motion. Her lips moved—in prayer, surely, since all but one of the men were bowed, performing ritual gestures toward whatever lay on the ground. The one who did not bow never ceased to watch the sky. The prayer was brief. The woman's left hand dropped meaningly, the hide was unrolled, and its bearer raised what the grass had hidden—no more than a skull and a few bones, a broken spear, a muddy scrap that might have been a grass skirt. The hide was folded gently over these; the group went on.

"Dorothy—those things you saw running when we were circling down—I missed 'em," Wright said. "Poor eyesight, and seems to me the air was still misty from Argo's crash in the lake. They were going south, away from here? And they could have been—people like these?"

"Yes. Hundreds or thousands of them. I suppose the crash of Argo must have seemed like the heavens falling. The lifeboats too."[47]

"I think we interrupted a war."

"These would be survivors? Live in this part of the jungle maybe? Looking for what's left after those—those flying beasts—"

"It makes sense," Wright said. "They're more afraid of the sky than of our setup over here. Maybe we're gods who came down to help them. If we did help them. Look: they've found another.... Yes, now the prayer.... Wish Mijok wasn't so afraid of them. Inevitable. To them I suppose he's an ugly wild animal. Different species, similar enough to be shocked at the similarity. 'Tain't good."

"Do we try for a foot in both camps?"

"Paul, I think I'll take a rain check on answering that.... Ach—if I could go out there now—communicate—"

"No!" Dorothy gasped. "Not while the others are still sick."

"You're right of course." Wright fretted at his beard stubble. "I get sillier all the time. As Ed would tell me if he were up and around. It's the high oxygen...."

There were brown splashes in the sky. The pygmies saw the peril first and darted for the woods—an orderly flight however—the woman with the hide in front, the blue-skirted woman next, then the bowmen. Three of the latter turned bravely and shot arrows that glittered and whined. The brown beasts wheeled and flapped angrily upward, though the buzzing arrows dropped far short of them. The pygmies gained the trees; the omasha scouted the edge of the woods, squawking, three of them drifting toward the lifeboat, weaving heads surveying the ground. Paul gave way to unfamiliar savage enjoyment. "Do we, Doc?"

"Yes," said Wright, and took aim himself.

All three were brought down, at a cost of four irreplaceable rifle bullets and two shots from Dorothy's automatic. Mijok bellowed with satisfaction but recoiled as Wright dragged a dirty brown carcass into the clearing. "A dissection is in order." Mijok grumbled and fidgeted. "Don't fret, Mijok." Wright pegged down the wings of the dead animal with sharp sticks and drew an incision on the leathery belly with his hunting knife. "Good head shot, Paul—this one's yours. We'll do a brain job from[48] one of the others, but I think we'll let that wait for Sears—oh my, yes...! Doesn't weigh over thirty pounds. Hollow bones like a bird's, very likely. Hope they'll keep."

"You hope," Dorothy sniffed. "What do you do when I turn housewife and instruct you to get that awful mess the hell off my nice clean floor?"

"Dope! And you my best and only medical student." He worked at the cutting dubiously, inexpertly. "Conventional mammalian setup, more or less. Small lungs, big stomach. Hah—two pairs of kidneys?" He spread the viscera out on the wing. "Short intestine, also like a bird. And she was preparing a blessed event multiplied by—count 'em—six."

"Too many," said Paul. "Altogether too industrious."

"What I really want to know—Oh...?" With the lungs removed, it could be seen that the hump on the back was caused by a great enlargement of four thoracic vertebrae, which swelled into the chest cavity as well as outward. Wright cut away spinal cartilage. "Damn, I wish Sears was doing this. Well, it's neural tissue, nothing else—a big swelling of the spinal cord." He sliced at the ugly head, but the hermorrhage from a .30-caliber bullet confused the picture. "The brain looks too simple. Could that lump in the cord be the hind brain? I hereby leave the theories to Sears. But, son, you might slit the stomach and see what the old lady had for breakfast."

Paul's clumsy cut on the slippery stomach bag made it plain what the omasha had eaten—among other things, an almost complete seven-fingered hand. Dorothy choked and walked away, saying, "I am going to be—"

"Cheer up." Paul held her forehead. "Never mind the clean floor—"

"Go away. I mean stay very close. Sorry to be so physiological. Me a medic student! Even blood bothers me."

"Never mind, sugar—"

"Sugar yourself, and wash your paws. We smell."

Mijok was muttering in alarm. Wright had abandoned the dissection and gone out in the meadow, cautious but swift, to the spot where yesterday they had found the pygmy soldiers. He took up a small skull and arm bone, pathetically clean—perhaps there were insect scavengers that followed after the omasha—and the discarded bow.[49] But instead of bringing back these relics, Wright held them high over his head, facing westward. Tall and gray in the heavy sun, he stepped twenty paces further toward the region where the pygmies had entered the jungle; then he set the bones down in the grass and strode back to the shelter, fingers twitching, lips moving in his old habit of talking half to himself, half to the world. "The omasha," he said, "cracked the enlarged vertebrae—favorite morsel maybe."

Mijok moaned, blinking and sighing. He stared long at the silent grace of the lifeboat, then at Christopher Wright. He too was talking to himself. Abruptly, something gave way in him. He was kneeling before Wright, bending forward, taking Wright's hands and pressing them against the gray-white fur of his face and his closed eyes. "Oh, now," Wright said, "now, friend—"

Paul remarked, "You're elected."

"I will not be a god."

[50]

6

Mijok released the hands of his deity and sat back on his haunches, foggy-eyed. Wright stroked the great furry head, troubled and amazed. "It won't do," Wright said. "We'll have no gods on this planet. Unless human nature can make itself a little godlike. And no final Armageddon—for that's within too, and always was. Well, he'll learn language fast. As he does, the first thing he must discover is that we're all one flesh." But Mijok was gazing up in adoration at the sound of the voice, trembling, not in fear, smiling when he saw Wright smile. "I believe he never had a god before—hadn't reached the stage of personalizing the forces of nature. They're just forces, and himself a bundle of perception, not even realizing that he's more knowing and sensitive than other animals. Not arrogant yet, not sophisticated enough to be cruel, or mean, or even ambitious...."

Dorothy pushed her fists into her cheeks, brown eyes upturned to study the old man: a way she had, carrying Paul back eleven years to the day he had come aboard the ship and seen her for the first time and loved the woman who was, even then, manifest in the leggy, awkward child. "Doc, why did you do that, out there in the meadow?"

"Why, Dorothy, we must make contact with those pygmies too. They are—advanced. It'll be more difficult. They'll have traditions—maybe some very