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

ancient ones. But we must make contact."

"Mijok hates them though. If they come here—"

Wright grinned. "Temporary advantage of being little tin deities. I think Mijok will do whatever we indicate—until we're able to teach him independence."

Paul said, "Don't think for a minute I'm not with you.[51] But Doc, with the others helpless we're only three—"

"Four."

"Yes, four. There's our own survival to think of. It's a big planet. Seems to me you're taking it on all at once."

Wright slouched, loose-limbed, at the barrier, where he could watch the meadow, and Mijok stayed close to him. "I think we must, Paul. If we start right perhaps we can go on right. A mistake at this point could go on burning for a thousand years.... Why do you think he broke out into worship when he did? Our superior achievements—lifeboat, guns, the rescue from that reptile? The fact that I wasn't afraid of a poor pygmy's bones? All that, sure, but something else. Ed would say I was daydreaming—but I think Mijok's heart knows what his brain can't yet interpret. Sears would agree, I think—his own heart's bigger than Lucifer. Mijok hasn't the least conscious idea why I invited those pygmies to come and get their dead. Down deeper, in the part of him that made him bring the moss and the meat and take care of us, I think he knows very well."

"You're proposing," Dorothy said, "to take a chance on love?"

Wright was tranquil, watching the meadow. "Whenever men put their chips on the other thing they always lost, didn't they? Repeatedly, for twenty or thirty thousand years? Did they ever create anything good except in a milieu of co-operation, friendship, forbearance? One of the oldest of commonplaces—the teachers all knew it. Lao-tse—Buddha—or stated negatively: 'He who lives by the sword....' And so on. Good is not the mere absence of evil, but the most positive of human forces. The instruments of good are charity, patience, courage, effort and self-knowledge, each unavailing without the others; remember that. And that's all the basic ethics I know. The rest is detail, solution of immediate problems as they arise. Even on Earth the good tended to win out in the long run: at least it did until the mechanical toys got out of hand. Then there was a century of living under a question mark. There was also the Collectivist Party. Yes, as a prime example of a part of my own philosophy totally perverted, I give you the Collectivist Party." Wright was talking to himself again, the bitterness of Earth's history goading[52] him into soft-spoken monotone, drawling and dark, on a planet nearly five light-years distant from the ancient confusions. "The Collectivist Party, which turns 'co-operation' into the same sort of word fetish that 'democracy' was less than a hundred years ago—co-operation without charity, without patience, without courage and always, always, without self-knowledge."

Dorothy still watched him with sober upturned eyes. "Ed told me once his father was a pilot in the Collectivist Army during the Civil War."

"I know." Wright smiled at her in bashful half apology. "Some of the old wounds still bleed too, I guess. I generally manage to keep my political mouth shut when he's listening, if I can. Not that Ed could be accused of still fighting the war that ended before he was born.... Relax: I think they're coming."

Paul joined Wright and the giant at the barrier, but Dorothy stayed a moment with the sick, feeling their wrists, murmuring something close to Ann's ear, although the girl could not respond. "Past the fever stage, I believe," she said. "They're all breathing well. No chance they'll be out of it before night, I suppose...."

The pygmies were still some distance away, slipping along the edge of the woods in plain sight. There were only three—the two women and one bowman; perhaps the others were paralleling their course inside the forest—perhaps a hundred others were. Wright whispered, "Have we anything that would make a respectable gift?"

Mijok was rumbling in misery and fright. Dorothy came over holding a locket. "This—you remember, Doc—a matron at the Orphanage gave it to me. I used to imagine it could be a portrait of my mother—"

"But my dear—"

The brown girl shook her head. "This ship-metal wedding ring Paul hammered out for me—that's the only Earth jewelry I want to keep. This face that might be like my mother's—Oh, Doc, I'm getting to be a big girl now. Besides, Lucifer will have plenty of pretties for us later on. And Doc—let me do this, will you? They've got a woman leading 'em, so—wouldn't she be less afraid of another woman? I'll uncover, so she—" Dorothy shrugged out of her jacket. "Please, Doc? I'm scared, but—"[53]

Wright glanced helplessly at Paul. "We—"

Dorothy said quickly, "My decision." Holding the locket up for the sun to gleam on it, she walked into the meadow and waited in the brightness. Paul's hand sweated on the rifle stock. He saw Wright patting Mijok's arm, heard his restraining murmur: "Quiet, Mijok—keep your shirt on, Mijok, old man—man...." Mijok searched the face of his god with a mute desperation and remained as he was.

The pygmy woman halted fifty feet away in still-faced musing. As Paul had seen through the binoculars, she was elaborately tattooed and young. The pause was long. Dorothy stepped nearer to the place where Wright had left the bones, displaying the locket, her open left hand waving down at her body to demonstrate that she carried no weapons. For the first time Paul realized she had left her holster belt behind.

The blue-skirted woman shrilled a word; her two followers fell back. She thrust the blunt end of her spear in the ground and came forward steadily until she was only a few feet from the woman of the twenty-first century; mask-faced, she met Dorothy's smile with a long scrutiny. Now and then the green eyes shifted to study the clearing, the lifeboat, the quiet shapes of Paul and Wright. And Mijok. Perhaps she stared longest at Mijok, but by some heavy discipline her face refused to tell of anything but dignity and caution.

She spoke at last. It was complex, in a tone like the piping of a tree frog. There were pauses, studied inflections, no gestures: her seven-fingered hands hung limp against the blue grass skirt. The closing words seemed to have a note of questioning and of sternness; she waited.

Dorothy's contralto was startlingly deep in contrast: "Darling, I would like to know where you picked up that perfectly adorable wrap-around, only I don't think it would suit me. I'm, to put it frankly, a shade too hippy for such. In case you're wondering, I'm a female sample of man"—she touched herself and pointed to the pygmy lady—"man—"

"Oh!" Wright whispered. "Good girl, good—"

"—and it does seem to me us girls ought to stick together, because"—she held out the locket—"well, just[54] because. And anyway look: I have only ten toes, fastened on to the ends of my feet, and if I had more, Heaven knows (just count 'em and see how each grows!) I'd have trouble in keeping them neat. Pome. There now, sweetie pie, please take it, huh?" And she opened the locket—Paul remembering in lessening panic how much the unknown portrait did resemble her—and held it face out to the woman of Lucifer. A tiny palm came up dubiously; Dorothy placed the locket in it. "It won't bite, baby." The pygmy woman turned it about, puzzling at the hinge. Dorothy stooped to demonstrate the mechanism a few times. "I'm Dorothy, by the way, more widely known as the Dope, which is a title of uncommon distinction among my people, achieved only after long study of the art of saying the right thing at the wrong time, burning the bacon, and preserving at all times an air of sweet and addled dignity—Dorothy...." She indicated herself plainly and pointed, with questioning eyebrows.

The tree-frog voice, with no sternness, but a hint of friendliness: "Tor-o-thee...?" She imitated Dorothy's motions. "Abro Pakriaa—"

"Pakriaa."

"Abro Pakriaa." There was sternness again in that correction.

"Abro Pakriaa...."

Wright muttered, "Royalty, I believe. Don't dare do any coaching. Trust Dot's instinct. Ah, here we go—"

The pygmy woman had taken off her shell necklace. She crushed the dainty blue and yellow against her upper right breast; she set it for a moment on her shining hairless skull, and then offered it. Wright sighed, shaken, "It had to work—exchange of gifts—a universal—"

When Dorothy dropped on one knee to take it, the mask relaxed for the first time in a wintry smile. Over the proud bald head went the chain of the locket, and Abro Pakriaa watched Dorothy put the necklace on—fortunately it was long, even drooping a little below Dorothy's throat. A flutter of red hands seemed to mean that Dorothy was to stand back; another motion brought forward the woman who carried the hide, her face a chip of red stone. The hide was unrolled, and the bones placed on it. There was more intricate speech, with touching of[55] the locket and graceful, apparently kindly waving of thin arms. Dorothy responded: "Four score and seven years ago...." She went on to the end without mirth or hesitation, fondling the shell necklace, giving the words the power of music that belongs to them even apart from knowledge of their meaning. When she was silent, Abro Pakriaa motioned the woman with the hide to go and held up her two hands clasped together, the Chinese salutation. She waited till Dorothy had done the same and strode away, recovering her spear without a backward look, vanishing under the trees.

Dorothy collapsed in the shadow of the barrier. Tentatively she groaned: "How'm I doing?"

Wright snarled; "Suppose you know that damn bowman had an arrow trained on you the whole time?"

She glanced at him, lips quivering. "I was kind of aware of it."

"Can I," said Paul, "touch the hand that touched the hand—"

"Oh no. I ain' gonna 'sociate with no common scum no mo'."

Mijok stared in wonder at their sudden paroxysms of hysterical laughter. He rumbled in doubt. Then the contagion caught him. Whatever his own interpretation might be, he was bellowing, hammering his chest, rolling over on the moss and scattering handfuls of it while he roared.

He did not sober until he saw Wright drawing pictures on the earth—three stylized but obvious human figures, one small, one medium-sized, one large. Only the middle one had five fingers. Wright gouged a circle around all three. He said, "C'm'on, Mijok—language lesson."

[56]

7

The trail was obvious only to the pygmies, through a border region of meadow and forest that was full of dappled light, a warm hurry of life feeding, struggling, wandering. Aware of his own power and readiness, able now to enjoy the shifting scents and noises of this new trail, Paul watched Ann's quick slenderness and the swing of Spearman's solid shoulders. They, and Sears Oliphant, had emerged unharmed from the illness. During a week unmeasurably long in retrospect, all six of the party had found the ease and sureness of physical acclimation. Their bodies rejoiced in the hot clean air of day and the moist moderate nights; the only rebel was the Earth-born brain—grudging, frightened, trailing, making endless reservations and timid of shadows. In Sears Oliphant it was an almost open battle between a brave and curious mind and flesh that could not hide its wincing from pain and danger. His "Oh my, yes" had a tremor which angered himself and oppressed his natural garrulity.

When Ann Bryan had drifted out of the sleep of illness, Ed Spearman was petting her hands, sponging her forehead. Paul had seen something happen in Ann at that moment, like an innocent putting forth of leaves when winter is not surely gone. Ann had never taken a lover. On the ship, not so much unawakened as unwilling, she had rejected all that; Spearman, making no secret of wanting her, had not been insistent. Nor had he seemed outwardly much distressed, but (at a time when Earth-harbored youth of his nature would have been in their liveliest and most demanding prime) he had buried himself in Argo's technical library to the point of red-eyed exhaustion, a desperation of unceasing study in the technologies that Captain Jensen would have helped him explore if[57] Jensen had lived. Ann had read other matters after the violin strings were gone, read and daydreamed. If she'd wept (and Paul thought she had) she had done it alone, in that pocket of a room sacred to herself. To the others, she was a passionately silent adolescent turning into a tiredly silent woman, who made too much point of doing her own work and asking for nothing.

Yes, Ann was different now. The thin beauty of her face, vivid white under heavy black hair, was still too quiet, but with a troubled radiance. During this long week