"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."
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 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 she had talked much with Dorothy--talk
superficially inconsequential, but Paul assumed it had a meaning below
words, as if Ann had only just realized, probably without envy, that
the brown girl was a thousand years older in heart and mind.
Beyond Ann and Spearman were the six bowmen of the escort, bodies
bright with a sour-smelling oil, grouped around Abro Pakriaa at a
deferential distance. The princess wore Dorothy's locket. "Abro," Paul
had learned, was best translated as "princess" or "queen." A flame-red
flower behind her ear caught sunlight from the early afternoon. Five
others were following Paul--women, with skirts of every tint but
Pakriaa's blue, taller than the men, carrying spears with blades of a
white stone resembling quartz. The men were unvaryingly soft, rounded
in contour, lacking the women's tough-sinewed vigor. It was plain,
merely from the manner of Abro Pakriaa and her spear bearers, that
among this people to be a woman was to be a leader and soldier, no
doubt a hunter and head of the household by virtue of size and
strength. In muscular power, a male pygmy was to a female as the
weakest of Earth's women was to the toughest male athlete. These of
the bodyguard were soldiers of a sort: the bows were small, the arrows
only big darts. The bowmen never spoke except meekly in response to
some patronizing word of the princess. Pakriaa's height topped forty
inches; none of the bowmen was quite three feet tall. Paul's fingers
itched for brush and palette. They were available in the lifeboat. The
fact that he had not even unpacked them he blamed on a preoccupation
with the daily work needed for mere survival, but there was a deeper
reason: perhaps a fear of finding his moderate ability vanished if he
should once try to hint with oil at the welling profusion of color and
line that was Lucifer. Now he found himself trying to measure the
quality of Pakriaa's rich copper against the softness of leaves that
were burnt umber, malachite green, saffron, purple, and he thought: _I
must be recovering. Wake up, ego, and look around._
Spearman was carrying rifle and automatic; Paul had preferred to leave
his rifle behind; Ann, hating firearms, had only her knife.
Abro Pakriaa had entered the camp at noon, her fourth visit in the
week. Her gloomy majesty unchanging, she had indicated that she wished
them to come to her village. But Dorothy had turned her ankle the
evening before and it still pained her. Wright, no doubt hungering
more than any of the others for a sight of Pakriaa's way of living,
had fretted and bumbled and elected to remain with Dorothy and Sears,
urging Paul needlessly to remember his anthropology. Sears, sweating
out a microsection of a water insect from Lake Argo, had flapped a fat
hand and boomed: "You be sure 'n' telephone, damn it, if you're
staying for dinner, hey?"
Remaining uneasily close to Wright, as he did whenever the pygmies
appeared, Mijok had said carefully, "Telephone?"
"Word without meaning," said Wright gently, patting the huge arm.
"Noise word for fun."
The attitude of Pakriaa's people to Mijok suggested the studious
ignoring of an indecency. They would not harm the ugly animal, their
manner said, so long as he was the property of the important sky
people....
Life was generously abundant in this thinner forest. Things buzzed and
flew; Paul noticed a few webs cunningly extended before burrows in the
humus. Ann's ocean-gray eyes glanced back, brave and uncertain. "Those
girls are too quiet. Paul, how much _do_ they know of our language?"
"Not much." He moved up to walk on her other side. "Doc and I have
made only those two efforts to swap languages. A lot of that time had
to be wasted on theirs, a dead end for us."