"Doubt it. Probably like us--except that women are the bosses. The
clothes suggest a continuing sex consciousness."
The pygmy leaders halted. A murmuring explained itself as the music of
a stream. Paul consulted his memory of the map made from orbit
photographs and of his one solo exploration flight in the lifeboat.
There could be few such flights: the charlesite, even with the surplus
salvaged from the wrecked boat, must be hoarded. Ann and Ed had flown
over the lake on the day after their recovery, searching for any sign
of _Argo_. Returning, Ed's face had been a leather mask of grief, and
neither had wanted to talk of it. Later they explained: the lake was a
profundity of secret blue; a shelf of sand or possibly white stone ran
out some yards offshore, under water marvelously clear, and ended
abruptly. Beyond it, where _Argo_ must have fallen, no bottom could
even be guessed at; the lifeboat's camera confirmed the presence of an
abyss that would have thwarted the most complex twenty-first-century
machinery.
This stream, Paul knew, came from the western hills, flowing east and
slightly north until it entered the lake northeast of the clearing
called home. Another creek joined it east of the spot where they now
stood, and Pakriaa's village--if the parallel lines did represent its
location--was not far upstream from that junction.
Worn boulders rose above noisy water. The stream was twenty yards
wide, sluggish even here in the shallows. A steppingstone crossing.
Nearly all the rivers on the map passed through jungle for most of
their length; numberless smaller streams would be hidden from the sky.
There was grassland for fifteen to twenty miles on the eastern side of
every range of hills. The prevailing winds were from the west; perhaps
a dryness in the lee of the hills favored the grass. The broadest
stretch of such open land lay east of a rugged coastal range seventy
miles to the southwest; some of the mountains in that seacoast
formation were mighty enough to hold a blur of snow at their summits.
The base of the coastal range was narrow--hardly more than twenty
miles. From this the peaks shot up with incredible sheerness to great
heights of bare rock that glittered in morning sun like black and red
glass. This grandeur, like nothing known on Earth, was clearly visible
from the camp above the near hills, especially at midday, when the
mists were gone.
And ten miles offshore from that dizzy range, Paul remembered a
mountainous island. On his solo exploration two days ago, with the
lifeboat's panoramic camera and a head full of puzzled dreams, he had
soared above it, noting a peninsular strip of red sand at its southern
end, sheltered mountain valleys--one framing a jewel of lake. In the
north was a white beach where landing should be easy, and this was
protected by a low headland of red cliffs running out to the very tip
of the island. Surely a place to carry in the mind, it seemed to
invite human living as did no other near region in this continent of
Lucifer. Wright thought so: he listened to Paul's description and
named the island Adelphi....
North of the camp, the range of low western hills dwindled to rolling
land and was lost in a tremendous expanse of unbroken jungle, which
ended only at the shore of one of the great lakes four hundred miles
away--an inland sea fourteen hundred miles long. Sixty-odd miles to
the south there was that large cluster of parallel lines in jungle,
and beyond it the forest gave way to more open ground, prairie, red
desert, and bare mountains.
Abro Pakriaa dipped her spear in the water; she lifted a handful,
letting it trickle away while she spoke a rippling invocation; then
she was lithely crossing on the stones after the bowmen. The bottom
was pale sand with varicolored pebbles.
Beyond the stream, Pakriaa followed a path a short way and pressed
into undergrowth. Spearman grumbled, "Good path for once, and we have
to--"
"Path's probably booby-trapped. She expects us to know that."
"Hell...." It was difficult passage, stooping on a trail meant for
little folk; it ended at a ditch six feet wide and five deep. The
ditch made a right angle, both lines stretching away straightly as far
as the eye could go; the inner side of the ditch was heaped with dry
sticks and bundles of grass. Pakriaa trilled orders to an old
black-skirted woman with a whip, in charge of a gang of four women and
three men, all totally naked. They were struggling to shove a movable
bridge into place across the ditch--two logs bearing a mat of vines
and bark. It was grunting work for them, and when the end of the
bridge was in reach, Pakriaa's escort made no motion to help. Spearman
started to; Paul interfered. "We'd lose face. Those are slaves. Women
tied together at the ankles--one of the men a eunuch. Look at the
brands on their cheeks. Nan, you're the dominant sex--try to look more
like the president of a women's club."
Her finely modeled face had dignity enough, he thought, if she could
keep the worry out of it.... The old woman in the black skirt bowed
arrogantly to Pakriaa; the slaves cringed, with the hating stare of
the trapped. All were scarred and young except for the eunuch, who was
wrinkled and flabby. One female had a recent chest wound; the effort
at the bridge had made it bleed, but she ignored it. Paul saw
Spearman's face settle into lines of poker blankness and thought:
_Good_. _And if, to patience and courage, he could add (I hear you,
Doc) charity and self-knowledge--Oh, be quiet, critic, be quiet._...
Trees had been felled--some time ago, for the stumps were rotted--and
the spacing was such that the tops of the trees left standing provided
a gap twenty feet wide, the entire length of the village. There would
be two other such gaps, visible from the sky as parallel lines,
admitting full midday sunlight but shutting out the omasha.
"Nan--let's try to learn something about that big settlement in the
south--the other parallel lines."
It was surprisingly easy to convey the question to Pakriaa with the
help of signs, but her response when she understood it was a shrill
snarl and shaking of her spear, a repetition of a name, "Vestoia,"
which seemed to be the place, and of another name, "Lantis," a name
that caught in her throat and made her spit. Paul said, "We make faces
at the south too, and do it fast." It seemed to appease the princess:
she even smiled.
The area bordering the ditch had been left wild, a barrier of vines,
brush, untended trees. Inside were orderly rows of plants, some
broad-leaved, resembling beets, some bushy; another type was rangy
with cosmos-shaped blooms of startling emerald green. Near the row of
trees was a path which Pakriaa followed; under the trees stood
grass-thatched structures. Paul counted thirty, well separated, before
the princess left the path, and no sound came from them. The trees
were mostly of the same species, thin-trunked towers with dark
serrated leaves, blazing with scarlet blossoms like the one Pakriaa
wore. They were the source of an odor like frangipani which filled the
village, heady and sweet but clean. It was no primitive agriculture in
this part-sunny corridor: rich darkness of earth was drawn up about
the plants; there was not a weed in sight. And there was no trace of
the strangling purple vines.
Pakriaa's male attendants had slipped away; her spearwomen accompanied
her through an opening into the next corridor, where her people were
waiting for her, the soldier women in three formal ranks. There were
about fifty in each rank, and here again were dyed skirts of every
color but the regal blue that was Abro Pakriaa's. Small faces
maintained the flat indifference of the unliving copper they
resembled.
Pakriaa's intricate oratory flowed over them. More than two thirds of
the stiff soldiers were gashed with recent wounds, ranging from
scratches to lost hands or breasts or eyes. Some had deep body wounds
so ugly it was amazing that they could stand upright, but there
seemed to be no evidence of infection and there was no wavering in the
lines while Pakriaa declaimed. Her right hand soared with spread
fingers. The lifeboat? The name Torothee occurred; when it was
repeated the women swayed with unchanging faces, murmuring it in
unison like a breath of wind. Pakriaa faced her guests. Tears were not
unknown to her; laughter might be. She clenched and relaxed her hands,
the fourteen fingers rising and falling until Paul lost count of the
motions--more than twenty. She pointed to the soldiers, repeating the
display more slowly and only ten times; then one hand rose alone with
the thumb curled under. Paul muttered, "I think she's saying only 146
are left after the war, from--maybe three hundred."
Pakriaa laid her spear at Ann's feet. Paul advised: "Give her your
knife, same way." Pakriaa took it and placed it across the spear and
stood back, motioning to Ann to do the same. When the three had
withdrawn, Pakriaa still made impatient gestures. Paul whispered, "Ed,
you and I are trifling males. We stand further back."
"We do like hell," said Spearman in his throat.
"We do, just the same. It's nothing but ceremony. Safety's off on my
.38. We can handle anything. Stand back."
Ed Spearman stood back, muttering. At a shrill summons from Pakriaa, a
shuffling procession swung out from the tree shadows. These were all
men, decrepit, ancient, dirty; some limped and two had empty eye
sockets and one, from a pathological fatness, could barely waddle.
They were striped and splotched with paint in elaborate designs,
mostly of white and yellow, and their skins, either with dirt or age,
had darkened to dull mahogany. They formed a hobbling circle around
the crossed knife and spear; each grotesque, as he passed the weapons,
spat on them and scattered on them a handful of earth until the place
became a low mound. As they did this, they muttered and howled and
squeaked, performing precise evolutions with twiddling fingers. They
carried white thigh-bones like clubs, and shell ornaments jangled on
their raddled throats and ankles. It was, on the surface, a simple
ceremony of peace and friendship, but the casual contempt of these
male witches cast a foulness over it. Their sidelong glances at the
strangers were poisonous with furtive malignancy. "Medicine men,"
said Paul under his breath. "Distant equivalent of the wise women in
some patriarchal groups. Ed, we stay on the good side of those loopy
scarecrows, or it's just too bad." And with a certain hunger he
studied the mask of the man who had never offered the relaxation of
friendship, wondering how far it was physically possible for Spearman
to accept a world in which engineering science was the dream and crude
survival the reality.
The ceremony ended in a dribble of anticlimax. The hideous old men
merely shambled away from the mound toward the shadows after a
ceremonial whoop that caused the soldiers to relax. But they did not
quite go. They huddled and squatted under the trees. They stared. They
spat and scratched and consulted together. Some of the green eyes were
close-lidded, veiled; others were wide, making no effort to conceal a
hatred compounded of jealousy and fear. The fat monster nursed his
obscene belly between scrawny knees and whispered a stream of
information into the close ear of a witch with empty eye sockets, and
the whispering dark lips wore a destroying smile.
8
Abro Pakriaa motioned her guests to be seated before a large building;
the fibers of this structure were dyed the blue of her skirt. The
soldiers stalked about in a show of nonchalance. Young men and naked
children had come timidly from the houses. The youngest children were
disproportionately tiny, large-headed but no bigger than house cats.
Perhaps childbirth for this race was no more than a passing
inconvenience. There were many pairs of obviously identical twins. The
children stayed near the protective men, all but the older girls, who
ventured somewhat closer.
It was a village without laughter. No scampering, no horseplay, no
evidence of any tenderness except between the men and the smallest
children. Curiosity burned in all of them, but its overt expression
was limited to the dead-pan stare.
Pakriaa entered her blue building alone, greeted by a flutter of
voices from within, and she was gone several minutes. When Pakriaa had
seated her guests, most of the ancient painted males had shuffled
across the clearing--even the fat horror whose walking must have been
pain--to settle in the shadows on the other side and continue their
baleful watching. Paul noticed that even the spear-carrying women
skipped clear to give them elbow-room and never looked directly at
them. The fat witch found a place to squat that gave him a clear view
of all three visitors; as he gazed he sucked toothlessly at the knob
of his thighbone club.
The houses were lightly framed of wood, with walls of interwoven fiber
two thirds of the way to the eaves, joints bound and roofs thatched
with the same material, a design similar to what Paul remembered from
a year spent in the Republic of Oceania. The modern citizens of that
many-islanded republic, Paul recollected, still preferred the
ancestral savage building pattern to stone or plastic; it suited the
climate and the friendly, unpretentious way of life. But none of the
buildings here was raised on supports: snakes and vicious insects were
evidently no problem. There were no domestic animals, apparently no
parasites nor self-evident diseases; except for wounds and the dirt of
the old men, the pygmy skins looked clear and healthy. There were not
even any bad smells except the mildly disagreeable oil the males used
to anoint their bodies.
Pakriaa returned, with her make-up on. She had flowers behind both
ears, and one tied by its stem to Dorothy's locket. Heavy white
circles were drawn about the lady's eyes and breasts and navel; blue
bracelets dangled at her wrists; her skirt had been replaced by an
innocently unconcealing fringe of shells--similar to snail shells,
Paul thought. Pakriaa's anklets of wooden beads were orange. The top
of her bald head was robin's-egg blue. Two males, with the brand marks
that must mean slavery, followed her with a seat--a block of wood,
cleverly carved with stylized animal figures. It brought her face on a
level with Ann's. Ann said politely, "Why the hell can't I be handsome
too?" And Pakriaa inclined her head. A boy without the slave brand
came with a wooden bowl; Pakriaa sipped the greenish liquid and
offered the bowl to Ann. Spearman rumbled. Paul said, "Protocol. You
gotta, Nan, but don't offer us any--we're meek males."
Ann swallowed some; her eyes watered; she repressed choking.
"Alcoholic, I do mean...."
Feasting followed--a laborious hour of it, as food arrived without
pause in the hands of branded men from the other side of the
sheltering trees. Wood smoke drifted from that direction, and a hum of
voices. All the dishes included meat cut in tiny cubes--stewed, fried,
boiled, or smothered in unknown vegetables. Only one course was
aggressively horrid, carrion swimming in peppery sauce, clearly a
favorite of Pakriaa's, for she belched wonderfully and patted her
stomach in self-applause. Ann remarked, "Another go at that and I
start looking for another planet."
In time even Pakriaa had had enough. She clapped her broad hands.
Greasy-mouthed and bulging, the soldiers formed a swaying, stamping
line. Spearman burped helplessly. "All that inside, and they can
dance?"