They had put him into a kind of enclosed seat at the end of a long
rotating arm, counter-weighted at the opposite side of the aircar
proper, and the whole affair swung gently in an eccentric path, around
and around, and up and down as the aircar moved very slowly forward
through the village.
All the houses were faced with broad wooden balconies stained blood-red
and turquoise, umber and yellow, gold and pale green; and all of these
were crowded to bursting with the blue and white horny chests and the
big-eyed faces of the bug things. Weaver swung in his revolving seat
past first one level and another, and the twittering voices burst around
him like the stars of a Fourth-of-July rocket.
This was the fifth village they had visited since the bug things had
found him wandering in the mountains. At the first one, he had been
probed, examined and twittered over interminably; then the aircar had
arrived, they had strapped him into this ridiculous seat and begun what
looked very much like a triumphal tour. Other aircars, without the
revolving arm, preceded and followed him. The slowly floating cars and
their riders were gay with varicolored streamers. Every now and then one
of the bug things in the cars would raise a pistol-like object to fire a
pinkish streak that spread out, high in the air, and became a gently
descending, diffusing cloud of rosy dust. And always the twittering rose
and fell, rose and fell as Weaver revolved at the end of the swinging
arm.
One had to remember, he reminded himself, that Earthly parallels did not
necessarily apply. It was undignified, certainly, to be revolving like a
child on a merry-go-round, while these crowds glared with bright alien
eyes; but the important thing was that they had not once offered him any
violence. They had not even put him into the absurd revolving seat by
force; they had led him to it gently, with a great deal of gesturing and
twittered explanation. And if their faces were almost nauseatingly
unpleasant--with the constantly-moving complexity of parts that he had
seen in live lobsters--well, that proved nothing except that they were
not human. Later, perhaps, he could persuade them to wear masks....
* * * * *
It was a holiday; a great occasion--everything testified to that. The
colored streamers, the clouds of rosy dust like sky-rockets, the crowds
of people lined up to await him. And why not? Clearly, they had never
before seen a man. He was unique, a personage to be honored: a visitor
descended from the heavens, clothed in fire and glory. Like the
Spaniards among the Aztecs, he thought.
Weaver began to feel gratified, his ego expanding. Experimentally, he
waved to the massed ranks of bug things as he passed them. A new
explosion of twittering broke out, and a forest of twiglike arms waved
back at him. They seemed to regard him with happy awe.
"Thank you," said Weaver graciously. "Thank you...."
In the morning, there were crowds massed outside the building where he
had slept; but they did not put him into the aircar with the revolving
arm again. Instead, four new ones came into his room after he had eaten
the strange red and orange fruits that were all of the bug diet he could
stomach, and began to twitter very seriously at him, while pointing to
various objects, parts of their bodies, the walls around them, and
Weaver himself.
* * * * *
After awhile, Weaver grasped the idea that he was being instructed. He
was willing to co-operate, but he did not suppose for a moment that he
could master the bird-like sounds they made. Instead, he took an old
envelope and a stub of pencil from his pocket and wrote the English word
for each thing they pointed out. "ORANGE," he wrote--it was not an
orange, but the color was the same, at any rate--"THORAX. WALL. MAN.
MANDIBLES."
In the afternoon, they brought a machine with staring lenses and bright
lights. Weaver guessed that he was being televised; he put a hand on the
nearest bug thing's shoulder, and smiled for his audience.
Later, after he had eaten again, they went on with the language lesson.
Now it was Weaver who taught, and they who learned. This, Weaver felt,
was as it should be. These creatures were not men, he told himself; he
would give himself no illusions on that score; but they might still be
capable of learning many things that he had to teach. He could do a
great deal of good, even if it turned out that he could never return to
Earth.
He rather suspected that they had no spaceships. There was something
about their life--the small villages, the slowly drifting aircars, the
absence of noise and smell and dirt, that somehow did not fit with the
idea of space travel. As soon as he was able, he asked them about it. No
they had never traveled beyond their own planet. It was a great marvel;
perhaps he could teach them how, sometime.
As their command of written English improved, he catechized them about
themselves and their planet. The world, as he knew already, was much
like Earth as to atmosphere, gravity and mean temperature. It occurred
to him briefly that he had been lucky to hit upon such a world, but the
thought did not stick; he had no way of knowing just how improbable his
luck had been.
They themselves were, as he had thought, simple beings. They had a
written history of some twelve thousand of their years, which he
estimated to be about nine thousand of his. Their technical
accomplishments, he had to grant, equalled Earth's and in some cases
surpassed them. Their social organization was either so complex that it
escaped him altogether, or unbelievably simple. They did not, so far as
he could discover, have any political divisions. They did not make war.
They were egg-layers, and they controlled their population simply by
means of hatching only as many eggs as were needed to replace their
natural losses.
* * * * *
Just when it first struck Weaver that he was their appointed ruler it
would be hard to say. It began, perhaps, that afternoon in the aircar;
or a few days later when he made his first timid request--for a house of
his own. The request was eagerly granted, and he was asked how he would
like the house constructed. Half timidly, he drew sketches of his own
suburban home in Schenectady; and they built it, swarms of them working
together, down to the hardwood floors and the pneumatic furniture and
the picture mouldings and the lampshades.
Or perhaps the idea crystallized when he asked to see some of their
native dances, and within an hour the dancers assembled on his
lawn--five hundred of them--and performed until sundown.
At, any rate, nothing could have been more clearly correct once he had
grasped the idea. He was a Man, alone in a world of outlandish
creatures. It was natural that he should lead; indeed, it was his duty.
They were poor things, but they were malleable in his hands. It was a
great adventure. Who knew how far he might not bring them?
Weaver embarked on a tour of the planet, taking with him two of the bug
things as guides and a third as pilot and personal servant. Their names
in their own tongue he had not bothered to ask; he had christened them
Mark, Luke and John. All three now wrote and read English with fair
proficiency; thus Weaver was well served.
The trip was entirely enjoyable. He was met everywhere by the same
throngs, the same delight and enthusiasm as before; and between
villages--there seemed to be nothing on the planet that could be called
a city--the rolling green countryside, dotted with bosquets of yellow-
and orange-flowered trees, was most soothing to the eye. Weaver noted
the varieties of strangely shaped and colored plants, and the swarms of
bright flying things, and began an abortive collection. He had to give
it up, for the present: there were too many things to study. He looked
forward to a few books to be compiled later, when he had time, for the
guidance of Earthmen at some future date: _The Flora of Terranova_, _The
Fauna of Terranova_....
All that was for the distant future. Now he was chiefly concerned with
the Terranovans themselves--how they lived, what they thought, what sort
of primitive religion they had, and so on. He asked endless questions of
his guides, and through them, of the villagers they met; and the more he
learned, the more agitated he became.
* * * * *
"But this is monstrous," he wrote indignantly to Mark and Luke. They had
just visited a house inhabited by seventeen males and twelve
females--Weaver was now beginning to be able to distinguish the
sexes--and he had inquired what their relations were. Mark had informed
him calmly that they were husbands and wives; and when Weaver pointed
out that the balance was uneven, had written, "No, not one to one. All
to all. All husband and wife of each other."
Mark held Weaver's indignant message up to his eyes with one
many-jointed claw, while his other three forelimbs gestured uncertainly.
Finally he seized the note-pad and wrote, "Do not understand monstrous,
please forgive. They do for more change, so not to make each other have
tiredness."