WISE ONE WOKE in the dawn chill; Little She and Big She and Lame
One and Fruitfinder were cuddled against him, warmed by his body
heat as he was by theirs. Lame One, waking, stirred. It was still
dark under the thornbushes, but there was a faint grayness above;
the sun was stirring awake in its sleeping-place, too, and would
soon come out to make light and warmth. The others, Stonebreaker
and Stabber and Other She, were also waking. This had been a good
sleeping-place, safe and cozy. It would be nice to lie here for a
long time, but soon they would have to relieve themselves, and that
would mean digging holes. And he was hungry. He said so, and the
others agreed.
Little She said: “Don’t leave pretty bright-things.
Take along.”
They would take them, and, as usual, Little She would carry
them. Lately the others had begun calling her
Carries-Bright-Things. But they all wanted to keep them. They were
pretty and strange, and they never tired of looking at them and
talking about them and playing with them. Once, they lost one of
the bigger ones, and they had gone back and hunted for it from
before sunhighest time until a long while after before they found
it. After that, they had broken off three sticks and wedged one
into the open end of each bright-thing, so that they would be
easier to carry and harder to lose.
The daylight grew stronger; birds twittered happily. They found
soft ground and dug their holes. They always did that—bury the bad
smells, even if they went away at once. Then they went to the
little stream and drank and splashed in it, and then waded across
and started, line-abreast, to hunt. The sky grew bright blue,
flecked with golden clouds. He wondered again about the
sleeping-place of the sun, and why the sun always went into it from
one part of the sky and came out from another. The People had
argued about that for as long as he could remember, but nobody
really knew why.
They found a tree with round fruit on it. When best, this kind
of fruit was pure white. Now it was spotted with brown and was not
so good, but they were hungry. They threw sticks to knock it down,
and ate. They found and ate lizards and grubs. Then they found a
zatku.
Zatku were hard-shelled things, as long as an arm, with many
legs, a hand and one finger of legs on each side, and four jointed
arms ending in sharp jaws. Zatku could hurt with these; it had been
a zatku that had hurt Lame One’s leg. Stonebreaker poked this
one with the sharp end of his killing-club, and it grasped it with
all four jaw-arms. Immediately, Other She stamped the knob of her
club down on its head and, to make sure, struck again. Then they
all stood back while Wise One broke and tore away the shell and
pulled off one of the jaw-arms to dig out the meat. They all
trusted him to see that everybody got a share. There was enough
that everybody could have a second small morsel.
They hunted for a long time, and found another zatku. This was
good; it had been a long time since they had found two zatku in one
day. They hunted outward after they had eaten the second one, until
almost sunhighest time, but they did not find any more.
They found other things to eat, however. They found the soft
pink growing-things, like hands with many fingers; they were good.
They killed one of the fat little animals with brown fur that ran
from one of them and was clubbed by another. And Stonebreaker threw
his club and knocked down a low-flying bird; everyone praised him
for that. As they hunted they had been climbing the slope of a
hill. By the time they reached the top, everybody had found enough
to eat.
The hilltop was a nice place. There were a few trees and low
bushes and stretches of open grass, and from it they could see a
long way. Far to sun-upward, a big river wound glinting through the
trees, and there were mountains all around. It was good to lie in
the soft grass, warmed by the sun, the wind ruffling their fur and
tickling pleasantly.
There was a gotza circling in the sky, but it was too far away
to see them. They sat and watched it; once it made a short turn,
one wing high, then dived down out of sight.
“Gotza see something,” Stonebreaker said. “Go
down, eat.”
“Hope not People,” Big She said.
“Not many People this place,” he said. “Long
time not see other People.”
It had been many-many days ago, far to the sun’s right
hand, that they had last talked to other People, a band of two
males and three females. They had talked a long time and made
sleeping place together, and the next day they had parted to hunt.
They had not seen those People again. Now they talked about
them.
“We see again, we show bright-things,” Lame One
said. “Nobody ever see bright-things before.”
The gotza rose again, and they could hear its wing-sounds now.
It began soaring in wide circles, coming closer.
“Not eat long,” Stabber commented. “Something
little. Still hungry.”
Maybe they had better leave this place now and go down where the
trees were thicker. Wise One was about to speak of that, and then
he heard the shrill, not unpleasant, sound they had heard at the
spring after the thunder-death had killed those three gotza. He
recognized it at once; so did the others.
“Get under bushes,” he commanded. “Lie
still.”
There was a tiny speck in the sky, far to the sun’s left
hand; it grew larger very rapidly, and the sound grew louder. He
noticed that the sound was following behind it, and wondered why
that was. Then they were all under the bushes, lying very
still.
It was an odd thing to be flying. It had no wings. It was
flattish, rounded in front and pointed behind, like the seed of a
melon-fruit, and it glistened brightly. But there were no flying
Big Ones carrying it; it was flying of itself.
It flew straight at the gotza, passing almost directly over
them. The gotza turned and tried desperately to escape, but the
flying thing closed rapidly upon it. Then there was a sound, not
the sharp crack of the thunder-death, but a ripping sound. It could
be many thunder-death sounds close together. It lasted two
heartbeats, and then the gotza came apart in the air, pieces flying
away and falling. The strange flying thing went on for a little,
turning slowly and coming back.
“Good thing, kill gotza,” Stabber said. “Maybe
see us, kill gotza so gotza not kill us. Maybe friend.”
“Maybe kill gotza for fun,” Big She said.
“Maybe kill us next, for fun.”
It was coming straight toward them now, lower and more slowly
than when it had chased the gotza. Carries-Bright-Things and
Fruitfinder wanted to run; Wise One screamed at them to lie still.
One did not run from things like this. Still, he wanted to run
himself, and it took all his will to force himself to lie
motionless.
The front of the flying thing was open. At least, he could see
into it, though there was a queer shine there. Then he gasped in
amazement. Inside the flying thing were two big People. Not People
like him, but People of some kind. They had People faces, with both
eyes in front, and not one on each side like animal faces. They had
People hands, but their shoulders were covered with something
strange that was not fur.
So these were the flying Big Ones. They had no wings; when they
wanted to fly, they got into the melon-seed-shaped thing, and it
flew for them, and when it came down on the ground, they got out
and walked about. Now he knew what the great heavy thing that had
broken bushes and crushed stones under it had been. It might be
some live-thing that did what the Big Ones wanted it to, or it
might be some kind of a made-thing. He would have to think more
about that. But the Big Ones were just big People.
The flying thing passed over them and was going away; the shrill
wavering sound grew fainter, and it vanished. The Big Ones in it
had seen them, and they had not let loose the thunder-death. Maybe
the Big Ones knew that they were People too. People did not kill
other People for fun. People made friends with other People, and
helped them.
He rose to his feet. The others, rising with him, were still
frightened. So was he, but he must not let them know it. Wise One
should not be afraid. Stabber was less afraid than any of the rest;
he was saying:
“Big Ones see us, not kill. Kill gotza. Big Ones
good.”
“You not know,” Big She disputed. “Nobody ever
know about Big Ones flying before.”
“Big Ones kill gotza to help us,” he said.
“Big Ones make friends.”
“Big Ones make thunder-death, make us all dead like
gotza,” Stonebreaker insisted. “Maybe Big Ones come
back. We go now, far-far, then they not find us.”
They were all crying out now, except Stabber. Big She and
Stonebreaker were loudest and most vehement. They did not know
about the Big Ones; nobody had ever told of Big Ones; nobody knew
anything about them. They were to be feared more than gotza. There
was no use arguing with them now. He looked about, over the country
visible from the hilltop. The big moving-water to sun-upward was
too wide to cross; he had seen it. There were small moving-waters
flowing into it, but they could follow to where the water was
little enough to cross over. He pointed toward the sun’s left
hand with his club.
“We go that way,” he said. “Maybe find
zatku.”
THROUGH THE ARMOR-GLASS front of the aircar, Gerd van Riebeek
saw the hilltop tilt away and the cloud-dappled sky swing dizzily.
He lifted his thumb from the button-switch of the camera and
reached for his cigarettes on the ledge in front of him.
“Make another pass at them, Doc?” the ZNPF trooper
at the controls asked.
He shook his head.
“Uh-uh. We scared Nifflheim out of them as it is;
don’t let’s overdo it.” He lit a cigarette.
“Suppose we swing over to the river and circle around along
both sides of it. We might see some more Fuzzies.”
He wasn’t optimistic about that. There weren’t many
Fuzzies north of the Divide. Not enough land-prawns. No zatku, no
hokfusine; no hokfusine, no viable births. It was a genetic miracle
there were any at all up here. And even if the woods were full of
them, with their ultrasonic hearing they’d hear the
vibrations of an aircar’s contragravity field and be under
cover before they could be spotted.
“We might see another harpy.” Trooper Art Pamaby had
been a veldbeest herder on Delta Continent before he’d joined
the Protection Force; he didn’t have to be taught not to like
harpies. “Man, you took that one apart nice!”
Harpies were getting scarce up here. Getting scarce all over
Beta. They’d vanished from the skies of the cattle country to
the south, and the Company had chased them out or shot them up in
the Big Blackwater, and now the ZNPF was working on them in the
reservation. As a naturalist, he supposed that he ought to deplore
the extinction of any species, but he couldn’t think of a
better species to become extinct than Pseudopterodactyl harpy
zarathustra. They probably had their place in the overall
ecological picture—everything did. Scavengers, maybe, though they
preferred live meat. Elimination of weak and sickly individuals of
other species—though any veldbeest herder like Art Parnaby would
tell you that no harpy would bother a sick cow if he could land on
a plump and healthy calf.
“I wonder if that’s the same gang you and Jack saw
the time you found the sunstones,” Pamaby was saying.
“Could be. There were eight in that gang; I’m sure
there were that many in this one. That was a couple of hundred
miles north of here, but it was three weeks ago.”
The car swung lower; it was down to a couple of hundred feet
when they passed over the Yellowsand River, which was broad and
sluggish here, with sandbars and sandy beaches. He saw a few bits
of brush with half-withered leaves, stuff carried down from where
Grego and his gang had been digging a week ago at the canyon.
Tributary streams flowed in from both sides, some large enough to
be formidable barriers to Fuzzies. Fuzzies could swim well enough,
and he’d seen them crossing streams clinging to bits of
driftwood; but they didn’t like to swim, and didn’t
when it wasn’t necessary. Usually, they’d follow a
stream up to where it was small enough to wade across.
They saw quite a few animals. Slim, deer-like things with three
horns; there were a dozen species of them, but everybody called all
of them, indiscriminately, zarabuck. Fuzzies called them all takku.
Once he saw a big three-horned damnthing, hesh-nazza in Fuzzy
language; he got a few feet of it on film before it saw the car and
bolted. Now, there was a poor mixed-up critter; originally a
herbivore, it had acquired a taste for meat but couldn’t get
enough to support the huge bulk of its body, and had to supplement
its diet with browse. The whole zoological picture on this planet
was crazy. That was why he liked Zarathustra.
They came to where Lake-Chain River joined Yellowsand. At its
mouth, it was larger than the stream it fed, and it came in from
almost due south, while the Yellowsand, which rose in the Divide,
curved in from the east. Beyond this, there weren’t any
sandbars. The current was more rapid, and the water foamed whitely
around bare rocks. The wall of the Divide began looming on the
horizon. Finally they could see the cleft of the canyon. There was
a circling dot in the sky ahead, but it wasn’t a harpy. It
was one of the CZC air-survey cars, photomapping and measuring with
radar, and scanning. He looked at his watch. Almost 1700, getting
on to cocktail time. He wondered how many Fuzzies Lieutenant
Bjornsen had seen on his sweep south of the Divide, and how many
harpies he’d shot.
WISE ONE WOKE in the dawn chill; Little She and Big She and Lame
One and Fruitfinder were cuddled against him, warmed by his body
heat as he was by theirs. Lame One, waking, stirred. It was still
dark under the thornbushes, but there was a faint grayness above;
the sun was stirring awake in its sleeping-place, too, and would
soon come out to make light and warmth. The others, Stonebreaker
and Stabber and Other She, were also waking. This had been a good
sleeping-place, safe and cozy. It would be nice to lie here for a
long time, but soon they would have to relieve themselves, and that
would mean digging holes. And he was hungry. He said so, and the
others agreed.
Little She said: “Don’t leave pretty bright-things.
Take along.”
They would take them, and, as usual, Little She would carry
them. Lately the others had begun calling her
Carries-Bright-Things. But they all wanted to keep them. They were
pretty and strange, and they never tired of looking at them and
talking about them and playing with them. Once, they lost one of
the bigger ones, and they had gone back and hunted for it from
before sunhighest time until a long while after before they found
it. After that, they had broken off three sticks and wedged one
into the open end of each bright-thing, so that they would be
easier to carry and harder to lose.
The daylight grew stronger; birds twittered happily. They found
soft ground and dug their holes. They always did that—bury the bad
smells, even if they went away at once. Then they went to the
little stream and drank and splashed in it, and then waded across
and started, line-abreast, to hunt. The sky grew bright blue,
flecked with golden clouds. He wondered again about the
sleeping-place of the sun, and why the sun always went into it from
one part of the sky and came out from another. The People had
argued about that for as long as he could remember, but nobody
really knew why.
They found a tree with round fruit on it. When best, this kind
of fruit was pure white. Now it was spotted with brown and was not
so good, but they were hungry. They threw sticks to knock it down,
and ate. They found and ate lizards and grubs. Then they found a
zatku.
Zatku were hard-shelled things, as long as an arm, with many
legs, a hand and one finger of legs on each side, and four jointed
arms ending in sharp jaws. Zatku could hurt with these; it had been
a zatku that had hurt Lame One’s leg. Stonebreaker poked this
one with the sharp end of his killing-club, and it grasped it with
all four jaw-arms. Immediately, Other She stamped the knob of her
club down on its head and, to make sure, struck again. Then they
all stood back while Wise One broke and tore away the shell and
pulled off one of the jaw-arms to dig out the meat. They all
trusted him to see that everybody got a share. There was enough
that everybody could have a second small morsel.
They hunted for a long time, and found another zatku. This was
good; it had been a long time since they had found two zatku in one
day. They hunted outward after they had eaten the second one, until
almost sunhighest time, but they did not find any more.
They found other things to eat, however. They found the soft
pink growing-things, like hands with many fingers; they were good.
They killed one of the fat little animals with brown fur that ran
from one of them and was clubbed by another. And Stonebreaker threw
his club and knocked down a low-flying bird; everyone praised him
for that. As they hunted they had been climbing the slope of a
hill. By the time they reached the top, everybody had found enough
to eat.
The hilltop was a nice place. There were a few trees and low
bushes and stretches of open grass, and from it they could see a
long way. Far to sun-upward, a big river wound glinting through the
trees, and there were mountains all around. It was good to lie in
the soft grass, warmed by the sun, the wind ruffling their fur and
tickling pleasantly.
There was a gotza circling in the sky, but it was too far away
to see them. They sat and watched it; once it made a short turn,
one wing high, then dived down out of sight.
“Gotza see something,” Stonebreaker said. “Go
down, eat.”
“Hope not People,” Big She said.
“Not many People this place,” he said. “Long
time not see other People.”
It had been many-many days ago, far to the sun’s right
hand, that they had last talked to other People, a band of two
males and three females. They had talked a long time and made
sleeping place together, and the next day they had parted to hunt.
They had not seen those People again. Now they talked about
them.
“We see again, we show bright-things,” Lame One
said. “Nobody ever see bright-things before.”
The gotza rose again, and they could hear its wing-sounds now.
It began soaring in wide circles, coming closer.
“Not eat long,” Stabber commented. “Something
little. Still hungry.”
Maybe they had better leave this place now and go down where the
trees were thicker. Wise One was about to speak of that, and then
he heard the shrill, not unpleasant, sound they had heard at the
spring after the thunder-death had killed those three gotza. He
recognized it at once; so did the others.
“Get under bushes,” he commanded. “Lie
still.”
There was a tiny speck in the sky, far to the sun’s left
hand; it grew larger very rapidly, and the sound grew louder. He
noticed that the sound was following behind it, and wondered why
that was. Then they were all under the bushes, lying very
still.
It was an odd thing to be flying. It had no wings. It was
flattish, rounded in front and pointed behind, like the seed of a
melon-fruit, and it glistened brightly. But there were no flying
Big Ones carrying it; it was flying of itself.
It flew straight at the gotza, passing almost directly over
them. The gotza turned and tried desperately to escape, but the
flying thing closed rapidly upon it. Then there was a sound, not
the sharp crack of the thunder-death, but a ripping sound. It could
be many thunder-death sounds close together. It lasted two
heartbeats, and then the gotza came apart in the air, pieces flying
away and falling. The strange flying thing went on for a little,
turning slowly and coming back.
“Good thing, kill gotza,” Stabber said. “Maybe
see us, kill gotza so gotza not kill us. Maybe friend.”
“Maybe kill gotza for fun,” Big She said.
“Maybe kill us next, for fun.”
It was coming straight toward them now, lower and more slowly
than when it had chased the gotza. Carries-Bright-Things and
Fruitfinder wanted to run; Wise One screamed at them to lie still.
One did not run from things like this. Still, he wanted to run
himself, and it took all his will to force himself to lie
motionless.
The front of the flying thing was open. At least, he could see
into it, though there was a queer shine there. Then he gasped in
amazement. Inside the flying thing were two big People. Not People
like him, but People of some kind. They had People faces, with both
eyes in front, and not one on each side like animal faces. They had
People hands, but their shoulders were covered with something
strange that was not fur.
So these were the flying Big Ones. They had no wings; when they
wanted to fly, they got into the melon-seed-shaped thing, and it
flew for them, and when it came down on the ground, they got out
and walked about. Now he knew what the great heavy thing that had
broken bushes and crushed stones under it had been. It might be
some live-thing that did what the Big Ones wanted it to, or it
might be some kind of a made-thing. He would have to think more
about that. But the Big Ones were just big People.
The flying thing passed over them and was going away; the shrill
wavering sound grew fainter, and it vanished. The Big Ones in it
had seen them, and they had not let loose the thunder-death. Maybe
the Big Ones knew that they were People too. People did not kill
other People for fun. People made friends with other People, and
helped them.
He rose to his feet. The others, rising with him, were still
frightened. So was he, but he must not let them know it. Wise One
should not be afraid. Stabber was less afraid than any of the rest;
he was saying:
“Big Ones see us, not kill. Kill gotza. Big Ones
good.”
“You not know,” Big She disputed. “Nobody ever
know about Big Ones flying before.”
“Big Ones kill gotza to help us,” he said.
“Big Ones make friends.”
“Big Ones make thunder-death, make us all dead like
gotza,” Stonebreaker insisted. “Maybe Big Ones come
back. We go now, far-far, then they not find us.”
They were all crying out now, except Stabber. Big She and
Stonebreaker were loudest and most vehement. They did not know
about the Big Ones; nobody had ever told of Big Ones; nobody knew
anything about them. They were to be feared more than gotza. There
was no use arguing with them now. He looked about, over the country
visible from the hilltop. The big moving-water to sun-upward was
too wide to cross; he had seen it. There were small moving-waters
flowing into it, but they could follow to where the water was
little enough to cross over. He pointed toward the sun’s left
hand with his club.
“We go that way,” he said. “Maybe find
zatku.”
THROUGH THE ARMOR-GLASS front of the aircar, Gerd van Riebeek
saw the hilltop tilt away and the cloud-dappled sky swing dizzily.
He lifted his thumb from the button-switch of the camera and
reached for his cigarettes on the ledge in front of him.
“Make another pass at them, Doc?” the ZNPF trooper
at the controls asked.
He shook his head.
“Uh-uh. We scared Nifflheim out of them as it is;
don’t let’s overdo it.” He lit a cigarette.
“Suppose we swing over to the river and circle around along
both sides of it. We might see some more Fuzzies.”
He wasn’t optimistic about that. There weren’t many
Fuzzies north of the Divide. Not enough land-prawns. No zatku, no
hokfusine; no hokfusine, no viable births. It was a genetic miracle
there were any at all up here. And even if the woods were full of
them, with their ultrasonic hearing they’d hear the
vibrations of an aircar’s contragravity field and be under
cover before they could be spotted.
“We might see another harpy.” Trooper Art Pamaby had
been a veldbeest herder on Delta Continent before he’d joined
the Protection Force; he didn’t have to be taught not to like
harpies. “Man, you took that one apart nice!”
Harpies were getting scarce up here. Getting scarce all over
Beta. They’d vanished from the skies of the cattle country to
the south, and the Company had chased them out or shot them up in
the Big Blackwater, and now the ZNPF was working on them in the
reservation. As a naturalist, he supposed that he ought to deplore
the extinction of any species, but he couldn’t think of a
better species to become extinct than Pseudopterodactyl harpy
zarathustra. They probably had their place in the overall
ecological picture—everything did. Scavengers, maybe, though they
preferred live meat. Elimination of weak and sickly individuals of
other species—though any veldbeest herder like Art Parnaby would
tell you that no harpy would bother a sick cow if he could land on
a plump and healthy calf.
“I wonder if that’s the same gang you and Jack saw
the time you found the sunstones,” Pamaby was saying.
“Could be. There were eight in that gang; I’m sure
there were that many in this one. That was a couple of hundred
miles north of here, but it was three weeks ago.”
The car swung lower; it was down to a couple of hundred feet
when they passed over the Yellowsand River, which was broad and
sluggish here, with sandbars and sandy beaches. He saw a few bits
of brush with half-withered leaves, stuff carried down from where
Grego and his gang had been digging a week ago at the canyon.
Tributary streams flowed in from both sides, some large enough to
be formidable barriers to Fuzzies. Fuzzies could swim well enough,
and he’d seen them crossing streams clinging to bits of
driftwood; but they didn’t like to swim, and didn’t
when it wasn’t necessary. Usually, they’d follow a
stream up to where it was small enough to wade across.
They saw quite a few animals. Slim, deer-like things with three
horns; there were a dozen species of them, but everybody called all
of them, indiscriminately, zarabuck. Fuzzies called them all takku.
Once he saw a big three-horned damnthing, hesh-nazza in Fuzzy
language; he got a few feet of it on film before it saw the car and
bolted. Now, there was a poor mixed-up critter; originally a
herbivore, it had acquired a taste for meat but couldn’t get
enough to support the huge bulk of its body, and had to supplement
its diet with browse. The whole zoological picture on this planet
was crazy. That was why he liked Zarathustra.
They came to where Lake-Chain River joined Yellowsand. At its
mouth, it was larger than the stream it fed, and it came in from
almost due south, while the Yellowsand, which rose in the Divide,
curved in from the east. Beyond this, there weren’t any
sandbars. The current was more rapid, and the water foamed whitely
around bare rocks. The wall of the Divide began looming on the
horizon. Finally they could see the cleft of the canyon. There was
a circling dot in the sky ahead, but it wasn’t a harpy. It
was one of the CZC air-survey cars, photomapping and measuring with
radar, and scanning. He looked at his watch. Almost 1700, getting
on to cocktail time. He wondered how many Fuzzies Lieutenant
Bjornsen had seen on his sweep south of the Divide, and how many
harpies he’d shot.