Chapter III: Part 3

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 When the three had withdrawn, Pakriaa still made impatient gestures.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?"

Ann suggested: "Maybe it helps...."

It was an hour-long narrative dance, vastly monotonous, a picture of war. Some of those most cruelly wounded pranced into solo pantomimes bragging of how the injuries had been received. In climax, a straw figure of a woman was dragged to the center of the clearing: an image carefully made, brightly painted, the face hideous, the sexual features grossly exaggerated. Shrilling what seemed to be a name ("Lantis! Lantis!"), the soldiers swarmed on this effigy, squealing, stabbing, defiling, tearing it into shreds, which they carried away as treasures or mementos.

When the soldier women had finished in yawning exhaustion, a crowd of dainty men performed another sort of dance, purely an erotic show, indicating that the role of the male was seductive, half infantile, submissive all the way. Occasionally a soldier pulled a dancer out of the line, slapping his face until he stopped the squealing that was evidently required of him, and wandered away with him; but most of the soldiers were too tired, gorged, or wounded to be interested. Later, some twenty soldiers formed a group, and men brought them babies to be nursed, morsels of humanity, quite silent, far smaller in proportion than Earth's newborn. The mothers' arms were careful and competent, without tenderness; they held the infants two at a time, examining them shrewdly, often exchanging them with other soldiers. There were a few cooing demonstrations of affection by the men toward these infants, demonstrations which the soldiers ignored. Ann whispered, "I could spend a lot of time hating these little devils."

"Try not to."

"I know, Paul, but--"

"At least they have a civilization." Spearman was arguing with himself. "A potential technology. That's good gardening. Good tools, weapons."

"Nan, see if you can ask Mrs. President to show us the town."

Pakriaa caught on swiftly and was delighted....

The first of the tree-sheltered areas contained all the dwelling houses, dulled by the splendor of Pakriaa's. Ann was invited to enter this blue palace, Pakriaa making it clear that the men must not follow. Ann emerged, red-faced. Later, when it would not be so patent that she was talking of Pakriaa's house, Ann said, "Couldn't make out much detail. Dim, and no lamps burning, though I think I saw some clay things like old Roman lamps. Clean, funny perfume smells. I met--her mother maybe. Incredibly old anyway, and almost black. Their skin must change color with age."

"Dirt more likely," Spearman said.

"Not a bit of it. Very clean. Just a dry little ghost in a fancy room of her own, with a--a male slave manicuring her toenails. We haven't seen any old women out in the open."

"Sheltered and reverenced, maybe," Paul said. "Natural."

"Her Highness has a--I suppose you'd have to call it a harem. Ten little husbands, or maybe eleven."

"What a girl!" said Spearman.

Ann was amused, though her cheeks were flaming. "I was offered one."

"Hope you explained the rejection implied no lack of merit."

"Tried to, Paul. I think I got over the idea that there was a taboo involved--something like that. Her Majesty didn't insist...."

The ditch enclosed the village. One side of its square paralleled the river, not more than thirty feet from it but making no connection. It would have been easy to flood the ditch, but that was evidently not the intention. When Ann conveyed curiosity, Pakriaa was astonished that anyone could be ignorant of its function. "_Kaksma!_" she said, and pointed west. "Kaksma...!" Convinced at last that Ann's puzzlement was genuine, she drew a picture on the earth, with such vigorous art that she herself feared the image and drew back. It was a profile view of an animal larger than a rat, long-headed with a hump on the back. She had given it a tiny eye and a forward-thrusting tooth nothing like a rodent's; the forefoot was broad and flattened, a digger's foot. Giving Ann only a brief time to study it, Pakriaa spat on the image and wiped it out with a violent heel. She muttered an angry incantation and pointed to the dry wood heaped by the ditch, while her dancing fingers told of flames that would defend the village....

In the second tree-sheltered area were the industries. Men, not slaves, glanced up from the shaping of earthenware vessels. They had no potter's wheel, only their hands, but there was a kiln of baked earth. Pakriaa called a favorite over, hugged him, and sent him back with a pat on the rump. He was quite old, toothless, and giggling. They passed a row of dye pots, three women braiding fiber into flat sheets, a square of ground with part-finished spearheads, arrow points, other devices, a rack where deerlike hides were stretched in some curing process. "They sleep on those," Ann said, "and use 'em for rugs. The palace was full of 'em...."

In the rear of the village was a stockade of stripped logs, guarded by two soldier women. In the space before it, but facing away from it so that the painted eyes brooded over the village, stood a monstrous wooden idol, eight feet tall, raised on a low platform. Pakriaa led her guests before the image and knelt. It was necessary to do the same, and Ann imitated her gracefully enough. As he knelt himself, Paul saw in a backward glance that three gangling male witches had followed and were observing every motion with a rigid malevolence. It was difficult to kneel with his back to them; Spearman, he hoped, had not seen them.

The idol was exaggeratedly female, with huge carnivorous teeth indicated in white paint. A slot representing the left hand carried a nine-foot spear upright. The right arm, a natural branch of the log, reached forward and spread into a rugged table; more wood had been neatly joined to make the table five feet long, but the whole gave the effect of a swollen accepting hand, and it was foul with bloodstains old and new. Pakriaa's long murmured prayer repeated the name Ismar many times. At the end she seemed satisfied; her glance at Ann was almost a smile. Paul saw that the witches had drifted away, but the pressure of their watching remained.

Pakriaa now took them into the stockade. It seemed to Paul that the guards were scarcely needed....

These naked men, women, and children had no danger in them. No life. They moved and functioned as if in life: walked, spat, scratched, yawned; a woman nursed a baby mechanically; a man strolled to a trough in the center of the compound and ate a handful of damp stuff like poultry mash, then rubbed his side against the wooden edge as a pig might. Beyond such elemental motions there was no life. A woman followed a man for several paces; both flight and pursuit were dull, unfinished, a fumbling response to a sluggish stimulus. They paid no attention to Pakriaa and the strangers. The slack emptiness of their faces denied the possibility of any thought more than a flurry in response to physical need. They were all over-plump; some of the females were scarred, but the wounds were old and healed. Paul could see no anatomical differences between them and their lively free kindred. A drug...?

Pakriaa walked among them like a farmer in a flock of chickens. She lifted a young girl, who made no effort to escape, and showed her to Ann with contented pride, pinching a fat thigh and middle. The child was limp, unexcited, mumbling a mouthful of the mash. Fighting back a retching, Ann muttered, "Paul, when can we get out of here?"

Abro Pakriaa caught the tone. She tossed the little girl away and led them out of the stockade. She seemed hurt rather than angry--disappointed that her important friends had shown no admiration at this thriving industry....

The soldiers had gathered again in the clearing, but now there was a waiting, a tension with the descent of twilight, and a gloom. A long fire had been built; Pakriaa's wave at her guests appeared to mean that they should sit where they pleased. Ann had not been able to convey the wish for an escort home, and Pakriaa's mind was plainly filled with some other, graver concern, having no more time for hospitality. Pakriaa entered her blue house. While she was gone, the soldiers seated beyond the fire scattered handfuls of earth in synchronized motions and the witches grouped behind them set up a monotone of chanting. Pakriaa returned wearing a white skirt, bare of all her paint and jewelry; she walked back and forth along the line of the fire, praying, until daylight was wholly gone. At her call, old men, neither painted nor grotesque, carried out burdened hides and laid them open beside the fire: white bones, broken weapons, skirts, loincloths, necklaces, arrows, little earthen pots and wooden bowls, many images of clay. The soldiers threw themselves face down, their foreheads on their arms, and wailed.

Spearman's voice was tortured with perplexity: "Eat some, mourn for others. Murder them and love them--"

"Yes, they're human."

"Oh, shut up, Paul. What do you mean, human? These animals?"

"Human mourning, isn't it? Listen to it."

Ann spoke with held-in fury: "At least we're not cannibals. There may still be war back on Earth, but after all--"

"Better to murder in groups of a thousand at long distance? Just listen to it, Ann...."

It was music, becoming after a time the only thing existing under the red moon and the delicate unceasing dance of blue fireflies. It was the music they had heard on the first night in the jungle, a pouring forth of lamentation, wonder, supplication, whatever the spirit may feel in the contemplation of death and its troubling counterpart. A music that was meant to go on unchanging as the song of tree frogs for the thirteen hours of a night of Lucifer.... Pakriaa took no vocal part in the ritual, but sat alone, guarding the relics of the fallen. From time to time small man shapes carried new fuel to the fire. And there were stern sidelong glances from the princess: she had not forgotten her guests. Once or twice Paul caught himself dozing off, dragged into a partial hypnosis by the endless lamentation....

"Paul?"

"Yes, Nan. I'm awake." He saw Spearman's head jerk upright.

"Doc asked me yesterday--if I would bear him a child."

Spearman's arm sought for her gently. "Why bring that up now? Can't think with all this damn caterwauling."

"I--did get to thinking.... Everything we used to live by--it's so far away. Paul, you're close to Doc. You understand him, I guess."

Two troubled faces were turned to Paul in the mystery of firelight. A glance from Pakriaa conveyed annoyance at the sound of voices. "Dorothy told me she wants Sears to be the father of her second. It won't take her away from me. Not natural perhaps, but right under the circumstances. Some of the most important laws and customs can't be started by us. They'll be established by our grandchildren, if we can have them."

"I know." But her upward look at Spearman's worried, half-angry face said that her decision would be made by him, no other.

"He mustn't talk. The queen no like...."

It might have been an hour later that Paul saw Spearman's head sag down on his chest. Ann leaned against him, but his arm around her had gone slack. Paul searched for the cause of a sense of danger that prickled his skin. Not the witches: they were grouped as before, chanting a faint counterpoint to the soldiers' wailing. No--it was Ed Spearman himself, and Paul came broad awake in a certainty of what would happen. Too late. Spearman's head twitched, and his unconscious throat let loose a resonant, uncompromising snore, a snore that had been famous on the great ship _Argo_. Sears Oliphant had always claimed that if only Ed could be harnessed in sleep to the reaction chamber.... But this was not going to be funny....

Pakriaa leaped up and shrieked a raging order. The wailing ceased. The soldiers were staggering upright, grabbing spears, forming a circle of violence around the guests before Spearman could even rise. He gasped, "Wha's matter?" and ten pygmy women were hauling him away by wrists and ankles, clear of the ground.

Paul shouted. "Don't fight 'em, Ed! Keep quiet!" Two soldiers were clinging to each of his own arms, there was a ring of shivering spears around him, and others had dragged Ann out of sight, but she was screaming as if they could understand: "Don't hurt him! He didn't do anything! Let him go!"

Without twitching his hampered arms, Paul moved slowly against the circle of spears. They had no quarrel with him, he sensed, but only meant to restrain him: it was at least the only action worth a gamble. The spearwomen stepped backward away from him. The whole circle moved in slow motion, following where Spearman had been carried--through the tree shelter, on across the next clearing, and into the space before the looming god.

Ed had not been able to snatch his rifle; he still had his holstered automatic. Paul could not see Ann, nor Pakriaa. He could see Spearman's face, a concentration of craft and fighting fury. The pygmy women lifted him and flung him on the table before the idol. He was ready. He bounced like a great cat, gained his feet, and twitched out the pistol, which banged once--at the huge blade of the idol's spear. The stone blade crumbled; the crash of the little gun made his captors wince back in shocked reaction. Then Ed Spearman stooped, grasped the reaching wrist of the idol, and heaved upward with the whole of his strength.

The god swayed, groaned like a thing of life, and toppled over, squashing one of the howling witches--a blind one--like a red bug.

The village dropped into total silence. Paul could see Ann now. The pygmies had let her go. The whiteness of her face had more than terror in it: it had exultation, a glory of excitement and wrath. Paul's own captors had lurched away; his automatic had slipped into his hand without conscious effort; he searched in desperation for something that might restore his friends to steadier sanity. "Walk," he said. "Walk, don't run, to the nearest exit...."

The pygmies allowed it. The god had fallen. They even stood back, too profoundly dazed for any thought or protest.... At the edge of the village Spearman jumped in the ditch, reached for Ann, swung her up on the other side. "Did anyone bring a flashlight?"

"Oh, I--I did," said Ann, and began to cry. "Brought flashlight--'stead of gun...."

Paul stayed in the rear. "They won't follow, I think. Not for a while."

The stooping passageway was hard to find. But when they won clear of it there was the guiding sound of the stream. Paul held the flashlight on the line of stepping stones until the others had crossed. Ann was still weeping in reaction. "We'll never win. It's all madness--the ship, everything. All human beings are crazy, crazy--"

"Hush, dear," Spearman said. "We got out, didn't we?"

Now, where was the trail? A madness of groping, blundering, where there was no path, no guidance, and even their little thread of light a mockery and confusion.

Abruptly, ahead of them, there were other lights, then voices--Mijok's soft rumbling, Wright's clear outcry: "There they are! All three, Mijok--"

Paul ran to him. "The others--Dorothy? Sears?"

"Right as rain, son," Wright mumbled. "Except Dot's been frantic about you since we heard the shot. We left Sears practically sitting on her--well, figuratively. Women are odd, you know: they don't like shots in the night when the best boy friend is out on the tiles."

"Had a little trouble. They may come after us--don't know...."

Ann was quiet. Paul saw her white hands starfished on the gray of Mijok's chest. She said, "Mijok, I'm tired and sick. Will you carry me?"

Spearman groaned: "Ann, what--Use your head...."

But Mijok knelt at once to make a cradle of his arms, and Christopher Wright said, "Why not? Why shouldn't we need each other?" Mijok went ahead with her on the blind trail.

Paul heard Spearman choke: "I would have carried her." It was not meant to be heard. Paul looked away, hearing also the deep precision of the giant's voice exploring the mystery of words: "You are my people. I will not ever be much time far from you."

Part Two

The Year One

1

"This island is Eden." Sears Oliphant spoke drowsily. Toy bat wings flickered from the woods crowning the hillside, hovered over a pond: _illuama_. In a scant year of Lucifer time (seventeen months of the calendar of Earth) native names had become natural, mostly Mijok's names.

Two red-moon changes ago, in the final jading month of the rains, the pygmy word "kaksma" had been only a symbol. Now it woke the image of a village desolate, bones scraped and scarred. The mind's eye winced in pity--a sentry careless, a bridge left in place after dark; thousands of ratty bodies rustling down from the wet hills, over open ground, swimming swollen streams, finding the bridge before oil on the rain water in the ditch could be ignited. Small bodies, not swift, leaping or humping along like furry worms, sniffing, squeaking, their stabbing teeth dark with the blood of any flesh that moved. The northernmost of the villages allied with Pakriaa's had already returned to jungle.

But here, ten miles offshore from the coastal range, no kaksmas lived; Sears and Paul, in two days of study on this second visit, had established that. No wide wings lurked in the sky. The hilly island had no large meadows where omasha could hunt. Three giants had been flown to the island a month ago--the girl Arek, her mother Muson, and old Rak. They said it was a place of calm. Their soft talk could be heard up the slope, where a log building was growing. Paul stretched, lean and comfortable, on the grass, glad to be alone for a while with this least demanding of his friends.

Sears was fatter, but hardened, a round block of man, with a coarse black beard, kindness of brown eyes unaltered. Christopher Wright, waiting at the "fortress" by Lake Argo and no doubt frantic for word of this exploration, had let his beard grow too, sandy gray. Spearman and Paul had stayed clean-shaven, with soap made from fat and wood ashes. "The others must come here, Paul. I suppose Chris won't consent till Pakriaa agrees--damn, you'd think she could see it. She knows her enemies fear the ocean as she does. Lantis' two-by-four army would never chase after us in their lake boats."

"Wait a minute, Jocko. Lantis is no two-by-four proposition."

"Damn pint-size Napoleon with four teats and a grass skirt."

"Lookee: that settlement south of Lake Argo is thirty miles long. Equivalent of two hundred villages, to Pakriaa's six. Say twenty thousand warriors who got their pride hurt a year ago when the crash of _Argo_ swamped their fleet and scared the pants off 'em. They'll have replaced the fleet. They'll come overland too. Lantis, Queen of the World."

"If they do"--Sears' heavy voice had the tremor that he himself hated--"the firearms should be at least one ace in the hole."

"Ye--es. Ed's pistol helped in our one bad scrape with Pakriaa herself. But it was his smashing the idol that stalled 'em, not the gun."

"Poor little Abro Pakriaa!" Sears spoke with tenderness. "If ever a lady was pulled seven ways from Sunday! Wants our way of life, doesn't want it. Wants to grasp Chris' ethics, doesn't want to. Afraid of Ed's strength and aggressiveness, admires 'em too, oh my, yes. Tries to believe the god Ismar died or never lived--but can't, quite."

"And can't understand why our women are gentle--Dorothy anyway----"

"Nan's toughening up is conscious effort, Paul. Superficial. She's made herself hunt, shoot well, act hard, because her brain tells her she should. If we could only find something to restring her violin! I think she's given up hope of it: nothing I've found so far has been any good. She doesn't see that Dorothy does more for us by remaining the person she always was.... You know, when I go alone to Pak's village, I just set. Even the witches have got used to me, not that they wouldn't gut me if they could."

"Jocko"--Paul looked away--"you told me once you were scared all the time. When you go there alone--or when you tame the olifants for that matter--are you sort of grasping the nettle? And does it work?"

"Don't ask me, friend. Because I don't exactly know. I was never a brave man." Brown eyes misted in what was partly laughter. "Oy, the witches! There's the big enemy in the battle for Pakriaa's mind. Chris may claim they aren't real witch doctors, just advisers, low-grade magicians. I'm not so sure. Priests of Ismar, and when Ed clobbered the idol Pakriaa did consider having 'em all burned alive. Point is, she didn't do it. They gnaw away in the dark at all we try to teach her. That proposed bonfire, by the way, is gossip passed on to me in confidence by Abara."

"There's a dear little man."

"Ain't he though?" Smiling into late sky, Paul envisaged the wizened red midget riding the white monsters that Sears had tamed and insisted on naming olifants-with-an-f. A painting might grow out of that, he thought, squat coppery lump astride of massive white--it might, if the desire to paint should ever wake again and be as strong as it once was on _Argo_, when his mind's eye could remember Earth without distortion. Abara, popeyed and potbellied, a favorite in Pakriaa's harem, had been commissioned by her as a student and go-between at the lakeside camp; Sears had not only adopted him as an olifant trainer, but suspected him of furtively possessing a sense of humor. "Well--the giants. Lantis will always have thought of them as wild animals----"

"Sears"--Paul rolled over and pressed his face in the grass--"can we ask or even permit the giants to tangle in a pygmy war?"

"Ah.... It's tormenting Chris too, ever since Lantis sent that ultimatum." He snarled in his beard, "Thirty fat meat slaves every two months! There's politics for you. Dirtiest way she could answer Pak's challenge to personal combat, and the automatic refusal makes an excuse to come and clean up. Sounds like home.... Mijok wants to help fight--says he does."

"It's still our responsibility." Paul sat up. His eyes kept returning to the towering courage of the trees. Brave as any cathedral spire, scarcely one was free from the clutch of the purple-leaf vine. "As for moving here to the island, Pak sees it, but the idea's too new. You just don't pull up stakes, venture on the Big Water, crossing forbidden kaksma country."

Sears chewed a grass blade. "Anyway we've got to bring Dorothy and the baby here, and Ann. Dorothy won't fuss, will she, son?"

"Since there _is_ Helen--no, she won't. I still dream sometimes, as I did during her first pregnancy. Things, shapes, trying to pull her away--or she's where I can't find her, can't push through the leaves."

"She told me. It's something else that's made you blue lately."

"No."

Sears watched him. "Yes.... Want to start back tomorrow?"

"Might as well. We've learned all we need."

"Mm.... Second thoughts about the daddy of Dorothy's second----"

"No no. We settled that. She's proud to be carrying it."

"Good genetics could be damn bad psychology."

"No, Jocko. Don't think that. She's close to me as ever."

Sears waited and spoke softly: "New York late on a rainy night, a few car lights moving, street-lamp reflections like golden fish----"

"Orange paintbrush in New Hampshire meadows----We'd better stop."

"We better. I want boat whistles--floating city coming out of the fog. Call it a slow-healing wound.... And look across the channel."

Paul saw it presently: a cliff formation in the coastal range made a brow, nose, and chin. Below this, rounded rock could be a shoulder straining in heroic effort; then, tumbled reality of mountain-fancy must supply whatever held the figure in bondage. "Yes. He looks west. Past us, at the sun."

"Why, no, Paul. I think he looks west of the sun...."

A red-furred girl wandered down from the woods. "I got tired." Arek had lived twenty-two years; she was seven feet tall, not yet adolescent but near it. In the next Red-Moon-before-the-Rains, ten months away, she might take adult part in the frenzy of love if her body demanded it: if not, she would go apart with the other children, whose play also became innocently erotic at that time, and help care for the youngest. Sears grinned as she sat down with them. "Tired or lazy?"

"Both. You Charins are never lazy enough." The name Charin, Paul thought, was almost natural now, a pygmy word for "halfway," intended by Pakriaa merely to convey that Wright and his breed were halfway in size between her people and the giants, but Wright took sardonic satisfaction in it as a generic name. "Work and loafing are both good. Why can Ed Spearman never sit still in the sun? Or maybe I like to talk too much."

"Never," Sears chuckled. "Well--his best pleasure is in action. Maybe it's the technician in him--he must always be doing something."

"Like always waking, never sleeping." She sprawled in comfort; her broad hands plucked grass, scattered it over the furry softness of her four breasts. "Green rain.... I want to stay on this island. Will they come?"

"We hope so. Mijok will as soon as Doc does."

She sighed. "Mijok is a beautiful male. I think I'll take him for my first when I'm ready.... And soon the pretty boat will be no more good. It's sad we can't make another. Tell me again about Captain Jensen. He was as tall as me? He had hair on his head, red like my fur. He spoke----"

"Like storm wind," said Paul, supplying the wanted note in a favorite fairy tale, remembering a brother on Earth who was--perhaps--not dead.

"Hear the ocean," Arek whispered. Paul could hardly separate the sound from the mutter of the pond's outlet. This ridge of high ground ended short of the island's northern limit. A white beach, where the lifeboat was shaded from late sun, faced the mainland. West of the beach a red stone cliff ran to the tip of the island, shouldering away the sea. Wind out of the west allowed no soil to gather on it. Now and then a rainbow flashed and died above the rock, when a wave of uncommon grandeur spent itself in a tower of foam. "Hear what it says? 'I--will--try--aga-a-ain....' Why must the others wait to come here?"

"Pakriaa's people are not ready."

"Oh, Sears!" Arek laughed unhappily and sat up. "I think of how my mother taught me the three terrors. She took me to the hills, beat two stones before a burrow till one blundered out maddened, afraid of nothing but the light. She crushed it, made me smell it. I was sick; then we fled. I think of how she flung an _asonis_ carcass into meadow grass, so the omasha came. She wounded one with a stone, made me watch while the others tore it apart. Later still, when I could run fast--ah, through night to a village of the Red Bald----"

"Please, dear--pygmies. That's a name they accept."

"I'm sorry, Sears.... Yes, we hid in the dark, waited until a sentry moved--careless.... It was wrong. You've shown us how such things are wrong. And memory's someone talking behind you, out of the big dark."

"The laws we've agreed on----"

"I do honor them," she said gently. "The law against murder was my first writing lesson. But--what if Pakriaa's tribe--"

"They're slower," Sears said in distress, and the distress would be as much a message to Arek as any words. There was no hiding the heart from these people: green eyes and black ears missed no smallest nuance.

"When will they know they must not dig pits, with poisoned stakes--"

"But Pakriaa's tribe don't do that now. Do they?"

Arek admitted: "I suppose not. But the six other villages----"

"Five, dear. The kaksmas. And only two months ago, Arek."

She stared at Paul with shock. "I _had_ almost forgotten. But they do still hate us. The day before you flew us here, Paul, I met Pakriaa and two of her soldiers in the woods. I gave them the good-day greeting. Oh, if one of you had been there she would have answered it.... Wouldn't the island be better without them? Some of _you_ don't like them. Even Dorothy only tries to like them. Since the baby was born, Paul, she--shrinks when they come to the fortress. They don't know it, but I do."

Dimly, Paul had known it, known also that it was a thing Dorothy would consciously reject. "Time, Arek. You'll live a hundred and fifty years or better--more than three pygmy lifetimes. You'll see them change."

Speaking almost like a Charin, Arek said, "They'd better."

They strolled up the hill; the other giants' labor had ceased. The building was a sturdy oblong, intended as storehouse and temporary communal dwelling for them all, including (Wright hoped) some of Pakriaa's people. Rafters were not yet in place. For that, Rak needed the strength of another like himself: chubby Muson tired easily. Someday a road would climb from the beach, traversing the ridge which was the backbone of the northern half of the island. Here, where spring water filled the pond and rushed on down to carve a small harbor below the beach, would be Jensen City, and the three races of Lucifer would learn to live there in good will and pleasure under a government of laws. So Wright said--peering at photographs, teasing his gray beard, tapping thin fingers on the map drawn on the paper of Earth, on the new maps of whitebark. Paul could see it too--sometimes; glimpse the houses, gardens, open places. South of the pond, a wheat field, for on Lucifer the wheat of Earth grew to four feet and bore richly. Near the field, perhaps the house for Dorothy and himself, with no doorway lower than ten feet.

At other times he could see only defeat--the arrogance and blind drive of genus _Charin_, species _Semisapiens_ beating against the indifference of nature, the resentment of other life. He could see his people destroyed, by accident or anger, the giant friends adrift with only hints of the new life and spoiled for the old. Then he would stop trying to foresee and would make his mind's ear listen to Wright insisting: "_Give protoplasm a chance. Patience is the well-spring._..."

The walls were eleven feet in height. Rak and Muson rested on the coolness of bare ground within; Rak pointed at the top of the walls where rafters would rest. "Slow," he said, "and good." Rak could not be sure how old he was. When Mijok had first persuaded him to the camp ten months ago, Rak had won his English with the grave precision of a mason selecting fieldstone. His language had none of the flexibility and scope that Mijok and others had achieved, but it served him. After absorbing basic arithmetic, Rak had deliberated on the problem of his age--squatting at the gate of the stone fortress by Lake Argo, spreading out rows of colored pebbles to indicate years, rainy seasons, episodes of hunting or fear or passion too keen to forget. At last he had come up with the figure of 130 years. "But," he said, "there are two times. In here"--he patted an ancient scar on his belly--"and there." He pointed at the red crescent moon.

"I'll cook supper," Arek said. Muson bubbled and shadowboxed with her daughter. Muson would laugh at anything--the flutter of a leaf, a breath of breeze on her red-brown fur. Paul followed to help Arek trim the carcass of an asonis killed the night before. Hornless, short-legged, fat, the bovine animal was abundant on the island; its one enemy here was what Arek called _usran_, a catlike carnivore the size of a lynx, which could tackle only the young asonis or feeble stragglers. Rak hunted in the old way. Bow, club, spear, even rifle, had been explained to him, but the stalk, the single rush and leap, the grasp of a muzzle and backward jerk that snapped the neck before the prey could even struggle--these were Rak's way still. In the old life, Rak's age would have led him eventually to a few dim years with a band of women, who would have fed him until he chose to wander into deep jungle, preventing any from following. When far away, he would have sat in the shadows to wait--for starvation or the black marsh reptiles or a great mainland cat, _uskaran_, which never attacked a giant in the prime of strength. Rak would have taken no harm from the young men in this weakness: his own territory would have been inviolate, and he would have joined the women, in a taciturn farewell to life, only when teeth and arms had failed. ("We're gentle people," Mijok said, puzzled at it himself. "In the Red-Moon-before-the-Rains we only play at fighting. It's not like what we see the other creatures do at that time. How could one 'possess' a woman? Do I possess the wind because I like to run against the touch of it...?")

The meat hung from a makeshift tripod; Arek jumped back, startled, as a furry thing scampered down. It was like a kinkajou except for the hump on the back (a true hindbrain in the spine: Sears had long ago verified that guess of Wright's). "Little rascal," Paul said. "Let's tame it."

"What?" Arek was bewildered. "Do what?"

"Do these live on the mainland?"

"I never saw one till I came here. Too small to eat. Tame it?"

"Watch." Paul tossed a bit of meat. The visitor's chatter changed to a whistling whine; it elongated itself, grabbed, sat back on stubby hind legs to eat in clever paws; it washed itself with a squirrel's pertness. Arek chuckled, examining the idea, and went on with her work; she had become a hypercritical cook, under Dorothy's guidance. "Jocko, biologist, stand by: I propose to name an animile. Genus _Kink_, species _quasikinkajou_." Genus Kink did not retreat at Sears' quiet approach, but wriggled a black nose.

Rak asked in solemn curiosity, "For what is it good?"

"To make us laugh," Paul said, "so long as we're kind to it."

"Ah?" Rak moved his fingers to aid the patient mill of his mind.

"Dance-Nose," said Muson, who already understood. She shook all over. "Come, Funny-Nose." It would not--yet, but Muson could be patient too.

Sears whispered in his beard, "Less homesick?"

"Yes...."

After the meal Arek wanted Paul to come out on the cliffs. Though there seemed no danger from the omasha, she carried a long stick and Paul took his pistol. The slope leveled out to the bare rock of the headland; the ocean voice was the humming of a thousand giants. The way was easy, with no crevasses, no peril while the wind was mild. Arek had often been out here alone. Yesterday Paul had seen her standing for an hour, watching the west where unbroken water met a sun-reddened horizon. In her earlier years there might have been dim mention of the sea by her almost wordless people, but no true knowledge: the mainland coast was steaming vine-choked jungle, or tidal marsh, and shut away by the kaksma hills. Paul wondered what member of his race could stand for an hour in contemplation like a thinking tree, not shifting a foot nor raising an arm...?

"Paul, why did you leave Earth?" Arek patted the rock beside her.

Below the troubled water laughed, endlessly defeated and returning. Cloud fantasies gathered below a lucid green, and the wind was a friend. "I have doubted sometimes whether we ought to have done so."

"That wasn't my meaning. We love you. Didn't you know? But I've wondered what sent you away from such a place. Ann says it was beautiful."

"A--drive of restlessness. We took boundaries as a challenge. I used to think that a great virtue. Now I call it neither good nor evil."

"I think it is good."

"Everywhere, we carry good _and_ evil."

"What you do here is good. You teach us. You do kind things."

"We can be bad. But for Doc Wright and his dreams that Ed Spearman finds so impractical, we'd have done you harm." Helpless at her innocence, Paul saw she did not believe him. "On Earth, we fought each other. We hunted for lies to make ourselves feel big. We created great institutions built on vanity--tickling lies: imperialism, communism--most of the isms you find so puzzling when we talk of Earth history. The anger of Charins rarely focused itself on the actual causes of unhappiness or injustice. Instead we hunted for scapegoats, easy solutions. We wouldn't study ourselves. Always we itched for something external to take the blame for our own follies and crimes."

"I don't understand."

"As if you stumbled on a root, Arek, and then banged your fist on the tree that grew it, to blame it for your own clumsiness."

"But Paul--only a very small child would act like that."

"Darling, let's watch the sunset." She felt his pain, touched his knee, and was silent until he said, "A poor naughty child...."

"There was a thing Ed Spearman said to me--what I wanted to talk to you about. I've never gone to Pakriaa's village. You know, even Mijok won't go there except with one of you. I asked Ed if Pakriaa still kept that stockade for drugging and fattening prisoners--in spite of her agreeing to the laws. He said yes, she did. I said it was not right. I said we made a law against slavery too. He said, 'Forget it, baby--one thing at a time.' I am not a baby. How can the laws govern us unless all obey them?"

"Ed--meant no harm, Arek. He only meant it does take time. The pygmies have more to unlearn. You--started clean. And--well--with the army of Lantis likely to come back at any time--we can't afford--"

Yet it seemed natural that this giant child, who had herself done murder in the old days, should answer his troubled evasions not only with reproach but with command: "If the laws are to govern us they must be respected by everyone. I wish I had gone to that village and torn down the stockade with my hands."

"And they would have killed you with a hundred spears and Pakriaa's people would hate us forever, learning nothing but more hatred."

Arek cried a little, rubbing at the unfamiliar wetness. "Maybe I begin to see, how difficult.... The sun's going." But they sat quietly in the warm and undemanding wind until the first sapphire glint of fireflies dotted the slope where Jensen City might one day shine. Arek stood, reaching down an affectionate hand.

2

Paul glanced down at sunrise-tinted snow on the highest peak of the coastal range, thirteen thousand feet above the sea. Prairie spread for thirty miles east of its base; then came a region of forest and small lakes fed by the outlet of Lake Argo, which was the core of the empire of Lantis, Queen of the World.

Pakriaa's information on Lantis was a murky blend of truth and fantasy. Lantis claimed birth from Ismar-Creator-and-Destroyer. Pakriaa had different theories. Originally ruler of a single village, Lantis consolidated by conquest. Instead of annihilating defeated villages she took their populations captive, sorting out three categories: potential followers, slave laborers, and meat. Many in the first class became fanatically converted; those in the second provided a year or so of work before dying of whippings and other abuse; captives of the third class were forced to eat the green-flowered weed that numbed the brain and were bled out at the right stage of fatness. In fifteen years one riverside village had swollen to a city of sixty thousand, fed by expeditions far to the east, and Lantis named her city Vestoia--Country of Freedom and Joy. "Got anything new in the 'scope?"

Sears groaned: "There _are_ more boats above the falls."

The boats, they knew, were broad canoes roofed like sampans against the omasha, but with no sail. "Not moving, are they?"

"No--anchored maybe." Sears mopped his round face.

Without the telescope, Paul could see brownness on the water of Lake Argo's southern end, near the spot where the outlet tumbled over a high falls to a smaller lake. It meant that hundreds more must have been portaged past the falls from Vestoia during his two days on the island....

The fifty red-green flowing miles became a pain of delay. Sears too would be aching for the gray square of their "fortress" to claim the eye in the north, touched by early sunlight, a brave structure twelve feet high, fifty square, built of split stone by the labor of giant friends. Outside it ran a moat twenty feet wide, ten deep, with a drawbridge of logs, bark matting, grass-fiber ropes, the bottom flooded with lake water. There was room within for living quarters, a supply of smoked meat, dried vegetables.

Lantis understood scaling ladders, Pakriaa said. Lantis had patience for a siege. There was no defense, Pakriaa said, in these measures. The only defense was to attack, to retreat, and attack again. It had always been so in the old wars. It was still so with this Lantis and her Big-Village-Vestoia, this bastard begotten of a red worm and Inkar, goddess of kaksmas. It would always be so--at least, until.... Paul remembered Dorothy, cherishing Helen at her brown breast, asking neutrally, "Until what, Abro Pakriaa?"

Pakriaa had studied the giants' walls with contempt. "Until I shame this worm spawn Lantis into meeting me alone. She must respect custom. Her first answer is a--what word?--rejection, because she has fear. I have sent a second challenge. She will meet me, or her own people will condemn her. I will pin her belly to the ground. Her government will be mine." There had been no mistaking it: for the first time in the year since the idol of Ismar fell and was not restored, Pakriaa was making vast decisions wholly her own, with only perfunctory interest in what the Charins might think. In her wrath against the mighty soldier ruler in the south there was natural grief at the outrages of past years, but something else too. Her red face glaring southward said: _She has what I desire; she is doing what I would do_. Pakriaa had finished her answer quietly: "It is _I_ who will be Queen of the World."

Three days ago. It could have been a mistake to leave the camp at all. Now--a streak of sunshine on gray at the end of familiar meadow. With fuel for only a few more flights, Paul knew he had never made a better landing. The drawbridge was down. Dorothy ran to meet him. Sears was shouting, "Chris! It's perfect--no kaksmas--everything Paul said it was--"

Paul stammered, "You look like a million dollars."

"Dollars. What're those?"

"I forget. What's news?"

"Your funny mouth is tickling my ear."

"That isn't news, Dope. Helen--"

"Full of the best gurgles. Come and see." He thought: _How do I tell her of the boats, the thirty-mile hive of savage hatreds_--but Sears was already talking of it. Wright had no smile for Paul, only a warm gray-eyed stare and pressure of the hand. Paul asked, "Where's Ed? Mijok and the boys?"

Ann looked up from cutting a square of hide. She had not come to meet them. Ann's way nowadays; one's mind insisted: _It doesn't mean anything_. "Ed's hunting. Should have been back last night."

Dorothy added: "Mijok's off missionarying, with Elis and Surok. They took Blondie--Lisson, I mean: moral support."

Wright was hag-ridden. "Sears, if it were only Pakriaa's tribe--but--not fuel enough to fly all the giants over. We cannot abandon _them_."

"Then let's get the women there and the rest of us go overland."

Ann said, "I'm going overland."

Wright muttered, "Damn it, Nancy--"

Sears patted her shoulder and ignored her speech as she ignored the touch. "Chris, I've labored, myself, over that damn knotty little brain of Pakriaa's. She can't see things our way. We need a hundred years."

The conference lengthened into the morning. Sometimes it seemed to Paul that his teacher's stubbornness degenerated into the obsession of a man who won't leave a blazing house until the rugs are saved. Wright longed for the island, which he had seen only in photographs. There had always been some compelling reason why he must stay by the fortress, if only to hoe voracious weeds out of the gardens. Yet to Wright it was unthinkable that the island community should start without the pygmies: he returned to it with haggard insistence. "I know--I can't actually like Pakriaa--she's got a mind like a greased eel; but we've made a beginning. They speak our tongue--well. A people intelligent as they are--"

Paul thought: _It's not Lucifer that's aged him--it's us. We are not big enough_. Aloud he suggested: "Doc, can't we make a start without them and just keep the door open? Bring them in when we're stronger ourselves?"

"Oh, son, if we desert Pak now, she's finished. Over-confidence. Lantis will go over her like a tide. We might just turn that tide. If not, we _must_ be ready to help her escape with--whatever's left.... Well, at least we agree on this: Helen and the women must go to the island, at once."

"Tomorrow." Dorothy choked. "If the boats haven't started yet--"

"All right, dear. Tomorrow. And one man should go with them."

"You," Paul said. "You."

Wright said inexorably, "No." His stare groped at Sears Oliphant.

Sears was nakedly desperate. "Chris, I beg of you--you must not ask me to go away from this battle." He was sweating, white. "I am--in a sense--a religious man. The--Armageddon within, your own phrase--please understand without my saying any more. Don't ask me to go."

"Ed won't go.... Paul?"

_Leave him, with Sears' inner torments and Ed's arrogance?_ "No, Doc."

Ann Bryan said, "I'm staying for the show."

Dorothy lowered her cheek to the brown fuzz of Helen's head; the baby's absurd square of palm found Paul's finger. Helen was almost eight months old--Lucifer months. The new life in Dorothy had been conceived in the last month of the rains. Dorothy said, "I'm going, Nancy, with Helen. As a valuable brood mare, I can't afford heroism. Neither can you."