Earth in Twilight, page 10
Self-pity always made him restless so eventually he gave his wife a break and went up into the steeple. He sounded a battle cry in hopes that someone would take up the challenge, but it didn’t happen. Everyone had chosen the same time to go down to the surface to get something to eat. He alone guarded the sky. Knowing how inadequately he was endowed for the mission, he kept his eyes on the lights toward Laredo and waited. By and by he forgot how essential it was to be there in case another ship came, and back down the girders he climbed. He had a snack on the way.
There was a small, funny-looking child toddling about his place in the nest.
“I had it alive!” cried Odeeda when she saw him. “I did it! I did what you wanted! I had a live baby!”
For the longest while Whing squatted and stared while annoyance and confusion waged war within him. Surely the father of this brat had been no steeple sentry. It had hound dog ears and green spots all over its blue hide.
What was it men did when their wives behaved thusly? He couldn’t remember or perhaps he had never known. Better play it by ear.
“Where’s the proof?” he said.
“Proof? I just said it, didn’t I?”
“And I’m supposed to swallow your tale like rain?”
“You’d better if you want to stay in this nest.”
“Listen, you—”
“No, you listen! Always it’s me listening! I have a hole in my ear from listening to you! In a democracy we’re supposed to take turns at everything.”
The infant leaped onto Whing’s foot and tried to deprive him of some toes. Not daring to kick it away he picked it up by a long ear and deposited it on Odeeda’s lap.
“Where did you hear that?” he said.
“Where did I hear that? From your fat mouth.” Odeeda stretched in a relaxed kind of way, grabbed hold of her offspring and cleaned its face for a few minutes. “My what a beautiful day it is!” she said.
Casting a sour glance east and west Whing said, “What makes you think so?”
“I’ve given you a handsome son, live-born, mind you; I’m in good health and I’m married to the biggest steeple sentry in the world. Come and give me a kiss.”
He did and all the while the infant chewed on his tail.
Chapter 12
Normal everyday life was adventurous enough for LaLa without her going off into the wilderness with Pip. Having been born in this very tree she nevertheless had gone to the ground many times, but not to stay. Her home was up above where the air was heavy and the planet seemed to roll away like a sea of green. The point: if Pip wanted to marry her he had to stay with her.
Marrying was the farthest thing from his mind though he was careful not to say so. Kadooka or one of his dozen children kept an eye on him and had words to say if he got too close to LaLa. He felt persecuted because it was the other way around. She found excuses to visit his cave or she sought him out on the beach, or she followed him whenever he went to spy on the giants. Like today.
There were two behemoths on the bridge now and the newcomer was larger than the original. Her appetite was enormous and at least twice a day she climbed down a string to bring something back up. The male ornad shared her food and scarcely budged other than to waddle back the opposite way to pick a fight with something. His head had healed so that there was now a white scar where his ear had been. Quite often he stood up and stared long and hard at the tree where the white worm was hiding, the one who had caused his mutilation.
“One of these days he’s going to come tearing over here,” Pip said to LaLa.
She shrugged and nodded. “With him coming that way and Kadooka coming from this direction you’ll be caught in the middle.”
“What happens if I duck?”
“My brother won’t come out here after you. When he wants to, he’ll catch you in your cave and beat you black and blue.”
“Can’t you talk to him?”
LaLa shook her head. “I’ve tried. It doesn’t do any good. In his mind I’m still toddling around with my thumb in my mouth.”
Carefully Pip raised a wide section of fence and began winding a taut vine in and out of the right border. The section was stiff and upright, composed of vines an inch in diameter. The weave wasn’t tight or close together, and in fact there were spaces an inch or more apart, but only a small creature could penetrate them.
“That little fence won’t stop the monster,” said LaLa.
“What if there’s a whole wall of sections all the way across the front of the tree?”
“You mean you’re planning to steal all of Kadooka’s fences? He’ll murder you.”
“The first time he lays a hand on me I intend to go out there and throw something at the ornad so it’ll come in here. I’ve already told him so.”
“Would you do that?” she said.
“Sure, after I got everybody else away.”
The section of fence hung loosely in front of them but it was just a start. In time there would be a wide barrier across the entrance to the tree and though the ornad hurled himself against it and made it yield, he wouldn’t be able to get through. His teeth were powerful but they wouldn’t sever the vines, and the limbs to which the vines were attached wouldn’t break for another millennium.
Kadooka had been weaving fences since he was a small boy. They lay everywhere, stacks of them, some encased in mountains of webs, others hidden in ivy. He had forgotten why his father taught him the craft. Could it be that they were meant to be constructed around a camp to keep predators away? Pip thought so.
To protect his younger children Kadooka made runways by putting up walls alongside thinner limbs, thus restricting play areas. That way he didn’t have to worry about their pitching into empty space. Pip left those fences untouched but went on the hunt for the others. First he retrieved those covered with webs, drove tenants out and away and dragged the sections one by one to his wall by the bridge.
“If you bother Pip I’ll leave and never come back,” Lala said to her brother. It was high noon and hot.
“It won’t be with him. One thing he doesn’t want is a wife.”
“No man wants a wife, no more than any woman really wants a husband. It’s just something one has to do.”
“1 told him he could keep the wig if he killed the ornad. That was the deal.”
“He doesn’t like to kill things.” LaLa glared at her brother. “What do you care how he solves the problem?”
“I doubt if he will solve it. What’s he doing anyway? I never can find him when I go looking for him.”
“He’s minding his own business. Why don’t you do the same?”
“And where’s that other gink? The sissy with the locks of gold?”
This time LaLa frowned. “I don’t know. He wanted Pip to go to the ground with him.”
“Why didn’t he? It was his chance to get away.”
LaLa smiled. “First of all the problem of the ornad intrigues him. For another he’s still talking about Peru.”
“Mr. Stinko?” Kadooka said with a sneer. “That’s all a figment. A wild dream. I’ve been all over the world, practically, and there’s no such thing as a yellow man who drips and can make you blow up and explode.”
“Brownie said he wasn’t ever coming back. I mean he didn’t say it but that’s what he meant.”
“Oh, good grief, I suppose your sister is hiding in her cave bawling buckets?”
“No, she says he’ll be back because there’s no place else to go.” For LaLa the conversation was ended and she left Kadooka’s property and went back to the bridge to keep Pip company.
He put her to work sawing strips of thick vine with a swamp monster’s jawbone. With them she began binding sections of fence together.
While she sat on a limb and worked she happened to look up and spied the freak snape sitting above her. He wasn’t interested in her. His eyes never left Pip. He looked more relaxed than usual. Two of his furry arms hugged his knees while his other two hands clasped the back of his head. His one white eye glittered amidst the green, likewise his scarred dome.
“Pip, oh, Pip, look at that animal!” she said and he came to toss a fruit at the snape.
“Why does he hang around you all the time?” she said.
“Because he’s a hardhead and doesn’t know when to give up. Get out of here, you ugly fool! Scram!”
The snape scarcely seemed to move but suddenly he wasn’t in plain view anymore but was concealed in foliage with just his white eye showing. Though stronger than the people, he never would attack them. He was a herbivore and ate bundy leaves and certain kinds of fruit. Generally placid, he was good at running and hiding but could be formidable when cornered. Now he skulked among leaves and watched the man.
“Why didn’t you go with Brownie?” LaLa said to Pip after they resumed working.
“Because he isn’t coming back. A scrate is coming down to fly him away to a place in the sky.”
“That’s ridiculous!”
“I agree and that’s why I didn’t go with him. Also, Peru is somewhere down there and I don’t want to meet him again.”
“Tell me the truth, didn’t you make him up?”
The question didn’t annoy Pip because it was asked of him nearly every day. “I told you all about what happened at the desco camp. Every word of it was true. Peru is real.”
“What is he?”
“You might as well ask me what a swamp monster is. Things just grow. They start out little sometimes and then they get bigger, or they die and are never seen again, or they turn strange. It’s curious, isn’t it? I wonder why life is as it is?”
LaLa shrugged. “Brownie says it’s partly because of the different gases on the ground and in the air. At least I think that’s what he was trying to say.”
Pip gave her a surprised glance. “What’s wrong with the gas?”
“He says it’s poison.”
“Then why aren’t we all dead? Personally I think his meeting with Peru deranged him. He always talks crazy.”
“Does he learn quickly?”
“Oh, he’s bright, but he’s still crazy.”
At sundown they quit and went to have dinner in her cave. Afterward Pip wandered down to a lower limb and sat to watch the deeper depths of the tree. There was a cavity in a nearby limb where he slept every night. Hanging beside it was a long and sturdy vine at the end of which was attached a heavy gourd. Every day he practiced swinging the weight back and forth through the foliage.
Now he sat waiting for Peru to show up. He knew it was bound to happen sooner or later because that was the way reality was constructed. If there were but two moving objects on the entire planet or in the total universe they had to be on a collision course. It was fate.
How he would respond when the yellow hellion made an appearance he didn’t know, but he couldn’t sit by and let the creature handle Kadooka’s little group as he had the descoes. Somewhere, somehow, there was a way to rid the world of the pestilence and if he couldn’t find it he would at least try.
Through the leaves he saw stars winking at him. They made him feel good. Lying in the wooden crevice he relaxed and thought about the world, his beautiful, loud home, the place of heady fragrances and marvels that astounded him. He would have a long and eventful life, sire odd little children, make some woman deliriously happy and go down into his grave a satisfied old man.
While he slept a sudden rain pitter-pattered all over him so that he swelled and couldn’t get out of bed at daybreak.
The next afternoon Kadooka had cranky words with him. “If I’d wanted you to make a fort of this camp with my fences I would have asked you.” The burly man was hot and the hair on his chest glistened with sweat. Sometimes his wife Zeeba cut it off but it always grew back.
“Be reasonable,” said Pip, knowing Kadooka was sore because he hadn’t thought of the idea first. “Wouldn’t it be better if your wife didn’t have to worry about something snatching up one of the kids?”
“Nothing is going to snatch up any of them. I keep a good watch out for trespassers.”
“They’re such active kids nobody can watch them one hundred percent of the time.”
A big scowl had formed on Kadooka’s face ever since the day he first met Pip and it never really disappeared. Now it intensified. “Never mind that, give me a turn with my wig.”
“Nothing doing. I’ve seen you with it. You’re worse than Brownie. It doesn’t suit your temperament.”
Kadooka advanced. “I said give it to me.”
“A fat lot of good it’ll do me if you fall out of the tree and land in a swamp.” Pip backed away, reached for a higher limb and nimbly pulled himself onto it.
“That’s my wig!” roared Kadooka. His children heard the sound and ran to observe the confrontation. They liked the way the veins in their father’s neck and temples popped when he was in a rage. “Get away from here!” he yelled at them but they didn’t budge. Glaring up at Pip he said, “I’ve been fair with you! More than fair!”
“You’re a windbag. Frankly I’ve already had Zeeba’s permission to build the walls and she doesn’t want me to return the wig to you. She’s afraid you’ll fall and break your stupid neck. If you have any more to say, go say it to her.”
“I’ll have some head-squeezing to do when I get my hands on you.” Kadooka’s voice rose as Pip swung away and climbed higher. “You runt! I’ll fix you! You can’t do this to me! And if I catch you near my sister I’ll fry your eyeballs!”
Pip went to work on the wall by the bridge. Eventually he hoped to have the entire camp enclosed. It wouldn’t keep Peru out but it ought to make the people safe from nearly everything else.
LaLa came to tell him that DeLoona had disappeared.
“She must have gone after Brownie again,” he said.
“I can’t believe that. She knows he’s gone for good.”
“I thought I heard you say she didn’t think he meant it.”
“She only pretended. What else could she think? If he said he wasn’t coming back it meant he didn’t want to.”
Pip squatted and thought. “She shouldn’t have done it. She oughtn’t even have gone after him that first time. She can’t keep following him into danger.”
“I want to go after her.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Both of us. Come with me.”
“I told you Peru is down there.”
“She’s my sister. Please, Pip.”
“You don’t understand. This guy is a mindless killer. If he touches you you’re dead.” All at once Pip frowned. “All except Brownie.”
“You see. It isn’t as bad as you think.”
“It’s worse. He didn’t kill Brownie because he has a use for him. That’s the only reason he wouldn’t kill a person. He’s full of hate and contempt and every other bad thing there is.”
Laying a hand on his arm LaLa said, “Think about it. That’s all I ask.”
He glared at her retreating figure as she walked away. He had planned to fortify the camp and then leave to locate his future. It lay out there in the world somewhere and had nothing to do with yellow men who had bloodshot eyes. Or brown idiots with light hair. Or pretty women wanting him to get killed.
Didn’t LaLa have any sense? All his life he had been a cheat, a fraud and a liar. And a coward to boot. The most dangerous thing he ever did was to run from the people he swindled. It was true that he hadn’t robbed old ladies, but that didn’t make him a hero.
He slammed down the jawbone he had been using. Supposing he and LaLa did go to ground and while they were gone Peru came and murdered Kadooka and his family? Suppose he and LaLa walked straight into Peru’s waiting arms? It could happen that way. The yellow man wouldn’t have to look too hard for them. He was a fiend and fiends were always clever.
He picked up the saw and threw it at the snape peeking at him through the bushes. It missed and he listened as it dropped from limb to limb on its way to the bottom. Now he would have to go down anyway and hunt for a burial ground of swamp monsters. He couldn’t work without a saw.
Wondering why he was alive, he raised his head to stare bleakly at the sky.
Chapter 13
The stupid fools had done the very thing he instructed them not to do! Why were people so pigheaded? The pilots had landed the ship in the steeple, had to, otherwise where was the auxiliary? Certainly not at the prearranged meeting place near the signal station. Where were the pilots? With Carpall, no doubt, or mangled somewhere up there miles in the air where humans had no business being in the first place. Idiots! Traitors! Now what was he supposed to do?
Especially was Ferrer Burgoyne angry because he was so frightened. Something or someone had been following him right from the start, almost as soon as he climbed down a vine from the tree, and now it or they waited out there in the forest. Would that it was DeLoona, but he knew it wasn’t. This simply wasn’t his day, his game, his lifetime.
He knew Laredo Space Base had been annoyed by his call. Annoyed! Sitting on their fat duffs in a comfortable radio room, they were annoyed with him because he was fighting for his life. It was too bad about Carpall, they said, in clipped phrases that indicated they weren’t sorry at all. So much for Carpall; he would become a cipher in one of their dull ledgers.
Now was the present and Space Base could think only of the second ship. Something had happened to it, they knew, because the homing signal that was continually broadcast had abruptly cut off. Both vehicle and crew must be considered irretrievable, and a little bit of the blame for it was being laid at Burgoyne’s doorstep. The message he originally sent hadn’t been nearly specific enough and even read somewhat hysterical. Base couldn’t help it if there had been a denizen just outside the signal station. Earth might harbor a few odd and even hostile life forms, but astronauts were expected to regard them with equanimity, otherwise how could business be carried on as usual?
The important thing was that the government didn’t intend wasting any more money launching probe ships that disappeared, therefore one more craft equipped with Deep Green would shortly be dispatched. Auxiliary boats were expected to fly over every steeple and fire a package against a girder where it would become stuck fast by a powerful suction cup. Inside the packages would be timers. Once they were all securely in place an automatic signal would activate the sprayers.
