Almost Complete Short Fiction, page 13
Mary was quiet for a while, exhausted Drin surmised. So it startled him when she suddenly sat up and yelled: “Look, Drin, contrails!”
Do Tor had finally arrived.
Among all races, when violence is obviously futile, reason is encouraged. For this reason, where there is the likelihood of an irrational physical confrontation, the inclusion of a large Do’utian Monitor is highly recommended. Humans excel where strength is needed in confined places. And, where overhead intelligence and logistic agility are required, the Kleth can make a major contribution—but care should be taken to avoid endangering Kleth individually.
—Planet Monitor’s Handbook, Team Composition
. . . their mating bond is such that individuals become physiologically dependent on each other. A Kleth seldom survives the death of a mate, nor is their any record of one wanting to do so. Efforts to sustain life in these circumstances are always futile and should not be attempted.
—Planet Monitor’s Handbook, Medical Appendix
The Kleth aircraft met them just over the horizon from Lord Thet’s city, on the beach of an uninhabited island dominated by a huge granite crag that gave shelter from the circumpolar wind. After greetings, Team Leader Do Tor and his mate started unloading supplies.
Mary was exhausted, so Drin scraped a deep pit in the sand for her, gathered wood, and lit a fire. Then, despite her exhaustion, and still limping from her wound, she insisted on washing her clothes and body in the frigid polar water, and turned an amazing shade of blue before she got back to the fire.
“D-don’t worry,” she told him as she shook convulsively under a blanket in front of the fire, “It’s-s h-how we get our b-body heat b-back up.”
Do Tor and his mate stretched their wings to catch some fish for her, and jibbered with amusement as she threw away all the good parts and heated the remaining muscle almost to the point of decomposition on a flat stone she put by the fire. Drin looked forward to having a good long feed later that night, in his own manner, on his way back to Gri’il’s beach.
“Sorry late. Assumed you’d just leave Thet and wait for us,” the Klethan said in a guttural, sing-song English that was actually lower pitched than Mary’s, despite his being less than half her mass.
“We tried,” Mary laughed. “Things got in the way. We surface dwellers have certain problems about just flying away when things turn sour.”
“Don’t understand why primitivists had so much technology.”
“Lack of interest on our part. Ignorance of the Charter and evolutionary pressure on theirs,” Drin offered. “The best fighters end up in charge, and the best fighters are, more often than not, those with the best weapons. Also, if you can’t make it clever, make it big.” It would be a long while before he would forget the huge ram bearing down on him. “I doubt that Lord Thet or many of his people even understand why the Charter prohibits development in these areas; they’ve rebelled against anything resembling a scientific education.”
“For humans, there is an inherent contradiction between ‘back to nature’ and ‘no technology.’ ” Mary contributed, “because human nature is to make and use tools. So what happens is that the primitivists reinvent the wheel using primitive technology that, per capita, pollutes unmercifully and requires gobs of labor.” Mary picked up a stone and threw it out of sight. “So then you get leadership dominance games that the most ruthless win, with slave labor of one sort or another for the losers. That works well long enough for the glandular bullies to start assembling miniature empires, and then . . .” She shook her head. “Allowing this Lord Thet set-up was taking noninterference too far, in my view. But that’s up to the council. Anyway, we have our killers.”
“Maybe,” Drin demurred. “But I don’t think this is a one-species issue.” From a philosophical standpoint he certainly didn’t want it to be human versus Do’utian, but something more than that was bothering him. “I’m not sure we have the whole story. In defending his hunting, the human Jacob Lebbretzsky seemed to include the Do’utian primitivists in his defense.”
“Do’utians help get selves butchered?” Do Tor clucked. “Strange thing, I think.”
“If you think in groups, yes. But that isn’t the natural Do’utain way to think.” Drin moved his head slightly from side to side in mild negation. “I want to ask Gri’il some questions and learn more about this murdered beachmaster and his harem. I may have made some unfair assumptions about the last victim.”
“Name was Glodego’alah, by the way,” Do Tor added. “Left the north pole as a disillusioned student eight cubed great revolutions ago. Not happy as primitivist, either, but responsible. Took care of harem. Good being. We did our homework.” The Kleth held its hard translucent wings out in a gesture of pride.
“Oh yes,” his mate said, the first words she uttered, surprising Drin. Until now, Go Ton had been inert, folded up. One partner or the other might dominate, but they were always together. Divorce was unknown, as were widows or widowers. Go Ton’s contribution was unusually forward, for a subordinate Klethan. But Monitor couples were known to be more independent.
“Did you bring the Do’utian interface coronet?” Drin asked.
“Not so late, otherwise.” Do Tor rummaged in the pile of unloaded supplies and found a glasscloth package the size of a folded human tent. “Here.”
Drin placed it in his pouch. Its woven-in antennae picked up and decoded motor nene impulses—even those sent to absent peripheries. Now, not only could he ask questions of Gri’il; she would be able to answer.
There were also a tent and collapsible kayak for Mary. The tent fit nicely in the hollow he had dug, and she opened it up with its door to the fire. As it resumed its memorized shape, she turned to her fellow monitors.
“This,” she said, “is camping. It’s what most of us have in mind when we think of going back to nature, or living in a primitive situation. But, as you see, it’s not primitive at all. And it’s not social, we usually try to get away from other people when we do this. What’s happened back at Thet just hasn’t really registered with my people. I—”
“Mary’, why should it register with you any more than with the rest of us?” Drin interrupted. “You have no special responsibility for them just because they happen to be human. There is no need to apologize.”
“Oh yes, Go Ton agrees,” Do Tor’s mate spoke up. “We are one civilization on this world. Whole purpose of Planet Trimus. Eight-cubed years of lives meaningless if not. Eyes of Trimus we are. We should have noticed violations before dead bodies appear.”
“Any Do’utian can smell that place in currents an eighth of the way around the planet. We ignored it,” Drin said.
“Th-Thanks,” Mary said. “I just . . .” She shook her head and made sounds of human sadness, though Drin thought it was more in relief. He flicked out his tongue and wrapped his fingers around her hand, and she rewarded the gesture by squeezing him gently back, and baring her teeth in a big smile.
“We all go to the beach tomorrow, and gain more understanding,” Do Tor said. “Now rest.”
“You rest,” Drin answered reminding him that Do’utians didn’t sleep in the eternal days of a polar summer. “I need to eat, feed the harem, and keep my injuries in water until they heal more. I will see you there at the beach. Take care, Mary.”
She hugged his fingers to her, careless of her wrap, and his most sensitive organs were pressed into the alien heat and smell of her. He was overwhelmed for a moment, then she released him. “Yeah, you too,” she said.
He backed away from the fire carefully, to avoid upsetting anything. Clear, he turned. And as his body turned toward the water, his mind followed, thinking ahead to his duties. His cuts and bruises were beginning to hurt, true. But something in the back of his mind was pushing him, something perhaps as powerful as the instinctual desire to join with the harem that chose him as their provider and their protector. It did not make sense to him that humans—even as degenerate as Lord Thet and his gang—would or could suddenly start preying on Do’utians, even given the sort of general philosophical license primitivism in both species seemed to grant. Something less random and more evil was happening. Perhaps Gri’il could help him.
The Planetary Civilization must be permitted to evolve, and experiments must be encouraged, for only through change is knowledge expanded.
—The Compact and Charter of Planet Trimus, Article 5
Aurum stood high above Ember when Drin returned to the harem beach with his mouth full of fish, and the star had moved a dociradian west by the time he finished the simple duty of placing the fish into throats. Once done, he unpacked the neural interface cap and approached Gri’il.
Even now she hesitated, putting her nose to the beach. Despite everything that had happened, her distaste for this artificiality was evident. But then, apparently recognizing the necessity, she raised her head and came to him. He fitted the cap over her.
“It will take a while to calibrate itself. There will be a bit of a delay to start with, but you’ll get used to it. Now, just tell me your name, as if you were whole again. Repeat it until the computer in the cap gets it right.”
It produced an intelligible “Gri’illaboda” after about six tries, and she got used to it in a few more. Finally, she could speak through the device more or less naturally.
“OK,” Drin said. “I’m going to record this, so why don’t we start by having you say who you are?”
“I am Gri’illaboda, co-mate of Drinnil’ib.”
Great. Just great. “I am sorry, Gri’il. I am a planetary monitor, and not a primitivist. I care for you, yes—but more as a senior family member, not as a mate.”
“You replaced our beachmaster, mated with my co-mates.”
“It was not my choice. I did not seek you or them to mate.”
She was silent for a few heartbeats. He could hear the waves and the sea birds.
“Drinnil’ib, I was the daughter of Slora’analta and Broti’ilita. Did you know either of those?”
“The historian.”
“Who told the old tales of the free seas and made a romantic out of his daughter. I was bored with school. I met a free rover. He took me here, quickened my ovaries . . . then took my tongue.”
“Glodego’alah?”
“Never. Glodego’alah was a tourist who saw what had happened, fought the free rover for us, then took us here to be safe. But he paid for his charity in a way that happens all too often here.”
“Then I am sorry for what I thought about Glodego’alah. We are seeking the humans who killed him, and four others who were killed. Did you know any of them? Did they have families here?”
“Glodego’alah remarked once that harems change masters easily because of such human predation. Their ships come in the channels between the islands and the ice pack where beachmasters gather fish.”
Drin nodded. “I came close to being a victim myself on my way back from my initial investigation. It is easy enough for them—I suspected nothing until they shot at me. I would think someone down here would warn the humans not to do this.”
Gri’il huffed in derision. “The sea lords don’t interfere. They say the humans take the weak and the race gets stronger, and that the inbred softness of civilization is thus cleansed from our blood. But Glodego’alah was not soft.”
“No, I’m sure he wasn’t. Who are these ‘sea lords’ ?”
“They are the free rovers, the ones who take from both poles what they want. They live like beachmasters at the south pole, then swim north and have all the luxuries of civilization. They are . . . the human word is hypocrites.”
“And if they don’t come back?”
“A harem doesn’t stay unmastered long here. A sea lord shows up soon enough to claim a missing master’s family. They seem to know, somehow, when one isn’t coming back.”
Her passiveness disturbed him, but perhaps it was simply adjustment. Early Do’utian history wasn’t any prettier than early human history. Less so, in some respects. And the Kleth, of course, were cannibals well into their spacefaring days. Drin shuddered, wondering at his fascination with such things. But he had to ask; it might be important.
“Gri’il, how was your tongue to be taken?” Did she just submit to such an amputation?
“The sea lord who ran off my first mate, said it was traditional. He demanded this after the first mating, then he said he would not take my egg unless I submitted. Also . . . I can’t explain. I sometimes feel a need to surrender myself, to let the tides of providence have their way with my flesh. At any rate, I did not resist. In my state at the time, he was God.”
Submit to mutilation, or die. Such was her natural paradise. What polluting monster would . . .
“His name?”
“Gota’lannshk.” The same ruffian he encountered at Cragen’s? Drin hissed in disgust.
“You know of him?”
“We met. Look, Gri’il, will you come back to the North with me? For treatment.”
“We are bound to you. I need to stay with you, to submit to you. And I have the eggs, remember? Or are you so civilized that that doesn’t matter?”
The eggs probably shouldn’t be hatched, Drin thought. Two fathers. No tests. No family. No birth allocation.
“Gri’il, compulsions are subject to medical intervention. My duty is to try to right the wrongs done so far, if I can, and prevent others from being done. Can you get the others to come?” And how many more were there out in those islands. Should they save them all? By force if needed?
“If it is clear that we are leaving, they will come, for whatever good it will do them.”
“We’ll regenerate their tongues, teach them to speak, send them to school.”
“They were hatched out here. Their minds were untrained during the crucial years.”
Truly feral. He feared as much. “Still, we have to try. We can find a deserted northern island for your co-mates, and arrange for them to be watched. But what about you? Now that this has happened, can’t you see your way back to—”
“To what? We live with the humans and the Kleth on this planet at the expense of ceasing to live like Do’utians, at the expense of always pulling against our own inner nature. And the stars are too far apart for it to matter. I showed my tail to all of that. Say what you want. I lived. I swam in the wild currents. I did it on the beach. You want me to go back to that northern emotional straitjacket and listen to all those proper titters and I told you so’s? I’d rather die!”
And her present state was not a humiliation? But her age-old argument, Drin thought, was unanswerable. The civilization of Trimus was for those who thought it mattered.
“We don’t want to tell you how to live. I’m sure your privacy would be respected, and protected.”
“Like in a zoo! Drinnil’ib, you rescued us, fed us. Don’t you want us? Don’t you feel the need to own and protect us? Or in the name of your Compact have you let the humans reengineer your sex?”
Drin groaned. He wanted her enough, but he did not want to want her. At least not as she was now. The whine of fans reached him before he could find a suitable way to explain that. Mary! Relief flowed through him. The aircraft settled on its fans, the hatch popped, and Drin walked over to greet his partner, leaving Gri’il with her beak in the gravel.
But Mary was nowhere in sight. “Mary?” he called, worried.
Do Tor opened the canopy, jibbered to his machine, and the cargo door popped open. Of course, Drin realized. There was no room in the Kleth cockpit for a human, and indeed, it took Mary a while to unfold herself from the cramped space.
“I’m here, Drin.”
“It’s good to see you!” He explained about the sea lords. “So I think your human hunters have Do’utian accomplices, at least in principle. But things still don’t swim well in my mind.”
“The strongest, fastest, or most clever survive. I can see that, I guess. You think the Sea Lords were using Lord Thet to cull their herd, so to speak?”
“That seems to fit.”
“Well, Lord Thet’s gang of wannabe barbarians seems to be only too happy to help. Your people are the most challenging hunt in the ocean, they probably think.”
“Brings up the question of whether we have right to interfere,” Do Tor observed.
“To save lives?” Drin protested. “Of course we do.”
Mary sighed and gestured to the sky. “Drin, there are now many beings out there who can trace their origins to our home worlds, but who have engineered so much into themselves that they look on us as primitivists. They could make a problem like Lord Thet vanish in an instant with no loss of life—but would we want that?”
“Those who didn’t get killed might appreciate it.”
Mary shook her head. “The parts of our natures that lead to this mess could easily be changed, but then what would we be? Death, even random death, may have a justifiable role in society that transcends individual needs. Perhaps, to keep our identity, we need to learn to accept that.”
“I think,” Drin asserted, perhaps a little more loudly than necessary, “that such issues should be debated by the planetary council and that our job is to not let anyone else get killed until they do and decide . . . whatever. Now, I have four physically mutilated and three of them intellectually mutilated—Do’utian women to bring back to where they can be properly protected and cared for. Let’s do that and sort the rest out later.”
“Agreed,” Do Tor clucked. Mary nodded quietly.
“Gri’il,” Drin said, “Is there any way the others can be told of how long a journey this will be?”
“They will follow you if I do,” she said, coldly, it seemed. “But the hunters will be watching.”
“And the planet will be watching them!” Drin proclaimed. “They won’t dare do anything.”
“I will ride with you,” Mary said. “In full uniform. At least they’ll know what they’re playing with.”
Drin didn’t remind her of how persuasive her uniform and submarine were at Thet harbor.
“We’ll fly cover with loud voices and guns,” Do Tor said, spreading his wings. “Aircraft can fly itself, so that makes three above.”
