Authors: Craig Strete
For a long time
after that, he had had dreams about the creatures, about them surprising him one night as he
slept. Falling upon him as he slept in the night, wrapping his face up in their tendrils,
covering his body in the dark with the slick, ropey nerve endings, tightening, suffocating him
with their combined weight, choking him with their thick, yellow bodily excretions, flaying his
body with the razor-sharp poison spines.
The first stream of
oxidized nerve tissue began trickling down the narrow trench in the floor of the enclosure. It
was like a semithick soup, discolored, running slowly. Gantry released the handle on the nozzle
and the hose began sucking in air. Satisfied that his work was finished, he left the corral and
went to the big storage tanks behind the corral. The tanks were partially full of liquid
nitrogen, a perfect refrigerant for the nerve tissue that would soon be flowing
into the tanks. He checked the gauges in the
tanks. They were satisfactory.
The screaming began
and Gantry knew it was time to leave. The screaming was not really unpleasant. It was rather
melodious, a sort of birdlike trill as tie air sacs began disintegrating but still he knew it for
what it was, the death rattle of the creatures and he was in no mood to listen to that. He moved
away from the cabin, heading down the hill toward the sulphur water spring.
A family of Riyall
was there before him. The Riyall were the native race of Kingane—strange, aloof peoples, divided
into many different tribes. There were very few of them left. Diseases, unknown to Kingane before
the coming of Earth people, had taken whole groups of them. And then there had been fighting when
many of the more highly civilized of the wild Riyalls had put up a fight against the
encroachments of their land. The first year Gantry had set down on Kingane he'd signed up in the
militia, had engaged in several skirmishes with the revolting Riyall bands, and had personally
killed several of them. He neither liked nor disliked them. They were humanoid, so genetically
close to humans, that it only required minor genetic surgery to make intermarriage possible. A
thing that some of the settlers had been doing, as the loneliness of a world without women of
their own kind weighed heavily upon them. It was not until his third year, that the danger was
really over. The last of the big Riyall bands had been exterminated in his third year, leaving
him free to spend all his time raising stefel dogs and building a small empire on the new world.
Even now, there were occasional incidents, cases where travelers had been found dead, horribly
disfigured by the Riyalls.
It was, therefore,
with some caution that he advanced toward the spring. He had left the house without his hand
weapons. He had long since stopped wearing a gun, the long years of peace seemingly canceling the
need for it.
They were aware of
his coming, had been a minute before he was aware that they were even there. It was a big family
group, one of the largest he'd seen in the last year or so. There were about thirty adults, a
dozen or so young children, and a good-sized group of teenaged youngsters. The group moved away
from the water hole as he approached, falling silently back as he reached the spring.
Gantry raised his
hand and drew one finger across his bared teeth. It was the sign that meant he came in peace. He
moved down by the spring. They stared at him silently, expressionlessly as he cupped his hands in
the water and drank his fill from the sulphurous water.
Suddenly, as if
they had all reached the same decision, they moved back toward the water, careful to maintain a
guarded distance between themselves and Gantry. Gantry sat back on his heels and watched them
drinking, filling their lizard-bladder containers with water from the spring. They were
uninhibited peoples, both sexes stripping their animal-hide clothes off to slide into the water
of the spring. Having decided to ignore him, the young ones were already playing and splashing in
the water.
Gantry watched
them, watched as even the old ones got caught up in a water-splashing fight. And he envied them.
They were simple people, always moving, rather childlike in their ways. The sight of a
gray-haired old woman, naked as the day of her birth, splashing water like a five-year-old child,
filled him with a kind of vicarious pleasure and, at the same time, a feeling that he was being
left out.
His eyes appraised
them. They were short, wiry people, about five foot eight on the average. They had white skin
running to a very dark reddish-yellow. There seemed to be a great deal of variety from one group
to the next. Some groups, like the one before him, had orange hair mixed with black. A strange
coloration he found not at all displeasing. Their faces were basically human with the exception
that facial expressions were not possible. Their faces were flat-planed. They could neither smile
nor frown, lacking the facial muscles for either task. Neither could they close their eyelids
nor dilate their eyes. Their eyes were the most disturbing feature. They had twin pupils, only
one of which functioned in the day, while both functioned in the dark. They had a way of staring,
enhanced by their lack of facial expressions and their lidless eyes, that was
unnerving.
They dressed
plainly, wearing cured animal hides, mostly that of the snowfur lizards that lived in the
mountain regions, although, occasionally, one would have a shirt made of darbyo skin, ornately
beaded with darbyo bones. Their only weakness seemed to be for shiny metal which they pounded
into bracelets, items highly prized by the Riyall as having magic properties that would aid the
wearer.
Then, too, they had
a fondness for alcohol, a fondness that led them to great misfortune since the Riyall did not
have the proper enzymes to ingest alcohol. A small shot of whiskey was enough to make the
strongest of their number drunk. For one of them to drink half a bottle would be fatal, a thing
that the early colonists soon discovered and used to great effect against the natives in the
early stages of the war.
Gantry's eyes were
attracted to a young girl standing beside the spring. She was beautiful even by earth standards.
Her skin was almost white, with a deeper hue of red-yellow. Her body was sleek, with almost a
golden quality in the Kin-gane sun. She shook her body, luxuriously, unself-con-sciously, casting
off a fine spray of water from the tawny orange-black mane of hair that hung well past her
shoulders. And looking at her, the source of his restlessness became clear to him.
As self-sufficient
as he prided himself on being, he could not quell the feelings that come to a lonely man, to a
man who looks in the mirror one morning, realizing somewhere deep inside, that he doesn't want to
grow old alone.
In his heart,
watching her move along the edge of the spring, he felt the meaning of the word freedom slipping
away. He felt things stirring within him he had long since thought dead, buried. His pride had
cut him off from family, from settling down, but now he felt a stealing tide of emotion slipping
over his being and, in that instant, he knew he was lost.
He rose slowly and
approached an old man who had not entered the water. He was the leader, an old man with one eye
gone, a thick strip of lizard hide wrapped around his head covering the old wound.
"Do you speak
English?" asked Gantry.
The old man,
watching the young ones at their play, did not turn to look at him. He grunted once,
affirmatively.
Gantry stared at
the young girl. She was unmarried. The married Riyall woman wore a leather strip dyed blue around
one ankle. Her ankles were bare. Gantry figured her to be somewhere around sixteen or seventeen.
He kept his eyes on her, the words he knew he would speak damming up in his throat in a tumbled
stream.
The old man turned
to look at him, fixing the man with his expressionless Riyall stare.
And in that moment,
as Gantry turned to look at him, turned and looked, he was almost able to stop himself. He
remembered the times he had sworn to the buyers who came to buy his stefel harvest, sworn to them
that he'd never touch a Riyall woman. Call it racial prejudice, or simply racial fear, he'd
sworn he'd never degrade himself with a Riyall woman. He'd always told himself the colony company
would get white women moved in some day, always told himself he could wait until then to relieve
biological back pressure. He was about to make a liar out of himself.
Five years he'd
waited, five years while the colony company had promised women were coming. They were a long
time coming and there were a lot of men, men like Droble
who lived fifty miles from Gantry, Droble with two Riyall women, who
couldn't wait.
"I want her," said
Gantry, the words finally coming out.
"She-daughter-oldest-of mine," said the old man, in broken English.
"How much?" asked
Gantry, committed to it now.
Not knowing the
word, the old one pointed at Gantry's chest. "Bkaksil" said the old man and he turned his head
and motioned at the girl. She came up to his side and he said several words to her in his own
language. She took the news calmly, standing silently by the old man, gazing at Gantry with that
dead, expressionless Riyall look on her face.
Gantry did not
understand.
"How much?"
repeated Gantry and he tried to indicate by gestures that he wanted her.
The old man nodded
and touched his own chest. He fingered his snowfur lizard shirt and pointed at Gantry's
chest.
"That," said the
old man and he made smoothing motions along his shoulders and arms.
"The shirt?" asked
Gantry, fingering the heavy work shirt. He made a gesture as if taking it off and offering it to
him.
The old man nodded
and pushed her toward him. She walked toward him and stood beside him, turning to face her
father.
Gantry pulled the
shirt off over his head and handed it over. The old man took it, folded it several times, laid it
upon the ground, arranging it carefully and then sat down on it. He then turned away from them,
the matter dismissed from his mind.
Gantry stood there
for a little while, the enormity of what he had just done finally sinking in. He turned to look
at the young Riyall girl beside him. She did not seem upset or nervous. It seemed to be of little
importance to her, taking the fact of her having to go with him as a matter over which she had
neither control nor an opinion.
Gantry turned and
began walking away, the Riyall girl moving along behind him, following five paces behind as was
customary in her culture. The walk back to the cabin seemed to last an eternity to Gantry who
seemed to be in a kind of shock, a kind of irrational fear. He had no idea what to expect from
her. No idea then, but he soon found out.
She was more than
he had ever expected. At first, he told himself it was sex that had prompted him to buy her, that
he was not lonely, but even that lie fell away. He was lonely, and she filled that void. She
wasn't human. He could never quite think of her that way, never get involved with her he told
himself, but there were times when the difference seemed small, insignificant.
Although she seemed
to show no emotions of her own, she was quick to perceive his. She seemed in some strange way
related to the stefel dogs, having that kind of sensitivity, a turning outward with little
directed at herself. She seemed to accept things passively—her personality suited to fit him and
not her. She seemed to honor him and respect him in ways he himself could not quite understand.
Her body seemed to exist to please him, her hands so soft and yielding in his, at times playful,
coy almost when she sensed he needed some kind of resistance, when she sensed he needed something
to oppose him.
But she had a will
of her own in matters that did not directly affect him. He had discovered with a kind of shock
that the trade, that the ceremony of giving a shirt for her was as binding as any marriage
ceremony on any of the planets. And one day, why he never knew, after six months of their being
together, after six months of sharing the same bed, he loaded her in the all-terrain vehicle and
took her the 260 miles to the nearest hospital, and there, he had her placed in surgery so that
she might have his children. What
drove
him to that, he could never quite say. It was not something he was sure he wanted for himself. In
fact, the idea filled him with a kind of quiet terror. As if a child would be proof of his crime,
a crime that was no crime on Kingane, but an act that still disturbed his spirit, that troubled
his sleep as she lay beside him.
In a way, he
supposed, in some sort of meaningfully twisted way, he was doing it for her, as if he was
fulfilling some sort of obligation to her.
He remembered how
she had touched him as the doctors wheeled her away to surgery and he had been reminded of a dog
that one sends to a vet to have put to sleep. In that blank stare of hers, so guileless, so
direct, he saw the pet dog, unsuspecting, trusting perfectly in your love even up until that
moment when the needle breaks the skin and the long sleep begins.
In spite of his
toughness he found tears in his eyes. The wrongness of his actions sat very heavily upon him, and
deep inside, trapped within as deeply as he was trapped without, he knew he had as much power to
stop it as he had to stop the clouds overhead.