King Kobold revived-Warlock-2.5 (13 page)

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your teacher? For one thing, the way you talk tells me he wasn’t from a medieval culture.”

Yorick frowned. “How’d you guess? I mean, I know they didn’t exactly send me to prep school, but…”

“Oh, really! I would’ve thought they’d have enrolled you in Groton first thing!”

Yorick shook his head firmly. “Couldn’t pass the entrance exam. We Nean-derthals don’t handle symbols too well. No prefrontal lobes, you know.”

Rod stared.

Yorick frowned back at him, puzzled. Then his face cleared into a sickly grin. “Oh. I know. I’ll bet you’re wondering, if I can’t handle symbols, how come I can talk. Right?”

“Something of the sort did cross my mind. Of course, I do notice that your mates have something of a language of their own.”

“Their very own; you won’t find any other Neanderthal tribe that uses it.”

“I wasn’t really planning to look.”

Yorick ignored the interruption. “These refugees come from so many differ-ent nations that we had to work out a lingua franca. It’s richer than any of the parent languages, of course—but it’s still got a very limited vocabulary. No Ne-anderthal language gets very far past ‘Me hungry. That food—go kill.’ ”

“This, I can believe. So how were you able to learn English?”

“Same way a parrot does,” Yorick explained. “I memorize all the cues and the responses that follow them. For example, if you say, ‘Hello,’ that’s my cue to say ‘Hello’ back; and if you say, ‘How are you?’

that’s my cue to say, ‘Fine. How’re you?’ without even thinking about it.”

“That’s not exactly exclusive to Neanderthals,” Rod pointed out. “But the talking you’ve been doing here is a little more complicated.”

“Yeah, well, that comes from mental cues.” Yorick tapped his own skull. “The concept nudges me from inside, see, and that’s like a cue, and the words to ex-press that concept jump out of memory in response to that cue.”

“But that’s pretty much what happens when we talk, too.”

“Yeah, but you know what the words mean when you say ‘em. Me, I’m just reciting. I don’t really understand what I’m saying.”

“Well, I know a lot of people who…”

“But they could, if they’d stop and think about it.”

“You don’t know these people,” Rod said with an astringent smile. “But I get your point. Believing it is another matter. You’re trying to tell me that you don’t understand the words you’re saying to me right now—even if you stop to think about each word separately.”

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Yorick nodded. “Now you’re beginning to understand. Most of them are just noises. I have to take it on faith that it means what I want it to mean.”

“Sounds pretty risky.”

“Oh, not too much—I can understand the gist of it. But most of it’s just stimu-lus-response, like a seeing-eye parrot saying ‘Walk’ when he sees a green light.”

“This is a pretty complicated explanation you’ve just been feeding me,” Rod pointed out.

“Yeah, but it’s all memorized, like playing back a recording.” Yorick spread his hands. “I don’t really follow it myself.”

“But your native language…”

“Is a few thousand sound effects. Not even very musical, though—musical scales are basically prefrontal, too. Manipulating pitches is like manipulating numbers. I love-hearing music, though. To me, even ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ is a miracle.”

Tuan butted in, frowning. “Doth he say that he is a blinking idiot?”

“Hey, no, now!” Yorick held up a hand, shaking his head indignantly. “Don’t sell us short. We’re smart, you know—same size brain as you’ve got. We just can’t talk about it, that’s all—or add and subtract it either, for that matter. We can only communicate concrete things—you know—food, water, stone, fire, sex—things you can see and touch. It’s just abstractions that we can’t talk about; they require symbols. But the intelligence is there. We’re the ones who learned how to use fire—and how to chip flint into weapons. Not very good tools, maybe—but we made the big breakthrough.”

Rod nodded. “Yeah, Tuan, don’t underestimate that. We think we’re smart because we invented the nuclea—uh…” Rod remembered that he wasn’t sup-posed to let the Gramaryans know about advanced technology. It might disrupt their entire culture. He opted for their version of the weapon that endangered civilization. “The crossbow. But taming fire was just as hard to figure out.”

“Good man.” Yorick nodded approvingly. “You sapiens have been able to build such a complicated civilization because you had a good foundation under you before you even existed; you inherited it when you evolved. But we’re the ones who built the basement.”

“Neanderthals had the intelligence,” Rod explained. “They just couldn’t ma-nipulate symbols—and there’s just so far you can go without ‘em.”

Yorick nodded. “Analytical reasoning just isn’t our strong suit. We’re great on hunches, though—and we’ve got great memories.”

“You’d have to, to remember all these standard responses that you don’t un-derstand.”

Yorick nodded. “I can remember damn near anything that ever happened to me.”

“How about who taught you English?”

“Oh, sure! That’s…” Then Yorick gelled, staring. After a minute, he tried the sickly grin again. “I, uh, didn’t want to get to that, uh, quite so soon.”

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“Yes, but we did.” Rod smiled sweetly. “Who did teach you?”

“Same guy who gave me my name,” Yorick said hopefully.

“So he had a little education—and definitely wasn’t from a medieval culture.”

Yorick frowned. “How’d you make so much out of just one fact?”

“I manipulated a symbol. What’s his name?”

“The Eagle,” Yorick sighed. “We call him that ‘cause he looks like one.”

“What? He’s got feathers?” Rod had a sudden vision of an avian alien, direct-ing a secondhand conquest of a Terran planet.

“No, no! He’s human, all right. He might deny it—but he is. Just got a nose like a beak, always looks a little angry, doesn’t have much hair—you know. He taught us how to farm.”

“Yeah.” Rod frowned. “Neanderthals never got beyond a hunting-and-gathering culture, did you?”

“Not on our own, no. But this particular bunch of Neanderthals never would’ve gotten together on their own anyway. The Eagle gathered us up, one at a time, from all over Europe and Asia.”

Rod frowned. “Odd way to do it. Why didn’t he just take a tribe that was al-ready together?”

“Because he didn’t want a tribe, milord. He wanted to save a bunch of inno-cent victims.”

“Victims?” Rod frowned. “Who was picking on you?”

“Everybody.” Yorick spread his arms. “The Flatfaces, for openers—like you, only bigger. They chipped flint into tools, same as we do—only they’re a lot bet-ter at it.”

“The Cro-Magnons,” Rod said slowly. “Are your people the last Neander-thals?”

“Oh, nowhere near! That was our problem, in fact—all those other Neander-thals. They’d’ve rather’d kill us than look at us.”

Suddenly, Rod could place Yorick—he was paranoid. “I thought it worked the other way around.”

“What—that we’d as soon kill them as look at them?”

“No—that you’d kill them when you looked at them.”

Yorick looked uncomfortable. “Well, yes, the Evil-Eye thing—that was the problem. I mean, you try to cover it up as best you can; you try to hide it—but sooner or later somebody’s gonna haul off and try and whack you with a club.”

“Oh, come on! It wasn’t inevitable, was it?”

“Haven’t lived with Neanderthals, have you?”

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“Oh.” Rod cocked his head. “Not very civilized, were you?”

“We lived like cavemen,” Yorick confirmed.

“Oh. Right.” Rod glanced away, embarrassed. “Sorry—I forgot.”

“Great.” Yorick grinned. “That’s a compliment.”

“I suppose it is,” Rod said slowly. “But how come your quarrels had to turn violent?”

Yorick shrugged. “What can I tell you? No lawyers. Whatever the reason, we do tend to clobber—and you can’t help yourself then; you have to freeze him in his tracks.”

“Purely in self-defense, of course.”

“Oh yeah, purely! Most of us had sense enough not to hit back at someone who was frozen—and the ones who didn’t, couldn’t; it takes some real concen-tration to keep a man frozen. There just ain’t anything left over to hit with.”

“Well, maybe.” Rod had his doubts. “But why would he want to kill you, when you hadn’t hurt him?”

“That made it worse,” Yorick sighed. “I mean, if I put the freeze on you, you’re gonna feel bad enough…”

The clanking and rustling behind Rod told him that his soldiers had come to the ready. Beside him Tuan murmured, “ ‘Ware, beastman!”

Yorick plowed on, unmindful of them. “But if I don’t clobber you, you’re gonna read it as contempt, and hate me worse. Still, it wasn’t the person who got frozen who was the problem—it was the spectators.”

“What’d you do—sell tickets?”

Yorick’s mouth tightened with exasperation. “You know how hard it is to be alone in these small tribes?”

“Yeah… I suppose that would be a problem.”

“Problem, hell! It was murder! Who wants you around if you can do that to them? And there’s one way to make sure you won’t be around. No, we’d have to get out of the village on our own first. Usually had a lot of help…”

“It’s a wonder any of you survived.” Then something clicked in Rod’s mind. “But you would, wouldn’t you? If anyone got too close, you could freeze him.”

“Long enough to get away, yes. But what do you do when you’ve gotten away?”

“Survive.” Rod stared off into the sky, imagining what it would be like. “Kind of lonely…”

Yorick snorted. “Never tried to make it on your own in a wilderness, have you? Loneliness is the least of it. A rabbit a day keeps starvation away—but a sa-bertooth has the same notion about you. Not to
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mention dire wolves or cave bears.”

Rod nodded thoughtfully. “I can see why you’d want to form a new tribe.”

“With what?” Yorick scoffed. “We weren’t exactly over-populated, you know. It was a long way between tribes—and not very many Evil-Eye espers in any one of ‘em. You might have one in a hundred square miles—and do you know how long a hundred miles is, on foot in rough country?”

“About two weeks.” But Rod was really thinking about Yorick’s choice of word—he’d said “esper,”

not “witch” or “monster.”

“This is where your ‘Eagle’ came in?”

Yorick nodded. “Just in time, too. Picked us up one by one and brought us to this nice little mountain valley he’d picked out. Nice V high up, plenty of rain, nice ‘n’ cool all year ‘round…”

“Very cool in winter—I should think.”

“You should, ‘cause it wasn’t. Pretty far south, I suppose—’cause it never got more than brisk.

‘Course, there wasn’t enough game for the whole four thousand of us.”

“Four thousand? A hundred miles or more apart? What’d he do—spend a lifetime finding you all?”

Yorick started to answer, then caught himself and said very carefully, “He knew how to travel fast.”

“Very fast, I should think—at least a mile a minute.” Rod had a vision of a ground-effect car trying to climb a forty-five-degree slope. “And how did he get you up to that mountain valley? Wings?”

“Something like that,” Yorick confessed. “And it wasn’t all that big a valley. He taught us how to use bows and arrows, and we had a whee of a time hunt-ing—but the Eagle knew that could only last just so long, so he got us busy on planting. And, just about the time game was getting scarce, our first maize crop was getting ready to harvest.”

“Maize?” Rod gawked. “Where the hell’d he get that?”

“Oh, it wasn’t what you think of as maize,” Yorick said quickly. “Little bitty ears, only about four inches long.”

“In 50,000 B.C. maize was just a thickheaded kind of grass,” Rod grated, “like some parties I could mention. And it only grew in the New World. Neanderthals only grew in the Old.”

“Who says?” Yorick snorted. “Just because we weren’t obliging enough to go around leaving fossils doesn’t mean we weren’t there.”

“It doesn’t mean you were, either,” Rod said, tight-lipped, “and you’ve got a very neat way of not answering the question you’re asked.”

“Yeah, don’t I?” Yorick grinned. “It takes practice, let me tell you.”

“Do,” Rod invited. “Tell me more about this ‘Eagle’ of yours. Just where did he come from, anyway?”

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“Heaven sent him in answer to our prayers,” Yorick said piously. “Only we didn’t just call him ‘Eagle’

anymore—we called him the ‘Maize King.’ That way, we could stay cooped up in our little mountain valley and not bother anybody.”

“A laudable ideal. What happened?”

“A bunch of Flatfaces bumped into us,” Yorick sighed. “Pure idiot chance. They came up to the mountains to find straight fir trees for shafts, and blundered into our valley. And, being Flatfaces, they couldn’t leave without trying a little looting and pillaging.”

“Neanderthals never do, of course.”

Yorick shook his head. “Why bother? But they just had to try it—and most of ‘em escaped, too. Which was worse—because they came back with a whole horde behind ‘em.”

Rod was still thinking about the “most.”

“You’re not going to try to tell me your people were peaceful!”

“Were,” Yorick agreed. “Definitely ‘were.’ I mean, with five hundred scream-ing Flatfaces charging down on us, even the most pacifistic suddenly saw a lot of advantages in self-defense. And the Eagle had taught us how to use bows, but the Flatfaces hadn’t figured out how to make them yet; so we mostly survived.”

Again, “most.”

“But the Eagle decided he hadn’t hidden you well enough?”