Unearthly Neighbors (11 page)

Charlie certainly wasn’t very impressive physically. He was a dumpy, sloppy man who was losing his nothing-colored hair; if he had ever glanced into the mirror, which was highly unlikely, he would have seen what looked disturbingly like a bulldog’s face perched atop a penguin’s rotund body. Charlie lacked all of the conventional virtues: he dressed badly, changed his clothes all too infrequently, had little visible charm, and didn’t bother to cultivate the civilized buzz of small-talk which serves to cushion our dealings with our fellow seasick passengers on the voyage of life. Nonetheless, Charlie had something, something that was quite rare. Watching him at work, Monte realized that the man had a certain dignity, a certain integrity that had all but vanished from the contemporary scene. The very words
dignity
and
integrity
were slightly suspect these days; like so many others, they had been corrupted by the politicians and the tri-di dramatists. It was a surprising thing to find such a man and to know him—it was something like finding a worm that could do algebra. Now that the chips were down, Monte found that he could turn to Charlie Jenike in a way that he never could with a man like Don King, or even with Tom Stein.

Charlie finally sensed his presence and turned around, his eyebrows lifted questioningly.

“I’ve been talking to Bill York. He wants to take the ship back to Earth.”

“That figures. Will he do it?”

“Unless I can talk him out of it. I’d like to kick it around with you a little, if you don’t mind.”

The linguist fumbled for a cigarette and lit it. “I’ll try to fit you into my list of appointments. Shoot.” Monte filled his pipe and sat down on a hard, straight-backed chair. The whisper of the air vents seemed very loud to him. It was odd that the noise didn’t make Charlie’s work more difficult than it was. He wondered suddenly why Charlie kept on working as he did. To keep himself from thinking about Helen? Work was a kind of opiate, but that was a feeble explanation. For that matter, Monte didn’t know what it was that kept himself working. He smiled a little. He didn’t understand Charlie, he didn’t understand himself. How could he possibly hope to understand the natives of the Sirius Nine?

“How much did you get from Larst?”

“Plenty.”

“Enough to talk with them?”

“I think so. I already had a lot of stuff, and the old buzzard gave me enough of a key so that I can work out most of it. It’s a curious language—very weak in active verbs. But I can speak it now, after a fashion.”

Monte felt a wave of relief. That was one bluff he had pulled with York that had panned out. They had the words, they had a bridge. “What the devil do they call Sirius Nine?”

“That’s a tough one. They think of the world in a number of different ways, some of them pretty subjective. They do have a word, though—
Walonka.
It seems to mean a totality of some sort. It means the world, their universe, and it has an idea of unity, of interconnections. It’s the closest I can get. They don’t quite think in our terms. You know, of course, that it’s more than just a matter of finding different labels for the same thing—you have to dig up the conceptual apparatus that they work with. They call themselves
Merdosi,
the People. And they call those damned wolf-things by a very similar term:
Merdosini.
A rough translation would be something like ‘Hunters for the People.’ Interesting, huh?”

“It makes sense. Did you get anything else suggestive?”

“I got one thing. One of the words that Larst applied to himself has a literal meaning of man-who-is-old-enough-to-stay-in-the-village-all-year-round. What do you make of that?”

Monte frowned. “It must mean that the younger men
don’t
stay in the village all the time. And that means—”

“Yeah. When you noticed that none of the younger men were present, you were dead right. But it didn’t necessarily mean that we thought it meant—that they were out on a war party of some sort. The attack on our camp might not have been hooked up with their absence at all. Those guys are out in the woods most of the time—maybe they all live in trees like the man we tried to contact.”

“But they must come into the village
sometimes.”

“
Obviously. There are kids running around. That would indicate at least occasional proximity.”

“You think they have a regular mating season, something like that?”

“I wouldn’t know. It’s a possibility. But it seems a little far-fetched for such an advanced form of life.”

“It wouldn’t have to be strictly biological, though. Human beings do funny things sometimes. It might be a situation where there is some slight biological basis—females more receptive at certain times of the year—and then the whole business has gotten tangled up with a mess of cultural taboos. How does that strike you?” Charlie ground out his cigarette. “Well, it might explain a lot of things. The attack on the camp, for one.” Monte got to his feet, excited now. “By God, that’s it! How could we have been so stupid? And to think that I
planned
it that way—”

“You didn’t know.”

“But I did the worst possible thing! I set up our camp in a clearing, where they could watch us. I wanted them to see what we were like. And we had our women with us, all the time. We
flaunted
them. And then we went to the village with their women—”

“You couldn’t have known.”

Monte sat down again wearily. “Me, the great anthropologist! Any fool bonehead could have done better. I
should
have known—what was that guy doing in the tree by himself in the first place? We landed and the very first thing we did was to break the strongest taboo in their culture! It was just like they had landed in Chicago or somewhere and had promptly started to mate in the streets. My God!”

“It’s something to think about. But that isn’t the whole answer.”

“No, but it’s a lead! They don’t seem quite so unfathomable now. Charlie, I
can
crack that culture! I know I can.”

Charlie lit another cigarette. “You’re going back there.” He said it as a simple statement of fact, not as a question.

“Yes. I’ve got to give York a royal frosted snow-job to do it, but I’m going back.”

“Don won’t go. York won’t let Tom and Janice out of this ship again.”

“I don’t give a damn. I’m going alone.”

“You can forget that. Include me in. I’m going with you.”

Monte looked at him. “You don’t have to go, Charlie.”

“Don’t I?”

“You know what the odds are. I don’t think we’ll ever come back, to tell you the truth.”

“So? Who wants to come back? What for?”

Monte sighed. He had no answer for that one.

“We’re both crazy. But we’ve got to come up with a plan for Bill York. An eminently
sane
plan.”

“Yeah, sure. Sane.”

“Let’s hit it. Got any ideas?”

Charlie smiled, relaxing a little. “I’ve got a few. I was afraid you were going to try to sneak off and leave me here. I was working on a small snow-job of my own.” Monte pulled his chair up to the table and the two men put their heads together.

An hour or so later, a passing crewman was astonished to hear gales of laughter behind the closed door of Charlie Jenike’s linguistics lab.

Extract from the Notebook of Monte Stewart:

I’ve lost track of time.

Sure, I know what “day” it is and all that. It’s easy to look at the ship’s calendar. But it doesn’t mean anything to me. (Funny to think of how much trouble a people like the Maya went to in order to invent a calendar more accurate than our own. And even their calendar was forgotten in time; it got to the point where it didn’t matter. I wonder why? I wonder what really happened?)

It seems to me that Louise died only yesterday. That is the only past I know, the only past I have. There is a time when the pain is too much to bear. There is a time when the pain goes away—or so people tell me. Those are the two dates on my calendar.

I find it almost impossible to work on my official notebook. In this one, the one for myself, I can think. A man can’t think in terms of large abstractions like the United Nations and the First Contact with an Alien Culture. It gets to be a personal thing, a personal fight. There comes a time when a man must get up on his own hind legs and admit the truth. I’m doing it for me, for Monte Stewart. I’m doing it because I am what I am.

(And what am I? Cut it out, boy! You’re not ready for the giggle academy yet!)

Well, a long time ago I asked myself some questions about the people of Sirius Nine. Or should I say questions about the Merdosi of Walonka? That is progress of a sort. And I think I’ve got some answers now; the questions must have been good ones. And, as usual, I’ve got some more questions.

But what do I know?

I know what that man was doing in the forest by himself. The Merdosi have a mating season of some sort. The men live out in the forest most of the time, and only come into the cave village with the gals at certain times of the year. This may be biological, or cultural, or—more probably—both. Question: What in blazes do the men
do
out there in those hollow trees? Question: How do the women and kids get by on their own in the village?

The Merdosi are afraid of us, and I still don’t know why. Sure, we broke a powerful taboo by living with our women at the wrong time of the year—but that doesn’t explain everything. They attack us because they are afraid of us; I’m certain of that. At other times they try to ignore us. It is as though we are a threat to them simply by being here. Why?

Obviously, there is a very close relationship between the people and the wolf-things—between the Merdosi and the Merdosini. The Merdosini are the Hunters for the People. The two life-forms are interdependent. Can we call this symbiosis? Regardless of the name we tag it with, we have a problem. It’s easy to see what the wolf-things do for the natives—they do their hunting for them, and their fighting as well. But what do the natives do for the wolf-things? What do the Merdosini get out of the deal? It must be a very old pattern, but how did it start? How do the natives control those animals? On Earth, the dog probably domesticated itself—hung around the fire for scraps of food and the like. But that won’t work here, because the natives seem to
get
their food—or some of it—from the Merdosini. What’s the answer? (And we’ve got the same puzzle with those tarsier-like critters I saw in the village. Are they just pets, or something else?)

I’m convinced that the key to this whole thing is somehow mixed up with the fact that these people have no tools. We are so used to evaluating people in terms of the artifacts they use that we are lost when these material clues are denied to us. Making tools seems to us to be the very nature of man. The first things we see when we look at a culture are artifacts of some sort: clothes, weapons, boats, skyscrapers, glasses, watches, copters—the works. But most of this culture isn’t visible. We can’t see it, but it’s there.

What can it be like? Is there a richness here that we are just not equipped to see?

And remember that they do have the concept of tools. They even have a word that means an artifact of some sort:
kuprai.
The old man knew what a knife was for, but he was not impressed by it. Well, we have a lot of concepts in our culture that we don’t make much use of. I can remember hearing a lot of twaddle about how it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, but only how you play the game. Try telling that to a football coach. Try telling that to an honest man whose kids don’t have enough to eat.

Take away all our tools, all the trappings of our civilization, and what do we have left?

What do the Merdosi have?

The gray metallic sphere came down out of cold blackness into warm blue skies. The white inferno of Sirius burned in the heavens like a baleful eye that looked down upon a red and steaming world.

The sphere landed in the clearing where the charred logs told of a fire that once had burned, and bright cans of food and broken chairs hinted at a meal that had never been eaten.

The hatch opened and two men climbed out into the breathless heat of the day. They moved slowly and clumsily, for their bodies were completely encased in what had been spacesuits a few days before. They looked like awkward robots who had somehow strayed into a nightmare jungle in the beginning of time, and they carried extra heads in their hands.

Supplies were unloaded and the sphere lifted again into the wet blue sky and disappeared.

The two men carried no weapons.

They stood for a moment looking at the dark and silent forest that surrounded them. They heard nothing and saw nothing. They were not afraid, but they knew that they faced a world that was no longer indifferent and unprepared. They faced a world that was totally alien, and a world that was hostile beyond reason, beyond hope.

They were the Enemy. It was a fact of life.

Strange and unnatural in their stiff-jointed armor, already sweating under the great white furnace of the sun, they methodically began to make camp.

All around them, in the tall trees that reached up to touch the sky, long-armed shadows stirred and watched and waited.

Monte wiped the stinging sweat out of his eyes—no simple matter with his hand inside a spacesuit glove—and squinted up at the sun. The swollen white fireball was hanging just above the trees, as though reluctant to set. Its light turned the leaves to flame and sent dark shadow-tongues licking across the clearing.

It had been the longest afternoon of his life. The space-suits, even with the air vents that had been drilled into them, were miserably hot and clumsy. He felt as though he were standing in twin pools of sweat, and the faint breeze that whispered against his damp face only made the contrast more unbearable. He thought of what it would be like with the helmets on and shuddered.

Still, it was the only way.

His throat was getting sore again from the irritants in the air, but his nose was clear. It was odd, he thought, how different things affected a man at different times on an alien world. Now that he was used to the way Sirius Nine looked, now that he knew that the name of the world was Walonka and its appearance was familiar, he was struck by the way the place
smelled.
Even if he had been blind, he would have known that he was not on Earth.