Fuzzies and Other People

CHAPTER THREE

JACK HOLLOWAY SIGNED the paper — authorization for promotion of trooper Felix Krajewski, Zarathustra Native Protection Force, to rank of corporal — and tossed it into the out tray. A small breeze, pleasantly cool, came in at the open end of the prefab hut, bringing with it from outside the noises of construction work to compete with the whir and clatter of computers and roboclerks in the main office beyond the partition. He laid down the pen, brushed his mustache with the middle knuckle of his trigger finger, and then picked up his pipe, relighting it. Then he took another paper out of the in tray.

Authorization for payment of five hundred and fifty sols, compensation for damage done to crops by Fuzzies; endorsed as investigated and approved by George Lunt, Major Commanding, ZNPF. He remembered the incident: a bunch of woods-Fuzzies who had slipped through George’s chain of posts at the south edge of the Piedmont and gotten onto a sugar plantation and into mischief. Probably ruined one tenth as many sugar-plant seedlings as the land-prawns which the Fuzzies killed there would have destroyed. But the Government wasn’t responsible for land-prawns, and it was responsible for Fuzzies, and any planter who wouldn’t stick the Government for all the damages he could ought to be stuffed and put in a museum as a unique specimen. He signed it and reached for the next paper.

It was a big one, a lot of sheets stapled together. He pried out the staple. Covering letter from Governor-General Bennett Rainsford, attention Commissioner of Native Affairs; and then another on the letterhead of the Charterless Zarathustra Company, Ltd., of Zarathustra, signed by Victor Grego, Pres. He grinned. That “Charterless” looked like typical Grego gallows humor; it also made sense, since it kept the old initials for the trademark. And for the cattle-brand. Anybody who’d ever tried rebranding a full-grown veldbeest could see the advantage of that.

Acknowledgment of eighteen sunstones, total weight 93.6 carats, removed from Yellowsand Canyon for study prior to signing of lease agreement. Copy of receipt signed by Grego and his chief geologist, endorsed by Gerd van Riebeek, Chief of Scientific Branch, Zarathustra Commission for Native Affairs, and by Lieutenant Hirohito Bjornsen, ZNPF. Color photographs of each of the eighteen stones: they were beautiful, but no photograph could do justice to a warm sunstone, glowing with thermofluorescence. He looked at them carefully. He was an old sunstone-digger himself, and knew what he was looking at. One hundred seventeen thousand sols on the Terra gem market; S-42,120 in royalties for the Government, in trust for the Fuzzies. And this wasn’t even the front edge of the beginning; these were just the prospect samples. This time next year…

He initialed Ben Rainsford’s letter, stapled the stuff together, and tossed it into the file tray. As he did, the communication screen beside him buzzed. Turning in his chair, he flipped the screen on and looked, through it, into the interior of another prefab hut like this one, fifteen hundred miles to the north on the Fuzzy Reservation. A young man, with light hair and a pleasantly tough and weather-beaten face, looked out of it. He was in woods clothes, the breast of his jacket loaded with clips of rifle cartridges.

“Hi, Gerd. What’s new?”

Gerd van Riebeek shrugged. “Still sitting on top of ’steen billion sols’ worth of sunstones. Victor Grego was up; you heard about that?”

“Yes. I was looking at the photos of those stones a moment ago. How much flint did he have to crack to get them?”

“About seventy-five tons. He took them out from five different locations, on both sides of the canyon. Took him about eight hours, after he got the sandstone off.”

“That’s better than I ever did; I thought I’d hit it rich when I got one good stone out of six tons of flint. We can tell the Fuzzies they’re all rich now.”

“They’ll want to know if it’s good to eat,” Gerd said.

They probably would. He asked if Gerd had been seeing many Fuzzies.

“South of the Divide, yes, quite a few in small bands, mostly headed south or southwest. We get more on the movie film than we actually see. North of the Divide, hardly any. Oh, you remember the band we saw the day we found the sunstone flint? The ones who’d killed those goofers and were eating them?”

Holloway laughed, remembering their consternation when the three harpies had put in an appearance and been knocked down by his and Gerd’s rifle fire.

“ ‘Thunder-noise kill gotza; maybe kill us next’ ” he quoted. “ ‘Bad place this, make run fast.’ Man, were they a scared lot of Fuzzies.”

“They didn’t stay scared long; they were back as soon as we were out of there,” Gerd told him. “I was up that way this morning and recognized the place; I set down for a look around. The dead harpies were pretty well cleaned up — other harpies and what have you — just a few bones scattered around. I was up on top, where we’d been. It was three weeks ago, and it’d rained a few times since; so, no tracks. I could hardly see where we’d set the aircar down. But I know the Fuzzies were there from what I didn’t find.”

Gerd paused, grinning. Expecting Holloway to ask what.

“The empties, two from my 9.7 and one from your Sterberg,” Holloway said. “Sure. Pretty things.” He laughed again. Fuzzies always picked up empty brass. “You find some Fuzzies with empty cartridges, you’ll know who they are.”

“Oh, they won’t keep them. They’ve gotten tired of them and dropped them long ago.”

They talked for a while, and finally Gerd broke the connection, probably to call Ruth. Holloway went back to his paperwork. The afternoon passed, and eventually he finished everything they had piled up on him. He rose stiffly. Wasn’t used to this damned sitting on a chair all day. He refilled and lighted his pipe, got his hat, and looked for the pistol that should be hanging under it before he remembered that he wasn’t bothering to wear it around the camp anymore. Then, after a glance around to make sure he hadn’t left anything a Fuzzy oughtn’t to get at, he went out.

They’d built all the walls of the permanent office that was to replace this hut, and they’d started on the roof. The ZNPF barracks and headquarters were finished and occupied; in front of the latter a number of contragravity vehicles were grounded: patrol cars and combat cars. Some of the former were new, light green with yellow trim, lettered ZNPF. Some of the latter were olive green; they and the men who operated them had been borrowed from the Space Marines. Across the little stream, he couldn’t see his original camp buildings for the new construction that had gone up in the past two and a half months; the whole place, marked with a tiny dot on the larger maps as Holloway’s Camp, had been changed beyond recognition.

Maybe the name ought to be changed, too. Call it Hoksu-Mitto — that was what the Fuzzies called it — “Wonderful Place.” Well, it was pretty wonderful, to a Fuzzy just out of the big woods; and even those who went on to Mallorysport, a much more wonderful place, to live with human families still called it that, and looked back on it with the nostalgic affection of an old grad for his alma mater. He’d talked to Ben Rainsford about getting the name officially changed.

Half a dozen Fuzzies were playing on the bridge; they saw him and ran to him, yeeking. They all wore zipper-closed shoulder bags, with sheath-knives and little trowels attached, and silver identity disks at their throats, and they carried the weapons that had been issued to them to replace their wooden prawn-killers — six-inch steel blades on twelve-inch steel shafts. They were newcomers, hadn’t had their vocal training yet; he put in the earplug and switched on the hearing aid he had to use less and less frequently now, and they were all yelling:

“Pappy Jack! Heyo, Pappy Jack. You make play with us?”

They’d been around long enough to learn that he was Pappy Jack to every Fuzzy in the place, which as of the noon count stood at three hundred sixty-two, and they all thought he had nothing to do but “make play” with them. He squatted down, looking at their ID-disks; all numbered in the twelve-twenties, which meant they’d come in day before yesterday.

“Why aren’t you kids in school?” he asked, grabbing one who was trying to work the zipper of his shirt.

“Skool? What is, skool?”

“School,” he told them, “is place where Fuzzies learn new things. Learn to make talk like Big Ones, so Big Ones not need put-in-ear things. Learn to make things, have fun. Learn not get hurt by Big One things.” He pointed to a long corrugated metal shed across the run. “School in that place. Come; I show.”

He knew what had happened. This gang had met some Fuzzy in the woods who had told them about Hoksu-Mitto, and they’d come to get in on it. They’d been taken in tow by Little Fuzzy or Ko-Ko or one of George Lunt’s or Gerd and Ruth van Riebeek’s Fuzzies, and brought to ZNPF headquarters to be fingerprinted and given ID-disks and issued equipment, and then told to go amuse themselves. He started across the bridge, the Fuzzies running beside and ahead of him.

The interior of the long shed was cool and shady, but not quiet. There were about two hundred Fuzzies, all talking at once; when he switched off his hearing aid, most of it was the yeek-yeeking which was the audible fringe sound of their ultrasonic voices. Two of George Lunt’s family, named Dillinger and Ned Kelly, were teaching a class — most of whom had already learned to pitch their voices to human audibility — how to make bows and arrows. Considering that they’d only become bowyers and fletchers themselves a month ago, they were doing very well, and the class was picking it up quickly and enthusiastically. His own Mike and Mitzi were giving a class in fire-making, sawing a length of hard wood back and forth across the grain of a softer log. They had a score or so of pupils, all whooping excitedly as the wood-dust began to smoke: Another crowd stood or squatted around a ZNPF corporal who was using a jackknife to skin a small animal Terrans called a zarabunny. Like any good cop, he was continuously aware of everything that went on around him. He looked up.

“Hi, Jack. Soon as that crowd over there have a fire going, I’ll show them how to broil this on a stick. Then I’ll show them how to use the brains to cure the skin, the way the Old Terran Indians did, and how to make a bowstring out of the gut.”

And then, after they’d learned all this stuff, they’d go in to Mallorysport to be adopted by some human family and never use any of it. Well, maybe not. There were a lot of Fuzzies — ten, maybe twenty thousand of them. In spite of what Little Fuzzy was telling everybody about all the Fuzzies having Big Ones of their own, it wouldn’t work out that way. There just weren’t enough humans who wanted to adopt Fuzzies. So some of this gang would go to the ZNPF posts to the south or along the edge of Big Blackwater to the west, and teach other Fuzzies who’d pass the instruction on. Bows and arrows, fire, cooked food, cured hides. Basketry and pottery, too. Seeing this gang here, it was hard to realize just how primitively woods-Fuzzies had lived. Hadn’t even learned to make anything like these shoulder bags to carry things in; had to keep moving all the time, too, hunting and foraging.

Fuzzy sapiens zarathustra — he was glad they’d gotten rid of the Fuzzy fuzzy holloway thing; people were beginning to call him Fuzzy-Fuzzy — had made one hell of a cultural jump since the evening he’d heard something say, “Yeek,” in his shower stall.

Little Fuzzy, across the shed, saw him and waved, and he waved back. Little Fuzzy had a class too, on how to behave among the Big Ones. For a while, he talked with Corporal Carstairs and his pupils. The crowd he’d brought in with him wanted to stay there; he managed to get them away and over to where his own Ko-Ko and Cinderella and the van Riebeeks’ Syndrome and Superego were giving vocal lessons.

It had been the Navy people, temporarily sheltering his own family on Xerxes before the Fuzzy trial, who had found out about their ultrasonic voices and made special hearing aids. After the trial, when Victor Grego, once the Fuzzies’ archenemy, acquired a Fuzzy of his own and became one of their best friends, he and Henry Stenson, the instrument maker, designed a small self-powered hand-phone Fuzzies could use to transform their voices to audible frequencies. Then Grego discovered that his own Fuzzy, Diamond, was speaking audibly with the power-unit of his Fuzzyphone dead; he had learned to imitate the sounds he had heard himself making. Diamond was able to teach the trick; now his pupils were teaching others.

This class had several of the Stenson-Grego Fuzzyphones, things with Fuzzy-size pistol grips and grip switches. They were speaking with them, and then releasing the switches and trying to make the same sounds themselves. Ko-Ko seemed to be in charge of the instruction.

“No, no!” he was saying. “Not like that. Make talk away back in mouth, like this.”

“Yeek?”

“No. Do again with hold-in-hand thing. Hold tight, now; make talk.”

The van Riebeeks’ Syndrome didn’t seem to be doing anything in particular; Holloway spoke to her:

“You make talk to these. Tell about how learn to make talk like Big Ones.” He turned to the Fuzzies who had come in with him. “You stay here. Do what these tell you. Soon you make talk like Big Ones too. Then you come to Pappy Jack, make talk; Pappy Jack give something nice.”

He left them with Syndrome and went over to where Little Fuzzy sat on a box, smoking his pipe just like Pappy Jack. A number of the Fuzzies around him, one of the advanced classes, were also smoking.

“Among Big Ones,” he was saying in a mixture of Fuzzy language and Lingua Terra, “everything belong somebody. Every place belong somebody. Nobody go on somebody-else place, take things belong somebody else.”

“No place belong everybody, like woods?” a pupil asked.

“Oh, yes. Some places. Big Ones have Gov’men’ to take care of places belong everybody. This place, Hoksu-Mitto, Gov’men’ place. Once belong Pappy Jack; Pappy Jack give to Gov’men’, for everybody, all Big Ones, all Fuzzies.”

“But, Gov’men’; what is?”

“Big One thing. All Big Ones talk together, all pick some for take care of things belong everybody. Gov’men’ not let anybody take somebody-else things, not let anybody make anybody dead, not let hurt anybody. Now, Gov’men’ say nobody hurt Fuzzy, make Fuzzy dead, take Fuzzy things. Do this in Big-Room Talk-Place. I saw. Bad Big One make Goldilocks dead; other Big Ones take bad Big One away, make him dead. Then, all say, nobody hurt Fuzzy anymore. Pappy Jack make them do this.”

That wasn’t exactly what had happened. For instance, Leonard Kellogg had cut his throat in jail, but suicide while of unsound mind was a little complicated to explain to a Fuzzy. Just let it go at that. He strolled on, to where some of George Lunt’s family, Dr. Crippen and Lizzie Borden and Calamity Jane, were teaching carpentry, and stayed for a while, watching the Fuzzies using scaled-down saws and augers and drawknives and planes. This crowd was really interested; they’d go out for food after a while and then come back and work far into the evening. They were building a hand-wagon, even the wheels; nearby was a small forge, now cold, and an anvil on which they had made the ironwork.

Finally, he reached the end of the hut where Ruth van Riebeek and Pancho Ybarra, the Navy psychologist on permanent loan to the Colonial Government, sat respectively on a pile of cushions on the floor and the edge of a table. They had a dozen Fuzzies around them.

“Hi, Jack,” Ruth greeted him. “When’s that husband of mine coming back?”

“Oh, as soon as the agreement’s signed and the CZC takes over. How are the kids doing?”

“Oh, we aren’t kids anymore, Pappy Jack,” Ybarra told him. “We are very grown up. We are graduates, and next week we will be faculty members.”

Holloway sat down on the cushions with Ruth, and the Fuzzies crowded around him, wanting puffs from his pipe, and telling him what they had learned and what they were going to teach. Then, by pairs and groups, they drifted away. There was a general breaking-up. The vocal class was dispersing; Syndrome was going away with her group. If she could get them back tomorrow… What this school needed was a truant officer. The fire-making class had gotten a blaze started on the earthen floor, and the butchering-and-cooking class had joined them. The apprentice bowyers and fletchers had already left. Carpentry was still going strong.

“You know, this teaching program,” Ruth was saying, “it seems to lack unity.”

“She thinks there is a teaching program,” Ybarra laughed. “This is still in the trial-and-error, mostly error-stage. After we learn what we have to teach, and how to do it, we can start talking about programs.” He became more serious. “Jack, I’m beginning to question the value of a lot of this friction-fire-making, stone-arrowhead, bone-needle stuff. I know they won’t all be adopted into human families and most of them will have to live on their own in the woods or in marginal land around settlements, but they’ll be in contact with us and can get all the human-made tools and weapons and things they need.”

“I don’t want that, Pancho. I don’t want them made dependent on us. I don’t want them to live on human handouts. You were on Loki, weren’t you? You know what’s happened to the natives there; they’ve turned into a lot of worthless Native Agency bums. I don’t want this to happen to the Fuzzies.”

“That’s not quite the same, Jack,” Ybarra said. “The Fuzzies are dependent on us, for hokfusine. They can’t get enough of it for themselves.”

That was true, of course. The Fuzzies’ ancestors had developed, by evolution, an endocrine gland secreting a hormone nonexistent in any other Zarathustran mammal. Nobody was quite sure why; an educated guess was that it had served to neutralize some natural poison in something they had eaten in the distant past. When discovered, a couple of months ago, this hormone had been tagged with a polysyllabic biochemistry name that had been shortened to NFM _p .

But about the time Terran humans were starting civilizations in the Nile and Euphrates valleys, the Fuzzies’ environment had altered radically. The need for NFM _p vanished and, unneeded, it turned destructive. It caused premature and defective, nonviable, births. As a race, the Fuzzies had started dying out. Today, there was only this small remnant left, in the northern wilds of Beta Continent.

The only thing that had saved them from complete extinction had been another biochemical, a complicated long-molecule compound containing, among other things, a few atoms of titanium, which they still obtained by eating land-prawns — zatku, as they called them. And, beginning with their first contacts with humans, they had also gotten it from a gingerbread colored concoction officially designated Terran Federation Armed Forces Emergency Ration, Extraterrestrial Type Three. Like most synthetic rations, it was loathed by the soldiers and spacemen to whom it was issued, but after the first nibble Fuzzies doted on it. They called it Hoksu-Fusso, “Wonderful Food.” The chemical discovered in it, and in land-prawns, had been immediately named hokfusine.

“It neutralizes NFM _p , and it inhibits the glandular action that produces it,” Ybarra was saying. “But we can’t administer it environmentally; we have to supply it to every individual Fuzzy, male and female. Viable births only occur when both parents have gotten plenty of it prior to conception.”

The Fuzzies who lived among humans would get plenty of it, but the ones who tried to shift for themselves in the woods wouldn’t. The very thing he wanted to avoid, dependence on humans, would be selected for genetically, just as a taste for land-prawns had been. The countdown for the Fuzzy race had been going on for a thousand generations, ten little Fuzzies, nine little Fuzzies, eight little Fuzzies. He didn’t know how many more generations until it would be no little Fuzzies if they didn’t do something now.

“Don’t worry about the next generation, Jack,” Ruth said. “Just be glad there’ll be one.”