The Compass Rose

Intracom

CAPTAIN: Good morning, good morning, good morning everybody. How many of us are there, aboard this space ship? Well, let’s see. This is, of course, the Captain speaking. There is the First Mate, about whom there is something, well, different. But not the ears. I’ve seen First Mates with funny ears, but that isn’t this one’s problem. Well, then there is the Chief Engineer, whose vocabulary is limited to symptoms of valvular malfunction. And the Insane Second Mate, who is locked up in the Crew Recreation Lounge, busy pulling the stuffing out of chairs and sofas, and throwing pool balls at the indirect lighting fixtures. Then there is the Communications Officer, forever wearing headphones and hunched above the hissing radio. The hiss, I understand, is the noise stars make. It is quite a loud noise, out here. Is that all of us? I can’t think of anybody else. It is a small crew, but a select one, being composed entirely of officers. How many does it come to? Six, doesn’t it?”

FIRST MATE: Five.

CAPTAIN: Only five? Are you sure of that, Mr. Balls?

FIRST MATE: Affirmative.

CAPTAIN: Very well, five, then. I know you’re good with mathematics. But I keep having this feeling there’s somebody else.

FIRST MATE: Conceivably, sir, you are thinking of yourself in your capacity as Cook.

CAPTAIN: Don’t call me “sir,” Mr. Balls. All right, then. Here we are, the personnel of the space ship Mary Jane Hewett, Class F, b-1951, Type 36-25-38, Size 13, outward bound from Earth (Terra, 3 Solis) on an exploratory voyage in the direction of the South Orion Arm, with a cargo of breadfruit trees. We have travelled a tremendous distance already, light-years and light-years, though there are times it hardly seems we’re moving at all.

CHIEF ENGINEER: Aye, weel, compressed hydrogen tank A-30 is leaking. Leakage not contained at present time. Stoppage in forward conduit FC-599 continues, causing buildup of pressure in central coolant storage area CCS-2. Hairline crack in casing of Anti-Matter Isolater is being investigated with intention of presenting report on viability of implementation of repair procedures.

CAPTAIN: What procedure is indicated if repair implementation proves non-feasible?

CHIEF ENGINEER: Automatic Self-Destruct.

CAPTAIN: Good God.

CHIEF ENGINEER: Log entry continued: Vane One has suffered extensive meteor damage and is not currently functioning at full gather-power. Vane Two has been shortened by 81,000 miles to offset the slow spin imparted by imbalance in vane function. Results should be discernible within five to thirteen days (Ship Time). Automatic self-destruct units of ship are no longer functioning, due to suspect short circuit causing automatic self-destruct units to automatically self-destruct.

CAPTAIN: You mean the automatic self-destruct units are all self-destructed?

CHIEF ENGINEER: Aye, that’s about the size of it, Captain.

CAPTAIN: You mean we can’t destruct the ship, if the crack in the Anti-Matter Isolater widens? But if we can’t self-destruct, and the Anti-Matter Isolater blows, we’ll take the fifty nearest stars and all their planets with us—we’ll blow up this whole region of space—if the anti-matter meets an F-2 star, the destruction might become a chain reaction and the entire Galaxy could be destructed!

CHIEF ENGINEER: Weel, we’re working hard on that crack, Captain.

CAPTAIN: We? What do you mean, we? There’s only one of you down there in the Engine Room. Isn’t there?

CHIEF ENGINEER: Aye. But I wish there was a few more.

CAPTAIN : I know you do, at times like this, “Bolts.” But we have the utmost faith in you. You’re a fantastically good Chief Engineer, for a woman.

CHIEF ENGINEER: Thank you, Captain. I’ll be going back to my wee crack now.

CAPTAIN: Very well, and I’m on my way to the galley.

FIRST MATE : I am in the Computer Center, sir.

CAPTAIN: Will you please not call me “sir,” Mr. Balls. It estranges me. “Sparks,” where are you? “Sparks”? Report to Bridge by intracom at once. “Sparks”?

COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: Shhh. I’m listening to the radio. Roger. Over and out.

CAPTAIN: All right. And “Bolts” is down with the Anti-Matter Isolater; and I’m here on the Bridge trying to get to the galley. That’s four. Five, five, who’s five? Oh, yes. Insane Second Mate, report current whereabouts to Bridge by intracom at once.

INSANE SECOND MATE: I am clinging by the skin of my teeth and the nails of my toes to a cliff that towers above a raging sea of salt, lashed by great winds into waves and breakers whiter and heavier than ever water was. If I let go I will fall and be broken against the rocks and buried under tons of roaring salt, drowned in the dry sea. If I do not let go I have to keep holding on here, and holding on, and holding on, what for? I am so bored I could scream. I am screaming loudly but no one can hear it over the howl of the wind and the thunder of collapsing salt. I hope the rest of you are enjucting yourselves.

CAPTAIN: What?

INSANE SECOND MATE: Before the ship self-destructs, I hope you are emplucting your time in enjuctable diversions. I think I shall let go now.

CAPTAIN: Wait! Listen, “Bats.” is there anybody else there in the Crew Recreation Lounge with you?

INSANE SECOND MATE: Here I go. Eeeee-yahhhhhh!—Jesus Christ! it’s sugar.

CAPTAIN: Well, that seems to account for all six of us. There couldn’t have been anybody in Corridor G. I just thought there was.

FIRST MATE: Captain, there are only five persons aboard.

CAPTAIN: What makes you so sure of that, Mr. Balls?

FIRST MATE: Mathematics. Simple addition of real numbers. Yourself, 1, myself, 1, “Bolts,” 1, “Sparks,” 1, “Bats,” 1. 1 plus 1 plus 1 plus 1 plus 1 equals 5.

CAPTAIN: That may be. You can prove anything with statistics. But what if there’s one 1 you haven’t counted?

FIRST MATE: Who?

CAPTAIN: That’s what I’m asking you, Mr. Balls.

FIRST MATE: Captain, may I respectfully suggest that it is time for lunch, or dinner, or whatever time it is time for.

CAPTAIN: And what about irrational numbers, Mr. Balls? Eh?

FIRST MATE: Captain, may I respectfully suggest that you leave mathematics to me and the onboard computers.

CAPTAIN: All right, all right. What do you want for lunch?

FIRST MATE: Whatever you please, Captain.

CAPTAIN: I am sick and tired of having to think about it, planning meals all the time. I’m going to open a can of Campbell’s Tomato Rice Soup and if you don’t like it it’s too bad. Every time I’m on the verge of really understanding something, every time an insight is just within outgrope, every time I really realise that I am the Captain of a great ship, I have to turn around and decide whether it’s to be macaroni and cheese or rice pilaf. Why can’t somebody else do the cooking for a while?

FIRST MATE: Nobody else knows how.

CAPTAIN: Any one of you can heat a can of soup as well as I can.

FIRST MATE: Remember when the Second Mate tried?

CAPTAIN: Well, almost any of you. A robot could do it. Why don’t we have galley robots? Why weren’t we designed properly? The real trouble is that this is a lazy, uncoordinated, incoherent crew. And the center of the trouble, the real source of the disintegration, the stumbling block to all my efforts to run a tight ship, is one person, one single member of the crew, and I think you all know who I’m talking about.

FIRST MATE: Affirmative.

CHIEF ENGINEER: Oh, aye.

INSANE SECOND MATE: Not me. But poor Tom’s a-cold.

CAPTAIN: “Sparks,” are you listening? “Sparks,” come in please. Come in please.

COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: Shhh. I’m listening to the radio. Roger. Over and—

CAPTAIN: No! Now you take off those damned headphones and listen to me for a minute, “Sparks.”

COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: Captain, I wish I could take off the headphones. Sometimes I even wish I could turn off the radio. But I can’t. It does fade sometimes, you know. There’ll be days at a time, weeks, months, when I can’t pick up a thing, not even star hiss. But I have to keep listening, in case it comes back, in case a message comes through. That’s the way it is now. I haven’t picked up a message for five days (Ship Time). But what if one is just about to come through? What if it came through and I was in the galley heating soup? What if it’s coming through right now and I’m missing it because I’m talking on the intracom? It isn’t that I have anything against the rest of you, or that I want to be a stumbling block, but that’s the nature of a Communications Officer. Over and—

CAPTAIN: No. Now stay on the intracom and listen to this message. Other ships have Communications Officers, you know, and they don’t act like you at all. They don’t just sit there with their damned head between the earphones and their mouth hanging open all the time. They communicate. They talk with other ships of the Fleet. They receive news and directives, and exchange all sorts of information and friendly chitchat to beguile the interminable boredom of space. Why don’t you ever do that? Don’t you realise the rest of us would like to talk with the rest of the Fleet now and then?

COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: But I don’t listen on the Fleet wavelength.

CAPTAIN: Why not?

COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: Because I’m trying to pick up the message.

CAPTAIN: What message?

COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: The one we haven’t heard before.

CAPTAIN: What for?

COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: Well, it might indicate where we’re going—we and all the other ships of the Fleet.

CAPTAIN: What does it matter where we’re going, so long as we’re going? Listen, “Sparks,” I don’t like to berate you like this. We’d like to have the utmost faith in you. You’re a fantastically good Communications Officer, for a woman. But—

COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: Excuse me, Captain, I’m getting star hiss. Over and out.

CAPTAIN: Oh, hell. Mr. Balls, will you please proceed to Bridge. I’ll be in the galley, heating soup.

FIRST MATE: Captain, wait. There’s something funny in the air. Something in the ship’s atmospheric circulation system.

CAPTAIN: Probably just some of “Bolts’s” hydrogen leaking.

FIRST MATE: It doesn’t smell like hydrogen. It’s a strange smell. Or is it a vibration? Or is it a noise?

CAPTAIN: Mr. Balls, are you all right? You don’t sound like yourself.

FIRST MATE: Affirmative. Captain, I wish to report suspected presence of an alien aboard this ship.

CAPTAIN: An alien?

FIRST MATE: Affirmative. Alert. Alert. Red Alert. All hands to combat posts. Alien presence suspected on ship. Chief Engineer, report on conditions in Engine Room.

CHIEF ENGINEER: Weel, noo, everything’s dandy in the Engine Room, sir.

CAPTAIN: What about the Anti-Matter Isolater?

CHIEF ENGINEER: We mended the wee crack wi’ a wee Band-Aid, Captain, and it’s as good as new.

CAPTAIN: What about the ship’s self-destruct capacity?

CHIEF ENGINEER: Weel, noo, we’re working on that. But otherwise I may say that things in the Engine Room have never been better.

FIRST MATE: Red Alert! Red Alert! Chief Engineer, proceed instantly to repair automatic self-destruct units in Central Propulsion Zone, and as soon as repairs are completed place automatic self-destruct units on Imminent status.

CAPTAIN: Mr. Balls, what are you shouting about?

FIRST MATE: There’s an alien in this ship with us, Captain!

CAPTAIN: How do you know?

FIRST MATE: A slimy, unspeakable alien!

CAPTAIN: Have you seen it, Mr. Balls? Is it in the Athletic Supporter Storage Room?

FIRST MATE: No, I haven’t seen it. I don’t want to see it. I can feel it. It’s in here, Captain. It’s in the ship—something that doesn’t belong here. It’s not one of us. It came from Outer Space. From outside. To take us over. It’s waiting, waiting somewhere in the very bowels of the ship, waiting, and growing—

CAPTAIN: Good gracious. Get a hold of yourself, Mr. Balls.

INSANE SECOND MATE: I told you poor Tom was a-cold. Now poor Tom’s a-flipped.

FIRST MATE: It’s in there, in the Crew Recreation Lounge, with you, isn’t it, “Bats”? You’ve known about it for days, weeks. You’ve been hiding it from us. You traitor! I’m coming in. I’m coming in there, “Bats,” and I’m going to kill that thing, that unspeakable, amorphous Thing that you’ve been hiding from us and feeding with our food—

CAPTAIN: Mr. Balls! Where are you? What are you doing?

FIRST MATE: I’m breaking down the door of the Crew Recreation Lounge, Captain. Don’t worry. I’ll handle this. You just keep things running there on the Bridge, and the ship on course, and all.

CAPTAIN: I’m not on the Bridge. I’m in the galley.

FIRST MATE: For God’s sake, Captain, get back to the Bridge! The Thing will try to take control of the ship, if it escapes me!—All right, “Bats,” where is it? Where is it hiding? Show the Thing to me, or I’ll—Aagh! Aaaggghhh! Ow!

CHIEF ENGINEER: Captain? Captain Cook? Would there be a wee bit o’ trouble up there?

COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: Please be quieter, everybody. I’m receiving.

CAPTAIN: Mr. Balls, report current conditions in Crew Recreation Lounge. Mr. Balls, report please.

INSANE SECOND MATE: This is the Insane Second Mate speaking. The First Mate is temporarily incapacitated.

CAPTAIN: Report, please, Second Mate.

INSANE SECOND MATE: Well, he came busting in shouting about how he was going to do something to the alien, and I got in his way, and he tried to karate chop me. But as you know, Captain, I’m extraordinarily strong, even for an Insane Second Mate. I hit him on the head with a copy of I Ching, and he folded.

CAPTAIN: Report current condition of First Mate, please.

INSANE SECOND MATE: He is lying on the floor breathing.

CAPTAIN: Very good. “Bats,” I suppose you’d better get up to the Bridge and keep an eye on flight control. Last time I looked Arcturus seemed to have drifted a bit. If I don’t get lunch ready, tempers are going to be getting short.

INSANE SECOND MATE : Aye aye, Captain.

CAPTAIN : By the way, is there an alien aboard?

INSANE SECOND MATE: Oh, yes, Captain.

CAPTAIN: I thought so all along. I knew Mr. Balls couldn’t count. You’d better take it up to the Bridge with you and keep an eye on it.

INSANE SECOND MATE: Captain, I can’t do that. I have to leave it here in the Crew Recreation Lounge.

CAPTAIN: Why?

INSANE SECOND MATE: Well, see, it sort of fits in here. We can feed it through the slot in the door. Frankly, I’m just as glad to get out. Things were getting a little crowded in here. As Mr. Balls noticed, it’s been growing. You wouldn’t believe it. It was just a speck of a thing to start with.

CAPTAIN: And how is Mr. Balls?

INSANE SECOND MATE: He’s sitting up now, but he looks a bit catatonic. It’s the shock. I’ll walk him back to his quarters.

FIRST MATE: Oh my God I can’t stand it horrible vile like a giant worm slimy battening on us fattening on us invading us a vampire a parasite using us growing growing GROWING get me out get me out Red Alert Self-Destruct SELF-DESTRUCT!

INSANE SECOND MATE: There, there, Balls. Now. Come on. Here’s your own nice cozy quarters, see? And you can lock the door, and shut It out, and do mathematics all by yourself.

FIRST MATE: My God, you’re worse than It is! Get out of here! Out! Captain Cook! Captain Cook! This officer is insane!

CAPTAIN: What officer?

INSANE SECOND MATE: Me.

CAPTAIN: Oh, now, we just call you that, because you won’t use secondary process thinking.

FIRST MATE: Captain Cook! Order Engine Room personnel to activate automatic self-destruct units! Abort mission! Abort mission!

CAPTAIN: How’s that again?

FIRST MATE: Abort! Abort! We are being emplucted by an alien creature for unknown purposes! It is taking over the officers’ minds! This ship is a peril to the Universe!

INSANE SECOND MATE: Goodness, he talks almost the way I do.

CAPTAIN: It’s quite interesting, actually, looked at dispassionately. I wonder if Mr. Balls resents the presence of the alien because he too has always been, in a sense, an alien presence on this ship. Psychologists call the phenomenon “projection,” I believe.

FIRST MATE: Can’t you realise how horrible it is, horrible, horrible!

COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: Please order the First Mate to shut up, Captain. All this shouting is very annucting. I’m getting some interesting material on the radio.

CAPTAIN: Where from? I certainly could use some advice.

COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: I’m not sure. Seems very close. Loud signal.

CAPTAIN : What does it say?

COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: It doesn’t speak English.

INSANE SECOND MATE: This is “Bats” reporting from the Bridge. All well here.

CAPTAIN: All right, everybody. Lunchtime. Mouth to the soup chute, mates! Ready?

INSANE SECOND MATE: Ready.

CHIEF ENGINEER: Ready.

FIRST MATE: Ready.

COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: Ready.

CAPTAIN: Soup’s on!

CHIEF ENGINEER: Ahh.

FIRST MATE: Mmmm.

INSANE SECOND MATE: Yum.

COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: Yum.

CAPTAIN: Yum.

INSANE SECOND MATE: What about the alien?

CHIEF ENGINEER: I’ll see to the puir wee beastie. Send me another chute of soup, Captain, and I’ll catch it in an oilcan and pour it in through the slot. Aye, that’s it. Now then. Here I am. Are you ready, beastie? Here it comes!

ALIEN : Num, num.

CHIEF ENGINEER: There’s a bonnie beastie. Go to sleep now. Captain, how do you think the beastie got aboard?

CAPTAIN: I’ve been thinking about that.

INSANE SECOND MATE: It didn’t “get” aboard. It’s autochthonous. It’s ours, all ours.

CAPTAIN: It doesn’t happen that way, “Bats.” Not with advanced space ships of our type. At least, not without a Special Dispensation. Personally, I think the only time it could have got into the Crew Recreation Lounge was through the tubes, when we rendezvoused with that cruiser near Deneb. The hatches were open several times, if you recall, during that exchange.

CHIEF ENGINEER: Oh, aye, a lovely ship, that cruiser. Sleek and slim and tapered, and power enough to rattle my pipes.

COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: Yes, damn it, it kept interfering with my reception. Jammed the radio with a lot of sentimental nonsense for a week. Kept signalling us as “Honey Pot.”

FIRST MATE: Do you mean to imply, Captain, that that cruiser deliberately stowed this monster away aboard our ship? A cruiser of the Fleet?

CAPTAIN: Well, no, not deliberately. Those things simply happen, sometimes, if precautions haven’t been taken. If the Second Mate, for instance, failed to activate the hatch forcefields, and to remind me to go through decontamination procedure—which has happened before—

INSANE SECOND MATE: I hate activating those forcefields. They’re unnatural. They drive me crazy. All those vibrations. And worrying about getting the phases timed just right. They’re not good for the ship, in the long run. “Bolts” will back me up on that.

CHIEF ENGINEER: Aye, they’re a strain on the engines. Besides, why do we have to take all the precautions?

INSANE SECOND MATE: So I forgot to turn them on.

CAPTAIN: There you are.

FIRST MATE: You’re all psychotic—subhuman. You let us be infected, invaded, taken over by this alien. You deliberately invited it to happen, and now that it’s happened, you’re allowing it to go on happening—and it’s sitting there, growing, growing—

CHIEF ENGINEER: There, there, puir wee First Mate. Dinna let it fash ye.

FIRST MATE: Captain Cook! Listen to me! You’ve always listened to me sometimes, you’ve always been superbly rational more or less. Think about it, think about it—the danger, the danger to the ship. It’s taking us over, don’t you see? And we have a mission! How long are you going to let it go on? The sooner we act, the safer and easier it’ll be—

CAPTAIN: Well, how long has it been aboard?

INSANE SECOND MATE: About fifty days (Ship Time). That’s when the cruiser left, anyhow.

CAPTAIN: That leaves, let’s see, wait, fifty from 280—

FIRST MATE: 230.

CAPTAIN: Right. Yes. So. About 230 days (Ship Time) to go. If it follows the usual pattern. This isn’t the first time an alien has got aboard a Ship of the Fleet, you know, Mr. Balls. Nor will it be the last. We know, barring accidents, pretty well what to expect. Perhaps you should glance over the Handbook of Onboard Aliens to freshen up your information on the subject.

FIRST MATE: Captain, aren’t you even scared?

CAPTAIN: Mr. Balls, I am scared shitless. But what can I do?

FIRST MATE: Get rid of it! Now! Quick! While we still can! Before it gets any bigger! Let me stuff it into the Disposal Hatch! Unlock my door—just let me out—it won’t take any time at all—the rest of the Fleet won’t even know—

INSANE SECOND MATE: Listen, little Balls. I am on the Bridge now. And I think I’ll continue to be on the Bridge for the next 230 days (Ship Time). The Captain is needed in the galley. Your door is locked and will remain locked, until you come to terms with the situation. You may not like my being in charge. I know you feel I’m untrustworthy, and useful only in a subordinate position. And in normal conditions and most situations that’s quite true. I am untrustworthy, unpredictable, and devious. I can’t even count on myself. When I leap into a roaring seething ocean of salt, it turns out to be powdered sugar. When I look out the Bridge viewport at the stars, I don’t see the stars. I see dragons, swans, whales, scorpions, bears, huntsmen, chariots, crosses, signs, omens, and writings in huge shining words I cannot read. When I set my finger on the buttons on the Main Control Panel, the buttons turn into a dog’s hind paws, and my finger explodes like a firecracker. When I walk across the Bridge to check the computer readouts, I can’t see the floor; I see an abyss, the dark underpit where pale shapes writhe and shoulder in the gloom, turning vast rudimentary faces, eye spots, mouth holes, up towards me, their country-woman, mincing across the Bridge high above them on my thin wire, clutching at my flying trapeze. I do not belong on the Bridge of a ship of this class, except during the night shift when you and the Captain are asleep—and during certain exceptional situations, such as this. The fact is, granted all my peculiarities, at this point I’m the only one who can bring us through.

FIRST MATE: Captain, Captain Cook, listen to me. Don’t listen to that maniac, that mutineer. Listen to me. Captain, you know I have the utmost faith in you, almost. You’re a fantastically good captain, for a woman. Don’t let the Second Mate take over the Bridge!

CAPTAIN: I can’t stop her, Mr. Balls. It’s the influence of the alien, I suppose. We’ve all changed, don’t you see?

FIRST MATE: Changed?

CAPTAIN: Yes. “Bats” has acquired tremendous strength—as you must have noticed when she hit you with the I Ching—and a driving sense of purpose. “Bolts” isn’t complaining any more about engine malfunctions; she’s happy as a lark down there, singing “Scots Wha Hae wi’ Wallace Bled.” “Sparks” has gone completely out of touch—right, “Sparks”?—“Sparks”?—See? As for myself, I don’t know exactly what the change involves, except that the Second Mate makes better sense to me than she usedto, and you don’t; but I do know that since we’ve had the alien aboard I’ve felt a different person.

FIRST MATE: And I, Captain? I haven’t changed.

CAPTAIN: No. That’s the trouble, Mr. Balls. You haven’t. You aren’t really cut out to cope with this. But it’s not your fault; and in the long run it may be a good thing. It maintains a certain continuity aboard the ship. We don’t want to become totally alienated, after all.

FIRST MATE: Captain, you’re not as civilised as I am, but you are pretty much a product of civilisation—unlike the rest of this crew. And what I don’t understand is how, being a civilised person, you can stand the humiliation of it. The being used—like a bucket, or a Petri dish. We aren’t a mere vehicle, a vessel for aliens to get fat in, a damned yeast culture! We are a ship, a Ship of the Fleet, sailing under our own power, embarked on the Great Journey to the Unknown End.

CAPTAIN: But you know, Mr. Balls, that in fact we probably won’t get there.

FIRST MATE: I know. But there was a chance. Now there isn’t. We won’t get there, we won’t get anywhere, weighted down with this alien, and with all of you paying no more attention to anything outside the ship. I’ll bet, right now, that the Second Mate can’t give us a star fix. What’s our inclination to Arcturus, “Bats”?

INSANE SECOND MATE: Well. Let me see. Just let me press this dog’s hind paw here, and adjust this earthworm. There now. Arcturus? I’m not sure; but I do see a dead queen sitting upside down in a chair off the larboard bow.

FIRST MATE: You see? You see?

CAPTAIN: Yes. And I’m not crazy about staying in the galley all the time, either. But we can be patient, Mr. Balls. The alien won’t actually be aboard very long. Less than eight months to go, now. Then, you know, all we have to do is take it in tow for a while, just for a few years.

FIRST MATE: In tow? Tow it?

CAPTAIN: Well, of course. It’s our responsibility now.

CHIEF ENGINEER: An’ ye wouldna abandon the puir wee thing in the near-absolute-zero cold of interstellar space, surely, Mr. Balls?

FIRST MATE: Yes! Out the hatch! Now! Out the hatch! Out the hatch!

INSANE SECOND MATE: Shut the trap, Balls.

FIRST MATE: Captain. Now I’m talking quite quietly now, aren’t I. Now do you mean to say that when we finally get rid of this monster, when it gets too big for the ship and breaks its way out, causing terrible damage to the tubes, perhaps wrecking the whole Engine Room on its way—had you thought of that, “Bolts”?—and quite possibly destructing the entire ship—that, if we survive that ordeal, you intend to turn back, take the mindless, helpless thing in tow, and limp on after the Fleet at half speed for five years, ten years, twenty years (Ship Time)—while it keeps getting bigger, and stronger, and smarter, and wilder? Captain! don’t you realise that this thing is going to be the death of us?

CAPTAIN: Yes, Mr. Balls, I do. But you know, if it wasn’t, something else would be. A meteor, an interstellar plague spore, the irresistible gravity well around an invisible neutron star, an extra-galactic enemy destroyer, a collision with another Ship of the Fleet… One way or another, Mr. Balls, we are going to have had it. Sometime, somewhere in the time-space continuum, there is a point-instant with our name on it. So what can we do but go on?

FIRST MATE: But we don’t have to drag this thing along with us—

CAPTAIN: If we don’t give it a fair start, then who’s to. carry our breadfruit trees on to the Unknown End when we run out of fuel?

CHIEF ENGINEER: I’ve thocht, Captain, that perhaps that cruiser might lend us a hand wi’ the beastie, if it I knew we had one. "

CAPTAIN: It certainly would be a help in the towing. But ,the problem is getting “Sparks” to send a message to the cruiser. If only we had a normal Communications Officer!

COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: Please be quiet, everybody. I’m receiving.

INSANE SECOND MATE: From the dead upside-down queen out there?

COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: No; she isn’t saying anything. This is from the alien, I think.

INSANE SECOND MATE: Already? Ha! I always said that a ship could communicate with its alien, if it just listened carefully. What is it saying?

COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: It still doesn’t speak English.

INSANE SECOND MATE: What’s the message, then?

COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: Hiccups.

CAPTAIN: Hiccups?

COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: It has the hiccups. It must have been the tomato rice soup. Here, I’ll put it on the intracom. Listen.

ALIEN: Hic Hic

CHIEF ENGINEER: Captain, there’s a rattling in the forward pipes, and a high pressure area building up amidships. Should I try baking soda?

CAPTAIN: No, no, you never use soda when there’s an alien aboard, haven’t you read the Handbook? Try Maalox.

CHIEF ENGINEER: Aye aye, Captain.

ALIEN: Hic

CHIEF ENGINEER: There, there, puir wee sleekit cowerin’ beastie.

FIRST MATE: Oh, my God, if only I could have shipped aboard a cruiser, where I belong! I’m going mad here! You’re all mad. I’m mad.

INSANE SECOND MATE: Mr. Balls. Listen. Would it make you feel any better if there was another male on board?

FIRST MATE: Another male? Of course it would. Strength! Sanity! Logic! Cleanliness! Godliness! Virility! Yes! Yes!

INSANE SECOND MATE: Even if it was an alien?

FIRST MATE: An alien?

INSANE SECOND MATE: This might, you know, be a male alien.

CAPTAIN: Yes, there’s better than a fifty percent chance of that.

FIRST MATE: My God. It might. You’re right. It might.

CAPTAIN: That was a good thought, “Bats.”

INSANE SECOND MATE: Well, it’s not my own preference, but I thought it might stabilise Mr. Balls.

FIRST MATE: A male alien. A male. By golly. It just might be. Hey. Alien. Are you there?

ALIEN: Hie

FIRST MATE: What are you, alien? Hmm? Are you a little boy alien? Hmm?

CAPTAIN: Please, Mr. Balls, don’t, as it were, go overboard. Keep your duties in mind, and the obscure dignity of your position. We need you. You’d better do some mathematics right now. As for me, I’ll be starting dinner soon. Second Mate, how are things on the Bridge?

INSANE SECOND MATE: Splendid, Captain. Fiery bears and scorpions break like luminous foam and stream backward in glory from our prow. Beneath us, above us, on all sides of us is the abyss, unsounded, full of unimaginable horrors, unpredictable disasters, undeserved beauties, and unexpected death. Like a flying yarrow stalk we shoot forward, if it is forward, through the gulfs of probability.

CAPTAIN: Very good. “Bolts”?

CHIEF ENGINEER: Dandy, Captain. We’re on Warp Five, and the Maalox is working fine.

CAPTAIN : Very good. I shall make dinner now. Something light but nourishing, I think. Chinese Egg Flower Soup, perhaps.

COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: Please. Will you all be quiet a minute. I’m receiving from Cosmic Sources.

INSANE SECOND MATE: Oh, I hear them sometimes without even a radio. What are they saying?

ALIEN: Hie

COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: Shh. Well, here’s a message just came in from a sister ship of the fleet. It says: Tsk Tsk.

CAPTAIN: Never mind that. What do the Cosmic Sources say?

COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: I can’t quite make it out. There’s a lot of star hiss, and the code keeps changing. It might be Congratulations. Or again it might not be that at all. Be quiet, please. I’m listening.

The Eye Altering

Miriam stood at the big window of the infirmary ward and looked out at the view and thought, For twenty-five years I have been standing at this window and looking out at this view. And never once have I seen what I wanted to see.

If I forget thee, O Jerusalem—

The pain was forgotten, yes. The hatred and the fear, forgotten. In exile you don’t remember the grey days and the black years. You remember the sunlight, the orchards, the white cities. Even when you try to forget it you remember that Jerusalem was golden.

The sky outside the ward window was dulled with haze. Over the low ridge called Ararat the sun was setting; setting slowly, for New Zion had a slower spin than Old Earth, and a twenty-eight-hour day; settling, rather than setting, dully down onto the dull horizon. There were no clouds to gather the colors of sunset. There were seldom any clouds. When the haze thickened there might be a misty, smothering rain; when the haze was thin, as now, it hung high and vague, formless. It never quite cleared. You never saw the color of the sky. You never saw the stars. And through the haze the sun, no, not the sun, but NSC 641 (Class G) burned swollen and vaporous, warty as an orange—remember oranges? the sweet juice on the tongue? the orchards of Haifa?—NSC 641 stared, like a bleary eye. You could stare back at it. No glory of gold to blind you. Two imbeciles staring at each other.

Shadows stretched across the valley towards the buildings of the Settlement. In shadows the fields and woods were black; in the light they were brown, purplish, and dark red. Dirty colors, the colors you got when you scrubbed your watercolors too much and the teacher came by and said, You’d better use some fresh water, Mimi, it’s getting muddy. Because the teacher had been too kind to say to a ten-year-old, That picture’s a total loss, Mimi, throw it away and start fresh.

She had thought of that before—she had thought all her thoughts before, standing at this window—but this time it reminded her of Genya, because of the painting, and she turned to see how he was doing. The shock symptoms were almost gone, his face was no longer so pale and his pulse had steadied. While she held his wrist he sighed a bit and opened his eyes. Lovely eyes he had, grey in the thin face. He had never been much but eyes, poor Genya. Her oldest patient. Twenty-four years he had been her patient, right from the moment of his birth, five pounds, purplish-blue like a fetal rat, a month premature and half dead of cyanosis: the fifth child born on New Zion, the first in Ararat Settlement. A native. A feeble and unpromising native. He hadn’t even had the strength, or the sense, to cry at his first breath of this alien air. Sofia’s other children had been full-term and healthy, two girls, both married and mothers now, and fat Leon who could hoist a seventy-kilo sack of grain when he was fifteen. Good young colonists, strong stock. But Miriam had always loved Genya, and all the more after her own years of miscarriages and stillbirths, and the last birth, the girl who had lived two hours, whose eyes had been clear grey like Genya’s. Babies never have grey eyes, the eyes of the newborn are blue, that was all sentimental rubbish. But how could you ever make sure of what color things were under this damned warty-orange sun? Nothing ever looked right. “So there you are, Gennady Borisovich,” she said, “back home, eh?” It had been their joke when he was a child; he had spent so much time in the infirmary that whenever he came in with one of his fevers or fainting spells or gasping asthma he would say, “Here I am, back home, Auntie Doctor ”

“What happened?” he asked.

“You collapsed. Hoeing down in the South Field. Aaron and Tina brought you up here on the tractor. Touch of sunstroke, maybe? You’ve been doing all right, haven’t you?”

He shrugged and nodded.

“Dizzy? Short of breath?”

“On and off.”

“Why didn’t you come to the clinic?”

“It’s no good, Miriam.”

Since he was grown he had called her Miriam. She missed “Auntie Doctor.” He had grown away from her, these last few years, withdrawn from her into his painting. He had always sketched and painted, but now, all his free time and whatever energy he had left when his Settlement duties were done, he spent in the loft of the generator building where he’d made a kind of studio, grinding colors from rocks and mixing dyes from native plants, making brushes by begging pigtail ends off little girls, and painting—painting on scraps from the lumber mill, on bits of rag, on precious scraps of paper, on smooth slabs of slate from the quarry on Ararat if nothing better was at hand. Painting portraits, scenes of Settlement life, buildings, machinery, still-lifes, plants, landscapes, inner visions. Painting anything, everything. His portraits had been much in demand—people were always kind to Genya and the other sicklies—but lately he had not done any portraits; he had gone in for queer muddy jumbles of forms and lines all in a dark haze, like worlds half created. Nobody liked those paintings, but nobody ever told Genya he was wasting his time. He was a sickly; he was an artist; O.K. Healthy people had no time to be artists. There was too much work to do. But it was good to have an artist. It was human. It was like Earth. Wasn’t it?

They were kind to Toby, too, whose stomach troubles were so bad that at sixteen he weighed eighty-four pounds; kind to little Shura, who was just learning to talk at six, and whose eyes wept and wept all day long, even when she was smiling; kind to all their sicklies, the ones whose bodies could not adjust to this alien world, whose stomachs could not digest the native proteins even with the help of the metabolising pills which every colonist must take twice a day every day of his life on New Zion. Hard as life was in the Twenty Settlements, much as they needed every hand to work, they were gentle with their useless ones, their afflicted. In affliction the hand of God is visible. They remembered the words civilisation, humanity. They remembered Jerusalem.

“Genya, my dear, what do you mean, it’s no good?” His quiet voice had frightened her. “It’s no good,” he had said, smiling. And the grey eyes not clear but veiled, hazy.

“Medicine,” he said, “Pills. Cures.”

“Of course you know more about medicine than I do,” Miriam said. “You’re a much better doctor than I am. Or are you giving up? Is that it, Genya? Giving up?” Anger had come upon her so suddenly, from so deep within, from anxiety so long and deeply hidden, that it shook her body and cracked her voice.

“I’m giving up one thing. The metas.”

“Metas? Giving them up? What are you talking about?”

“I haven’t taken any for two weeks.”

The despairing rage swelled in her. She felt her face go hot, so that it felt twice its normal size. “Two weeks! And so, and so, and so you’re here! Where did you think you’d end up, you terrible fool? Lucky you’re not dead!”

“I haven’t been any worse since I stopped taking them, Miriam. Better, this whole last week. Until today. It can’t be that. It must have been heatstroke. I forgot to wear a hat…” He too flushed faintly, in the eagerness of his pleading, or with shame. It was stupid to work in the fields bareheaded; for all its dull look NSC 641 could hit the unsheltered human head quite as hard as fiery Sol, and Genya was apologetic for his carelessness. “You see,I was feeling fine this morning, really good, I kept right up with the others hoeing. Then I felt a bit dizzy, but I didn’t want to stop, it was so good to be able to work right with the others, I never thought about heatstroke.”

Miriam found that there were tears in her eyes, and this made her so ultimately and absolutely angry that she couldn’t speak at all. She got up off Genya’s bed and strode down the ward between the rows of beds, four on one side, four on the other. She strode back and stood staring out the window at the mud-colored shapeless ugly world.

Genya was saying something—“Miriam, honestly, couldn’t it be that the metas are worse for me than the native proteins are?”—but she did not listen; the grief and wrath and fear swelled in her and swelled in her, and broke, and she cried out, “Oh, Genya, Genya, how could you? Not you, to give up now, after fighting so long—I can’t bear it! I can’t bear it!” But she did not cry it out aloud. Not one word of it. Never. She cried out in her mind, and some tears came out and ran down her cheeks, but her back was turned to the patient. She looked through distorting tears at the flat valley and the dull sun and said to them, silent, “I hate you.” Then after a while she could turn around and say aloud, “Lie down,”—for he had sat up, distressed by her long silence—“lie down, be quiet. You’ll take two metas before dinner. If you need anything, Geza’s in the nurse’s station.” And she walked out.

As she left the infirmary she saw Tina climbing up the back path from the fields, coming to see how Genya was, no doubt. For all his wheezes and fevers Genya had never wanted for girl friends. Tina, and Shoshanna, and Bella, and Rachel, he could have had his pick. But last year when he and Rachel were living together, they had got contraceptives from the clinic regularly, and then they had separated; they hadn’t married, though by his age, twenty-four, Settlement kids were married and parents. He hadn’t married Rachel, and Miriam knew why. Moral genetics. Bad genes. Shouldn’t pass them on to the next generation. Weed out the sicklies. No procreation for him, and therefore no marriage; he couldn’t ask Rachel to live barren for the love of him. What the Settlements needed was children, plenty of healthy young natives who, with the help of the meta pills, could survive on this planet.

Rachel hadn’t taken up with anybody else. But she was only eighteen. She’d get over it. Marry a boy from another Settlement, most likely, and move away, away from Genya’s big grey eyes. It would be best for her. And for him.

No wonder Genya was suicidal! Miriam thought, and put the thought away from her fiercely, wearily. She was very weary. She had meant to go to her room and wash, change her clothes, change her mood, before dinner; but the room was so lonesome with Leonid away at Salem Settlement and not due back for at least another month, she couldn’t stand it. She went straight across the dusty central square of the Settlement to the refectory building, and into the Living Room. To get away, clear away, from the windless haze and the grey sky and the ugly sun.

Nobody was in the Living Room but Commander Marca, fast asleep on one of the padded wooden couches, and Reine, reading. The two oldest members of the Settlement. Commander Marca was in fact the oldest person in the world. He had been forty-four when he piloted the Exile Fleet from Old Earth to New Zion; he was seventy now, and very frail. People didn’t wear well here. They aged early, died at fifty, sixty. Reine, the biochemist, was forty-five now but looked twenty years older. It’s a damned geriatric club, Miriam thought sourly; and it was true that the young, the Zionborn, seldom used the Living Room. They came there to read, as it held the Settlement’s library of books and tapes and microfilm, but not many of them read much, or had much time to read. And maybe the April light and the pictures made them a little uneasy. They were such moral, severe, serious young people; there was no leisure in their lives, no beauty in their world; how could they approve of this luxury their elders needed, this one haven, this one place like home…The Living Room had no windows. Avram, a wizard with anything electrical, had done the indirect lighting, deliberately reproducing the color and quality of sunlight—not NSC 641 light, but sunlight—so that to enter the Living Room was to enter a room in a house on Earth on a warm sunny day of April or early May, to see all things in that clear, clean, lovely light. Avram and several others had worked on the pictures, enlarging colored photos to a meter or so square: scenes of Earth, photographs and paintings brought by the colonists—Venice, the Negev, the domes of the Kremlin, a farm in Portugal, the Dead Sea, Hampstead Heath, a beach in Oregon, a meadow in Poland, cities, forests, mountains, Van Gogh’s cypresses, Bierstadt’s Rocky Mountains, Monet’s water-lilies, Leonardo’s blue mysterious caves. Every wall of the room was covered with pictures, dozens of pictures, all the beauty of the Earth. So that the Earthborn could see and remember, so that the Zionborn could see and know.

There had been some discussion about the pictures, twenty years ago when Avram had started putting them up: Was it really wise? Should we look back? And so on. But then Commander Marca had come by on a visit, seen the Living Room of Ararat Settlement, and said, “This is where I’ll stay.” With every Settlement vying to have him, he had chosen Ararat. Because of the pictures of Earth, because of the light of Earth in that room, shining on the green fields, the snowy peaks, the golden forests of autumn, the flight of gulls above the sea, the white and red and rose of waterlilies on blue pools—clear colors, true, pure, the colors of the Earth.

He slept there now, a handsome old man. Outside, in the hard, dull, orange daylight, he would look sick and old, his cheeks veined and muddy. Here you could see what he looked like.

Miriam sat down near him, facing her favorite picture, a quiet landscape by Corot, trees over a silvery stream. She was so tired that for once she was willing to just sit, in a mild stupor. Through the stupor, faintly, idly, words came floating. Couldn’t it be… honestly, couldn’t it be that the metas are worse… Miriam, honestly, couldn’t it be…

“Do you think I never thought of that?” she retorted in silence. “Idiot! Do you think I don’t know the metas are hard on your guts? Didn’t I try fifty different combinations while you were a kid, trying to get rid of the side effects? But it’s not as bad as being allergic to the whole damn planet! You know better than the doctor, do you? Don’t give me that. You’re trying to—” But she broke off the silent dialogue abruptly. Genya was not trying to kill himself. He was not. He would not. He had courage, that one. And brains.

“All right,” she said to the quiet young man in her mind. “All right! If you’ll stay in the infirmary, under observation—for two weeks, and do exactly what I say—all right, I’ll try it!”

Because, said another, even quieter voice deep in her, it doesn’t really matter. Whatever you do or don’t do, he will die. This year; next year. Two hours; twenty-four years. The sicklies can’t adjust to this world. And neither can we, neither can we. We weren’t meant to live here, Genya my dear. We weren’t made for this world, nor it for us. We were made of Earth, by Earth, to live on Earth, under the blue sky and the golden sun.

The dinner gong began to ring. Going into the refectory she met little Shura. The child carried a bunch of the repulsive blackish-purple native weeds, as a child at home would carry a bunch of white daisies, red poppies picked in the fields. Shura’s eyes were teary as usual, but she smiled up at Auntie Doctor. Her lips looked pallid in the red-orange light of sunset through the windows. Everybody’s lips looked pallid. Everybody’s face looked tired, set, stoical, after the long day’s work, as they went into the Settlement dining hall, all together, the three hundred exiles of Ararat on Zion, the eleventh lost tribe.

He was doing very well. She had to admit it. “You’re doing well,” she said, and he, with his grin, “I told you so!”

“It could be because you’re not doing anything else,” she said, “smart ass.”

“Not doing anything? I filed health records for Geza all morning, I played games with Rosie and Moishe for two hours, I’ve been grinding colors all afternoon—say, I need more mineral oil, can I have another litre? It’s a much better pigment vehicle than the vegetable oil.”

“Sure. But listen. I have something for you better than that. Little Tel Aviv has got their pulp mill going full time. They sent a truck over yesterday with paper—”

“Paper?”

“Half a ton of it! I took two hundred sheets for you. It’s in the office.” He was off like a shot, and was into the bundle of paper before she even got there. “Oh, God,” he said, holding up a sheet, “beautiful, it’s beautiful!” And she thought how often she had heard him say that, “beautiful!” of one drab useful thing or another. He didn’t know what beauty was; he’d never seen any. The paper was thick, substantial, greyish, in big sheets, intended to be cut small and used sparingly, of course; but let him have it for his painting. There was little enough else she could give him.

“When you let me out of here,” Genya said, hugging the unwieldy bundle with both arms, “I’ll go over to Tel Aviv and paint their pulp mill, I’ll immortalise their pulp mill!”

“You’d better go lie down.”

“No, listen, I promised Moishe I’d beat him at chess. What’s wrong with him, anyhow?”

“Rashes, edema.”

“He’s like me?”

Miriam shrugged. “He was fine till this year. Puberty triggered something. Not unusual with allergic symptoms.”

“What is allergy, anyhow?”

“Well, call it a failure of adaptation. Back home, people used to feed babies cows’ milk, from bottles. Some of the babies could adapt to it, but some got rashes, breathing trouble, colic. The cow’s key didn’t fit their metabolic lock. Well, New Zion’s protein keys don’t fit our locks; so we have to change our metabolism with the metas.”

“Would Moishe or I have been an allergic on Earth?”

“I don’t know. Prematures often are. Irving, he died, oh, twenty years ago, he was allergic to this terrible list of things on Earth, they should never have let him come, poor thing, he spends his life on Earth half suffocated and comes here and starves to death even on a quadruple dose of metas.”

“Aha,” said Genya, “you shouldn’t have given him metas at all. Just Zion mush.”

“Zion mush?” Only one of the native grains yielded enough to be worth harvesting, and it produced a gluey meal which could not be baked.

“I ate three bowls of it for lunch.”

“He lies around the hospital all day complaining,” Miriam said, “and then stuffs his belly with that slop. How can an artistic soul eat something that tastes like jellied bilge?”

“You feed it to your helpless child patients in your own hospital! I just ate the leftovers.”

“Oh, get along with you.”

“I am. I want to paint while the sun’s still up. On a piece of new paper, a whole piece of new paper ”

It had been a long day at the clinic, but there were no inpatients. She had sent Osip home last night in a cast with a good scolding for being so careless as to tip his tractor over, endangering not only his life but the tractor, which was even harder to replace. And young Moishe had gone back to the children’s house, though she didn’t like the way his rash kept coming back. And Rosie was over her asthma, and the Commander’s heart was doing as well as could be expected; so the ward was empty, except for her permanent inmate of the past two weeks, Genya.

He was sprawled out on his bed under the window, so lax and still that she had a moment of alarm; but his color was good, he breathed evenly, he was simply asleep,deeply asleep, the way people slept after a hard day in the fields, exhausted.

He had been painting. He had cleaned up the rags and brushes, he always cleaned up promptly and thoroughly, but the picture stood on his makeshift easel. Usually these days he was secretive about his paintings, hid them, since people had stopped admiring them. The Commander had murmured to her, “What ugly stuff, poor boy!” But she had heard young Moishe, watching Genya paint, say, “How do you do it, Genya, how do you make it so pretty?” and Genya answer, “Beauty’s in the eye, Moishe.”

Well, that was true, and she went closer to look at the painting in the dull afternoon light. Genya had painted the view out the big window of the ward. Nothing vague and half created this time: realistic, all too realistic. Hideously recognisable. There was the flat ridge of Ararat, the mud-colored trees and fields, the hazy sky, the storage barn and a corner of the school building in the foreground. Her eyes went from the painted scene to the real one. To spend hours, days, painting that! What a waste, what a waste.

It was hard on Genya, it was sad, the way he hid his paintings now, knowing that nobody would want to see them, except maybe a child like Moishe fascinated with the mere skill of the hand, the craftsman’s dexterity.

That night as Genya helped her straighten up the injection cabinets—he was a good deal of help around the infirmary these days—she said, “I like the picture you painted today.”

“I finished it today,” he corrected her. “Damn thing took all week. I’m just beginning to learn to see.”

“Can I put it up in the Living Room?”

He looked at her across a tray of hypodermic needles, his eyes quiet and a little quizzical. “In the Living Room? But that’s all pictures of Home.”

“It’s time maybe we had some pictures of our new home there.”

“A moral gesture, eh? Sure. If you like it.”

“I like it very much,” she lied blandly.“It isn’t bad,” he said. “I’ll do better, though, when I’ve learned how to fit myself to the pattern.”

“What pattern?”

“Well, you know, you have to look until you see the pattern, till it makes sense, and then you have to get that into your hand, too.” He made large, vague, shaping gestures with a bottle of absolute alcohol.

“Anybody who asks a painter a question in words deserves what they get, I guess,” said Miriam. “Babble, babble. You take the picture over tomorrow and put it up. Artists are so temperamental about where they get their pictures hung, and the lighting. Besides, it’s time you were getting out. A little. An hour or two a day. No more.”

“Can I eat dinner in the dining hall, then?”

“All right. It’ll keep Tina from coming here to keep you from being lonely and eating up all the infirmary rations. That girl eats like a vacuum pump. Listen, if you go out in the middle of the day, will you kindly take the trouble to wear a hat?”

“You think I’m right, then.”

“Right?”

“That it was sunstroke.”

“That was my diagnosis, if you will recall.”

“All right: but my addition was that I do better without metas.”

“I have no idea. You’ve got along fine before for weeks, and then poof, down again. Nothing whatever has been proved.”

“But a pattern has been established! I’ve lived a month without metas, and gained six pounds.”

“And edema of the head, Mr. Know It All?”

She saw him the next day sitting with Rachel, just before dinnertime, on the slope below the storage barn. Rachel had not come to see him in the infirmary. They sat side by side, very close together, motionless, not talking.

Miriam went on to the Living Room. A half hour there before dinner had become a habit with her lately. It seemed to rest her from the weariness of the day. But the room was less peaceful than usual this evening; the Commander was awake, and talking with Reine and Avram. “Well, where did it come from then?” he was saying in his heavy Italian accent—he had not learned Hebrew till he was forty, in the Transit Camp. “Who put it there?” Then seeing Miriam he greeted her as always with a grand cordiality of voice and gesture. “Ah, Doctor! Please, join us, come, solve our mystery for us. You know each picture in this room as well as I do. Where, do you think, and when did we acquire the new one? You see?”

It’s Genya’s, Miriam was about to say, when she saw the new,picture. It wasn’t Genya’s. It was a painting, all right, a landscape, but a landscape of the Earth: a wide valley, the fields green and green-gold, orchards coming into flower, the sweeping slope of a mountain in the distance, a tower, perhaps a castle or medieval farm building, in the foreground, and over all the pure, subtle, sunlit sky. It was a complex and happy painting, a celebration of the spring, an act of praise.

“How beautiful,” she said, her voice catching. “Didn’t you put it up, Avram?”

“Me? I can photograph, I can’t paint. Look at it, it’s no reproduction. Some kind of tempera or oils, see?”

“Somebody brought it from Home. Had it in their baggage,” Reine suggested.

“For twenty-five years?” said the Commander. “Why? And who? We all know what all the others have!”

“No. I think”—Miriam was confused, and stammered—“I think it’s something Genya did. I asked him to put up one of his paintings here. Not this one. How did he do this?”

“Copied from a photograph,” Avram suggested.

“No no no no, impossible,” old Marca said, outraged. “That is a painting, not a copy! That is a work of art, that was seen, seen with the eyes and the heart!” With the eyes and the heart.

Miriam looked, and she saw. She saw what the light of NSC 641 had hidden from her, what the artificial Earth daylight of the room revealed to her. She saw what Genya saw: the beauty of the world.

“I think it must be in Central France, the Auvergne,” Reine was saying wistfully, and the Commander, “Oh no no no, it’s near Lake Como, I am certain,” and Avram, “Well it looks to me like where I grew up in the Caucasus,” when they all turned to look at Miriam. She had made a strange noise, a gasp or laugh or sob. “It’s here,” she said. “Here. That’s Ararat. The mountain. That’s the fields, our fields, our trees. That’s the corner of the school, that tower. See it? It’s here. Zion. It’s how Genya sees it. With the eyes and the heart.”

“But look, the trees are green, look at the colors, Miriam. It’s Earth—”

“Yes! It is Earth. Genya’s Earth!”

“But he can’t—”

“How do we know? How do we know what a child of Zion sees? We can see the picture in this light that’s like Home. Take it outside, into the daylight, and you’ll see what we always see, the ugly colors, the ugly planet where we’re not at home. But he is at home! He is! It’s we,” Miriam said, laughing in tears, looking at them all, the anxious, tired, elderly faces, “we who lack the key. We with our—with our—” she stumbled and leapt at the idea like a horse at a high wall, “with our meta pills!”

They all stared at her.

“With our meta pills, we can survive here, just barely, right? But don’t you see, he lives here! We were all perfectly adjusted to Earth, too well, we can’t fit anywhere else—he wasn’t, wouldn’t have been; allergic, a misfit—the pattern a little wrong, see? The pattern. But there are many patterns, infinite patterns, he fits this one a little better than we do—”

Avram and the Commander continued to stare. Reine shot an alarmed glance at the picture, but asked gamely, “You’re saying that Genya’s allergies—”

“Not just Genya! All the sicklies, maybe! For twenty-five years I’ve been feeding them metas, and they’re allergic to Earth proteins, the metas just foul them up, they’re a different pattern, oh, idiot! Idiot! Oh, my God, he and Rachel can get married. They’ve got to marry, he should have kids. What about Rachel taking metas while she’s pregnant, the foetus. I can work it out, I can work it out. I must call Leonid. And Moishe, thank God! maybe he’s another one! Listen, I must go talk to Genya and Rachel, immediately. Excuse me!” She left, a short, grey woman moving like a lightning bolt.

Marca, Avram, and Reine stood staring after her, at each other, and finally back at Genya’s painting.

It hung there before them, serene and joyful, full of light.

“I don’t understand,” said Avram.

“Patterns,” Reine said thoughtfully.

“It is very beautiful,” said the old Commander of the Exile Fleet. “Only, it makes me homesick.”

Mazes

I have tried hard to use my wits and keep up my courage, but I know now that I will not be able to withstand the torture any longer. My perceptions of time are confused, but I think it has been several days since I realised I could no longer keep my emotions under aesthetic control, and now the physical breakdown is also nearly complete. I cannot accomplish any of the greater motions. I cannot speak. Breathing, in this heavy foreign air, grows more difficult. When the paralysis reaches my chest I shall die: probably tonight.

The alien’s cruelty is refined, yet irrational. If it intended all along to starve me, why not simply withhold food? But instead of that it gave me plenty of food, mountains of food, all the greenbud leaves I could possibly want. Only they were not fresh. They had been picked; they were dead; the element that makes them digestible to us was gone, and one might as well eat gravel. Yet there they were, with all the scent and shape of greenbud, irresistible to my craving appetite. Not at first, of course. I told myself, I am not a child, to eat picked leaves! But the belly gets the better of the mind. After a while it seemed better to be chewing something, anything, that might still the pain and craving in the gut. So I ate, and ate, and starved. It is a relief, now, to be so weak I cannot eat. The same elaborately perverse cruelty marks all its behavior. And the worst thing of all is just the one I welcomed with such relief and delight at first: the maze. I was badly disoriented at first, after the trapping, being handled by a giant, being dropped into a prison; and this place around the prison is disorienting, spatially disquieting. The strange, smooth, curved wall-ceiling is of an alien substance and its lines are meaningless to me. So when I was taken up and put down, amidst all this strangeness, in a maze, a recognisable, even familiar maze, it was a moment of strength and hope after great distress. It seemed pretty clear that I had been put in the maze as a kind of test or investigation, that a first approach toward communication was being attempted. I tried to cooperate in every way. But it was not possible to believe for very long that the creature’s purpose was to achieve communication.

It is intelligent, highly intelligent, that is clear from a thousand evidences. We are both intelligent creatures, we are both maze-builders: surely it would be quite easy to learn to talk together! If that were what the alien wanted. But it is not. I do not know what kind of mazes it builds for itself. The ones it made for me were instruments of torture.

The mazes were, as I said, of basically familiar types, though the walls were of that foreign material colder and smoother than packed clay. The alien left a pile of picked leaves in one extremity of each maze, I do not know why; it may be a ritual or superstition. The first maze it put me in was babyishly short and simple. Nothing expressive or even interesting could be worked out from it. The second, however, was a kind of simple version of the Ungated Affirmation, quite adequate for the reassuring, outreaching statement I wanted to make. And the last, the long maze, with seven corridors and nineteen connections, lent itself surprisingly well to the Maluvian mode, and indeed to almost all the New Expressionist techniques. Adaptations had to be made to the alien spatial understanding, but a certain quality of creativity arose precisely from the adaptations. I worked hard at the problem of that maze, planning all night long, re-imagining the links and spaces, the feints and pauses, the erratic, unfamiliar, and yet beautiful course of the True Run. Next day when I was placed in the long maze and the alien began to observe, I performed the Eighth Maluvian in its entirety.

It was not a polished performance. I was nervous, and the spatio-temporal parameters were only approximate. But the Eighth Maluvian survives the crudest performance in the poorest maze. The evolutions in the ninth encatenation, where the “cloud” theme recurs so strangely transposed into the ancient spiralling motif, are indestructibly beautiful. I have seen them performed by a very old person, so old and stiff-jointed that he could only suggest the movements, hint at them, a shadow gesture, a dim reflection of the themes: and all who watched were inexpressibly moved. There is no nobler statement of our being. Performing, I myself was carried away by the power of the motions and forgot that I was a prisoner, forgot the alien eyes watching me; I transcended the errors of the maze and my own weakness, and danced the Eighth Maluvian as I have never danced it before.

When it was done, the alien picked me up and set me down in the first maze—the short one, the maze for little children who have not yet learned how to talk.

Was the humiliation deliberate? Now that it is all past, I see that there is no way to know. But it remains very hard to ascribe its behavior to ignorance.

After all, it is not blind. It has eyes, recognisable eyes. They are enough like our eyes that it must see somewhat as we do. It has a mouth, four legs, can move bipedally, has grasping hands, etc.; for all its gigantism and strange looks, it seems less fundamentally different from us, physically, than a fish. And yet, fish school and dance and, in their own stupid way, communicate!

The alien has never once attempted to talk with me. It has been with me, watched me, touched me, handled me, for days: but all its motions have been purposeful, not communicative. It is evidently a solitary creature, totally self-absorbed.

This would go far to explain its cruelty.

I noticed early that from time to time it would move its curious horizontal mouth in a series of fairly delicate, repetitive gestures, a little like someone eating. At first I thought it was jeering at me; then I wondered if it was trying to urge me to eat the indigestible fodder; then I wondered if it could be communicating labially. It seemed a limited and unhandy language for one so well provided with hands, feet, limbs, flexible spine, and all; but that would be like the creature’s perversity, I thought. I studied its lip motions and tried hard to imitate them. It did not respond. It stared at me briefly and then went away.

In fact, the only indubitable response I ever got from it was on a pitifully low level of interpersonal aesthetics. It was tormenting me with knob-pushing, as it did once a day. I had endured this grotesque routine pretty patiently for the first several days. If I pushed one knob I got a nasty sensation in my feet, if I pushed a second I got a nasty pellet of dried-up food, if I pushed a third I got nothing whatever. Obviously, to demonstrate my intelligence I was to push the third knob. But it appeared that my intelligence irritated my captor, because it removed the neutral knob after the second day. I could not imagine what it was trying to establish or accomplish, except the fact that I was its prisoner and a great deal smaller than it. When I tried to leave the knobs, it forced me physically to return. I must sit there pushing knobs for it, receiving punishment from one and mockery from the other. The deliberate outrageousness of the situation, the insufferable heaviness and thickness of this air, the feeling of being forever watched yet never understood, all combined to drive me into a condition for which we have no description at all. The nearest thing I can suggest is the last interlude of the Ten Gate Dream, when all the feint-ways are closed and the dance narrows in and in until it bursts terribly into the vertical. I cannot say what I felt, but it was a little like that. If I got my feet stung once more, or got pelted once more with a lump of rotten food, I would go vertical forever… I took the knobs off the wall (they came off with a sharp tug, like flower buds), laid them in the middle of the floor, and defecated on them.

The alien took me up at once and returned me to my prison. It had got the message, and had acted on it. But how unbelievably primitive the message had had to be! And the next day, it put me back in the knob room, and there were the knobs as good as new, and I was to choose alternate punishments for its amusement… Until then I had told myself that the creature was alien, therefore incomprehensible and uncomprehending, perhaps not intelligent in the same manner as we, and so on. But since then I have known that, though all that may remain true, it is also unmistakably and grossly cruel.

When it put me into the baby maze yesterday, I could not move. The power of speech was all but gone (I am dancing this, of course, in my mind; “the best maze is the mind,” the old proverb goes) and I simply crouched there, silent. After a while it took me out again, gently enough. There is the ultimate perversity of its behavior: it has never once touched me cruelly.

It set me down in the prison, locked the gate, and filled up the trough with inedible food. Then it stood two-legged, looking at me for a while.

Its face is very mobile, but if it speaks with its face I cannot understand it, that is too foreign a language. And its body is always covered with bulky, binding mats, like an old widower who has taken the Vow of Silence. But I had become accustomed to its great size, and to the angular character of its limb positions, which at first had seemed to be saying a steady stream of incoherent and mispronounced phrases, a horrible nonsense dance like the motions of an imbecile, until I realised that they were strictly purposive movements. Now I saw something a little beyond that, in its position. There were no words, yet there was communication. I saw, as it stood watching me, a clear signification of angry sadness—as clear as the Sembrian Stance. There was the same lax immobility, the bentness, the assertion of defeat. Never a word came clear, and yet it told me that it was filled with resentment,pity, impatience, and frustration. It told me it was sick of torturing me, and wanted me to help it. I am sure I understood it. I tried to answer. I tried to say, “What is it you want of me? Only tell me what it is you want.” But I was too weak to speak clearly, and it did not understand. It has never understood.

And now I have to die. No doubt it will come in to watch me die; but it will not understand the dance I dance in dying.

The Pathways of Desire

Tamara had thought he was off taping, but he was in his hut, lying on the cot, looking thin and cold. “Sorry, Ram! I’m after those photographs of the kids.”

“That box.” His gesture pointing out which box was so uncharacteristically languid that she asked, guardedly, “You all right?”

“Could be better.” From him, the admission was a catalogue of misery; but still she did not drop her guard. She waited; and he said, “Diarrhoea.”

“You should have said something.”

“Humiliation.”

Bob was wrong, then. He did have a sense of humor.

“I’ll ask Kara,” she said. “They must have something for the trots.”

“Anything but hot dogs and milkshakes,” Ramchandra said, and she laughed, for the description was apt; the staple foods of the Ndif were boneless poro meat and the mushy sweet fruit of the lamaba tree.

“Keep drinking plenty. I’ll refill that. Lomox doesn’t help?”

“Nothing left for it to work on.” He looked up at her; his eyes were large, black, and clear. “I wish that I throve here,” he said, “like Bob.”

That took her off guard. Rebuff and aloofness she expected, trust and candor she did not. She was unready, and her response inadequate. “Oh, he’s happy here.”

“Are you?”

“I hate it.” She dangled the crude clay water jug, and sought exactness. “Not really. It’s beautiful. But I… get impatient.”

“Nothing to chew,” Ramchandra said bitterly.

She laughed again, and went to fill his water jug at the spring a few meters away. The brightness of the sunshine, the perfumes of the air, the gorgeous colors of the lamaba trees, purple trunks, blue and green leaves, red and yellow fruits, all were delightful; the little spring welled up holy and innocent in its bed of clean brown sand. But she returned with gratitude to the hut containing one sullen linguist with diarrhoea. “Take it easy, Ram,” she said, “and I’ll try and get something useful out of Kara and the others.”

“Thank you,” he said.

Lovely words, she thought, as she went down the path through perfumed light and shadows towards the river; lovely in the man’s soft, precise accent. When their team of three had first been put together, at the Base on Ankara, she had been drawn to Ramchandra, a direct, powerful, unmistakable attraction of sex. She had suppressed it, with self-mockery and some shame, for the man was cold, holding himself ostentatiously apart and untouched. And then there was Bob, big beautiful blond Bob, lean tanned tough Bob, perfect hero of male wish fulfilment, irresistible. Why resist? Easier to give the easy pleasure he expected; easy, pleasant, a little depressing, but never mind that. Don’t look down into depressions. You might fall in. Live life as it comes, etc. She and Bob would come together inevitably. But they hadn’t; for the three of them had come to Yirdo, and met Yirdo’s inhabitants, the Ndif.

The Young Women of the Ndif—all females between age twelve and age twenty-two or -three—were sexually available, eager, and adept. They had bright wavy hair of gold or russet, long tilted eyes of green or violet, slender waists and ankles. They wore soft garments of slit pandsu leaves, clinging, modestly parting to reveal the merest glimpse of buttock or nipple. The under fourteens danced the hypnotic saweya dance in long lines, chanting in their soft, light voices, their round faces mischievously serious. From fourteen to eighteen they danced the baliya, leaping naked, one at a time, into the circle of swaying, clapping men, twisting their sinuous bodies into all the postures of practised eroticism, while the girls waiting their turn to dance sang the pulsing chorus, “Ah-weh, weh, ah-weh, weh…” After they were eighteen they no longer danced in public. Tamara left it to Bob to find out what they did in private. After forty-one days on Yirdo he was indubitably an expert in that.

She saw now that though she hadn’t wanted him, the promptness, the flatness of his loss of interest in her had hurt. Even last night she had been flirting at him; competing; trying to be a dancing girl, with short wiry hair, shit-brindle eyes that tilted the wrong way, muscular wrists… Stupid, stupid her self-mockery, her self-abasement, her self, self, self, swept away now like veils of cobweb as she followed the forest path downward to the washing place at the river thinking, How beautiful the bridge of Ram’s nose is. He can’t weigh much more than I do, maybe less; fine-boned. Thank you, he said. “Askiös, Muna! How’s the baby? Askiös, Vanna! Askiös, Kara!” How beautiful thy nose, my beloved, like unto a promontory between two wells of water, and the water thereof is exceeding black and cold. Thank you, thank you. “Hot today, no?”

“Hot today, hot today,” all the Middle-Aged Women agreed enthusiastically, as they trampled out the village laundry in the shallow, laughing water. “Put your feet in the river, you’ll get cool,” Vanna encouraged her. Brella patted her shoulder affectionately, murmuring, “Askiös!” as she went by to lay out her portion of the village laundry on a rock to dry.

The Middle-Aged Women were between twenty-three and (forty? data still uncertain), and some of them,in Tamara’s opinion, were more beautiful than the Young Women, a beauty which included missing teeth, sagging breasts, and stretchy bellies. The gapped smiles were blithe, the drooping tits held the milk of human kindness, the pregnancy-streaked bellies were full of belly laughs. The Young Women giggled; the Middle-Aged Women laughed. They laughed, Tamara thought watching them now, as if they had been set free.

The Young Men were off hunting poro (the pursuit of the fanged hot dog, she thought, and she too, being a Middle-Aged Woman of twenty-eight, laughed); or they were sitting goggling at the saweya and baliya dancers; or they were sleeping. There were no Middle-Aged Men. Males were Young till about forty, when they stopped hunting, stopped watching the dancers, and became Old. And died.

“Kara,” she said to her best informant, while she took off her sandals to put her feet in the cool water as Vanna had suggested, “my friend Ram is sick in the belly.”

“Oh me, oh dear, askiös, askiös,” the nearby women murmured. Kara, who looked to be pretty nearly an Old Woman, her knotted hair thin and greying, demanded practically, “Is it gwullaggh or kafa-faka?”

Tamara had never heard either word before, but translation was superfluous. “Kafa-faka,” she said.

“Puti berries, he needs,” said Kara, slapping a loincloth on a wet boulder.

“The food we eat here, he says it’s very good, too good.”

“Too much fried poro,” said Kara, nodding. “When children eat too much and spend all night shitting in the bushes, you feed them puti berries and boiled guo for a week. It tastes all right, with honey. I’ll boil Uvana Ram a pot of guo as soon as the washing’s done.”

“Kara is a beautiful noble person,” Tamara said. It was a stock phrase, the usual Ndif way of saying thank you.

“Askiös!” said Kara, grinning. That was a much commoner, and more difficult, expression. Ramchandrahad arrived at no set translation for it. Bob had suggested German bitte, but it covered even more ground than bitte. Please, you’re welcome, sorry, wait a minute, never mind, hello, goodbye, yes, no, and maybe, all seemed to fall within the connotations of askiös.

With her questions about kafa-faka and how to wean babies and when you had to stay in the Unclean Huts and what was the best kind of cooking pot, Tamara was always a welcome excuse for a conversation break. They sat around on hot boulders in the cool water and let the river wash the laundry and the sun dry and bleach it, while they talked. With a part of her mind Tamara listened to Heraclitus telling her that you shall not step twice into the same river; with the rest of it she sought information concerning birth control among the Ndif. The subject once opened, the women discussed it leisurely and frankly, but there wasn’t much to discuss. There were no devices or systems of birth control at all. Nature provided for the Young Women: for all their single-minded devotion to erotic practice, they did not become fertile till they were over twenty. Tamara was incredulous, but the women were perfectly certain: the dividing line between the Young and the Middle-Aged was, in fact, fertility. Once the line was crossed their only protection against perpetual pregnancy was abstinence, which they admitted was boring. Abortion and infanticide were not mentioned. When Tamara cautiously suggested them, heads were shaken. “Women can’t kill babies,” Brella said with horror. Kara observed more dryly, “If they get caught at it, the Men pull out all their hair and send them to the Unclean Huts to stay.”—“Nobody in our village would do such a thing,” Brella said. “Nobody got caught at it,” Kara said.

A group of Juvenile Males (nine to twelve) came whooping down to the river to swim and fish. They ran right over the drying laundry; the laundresses scolded, unauthoritatively; and the conversation ceased, because the ears of Males were not to be polluted with Unclean talk. The women rescued the laundry and set off back to the village. Tamara looked in on Ramchandra, who was asleep, and went on to take some photographs of Juvenile Males playing bhasto. After supper—communal, cooked and served by the Middle-Aged Women—she saw Kara, Vanna, and old Binira go into Ramchandra’s hut, and followed them.

They woke him up and fed him boiled guo, pinkish cereal like sticky tapioca; they rubbed his legs, sat on his shoulders, put heated stones on his stomach, rearranged his cot so that he lay with his head to the north, made him drink a sip of something hot, black, and minty-smelling; Binira sang at him for a while; they left him at last with a fresh hot stone, and went off. He accepted all this with ethnological aplomb or with the satisfaction of the invalid being fussed over. When they had gone he looked comfortable, curled up around the large rock, and half asleep. Tamara was going out when he asked in a remote, tranquil voice, “Did you tape the old lady’s song?”

“No. Sorry.”

“Askiös, askiös,” he whispered. Then, propping himself on his elbow, “I am better. Too bad we didn’t tape that. I missed most of the words.”

“Is Old Ndif a different language?”

“No. Only much fuller. Complete.”

“The Middle-Aged Women seem to have a much bigger vocabulary than the Youngs.”

“At Buvuna, the Young Women averaged 700 words; the Young Men 1,100, since they have the hunting vocabulary; I estimate the Middle-Aged Women here to know at least 2,500 words. I can make no estimate of the Old Men and Women yet. These are odd people.” Ramchandra lay back and cautiously rearranged himself around the hot stone. His tone, also, was cautious. There was a slight pause.

“Do you want to sleep?”

“To talk,” he said.

Tamara sat down on the woven cane stool. Beyond the open doorway the night was growing bright as day had been; Uper, the big gas planet of which Yirdo was a moon, was rising over the forest like a vast striped balloon. Its silver-gilt light pierced every crack in the mud and wattle walls of the hut and pooled incandescent on the ground outside the doorway. The dusk inside the hut was shot through with gleams, shaft, arrows dazzling the eye, a light that revealed nothing, that dissolved bodies and faces into radiant darkness.

“Nothing is real,” Tamara said.

“Of course not,” said the other shadow, amused, precise.

“They’re like actors.”

“No.”

“Yes. I don’t mean consciously acting, deceiving. I mean artificial. Too simple. Beautiful simple people in ever-bountiful paradise.”

“Ha,” Ramchandra said, and a patch of planet light blazed in his hair as he sat up.

“Why shouldn’t there be a South-Sea-Island world?” she argued with herself. “Why does it seem too simple—phony? Am I a Puritan, am I looking for original sin?”

“No, no, of course not, rubbish,” he said. “All that is theories. But listen.” For a minute he said nothing to listen to, then he said some Ndif words: “Vini. Pandsu. Bhasto. Askiös.—Askiös-bhis iyava oe is-bhassa.—What is that in English?”

“Well—‘please let me get by.’ ”

“Literal translation!”

“The great teaching tradition of the Brahman caste,” Tamara said. “I don’t know, the words have so many uses. ‘Sorry, I want to go this way’?”

“You don’t hear it.”

“Hear what?”

“People cannot hear their native language. All right, listen, carefully please!” He was charming when he got excited; the hauteur fell off him like dried mud from a water buffalo. “I’m going to say a sentence in English the way my uncle, who didn’t attend World Government School, spoke English. Now. ‘Excuse please I have to go by this path.’ Repeat!”

“Excuse please I have to go by this path.”

“Askiös-bhis iyava oe is-bhassa.”

A chill, like a touch of that cold dazzling planet light, proceeded slowly up Tamara’s backbone and prickled in the roots of her hair.

“Funny,” she said.

“Saweya: sway. Beliya: belly dance, Bali. Fini: ravine, vines. Bhasto: bat, baseball. Bhani: cabin, cabana. Shuwushu: ocean, sea—”

“Onomatopoeia.”

“Oe: go. Tunu: return. Itunu: I return; utunu: you return; tunusi: he returns. Padu, to hit, strike. Fatu, to build, make—facere, factus—factory. Say a word in Ndif!”

“Sikka.”

“Fishing lines. Wait. No, I can’t get that one. Another please.”

“Fillisa.”

“The Unclean Huts—Filth, filthy.”

“Uvanai.”

“Strangers. Visitors. Foreigners… singular uvana. You-foreigner.”

“Ram, you don’t have diarrhoea. You have paranoia.”

“No,” he said, so harsh and loud that she started. He cleared his throat. She could not see his eyes but she knew him to be looking at her. “I am serious, Tamara,” he said. “I am frightened.”

“Of what?” she jeered.

“Frightened sick,” he said. “Scared shitless. You must take words seriously. They are all we have.”

“What are you frightened of?”

“We are thirty-one light-years from Earth. No one from Earth ever came to this solar system before us. These people speak English.”

“They don’t!”

“The structure and vocabulary of Young Ndif is based at least sixty percent upon the structure and vocabulary of Modern English.”

His voice shook, as if with fear, or with relief.

Tamara sat solidly, clasping her knees, and held fast to incredulity. A Ndif word went through her mind, and another, and another, each one followed by its English root or shadow, shadows that had been waiting for the light to show them; but it was absurd. She should not have said the word “paranoia.” It was true. The man was ill. Weeks of touch-me-not rudeness and now this sudden change to talk, excitement, warmth. A manic change; and paranoid. The Ndif speaking an English-based code, for mysterious purposes, understood by the expert alone Ono, one. Te, two. Ti, three…

“All female names,” Ramchandra said morosely, “end in ‘a.’ That is a cosmic constant established by H. Rider Haggard. Male names never end in ‘a.’ Never.”

His voice, light-timbred, still a little uneven, confused her thoughts. “Listen, Ram.”

“Yes.”

He was listening, all right. She could not ask him, as she had intended, whether he was playing an elaborate and disagreeable joke on her. His trust must be met in kind. She did not know how to go on; and he broke urgently into her pause—“I saw this within a week, Tamara. First the syntax—Then I wouldn’t see it. Meaningless coincidence, et cetera, et cetera. I said no. But it says yes. It is so. It is English.”

“Even the Old language?”

“No, no, that’s different,” he said, hurried, grateful, “that’s not English, that’s itself, wherever it’s not based on the baby talk. But the—”

“All right, then. The Old language is old, the original language, and the Youngs have been influenced, corrupted, by some contact with Space Service people we don’t know about, weren’t told about.”

“How? When? They say we are the first. Why would they lie?”

“The Space Service?”

“Or the Ndif. They both say we are the first!”

“Well, if we are the first, then it’s us. We’re influencing the Ndif. They talk the way we unconsciously expect people to talk. Telepathy. They’re telepaths.”

“Telepaths,” he said, seizing the idea eagerly; and during the pause that followed he was evidently wrestling with it, trying to make it fit the circumstances, for he said at last, with frustration, “If only we knew anything about telepathy!”

Tamara meanwhile had been going around the problem in another direction, and asked, “Why didn’t you say anything about this till now?”

“I thought I was insane,” he said, in the controlled precise tone that sounded arrogant because his honesty would not permit him to evade. “I have been insane. Six years ago, after my wife died. There were two episodes. Linguists are often unstable.”

After a little while Tamara said almost in a whisper, “Ramchandra is a beautiful noble person…” She spoke in Ndif.

Ah-weh, weh, ah-weh, weh, went the chanting of the baliya dancers off on the dancing grounds at the edge of the village. A baby cried in a nearby hut. The dark-dazzling air was rich with the scent of night-blooming flowers.

“Look,” she said. “Doesn’t a telepath know what you’re thinking? The Ndif don’t. I’ve known people who do. My grandfather, he was Russian, he always knew what people were thinking. It was maddening. I don’t know if it was telepathy, or being old, or being Russian, or what. But anyhow, they’d get the thoughts, not the words—wouldn’t they?”

“Who knows? Maybe—You said it’s like a stage play, a movie, the island paradise. Maybe they sense what we expect or desire, and act it, perform it.”

“What for?”

“Adaptation,” he said, triumphant. “So that we like them and therefore don’t harm them.”

“But I don’t like them! They’re boring! No kinship systems, no social structure except stupid age-grading and detestable male dominance, no real skills, no arts—lousy carved spoons, all right, like a Hawaiian tourist trap—no ideas—once they grow up, they’re bored. Kara told me yesterday, ‘Life’s much too long.’ If they’re trying to produce a facsimile of somebody’s heart’s desire, it isn’t mine!”

“Nor mine,” Ramchandra said. “But Bob?”

There was a harshness, a homing-in quality, to the question. Tamara hesitated. “I don’t know. At first, sure. But he’s been restless, lately. After all he’s a myths man. And they don’t even tell stories. All they ever talk about is who they slept with last night and how many poro they shot. He says they all talk like Hemingway characters.”

“He doesn’t talk with the Old Ones.” Again that harshness, and Tamara, defensive of Bob, said, “Neither do I, much; do you? They don’t participate, they seem so shadowy… unimportant.”

“That was a healing song old Binira sang.”

“Maybe.”

“I think so. A ritual song, in the more complex language. If there is high culture, the Old Ones have it. Maybe they lose the telepathic power as they grow older; so then they can withdraw; they’re no longer influenced, forced to adapt—”

“Forced by whom to adapt to what? They’re the only intelligent species on the planet.”

“Other villages, other tribes.”

“But then they’d all talk each other’s language, all their customs would melt together—”

“Exactly! That explains the homogeneity of the culture! A solution to Babel!”

He sounded so pleased, and it sounded so plausible, that Tamara did her best to accept the hypothesis. The best she could do was admit finally, “The idea makes me queasy, for some reason.”

“The Old Ones have developed true language, nontelepathic language. They are the ones to talk with. I will request admission to the Old Men’s House tomorrow.”

“You’ll have to grow some grey hair…”

“Easily! Is it still black?”

“You’d better get some sleep.”

He was silent a while, but did not lie down. “Tamara,” he said, “you are not humoring me, are you?”

“No,” she said gruffly, shocked that he was so vulnerable.

“It is so very like a delusional system.”

“Then it’s folie á deux. All this about the language just brings the rest into focus. All six villages we’ve visited, all the same, the same things missing, the same—improbability—only it’s like overprobability—”

“Projected telepathy,” he said, brooding. “They are influencing us. Confusing our perceptions, forcing us into subjectivity—”

“Driving us away from the Reality Principle?” she said, defensive, now, of him. “Rubbish.” She recognized the quotation, and laughed. “We’re talking much too cleverly to be gaga.”

“I talked brilliantly in the mental institution,” he said. “In several languages. Even Sanskrit.” He sounded reassured, however; and she stood up. “I’m going to bed,” she said. “A fine night’s sleep I’ll have now! Do you need a fresh hot rock?”

“No, no. Listen, I’m sorry—”

“Askiös, askiös.”

No rest for the wicked. She had just lit her oil lamp and was spitting on her fingers and pinching the wick to keep it from smoking, which it continued to do, when Bob appeared in the doorway of her hut. The light of Uper haloed his thick fair hair; the importance of his return filled the entire biosphere as the bulk of his body filled the doorway. “I just got back,” he announced.

“From where?”

“Gunda.” The next village downriver.

He came in and sat down on the cane stool, while she swore at the burned poro fat on her fingers. An even more world-shaking announcement than that of his return loomed, imminent, in his scowl. She beat him to the draw. “Ram’s sick,” she said.

“What with?”

“Delhi belly, you could call it.”

“How could anybody get sick here?”

“They have a cure. You sleep with a hot boulder.”

“Christ! Sounds like a cure for potency!” Bob said, and they both broke into laughter. While laughing she almost began to tell Bob about Ram’s peculiar linguistic discovery, which for a moment seemed equally ridiculous; but she should let Ram do it, even if it was just a joke. Bob had gone serious again, and now emitted his announcement. “I have to fight a duel. Single combat.”

“Oh, Lord. When? Why?”

“Well, that girl. Potita, you know, the redhead. One of the Young Men in Gunda has his eye on her. So he challenged me.”

“An exogamy arrangement? Has he a claim on her?”

“No, you know they don’t have any affiliation patterns, stop hunting for them. All she is is an excuse for a combat.”

“I thought you’d get into trouble,” Tamara said priggishly, though she had thought no such thing. “You can’t sleep with all the native girls and not expect the assegai of a maddened savage in your back—Half the native girls, O.K., but not all of them—”

“Shit,” Bob said with discouragement. “I know. Look, I never got mixed up like this before. Sleeping with informants and stuff. I can’t seem to keep anything straight here. But they expect it. We talked it all out, way back in Buvuna, remember? Ram said he wouldn’t. That’s O.K., he’s forty, he’s an old man to them, anyhow he looks alien. But I look just like them, and if I refuse I’m offending local custom. It’s practically the only custom they’ve got. I have no choice—”

A laugh, a deep, Middle-Aged Woman belly laugh, welled up from Tamara. He looked at her a little startled. “All right, all right,” he said, and laughed too. “But God damn it! They always talked like these combats were voluntary!”

“They’re not?”

Bob shook his head. “I represent Hamo village against Gunda. It’s the only kind of war they have. All the Young Men are really worked up. They haven’t won a combat with Gunda for half a year, or some such huge historical timespan. It’s the World Cup. Tomorrow I get purified.”

“A ceremony?” Tamara found Bob’s predicament funny but trivial; she leapt from it to the hope of a ceremony, a ritual, anything that would prove some sense and structure in the rudimentary social life of the Ndif.

“Dances. Saweya and baliya. All day.”

“Bah.”

“Look. I know you’d like some patterns to study, being a configurationist and all, but I have an even more urgent problem. I have to fight a man day after tomorrow. With knives. In front of the entire population of two villages.”

“With knives?”

“Right. Hunters wrestle. Sallenzii fight with knives.”

“Sallenzii?”—As Bob translated, “Competitors for a girl,” she transliterated: “Challengers…”

After a short silence she suggested, “Could you just give him the girl?”

“No. Honor, local pride, all that.”

“And she… she’s content just to be the prize pig?”

Bob nodded.

“The pattern is familiar,” she said, and then, abruptly, “Nothing—There is nothing alien about these people. Nothing!”

“What?”

“Never mind. Let me work it out. Ram has an idea… Listen, Bob, I think you ought to get out of this, even if you lose face. We can always move on. It would be better than you killing the fellow! Or getting killed.”

“Thanks for the afterthought,” Bob said kindly. “Don’t worry. I’ll cheat.”

“Hypodermic?”

“Karate ought to do. I don’t mind. It’s just that I feel so damned foolish. Public knife fights for a girl. Like a lot of stupid teenagers.”

“It’s a teenage society, Bob.”

“Locker-room aliens!” He scratched his lion’s mane of hair and stood up, stretching. He was very beautiful; no wonder the villagers had picked him for their champion. The fact that his physical splendor was informed and animated by an intellectual spirit of no less splendor, a passionate trained mind that sought the stuff of poetry for its own sake—this fact would mean nothing much to the Ndif, or to many people on Earth, for that matter. But Tamara, in that moment, saw the young man as what he was, a king.

“Bob,” she said, “say no. Beg off. We can just move on.”

“No sweat!” he said, and, grateful for her concern, gave her an affectionate bear hug. “I’ll clobber the poor bastard before he knows what hit him. And then give a lecture. Freshman Hygiene: Murder is Hazardous to Your Health. It’ll wow ’em.”

“Do you want me there, or not there?”

“There,” he said. “Just in case he’s a black belt too.”

She was down at the laundry beach next afternoon having an interesting discussion of menopause with Kara and Libisa when Ramchandra came out onto the beach from the peacock-colored forest. Watching him from her rock amid the swirling waters, she thought how foreign he looked, how alien, as Bob had said—like the shadow of somebody standing up in the front row against the marvelous flowing colors of a jungle epic on a movie screen: too small, too black, too solid. Kara saw him too and shouted, “How’s the belly, Uvana Ram?”

When he was close enough not to have to shout, he replied, “Askiös, Kara, much better. I finished the guo this morning.”

“Good, good. Another potful tonight. You’re all skin,” Kara said, not inaccurately.

“Maybe if he eats enough guo he’ll turn people-colored,” said Brella, studying him; Kara’s mention of skin seemed to have brought Ramchandra’s swarthy,dusky complexion to her notice for the first time. The Ndif were remarkably inattentive to details. Brella now compared the two foreigners and said, “You too, Tamara. If you only ate people-colored food, maybe you wouldn’t be so ugly and brown.”

“I never thought of that,” said Tamara.

“Tamara, we are invited to the Old Men’s House.”

“Both of us? When?”

“Both. Now.”

“How did you swing that?” Tamara asked in English, splashing ashore from the boulder she had been sharing with Kara, Libisa, and a lot of freshly washed loincloths.

“I asked.”

“I’ll come too,” Kara announced, splashing after Tamara. “Askiös!”

“Is it right for women to do, Kara?”

“Of course. It’s the Old Men’s House, isn’t it?” Kara dusted off her flat little breasts and brought the fold of her sari-like garment neatly across them. “Go on ahead. I’ll stop by and pick up Binira. She told me it’s worth listening to sometimes in there. I’ll see you there.”

Tamara, her wet feet rimmed with the silvery river sand, joined Ramchandra and entered the peacock forest with him on the narrow path.

She was intensely aware of his brown shoulder beside hers, his dark, well-knit, and fragile body, the excellent nose in the stern profile. She was aware that she was aware of this, but it was not the important thing just now. “Are they holding a ceremony for us?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t got some of the key words yet. My request to go there appears to be sufficient reason for a gathering there.”

“Is it all right to bring that?” He was carrying a tape recorder.

“Anything goes in Cloud-Cuckoo Land,” he said, and the stem profile softened with a laugh.

Two of the withered, shadowy, scarce Old Men of the Ndif preceded them into the House, a large decrepit dugout; six or seven more were sitting around inside. There was much muttering of “askiös” and a strong reek of poro fat. The two foreigners joined the ill-defined circle, sitting on the dirt. No fire was lit. No apparatus or atmosphere of ritual was apparent. Presently Kara and Binira came in and sat down muttering “askiös” and cracking mild jokes with the Old Men. From across the circle—the place was lit only by the smokehole, and it was hard to see faces clearly—somebody asked something of Kara. Tamara did not understand the question. Kara’s response was, “I’m getting old enough, aren’t I?” There was a general laugh. One more came in, Bro-Kap, said once to have been a famous hunter, still a big man but stooped, wrinkled, and turtle-mouthed from the loss of his teeth. Instead of sitting down he went to the empty firepit under the smokehole and stood there, arms at his sides. Silence grew around him.

He turned slowly till he faced Ramchandra.

“Have you come to learn to dance?”

“If I may,” Ramchandra answered clearly.

“Are you old?”

“I am no longer young.”

My God, Tamara thought, it’s an initiation—can Ram keep it up? And the next question, sure enough, she did not understand at all; there were no Young or Middle Ndif words in it. Ram, however, appeared to understand, and replied promptly, “Not often.”

“When did you last bring home the kill?”

“I have never killed an animal.”

That brought a hoot, laughs, and some critical discussion. “He must have been born fifty years old!” Binira said, sniggering. “Or else he is terribly lazy,” said a youngish Old Man with a simple look, very earnestly.

Two more questions and answers Tamara could not follow, and then Bro-Kap demanded, harshly she thought, “What do you hunt?”

“I hunt peremensoe.”

Whatever it was, it was right. Audible and tangible approval, backslaps, relaxation. Bro-Kap nodded once, shortly, wiped his nose with the back of his hand, and sat down in the circle beside Ramchandra. “What do you want to know?” he inquired, in a thoroughly unritualistic and offhand manner.

“I should like to know,” Ramchandra said, “how the world began.”

“Oh ho ho!” went a couple of geezers across the circle. “Too old for his years, this one! A hundred years old, this fellow!”

“We say this,” Bro-Kap replied. “Man made the world.”

“I should like to know how he did it.”

“In his head, between his ears, how else? Everything is in the head. Nothing is wood, nothing is stone, nothing is water, nothing is blood, nothing is bone; all things are sanisukiarad.”

In her frustration at never knowing the key word, Tamara watched Ram’s face as if she could interpret from it; and indeed he understood. His eyes shone; he smiled, so that his features rounded out and grew gentle.

“He dances,” he said. “He dances.”

“Maybe so,” Bro-Kap replied. “Maybe Man dances in his head, and that makes sanisukiarad.”

Only with this repetition did Tamara hear the name “Man” as a name, a Ndif name or word which happened to coincide in sound with the English word “man”—but she had taken it to coincide in meaning—

Did it?

For a minute everything fell apart into two levels, two overlapping screens or veils, one of them sounds, one of them meanings, neither of them real. Their overlap and interplay, their shift and movement, confused everything, concealed or revealed everything, in that flow there was nothing to take hold of, not even once can you step into the river unless you are the river. The world began and nothing was happening, some wizened old men and women talking nonsense with Lord Shiva in a smelly hut. Talking, merely talking, words, words that meant nothing twice.

The parted veils closed again.

She checked that the tape was running in the recorder, and turned up the gain a little. Replaying all this later, with Ram to interpret and explain, maybe it would make sense.

They did dance, at last. After much talk Binira announced, “That’s enough peremenkiarad without music,” and Bro-Kap rather ungraciously said, “All right, askiös, go ahead.” At which Binira began to sing in a small unearthly creaking voice; and presently one old man, and then another, got up and danced, a slow dance, the feet close to the ground, the torso still and poised, intensity concentrated in the hands, arms, and face. It brought tears to Tamara’s eyes, the dance of the shadowy old men. Others joined; now they were all dancing, all but Kara and herself. Sometimes they touched one another, lightly and solemnly, or bowed like cranes. All of them? Yes, Ram was dancing with them. The golden dusty light from the smokehole flowed along his arms; lightly and softly he lifted and set down his bare feet. An old man faced him. “O komeya, O komeya, ama, O, O,” sang the creaking cricket trill, and Kara’s hands, Tamara’s hands patted time on the brown dirt The old man’s hands were lifted as in supplication. Ramchandra reached to him, the flowing arm, the poised and separated fingers; smiling, he touched, and turned, still dancing, and the old man smiled and began to sing, “O komeya, ama, ama, O…”

“Do we have a session on tape for you to listen to!” Tamara said, but she said it mainly to distract Bob from his hangdog mood as they went together down the path towards the clearing where the duel was to be fought. The path was littered with lamaba-fruit rinds, as most of the village had preceded them.

“More love songs?”

“No. Well, yes. Love songs to God… You know what God’s name is?”

“Yes,” Bob said indifferently. “Old man at Gunda told me. Bik-Kop-Man.”

The duel went nearly, but not quite, as planned by both parties. Since it was the one group action by the Young Ndif besides saweya and baliya dancing which seemed to be a genuine ritual or meaning-focussed act, Tamara diligently taped, filmed, and note-took the whole thing, including the redheaded Potita’s expression (and here she is, Miss America); the infliction of a knife stab in Bob’s thigh by Pit-Wat, the Gunda Challenger; Bob’s fine gesture throwing away his long-bladed knife (a glittering arc into the pink-flowered puti bushes); and the karate throw that stretched Pit-Wat flat and apparently lifeless on the ground.

Bob did not stay to deliver his lecture on the unhygienic aspects of murder. His wound was bleeding hard, and Tamara cut off the movie camera and got to work with the first-aid kit. Thus the jubiliation of Hamo village and the discomfiture of Gunda were recorded only on sound tape; and the tape recorder was off when Pit-Wat revived, to the discomfiture of both Hamo and Gunda. Slain sallenzii were not supposed to come alive and get up, staggering but undamaged. By this time, however, Bob was on the homeward path to Hamo, white-faced and not unwilling to hold on to Tamara’s arm. “Where’s Ram?” he asked for the first time, and she explained that she had not even told Ram a duel was to take place.

“Good,” Bob said. “I know what he’d say.”

“I don’t.”

“Irresponsible involvement in native lifeways—”

She shook her head. “I didn’t tell him because I didn’t even see him today, and I thought—” She had in fact forgotten about the duel, it had seemed so silly, so unreal, compared to that dancing in the Old Men’s House; it had all been a stupid annoying joke, right up to the moment when she saw the color, the splendid and terrible color of blood in the sunlight; but she could not tell Bob that. “He’s made a kind of breakthrough. By getting involved himself—he spent all day in the Old Men’s House. I want him to talk with you tonight. Once we get your leg looked after. And he’ll want to know what the people in Gunda said about Man. About God, I mean. Look out for that vine. Oh, Lord, here come the football fans.” A troupe of Young Women were pursuing them, halfheartedly pelting Bob with puti flowers.

“Where’s Potita?” Bob muttered, setting his teeth.

“Not in this lot. Are you really fond of her, Bob?”

“No. It’s that my leg hurts. No, it was just fun and games. I just wondered if Pit-Wat got her or I did.”

It turned out that Pit-Wat got her, since he stayed on the field of combat and performed the Victory Dance, rather shakily to be sure. Bob was relieved, since Pit-Wat was certainly better suited to Potita by temperament and circumstance; and as for the Victory Dance, a two-minute fit of stomping and posing, they had already got several films of champion wrestlers performing it. “All we needed was a movie of me beating my chest,” Bob said. “Christ! With my leg spouting. And feeling like a prize ass all round anyhow.”

“Ass all round, curious image,” Ramchandra said. They had got a fire going in Bob’s hut. It was raining—it rained only at night on Yirdo—and Bob had lost enough blood that a little extra warmth and cheer might do him good. The air got smoky, but the ruddy light was pleasant; it made Tamara think of winter, of rain and fire-fight in winter, a season unknown to Yirdo. Bob lay stretched out on his cot and the other two sat by the hearth, feeding the fire with dried lamaba rinds, which burned with a clear flame and a scent of pineapple.

“Ram, what does peremensoe mean?”

“Thinking. Ideas. Understanding. Talk.”

“And peremenkiarad, is that right?”

“About the same. Plus a connotation of… illusion, deception, trickery—play.”

“Is this Old Ndif?” Bob inquired. “If you’re making dictionaries, let me see ’em, Ram. I couldn’t understand anything the old boys were telling me in Gunda.”

“Except God’s name,” Tamara said.

Ramchandra raised his eyebrows.

“Bik-Kop-Man made the world with his ears,” Bob said. “And that is the Ndif equivalent of Genesis, Book One.”

“Between his ears,” Ramchandra corrected coldly.“With them or between them, it’s a pretty poor excuse for a Creation myth.”

“How do you know, if your vocabulary is inadequate?”

Why did he take that tone with Bob? Supercilious, pedantic, offensive, even the voice high and schoolmarmish. Bob’s solid good nature shone by contrast in his reply: “It’s taken me weeks to realize that if I’m after myth or history the only people here who may have them are the Old Ones. I should have been checking in with you much earlier.”

Ramchandra stared into the fire and said nothing.

“Ram,” Tamara said, profoundly irritated with him, “Bob should know about this thing we talked about the other night. The derivation of Young Ndif.”

He went on staring into the fire, mute.

“You can explain it better than I can.”

After a moment he merely shook his head.

“You’ve decided it was a mistake?” she demanded, more exasperated than ever, but also with a flash of hope.

“No,” he said. “The documentation is in that notebook I gave you.”

She fetched the notebook from her hut, lighted the oil lamp, and sat down on the floor by Bob’s cot so he could read over her shoulder. For half an hour they went over Ramchandra’s orderly and exhaustive proofs of the direct derivation of Young Ndif from Modem Standard English. Bob laughed at first, taking the whole thing as a grand scholarly joke; then he laughed at the sheer lunacy of it. It did not seem to disturb him, as it disturbed Tamar.

“If it’s not your hoax, Ram, it’s still a hoax—a terrific one.”

“By whom? How? Why?” Tamara asked, hopeful again. A mistake made sense; a hoax made sense.

“All right. This language,” and he tapped the notebook, “isn’t authentic. It’s a fake, a construct—invented. Right?”

Ramchandra, who had not said a word all this while, agreed in a remote, unwilling tone: “Invented. By an amateur. The correspondences with English are naive, unconscious, as in ‘speaking in tongues.’—But Old Ndif is an authentic language.”

“An older one, an archaic survival—”

“No.” Ramchandra said “No” often, flatly, and with satisfaction, Tamara thought. “Old Ndif is alive. It is based upon Young Ndif, has grown out of it, or over it. like ivy on a telephone pole.”

“Spontaneously?”

“As spontaneously as any language, or as deliberately. When words are wanted, needed, people have to make them. It ‘happens,’ like a bird singing, but it’s also ‘work,’ like Mozart writing music.”

“Then you’d say the Old Ones are gradually making a real language out of this fake one?”

“I cannot define the word ‘real’ and therefore would not use it.” Ramchandra shifted his position, reclasping his arms round his knees, but did not look up from the fire. “I would say that the Old Ndif seem to be engaged in creating the world. Human beings do this primarily by means of language, music, and the dance.”

Bob stared at him, then at Tamara. “Come again?” Ramchandra was silent.

“So far,” Tamara said, “working in three widely separate localities, we’ve found the same language, without major dialectical variations, and the same set of very rudimentary social and cultural patterns. Bob hasn’t found any legends, any expressions of the archetypes, any developed symbology. I haven’t found much more social structure than I’d find in a herd of cattle, about what I might find in a primate troop. Sex and age determine all roles. The Ndif are culturally subhuman; they don’t exist fully as human beings. The Old Ndif are beginning to. Is that it, Ram?”

“I don’t know,” the linguist said, withdrawn.

“That’s missionary talk!” Bob said. “Subhuman? Come on. Stagnant, sure. Maybe because there’s no environmental challenge. Food falls out of the trees, game’s plentiful, and they don’t have sexual hangups—”

“That’s inhuman,” Tamara interjected; Bob ignored her.

“There’s no stimulus. O.K. But the Old Ones get shoved out of the fun and games. They get bored; that’s the stimulus. They start playing around with words and ideas. So what rudiments of mythopoetics and ritual they’ve got are their creation. That’s not an unusual situation, the young busy with sex and physical competitions, the old as culture transmitters. The only weird thing is this English-Ndif business. That needs explaining. I just don’t buy telepathy, you can’t build a scientific explanation on an occultist theory. The only rational explanation is that these people—the whole society—are a plant. A quite recent one.”

“Correct,” Ramchandra said.

“But listen,” Tamara said with fury, “how can a quarter of a million people be ‘planted’? What about the ones over thirty? We’ve only had FTL spaceflight for thirty years! The Exploratory Survey to this system was unmanned, and it was only eight years ago! Your rational explanation is pure nonsense!”

“Correct,” Ramchandra said again, his clear, dark, sorrowful gaze on the flickering fire.

“Evidently there’s been a manned mission, a colonising mission, to this planet, which the World Government doesn’t know about. We have stumbled into something, and it begins to scare me. The So-Hem faction—”

Bob was interrupted by the sudden entrance (the Ndif never knocked) of Bro-Kap, two other Old Men, and two baliya dancers, beautiful half-naked sixteen-year-olds with flowers in their tawny hair. They knelt by Bob’s cot and made soft lamenting sounds. Bro-Kap stood as majestically as he could in the now very crowded hut, and gazed down at Bob. He was clearly waiting for the girls to be quiet, but one of them was now chattering cheerfully and the other was drawing circles around Bob’s nipples with her long fingernails. “Uvana Bob!” Bro-Kap said at last. “Are you Bik-Kop-Man?”

“Am I—Askiös, Wana!—No. Askiös, Bro-Kap, I don’t understand.”

“Sometimes Man comes,” the old Ndif said. “He has come to Hamo, and to Farwe. Never to Gunda or to Akko. He is strong and tall, golden-haired and golden-skinned, a great hunter, a great fighter, a great lover. He comes from far away and goes away again. We have thought that you were He. You are not He?”

“No, I am not,” Bob said decisively.

Bro-Kap took a breath that heaved his wrinkled chest. “Then you will die,” he said.

“Die?” Bob repeated without comprehension.

“Die how? Of what?” Tamara demanded, standing up so that in the press of people in the little hut she was brought face to face with the old man. “What do you mean, Bro-Kap?”

“Gunda challengers use poisoned knives,” the old man said. “To find out which ones from Hamo are Bik-Kop-Man. Poison doesn’t kill Bik-Kop-Man.”

“What poison?”

“That’s their secret,” Bro-Kap said. “Gunda is full of wicked people. We of Hamo use no poisons.”

“For Christ’s sake,” Bob said in English, and in Ndif, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“The Young Men thought you knew. They thought you were Man. Then when you let Pit-Wat wound you, when you threw away your knife, when you killed him but he came back to life, they weren’t sure. They came to the Old Men’s House to ask. Because we in the Old Men’s house have peremensoe about Man.” There was pride in the old man’s voice. “Thus I came to you. Askiös, Uvana Bob.” Bro-Kap turned and pushed his way out; the other old men followed him.

“Go away,” Bob said to the smiling, caressing girls. “Go on now.” They left, reluctant, swaying, their pretty faces troubled.

“I’ll go to Gunda,” Ramchandra said, “see if there’s an antidote.” And he was off at a run.

Bob’s face was dead white.

“Another damned hoax,” he said, smiling.

“You bled a lot, Bob. Probably bled out the poisonright away, if there really was any. Let me have a look at it… It looks absolutely clean. No inflammation.”

“My breath’s been coming short,” the young man said. “Most likely shock.”

“Yes. Let me get the medical handbook.”

The handbook had no recommendations, and Gunda had no antidote. The poison acted on the central nervous system. Paroxysms began two hours after Bro-Kap’s visit They increased quickly in severity and frequency. Some time after midnight, long before dawn, Bob died.

Ramchandra struck the tenth useless blow over the stopped heart, raised his arm to strike again, and did not strike. The dancer’s raised arm: creator, destroyer. The clenched, dark fist relaxed; the poised and separated fingers hovered above the white face and the unbreathing chest. “Ah!” Ramchandra cried aloud, and dropping down beside the cot broke into tears, a passion of tears.

Wind gusted the rain against the roof. Time passed and Ramchandra was silent, as silent as Bob, beside whom he crouched, his arms stretched across Bob’s body and his head sunk between them; exhausted, he had fallen asleep. The rain thinned and weakened and then beat hard again. Tamara put out the oil lamp, her movements slow and certain, full of the knowledge of what they meant. She added the last of the fuel to the fire and sat down at the little hearth. One must watch with the newly dead, and the sleeping should not sleep unprotected. She sat awake and watched the fire die out, and long afterwards, the grey light reborn.

Ndif funerals were, as she had expected, graceless. There was a burying ground not far off in the forest, which nobody talked about or ever visited except for burials. Gravedigging was the Old Men’s task. They had dug a shallow pit. Two of them, plus Kara and Binira, helped carry Bob’s body to the grave. The Ndif used no coffins, dumped their dead naked in the earth; it was too cold that way, too cold, Tamara thought with rage, and shehad put Bob’s white shirt and trousers on him, left his gold Swiss watch strapped on his wrist since he owned no other treasure, and wrapped the long, silky, bluish leaves of the pandsu carefully about him. She lined the shallow grave with leaves before they laid him in it; the four old men and women watched, expressionless. They laid him on his side, his knees a little bent. Tamara turned for a flower to put by his hand, but the pink and purple blossoms sickened her; she broke the chain around her neck, on which hung a little turquoise her mother had given her, a fragment of the Earth, and put that in the dead man’s hand. She had to be quick; the old men were already scraping the dirt back over the grave with their crude wooden shovels. As soon as that was done all four Ndif turned without a word and went off, not looking back.

Ramchandra knelt down by the grave. “I am sorry I was jealous of you,” he said. “If we meet reborn, you will be a king again, but I will be the dog at your heel.” He bowed down, touching the raw, damp clods of the grave, then slowly stood up. He looked at Tamara. She knew his look, the dark, clear, grieving eyes, but she could not meet them, or speak. It was her turn to cry. He came to her across the grave, as if it was any bit of ground, and put his arms around her, holding her so she could weep. When the first hardest sobbing was done and-she could walk, they set off slowly down the narrow, half-overgrown path through the peacock splendors of the forest, back to the village.

“Burning is better,” Ramchandra said. “The spirit is freed sooner to go on.”

“Earth is best,” Tamara said, very low and hoarse.

“Tamara. Do you want to radio Ankara Base to send the launch to us?”

“I don’t know.”

“There’s no hurry to decide.”

The gorgeous colors of the lamabas blurred and cleared and blurred again. She stumbled, though Ramchandra’s hand was kind and firm on her arm.

“We might as well go on and finish what we came for.”

“The ethnology of dreams.”

“Dreams? Oh no. This is real… Much realler than I wish it were.”

“So are all dreams.”

In three days they put in their regular call to Ankara, the inner planet where the central base for the various research groups in Yirdo’s solar system was established; they reported Bob’s death, “by misunderstanding—no blame,” in the Ethnographic Corps code., They did not request relief.

Life in Hamo village went on as before. The Middle-Aged Women said nothing about Bob’s death to Tamara, but several evenings old Binira sat just outside her hut and sang to her, a quiet cricket trill. Once she saw two of the little saweya dancers leaving a flowering branch at the door of Bob’s empty hut; she went towards them, but they trotted off, giggling. Soon after, the Young Men set. fire to the hut, deliberately or by accident, there was no telling; it burned to ashes and all trace of it was gone within a week. Ramchandra spent his days and nights) with the Old Ones of Hamo and Gunda, gathering an increasingly solid bulk of linguistic and mythic data. The long lines of saweya dancers undulated, the baliya dancers thrust their high breasts left and right, the singers chanted “Ah-weh, weh, ah-weh, weh,” and the forest glades round the dancing ground at dusk swarmed with coupled bodies. Hunters returned proudly with dead poro, like suckling pigs with blunt, curved fangs, slung on carrying poles. On) the twelfth night after Bob’s death Ramchandra came to Tamara’s hut; she had been trying to read over some notes, but the pages might as well have been empty, her head ached and nothing made sense, nothing meant anything. He came to the doorway, dark, slight, shadowy, and she looked up at him with dull eyes. He said some-! thing that meant nothing about loneliness, and then he said, with the darkness around him and behind him, “It’s like fire. Like burning in a fire. But the spirit caught too, burning—”

“Come in,” she said.

A few nights later they lay talking, in the dark, the soft windy rain sighing in the forest and on the thatch of the hut above them.

“Since I first saw you,” he said. “Truly, since the day we met, in the canteen at Ankara Base.”

With a laugh, Tamara said, “You scarcely behaved as if…”

“I didn’t like it! I refused. I said, No, no, no!—my wife was enough, this doesn’t come twice to a man in one life, I will remember her.”

“You do,” Tamara murmured.

“Of course. To her in me now I can say, Yes, and to you with me, Yes, yes… Listen, Tamara, you set me free, your hands free me. And bind me. Tighter to the wheel, never in this life now will I get free, never cease to desire you, I don’t want to cease…”

“It’s so simple now. What was in our way?”

“My fear. My jealousy.”

“Jealousy?—Of Bob?”

“Oh yes,” he said, shivering.

“Oh Ram, never—Right from the beginning, you—”

“Confusion,” he whispered. “Illusion…”

His warmth against her the length of her body; and cold Bob, cold in the ground. Fire is better than earth.

She woke; he was stroking her hair and cheek, soothing her, whispering, “Sleep again, it’s all right, Tamara,” his voice heavy with sleep and tenderness.

“What—did I—”

“A bad dream.”

“Dream. Oh, no—it wasn’t bad—just queer.”

The rain had ceased and the light of the giant planet, greyed and filtered by clouds, was like a faint mist in the hut. She could just make out the hook of his nose, the darkness of his hair, in that grey dust of light.

“What was the dream?”

“A boy—a young man—no, a boy, about fifteen. Standing in front of me. Sort of filling everything, taking up all the room, so that I couldn’t possibly get past him or around him. But just an ordinary boy, with glasses, I think. And he was staring at me, not threatening, not even really seeing me, but he kept staring and saying ‘Bill me, bill me.’ And I didn’t think he owed me anything, so I said, ‘What for?’ But he just kept saying, ‘Bill me!’ And then I woke up.”

“Bill me, how funny,” Ramchandra said sleepily. “Bill me… Me Bill…”

“Yes. That’s it. I’m Bill, that’s what he meant.”

“Oh,” Ramchandra said, a deep exhalation, and she felt his relaxed body go tense. Since Bob’s death she had not trusted the Ndif, or rather without distrusting any one of them she had lost trust in their world, she feared harm. She raised her head quickly to see if someone had entered the hut. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing is wrong.”

“What is it?”

“Nothing. Go back to sleep. You talked to God.”

“The dream?”

“Yes. He told you his name.”

“Bill?” she said, and because the alarm was past and she was still sleepy and Ramchandra was laughing, she laughed. “God’s name is Bill?”

“Yes, yes. Bill Kopman, or Kopfman, or Cupman.”

“Bik-Kop-Man?”

“The T assimilates to the ‘k,’ as in sikka, the fiber they make fishing lines of—silk.”

“What are you babbling about?”

“Bill Kopman, who made this world.”

“Who what? Who?”

“Who made this world. This world—Yirdo, the poro, the puti bushes, the Ndif. You saw him in your dream. A fifteen-year-old boy, with glasses, probably also acne and weak ankles. You saw him, and so my eyes see for a moment too. A skinny boy, lazy, shy. He reads stories, he daydreams, about the great blond hero who can hunt and fight and make love all day and night. His head is full of the hero, himself, and so it all comes to be.”

“Ram, stop it.”

“But you talked to him, not I! You asked him, ‘What for?’ But he couldn’t tell you. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t understand desire. He is entirely caught in it, bound by it, he sees and knows nothing but his own immense desire. And so he makes the world. Only one free of desire is free of the worlds, you know.”

Tamara looked, as if over her shoulder, back into her dream. “He speaks English,” she said, unwillingly.

Ramchandra nodded. His tranquillity, his acceptant, playful tone, reassured her; it was interesting to lie looking together at the same silly dream.

“He writes it all down,” she said, “his fantasies about the Ndif. Maps and everything. A lot of kids do that. And some adults…”

“Perhaps he has a notebook of his invented language. It would be interesting to compare with my notebooks.”

“Much easier just to go find him and borrow his.”

“Yes, but he doesn’t know Old Ndif.”

“Ramchandra.”

“Beloved.”

“You are saying that because a boy writes nonsense in a notebook in—in Topeka, a planet thirty-one light-years away comes into existence, with all its plants and animals and people. And always has been in existence. Because of the boy and the notebook. And what about the boy with a notebook in Schenectady? or New Delhi?”

“Evidently!”

“Your nonsense is much worse than Bill Kopman’s.”

“Why?”

“Time—And there isn’t room—”

“There is room. There is time. All the galaxies. All the universes. That is infinity. The worlds are infinite, the cycles are endless. There is room. Room for all the dreams, all the desires. No end to it. Worlds without end.”

His voice now was remote.

“Bill Kopman dreams,” he said, “and the God dances. And Bob dies, and we make love.”

She saw the boy’s blind yearning face before her, filling the world, no way around it, no path.

“You’re only joking, Ramchandra,” she said; she was shivering, now.

“I’m only joking, Tamara,” he said.

“If it weren’t a joke I couldn’t bear it. Being caught here, stuck in somebody else’s dream, dream world, alternate world, whatever it is.”

“Why caught? We call Ankara; they send the launch for us; next passage out we can go back to Earth if we like. Nothing has changed.”

“But this idea that it’s somebody else’s world. What if—what if—while we’re still here—Bill Kopman woke up?”

“Once in a thousand thousand years does a soul wake up,” Ramchandra said, and his voice was sad.

She wondered why that made him sad; she found it comforting. Brooding, she found further comfort. “It wouldn’t all depend on him, even if he started it,” she said. “All the uninhabited places, they’d just be blanks on his maps, but they’re full of life, animals and trees and ferns and little flies… Reality is what works, isn’t it? And the old men and women. They aren’t, they wouldn’t be, part of… of Bill’s wet dreams. He probably doesn’t even know any old people, he isn’t interested. So they get free.”

“Yes. They begin to imagine their world for themselves. To think, to make words. To tell the story.”

“I wonder if he ever thinks of death.”

“Can anyone think of death?” Ramchandra asked. “One can only do it. As Bob did it… Can one dream of sleep?”

The soft, dust-grey light was more intense, as the clouds thinned, drifting silent to the east.

“He looked anxious, in the dream,” Tamara murmured. “Frightened. As if… ‘Bill me…’ As if Bob paid… the debt.”

“Tamara, Tamara, you go before me, always before me.” His forehead was against her breasts; she touched his hair lightly.“Ramchandra,” she said, “I want to go home, I think. Away from this place. Back to the real world.”

“You go before, I follow you.”

“Oh, humble you are, liar, hoaxer, dancer, you’re so humble, but you don’t really care, do you? You’re not frightened.”

“Not any more,” he said, in a breath, barely audible.

“How long have you understood about this place? Since you danced with Bro-Kap and the others, that first time?”

“No, no. Only now, since your dream, this night, now. You saw. All I can do is say. But yes, if you like, I can say it because I have always known it. I speak my native tongue, because you have brought me home. The house under the trees behind the temple of Shiva in a suburb of Calcutta, is that my home? Is this? The world, the real world, which one? What does it matter? Who dreamed the Earth? A greater dreamer than you or I, but we are the dreamer, Shakti, and the worlds will endure as long as our desire.”