The Middle Man

  The Middle Man

  Chad Oliver

  Caravans, Unlimited, Story #3

  First published in Continuum 3, edited December 1974 by Roger Elwood.

  Out of all the millions of planets in that small sector of the universe that we refer to quaintly as our galaxy, few have names of their own. Worlds, by and large, are nameless things. They may have designations assigned to them from outside, but numbers are not names and in any case the numbers are unknown to the life-forms that dwell there.

  The giving of names is a characteristic of man and manlike beings, although it also occurs among a few other language-oriented genera. Moreover, the naming of planets is a special thing. First, you have to know what a planet is and that it needs to be distinguished from other planets—otherwise, it remains simply “the” world, if indeed it gets that far. It is not enough to name a territory, a river, a mountain. A concept of a total world is required—and most people don’t have it.

  It takes a complex and sophisticated culture to name a planet. Of course, the lightships of Caravans Unlimited tended to steer clear of civilizations more advanced than that of Earth. They had not encountered many, and the few they had touched briefly were almost totally alien. There was no basis for a trading relationship, and certainly not a profitable one. Caravans had little to offer to such a culture, and no bargaining power at all.

  Caravans left the handful of complex civilizations alone—which meant that Earth had no effective contact with them. The exploration of space was too costly to be undertaken by governments swamped by more urgent demands; the business corporations such as Caravans could pursue it only as long as it showed a profit. On the other side, it was a curious fact that the alien civilizations seemed to lack any interest in space travel.

  The Caravans lightships had never detected an alien ship in space.

  Alex Porvenir had long been convinced that this was nothing but a sampling error. The universe was immensely large, and the Caravans ships were few. The dimensional technique of moving a ship through not-space was tricky; the chances of direct contact with another ship were remote. The itch to explore the universe might not be universal. Certainly, there were civilizations that seemed unconcerned, or knew all they wished to know. But curiosity is a prerequisite to intelligent life, and somewhere…

  Alex was by no means certain that he wanted to encounter unknown ships in the depths of space. He had troubles enough as it was.

  For example, the problem on Arctica.

  Arctica was that rare thing, a world with a name. It had been named by the Caravans traders and had no official tag, but Arctica it was. It had to be.

  A cold planet, adrift with silver snow and sheeted with glinting ice. A world of howling blizzards and long stillnesses. A land of slow magnificent glaciers and sudden explosive thaws.

  Of course, it was not all snow and ice and barren frozen rock. Few life-sustaining worlds are that uniform. There was a broad equatorial belt that was moderate in its climate, there were transitional zones of treeless bush-covered plains, and there were deep central open seas.

  But the Lupani lived on the fringes of the snow and ice, and it was the Lupani who brought the traders to Arctica. There were other, more populous tribes south of the Lupani, but they had nothing that Caravans could use.

  On the charts, Arctica was Sirius XI, almost nine light-years from Earth.

  Nobody ever thought of it as Sirius XI.

  Now, as the Caravans lightship carrying Alex Porvenir approached the Sirius system, spring was coming to Arctica.

  That was no accident.

  What happened—or failed to happen—in the spring was the obvious key to the riddle of the Lupani.

  * * *

  The Lupani were a tough, resourceful people who somewhat resembled the Eskimos of an older Earth. They even looked like them in a purely physical sense, and for very good reasons. They had the same narrow eyes, the same high cheekbones and fatty pads protecting the nose, the same somewhat globular body build. When you confront the stresses of extreme cold, wide-open eyes are vulnerable to freezing, a projecting beak of a nose is an invitation to disaster, and a body that does not retain heat does not survive.

  When you have no wood, you build your houses of snow or rock and line the walls with skins. When you have to walk in a blizzard, you don’t go naked or with just a couple of strategically placed feathers.

  The old Eskimos—extinct now in the manswarm that was Earth—would have recognized the Lupani, and understood them.

  They had faced many of the same problems.

  The Lupani could not just park themselves in one spot and live off the land. Farming was impossible. They had to shift with the seasons, utilizing the resources of each to the maximum.

  Summers were hard and lonely, but productive. During the summer months, the askaggen moved in small groups onto the suddenly flowering treeless plains that formed the southern edge of the Lupani range. The askaggen were not herd animals. Large, hairy, and formidably tusked, they were more like a stunted mammoth than anything else. Scattered in little knots of four or five animals, they feasted on the grassies and shrubs of the summer plains. In order to hunt them —and even to find them—the Lupani had to split up into family groups and fan out over a huge territory. It took a lot of walking, and friends that parted when summer began would not see each other again for many long months.

  In the fall, when the chill winds began to blow, the askaggen drifted southward out of the land of the Lupani. The scattered Lupani began their trek north toward their winter villages, carrying their collected tusk-ivory with them. They lived on berries and marsh birds and the small rodents that burrowed in the damp soil.

  Winter was the best time, despite the bitter cold. The Lupani were together and snug in their rock villages with the interior walls lined with hides. There were sea mammals beneath the ice, sleek propoise-like karibu that maintained breathing holes in the crust ice. The harpoons of the Lupani hunters sought them out with ease; it took skill and patience but it was not really hard work. Winter was a time of enforced leisure, a time for sewing skins and repairing weapons and carving dreams and memories out of ivory. It was also a time of awesome frozen beauty, and the Lupani were by no means unaware of the magic of their winter world.

  The onslaught of spring was no cause for rejoicing; the Lupani sang no songs to spring. It was a time for thaws and open rushing water, a time for drenching rains and snarling knife-edged winds. The karibu swam far to the south to bear their young in warmer water that splashed against distant islands. For the Lupani, it was a time for farewells and a time of gnawing hunger. The people of the villages delayed as long as they could, and then broke up into tiny groups that moved toward the barren wet plains, waiting for the askaggen to come again. Meanwhile, they scavenged what they could.

  That was the annual cycle of the Lupani.

  That was the way it had always worked. That was the way it was supposed to work.

  The problem was simple. It wasn’t working now.

  The cycle was broken.

  * * *

  The Caravans lightship, operating now in normal space, flashed toward Arctica. The huge white sun that was Sirius bathed the ship in silver. The symbol of the laden camel on the bow seemed somehow right at home. Had there been anyone to see, it would not have been difficult to imagine another burning sun, a sea of shifting sand, the patient tinkling of the harness bells…

  And men. Men of a special breed. Men with an ancient lineage. Men who knew about far journeys and strange ports of call. Men who for most of their adult lives sought out products that were worth transporting across immense distances. Men who lived with the stars—

  “It just can’t be that way,” Tucker Olton said. “There has to
be some other explanation.”

  Alex Porvenir filled one of his habitually foul pipes and fired it up. “Great,” he said. “I’m all ears. Clue me in on that other explanation.”

  “I wish I could. Just once, I’d like to reverse our roles. It would do my ego a lot of good—what’s left of it.”

  Alex Porvenir smiled. “Your time will come. Besides, we worked this one out together, remember? It wasn’t just my idea. I don’t understand it either. But there’s no other way the thing will work.”

  “It won’t work this way either. You know it won’t. I don’t give a damn what the computer says. I’ve seen the Lupani. I know what they can do and what they can’t do. The theory may sound good, but it has the slight defect of being impossible.”

  Alex nodded and stretched out his long legs. His disconcertingly direct brown eyes narrowed slightly. He passed a lean hard hand through his graying hair. He liked Tucker Olton. The two men had been through a lot together, intellectually and otherwise. Alex was proud of the younger man. He had learned his lessons well but he had a mind of his own. He had the too-rare gift of being able to see what he looked at. He saw what was there, not what was supposed to be there.

  “You will grant two facts,” Alex said, puffing on his pipe. “One, the Lupani have virtually stopped producing their carved ivory artifacts. Two, they told the probe team that they were out of ivory. They said they no longer hunted the askaggen. No askaggen, no ivory. No ivory and thus no more of those wonderful carvings. And no product for Caravans; we can’t market harpoons and skin hats. Correct?”

  “Okay except for one small item. They have to hunt the askaggen. They can’t survive any other way. The karibu aren’t available in the summer, and even if they were the Lupani couldn’t eat them. The strongest tabu in their culture involves consuming out-of-season food. You remember Bob Edgerton’s classic article?”

  “ The Ecological Base of Lupani Food Prohibitions? I think I vaguely recall it. In fact, I talked it over with Bob before he wrote it, and I showed it to you when it first came out.”

  Tucker Olton flushed. “Well, anyway. They can’t eat askaggen meat except in the summer. They can’t eat the flesh of the karibu except in the winter. Under no circumstances can they eat both at the same time. Even allowing for overlapping distributions, it works out very neatly. They don’t harvest enough karibu to affect the breeding population and the same goes for the askaggen. They are assured a perpetual food supply—”

  “I grasp the argument.”

  “Yeah, but consider the implications. They have to hunt the askaggen in the summer. Otherwise, they’d starve. If they go after the askaggen, they get the ivory from the tusks. The karibu have no tusks; they’re not built like a walrus. Okay, no askaggen and no ivory. What in the hell are they doing?”

  Alex knocked out his pipe. “Obviously, our friends are staying put in their winter villages. Instead of dispersing in the spring and heading for the askaggen range, they are staying together where they are.”

  “My point is that they can’t do that. People have to eat. That’s as solid a law as we can have in what we laughingly refer to as the behavioral sciences.”

  Alex shrugged. “When you can’t get an answer or the answer is impossible the chances are that you’re asking the wrong question. The Lupani are not hunting the askaggen. They are parked on their posteriors in their winter villages. Presumably, they aren’t eating each other. Therefore, they have found a food resource that we don’t understand. The question is simple. What is this food and where is it coming from?”

  “Swell. Does that get us closer to an answer?”

  “Maybe. If we know the question we’re halfway to a solution. There’s something to be said for the old Boasian approach. We don’t need a speculative theory. We need some facts.”

  “I have a hunch that those facts are going to be pretty damned peculiar.”

  “Facts are generally more peculiar than imaginative guesses. I’m inclined to agree with you. I don’t pretend to know the answer to this one. I am sure that there’s only one place to find the answer.”

  Tucker Olton shivered. “It’s not my idea of an ideal vacation spot. I don’t have enough fat on my bones. I also regret to inform you that I’m not waterproof.”

  “It won’t be fun,” Alex Porvenir conceded. “Just the same, it’s the only way. No sacrifice is too great for dear old Caravans. If the old man can take it, you’ll survive. No matter how you slice it, we’re stuck. The two of us have to go down there and find out what is going on.”

  Tucker Olton shivered again. He did not look happy.

  * * *

  The spherical landing shuttle drifted silently down through a cold gray sky. Like a fragile bubble it came to rest, hardly breaking the crust of the old, melting snow. The wind moaned eerily outside, a wind untamed and unbroken by obstructions of any sort. It was not a playful wind. It had teeth in it and it meant business.

  “Mush,” Tucker Olton muttered. “Nanook rides again.”

  “Nanook walks,” Alex Porvenir corrected him. “But not very far, fortunately.”

  The two men left the shuttle, moving from an artificial world in which everything was controlled. The transition was a shock.

  The howling wind almost knocked Alex down. The cold got to him at once despite the special clothing that he wore. His face burned and then became numb.

  It was impossible to talk. The two men just had to bend their bodies against the wind and force themselves through the snow. Their boots sank in almost to their knees.

  Alex could see; there was no danger of losing his way. He had put the shuttle down within sight of the stone walls of the village, walls that glinted icily in the diffused white light of the cloud-hidden sun. He could see the forbidding sea beyond the village, with turbulent, open black water frothing between great piles of shifting pack ice.

  They kept going, stumbling through the snow. It took them a good thirty minutes to reach the Lupani village.

  Alex led the way to the house of Korigh, who was the nearest thing the Lupani had to a leader. There was no way to knock against the hides that sealed the tunnel entrance. Alex dropped down on his hands and knees, pulled aside the flap, and crawled inside. The passageway was cool, dark, and damp. But there was no wind and the silence was startling.

  “Horani!” he shouted. His voice didn’t perform up to his expectations. He swallowed and tried again. “Horani!”

  There was a stirring against the inner seal. He thought he heard an answering call.

  Alex shoved the second flap open and crawled in. He stood up, sensing Tucker behind him. The heat hit him like a hot fist. The chamber smelled heavily of burning fish-oil and half-cured hides and sweating bodies. It took him a long minute before his eyes adjusted to the dim light from the oil lamps hanging on thongs from the roof. He felt singularly vulnerable although he knew he had nothing to fear from Korigh under normal circumstances. Korigh had always welcomed the traders and the good things the traders had brought to the Lupani.

  Alex recognized the fat old man despite the fact that it had been years since he had last seen him. Korigh was not a man you forget easily. Strong he was, with arms like a wrestler. His long black hair shone with fresh grease. His round face was lined and weathered, but his eyes were as sharp as those of any man that Alex had ever known.

  Alex remembered one of Korigh’s wives too. She was no beauty and never had been, but there had been a time when she had extended the hospitality of the house to Alex and he had been only too happy to accept.

  Not a word was spoken.

  That was not the way.

  Alex shucked off his clothes, stripping down to the loin cloth that was proper indoors attire. He stepped forward and embraced Korigh.

  The old man smelled as bad as ever.

  Then the conversation exploded.

  Alex could not keep up with all of it. As a younger man, he had dealt directly with many different peoples on a variety of worlds; even then,
using the best linguistic boosters that were available, he could not possibly be fluent in all of the varied languages he had to speak and understand. Now, when he was essentially a policy planner and occasional troubleshooter, his linguistic skills were rusty. It was only the necessity of visiting the Lupani in the spring that had saved him. There had been time, utilized in between other jobs, to brush up on the language. He was far from perfect, but he was not totally out of it either.

  Tucker, he noticed, was in better shape. Languages got tougher with age.

  There were a few peoples in the galaxy with whom you could come straight to the point. The Lupani, emphatically, were not among them.

  They drank a kind of sweet berry wine that did nothing to improve Alex’s powers of communication. He was not a wine man; wine made him sleepy and gave him a colossal headache. They ate slabs of rubbery karibu flesh. The karibu were still acceptable in Lupani terms, since it was too early to hunt the askaggen and spring was only beginning, but the karibu were not wholly acceptable to Alex. The meat was nearly raw and full of fat.

  The heat inside the hide-lined house was terrific. It was hard to believe that a cold wind whined over fields of snow just beyond the walls.

  And the talk went on and on. Korigh was in no hurry.

  They spoke of when the traders had first come to the Lupani. They joked of the ivory heirloom that Korigh had always refused to trade. The old man laughed and brought it out for Alex to examine. It was a fantastic thing, alive, half dream and half memory. It was less than two feet long, yellowed with age, carved with an extraordinary skill. When you held it in your hands, you saw the ancient gods of sea and snow, you lived the old hunts and the old loves, you felt the pride of a people who had met a tough world head-on and licked the worst it had to offer—

  As art, it was a masterpiece.

  As a product for Caravans, it was ideal. Small, portable, eminently marketable.