A Star Above It and Other Stories Read online

  With the morning, the natives came.

  “They’re all around us,” Conan Lang said quietly.

  “I can’t see them,” whispered Andy Irvin, looking at the brush. “They’re there.”

  “Do you … expect trouble, sir?”

  “Not yet, assuming we’ve got this deal figured right. They’re more afraid of us than we are of them.”

  “What if we don’t have it figured right?”

  Conan Lang smiled. “Three guesses,” he said.

  The kid managed a wry grin. He was taking it well, Lang thought. He remembered how he’d felt the first time. It didn’t really hit you until that first day, and then it upped and kicked you in the teeth. Quite suddenly, it was all a very different proposition from the manuals and the viewers and the classrooms of the Academy. Just you, all alone, the alien breeze sighed in your ear. You’re all alone in the middle of nowhere, the wind whispered through the trees. Our eyes are watching you, our world is pressing you back, waiting. What do you know of us really? What good is your knowledge now?

  “What next?” Andy asked.

  “Just tend the field, kid. And try to act like a ghost. You’re an ancestor of those people watching us from the brush, remember. If we’ve got this figured wrong—if those survey reports were haywire somewhere, or if someone’s been through here who didn’t belong—you should have a little warning at least. They don’t use blowguns or anything—just spears, and they’d prefer a hatchet. If there’s trouble, you hightail it back to the hut at once and man the projector. That’s all.”

  “I’m not so sure I care to be an ancestor,” Andy Irvin muttered, picking up his hoe. “Not yet, anyhow.” He moved off along a water trench, checking on the plants.

  Conan Lang picked up his own hoe and set to work. He could feel the natives watching him, wondering, whispering to themselves. But he was careful not to look around him. He kept his head down and dug at the plants with his hoe, clearing the water channels. The plants were growing with astonishing rapidity, thanks to the dose of radiation. They should be mature in a week. And then—

  The sun blazed down on his treated skin and the sweat rolled off his body in tiny rivulets. The field was strangely silent around him; there was only the gurgle of the water and the soft sigh of the humid breeze. His hoe chopped and slushed at the mud and his back was tired from bending over so long. It was too still, unnaturally still.

  Behind that brush, back in the trees—a thousand eyes.

  He did not look around. Step by step, he moved down the trench, under the hellish sun, working with his hoe.

  The fire-burned days and the still, hushed nights alternated rapidly. On the morning of the third day, Andy Irvin found what they had been waiting for.

  In the far corner of the field, placed on a rude wood platform about four feet high, there were three objects. There was a five-foot-square bark mat, neatly woven. There was a small animal that closely resembled a terrestrial pig, face down, its throat neatly slashed. And there was a child. It was a female baby, evidently not over a week old. It had been strangled to death.

  “It’s … different … when you see it for yourself,” Andy said quietly, visibly shaken.

  “You’ll get used to it,” said Conan Lang, his voice purposely flat and matter-of-fact. “Get the pig and the mat—and stop looking like a prohibitionist who just found a jug of joy water in the freezer. This is old stuff to ancestors.”

  “Old stuff,” repeated Andy without conviction.

  They carried the contents of the platform back to their hut and Conan Lang wrapped the body of the child in a cloth.

  “We’ll bury her tonight after dark,” he said. “The pig we eat. It won’t do any harm to sit on the mat where they can see us while we’re eating it, either.”

  “Well,” Andy muttered. “Glad to see you’re not going to eat the baby, too.”

  “You never can tell,” smiled Conan. “We anthropologists are all crazy, or hadn’t you heard?”

  “I’ve heard,” agreed Andy Irvin, getting his nerves under control again. “Where’s the hot sauce?”

  Conan Lang stepped back outside and picked up his hoe. The blazing double sun had already produced shimmering heat waves that danced like live things in the still air over the green field. The kid was going to be all right. He’d known it all along, of course—but you could never be sure of a man until you worked with him under field conditions. And a misfit, an unstable personality, was anything but a joke on an alien planet where unknowable forces hung in the balance.

  “Let’s see if I’ve got this thing figured straight,” Andy said, puffing away on one of Conan’s pipes. “The natives are afraid of us, and still they feel that they must make us an offering because we, as their supposed ancestors, control their lives. So they pick a system of dumb barter rather than sending out the usual contact man to ferret out kinship connections.”

  “You’re O.K. so far,” Conan Lang said. “I guess you’ve studied about the dumb barter system used on Earth in the old days; it was used whenever trade took place between groups of markedly unequal strength, such as the African pygmies and trading vessels from the west. There’s a fear factor involved.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Forget the ‘sir.’ I didn’t mean to lecture. I think I’ll start calling you Junior.”

  “Sorry. The bark mat is a unit in a reciprocal trade system and the pig is a sacred animal—I get that part of it. But the baby—that’s terrible, Conan. After all, we caused that death in a way—”

  “Afraid not,” Conan Lang corrected him. “These people practice infanticide; it’s part of their religion. If the preliminary reports were correct—and they’ve checked out so far—they kill all the female children born on the last three days of alternate months. There’s an economic reason, too—not enough food to go around, and that’s a pretty effective method of birth control. The baby would have been killed regardless—we had nothing to do with it.”

  “Still—”

  “I know. But maybe she was the lucky one after all.”

  “I don’t quite follow you there.”

  “Skip it—you’ll find out soon enough.”

  “What are you going to leave them tonight?”

  “Not sure yet,” Conan Lang said. “We’ll have to integrate with their value system, of course. We brought some mats, and I guess a good steel knife won’t hurt things any. We’ll worry about that later. Come on, farmer—back to work.”

  Andy Irvin picked up his hoe and followed Conan Lang into the field. The clear water bubbled softly as it flowed through the trenches. The growing plants sent their roots thirstily into the ground and the fresh green shoots stretched up like tentacles into the humid air of Sirius Ten.

  That night, under the great yellow moon that swam far away and lonesome among the stars, they placed exchange gifts of their own on the platform. Next morning, the invisible traders had replaced them with four mats and another dead pig.

  “No babies, anyhow,” Andy Irvin said, puffing industriously on one of Conan’s pipes. They had decided that cigarettes, as an unfamiliar cultural trait to the natives, were out. Now, with Andy taking with unholy enthusiasm to pipe smoking, Conan Lang was threatened with a shortage of tobacco. He watched the smoke from the kid’s pipe with something less than ecstasy.

  “We can have smoked ham,” he observed.

  “It was your idea,” Andy grinned.

  “Call me ‘sir’.”

  Andy laughed, relaxed now, and picked up the pig. Conan gathered up the somewhat cumbersome mats and followed him back into the hut. The hot, close sun was already burning his shoulders. The plants were green and healthy looking, and the air was a trifle fresher in the growing field.

  “Now what?” Andy asked, standing outside the hut and letting the faint breeze cool him off as best it could.

  “I figure we’re about ready for an overt contact,” Conan Lang said. “Everything has checked out beautifully so far, and the natives do
n’t seem to be suspicious or hostile. We might as well get the ball rolling.”

  “The green branch, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right.”

  They still did not get a glimpse of the natives throughout the steaming day, and that night they placed a single mat on the platform. On top of the mat they put a slim branch of green leaves, twisted around back on itself and tied loosely to form a circle. The green branch was by no means a universal symbol of peace, but, in this particular form, it chanced to be so on Sirius Ten. Conan Lang smiled a little. Man had found many curious things among the stars, and most of them were of just this unsensational but very useful sort.

  By dawn, the mat and the circle branch were gone and the natives had left them nothing in return.

  “Today’s the day,” Conan Lang said, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. “They’ll either give us the works or accept our offer. Nothing to do now but wait.”

  They picked up their hoes and went back into the field. Waiting can be the most difficult of all things, and the long, hot morning passed without incident. The two men ate their lunch in silence, thankful for the odorless injection that kept the swarming insects away from them. Late in the afternoon, when the long blue shadows of evening were already touching the green plants and the clean, flowing water, the natives came.

  There were five of them and they appeared to be unarmed. One man walked slightly in advance of the others, a circular branch of green leaves in his hand. Conan Lang waited for them, with Andy standing by at his side. It was moments like this, he thought, that made you suddenly realize that you were all alone and a long, long way from friends. The natives came on steadily. Conan felt a surge of admiration for the young man who led them. From his point of view, he was walking into a situation filled with the terror of the supernatural, which was a very real part of his life. His steps did not falter. He would, Conan supposed, be the eldest son of the most powerful chief.

  The natives stopped when they were three paces away. Their leader extended the circular green branch. “We would serve you, fathers from the mountains,” the native said in his own tongue.

  Conan Lang stepped forward and received the branch. “We are brothers,” he replied in the same language, “and we would be your friends.”

  The native smiled, his teeth very white. “I am Ren,” he said. “I am your brother.”

  Conan Lang kept his face expressionless. but deep within him a dark regret and sadness coursed like ice through his veins.

  It had begun again.

  III

  For many days, Conan Lang listened to the Oripesh natives preparing for the feast. Their small village, only a quarter of a mile from the field, was alive with excitement. The women prepared great piles of the staple ricefruit and broiled river fish in great green leaves on hot coals. The men chanted and danced interminably, cleansing the village by ritual for the coming visitation, while the children, forgotten for once, played on the banks of the river. On the appointed day, Conan Lang walked into the village with Andy Irvin at his side.

  It was a crude village, necessarily so because of its transient nature. But it was not dirty. The natives watched the two men with awe, but they did not seem unfriendly. The supernatural was for them always just on the other side of the hill, hidden in the night, and now it was among them, in the open. That was all. And what, after all, thought Conan Lang, could have seemed more supernatural to them than a silver ship that dropped out of the stars? What was supernatural depended on one’s point of view—and on how much one happened to know about what was natural.

  The box he carried was heavy, and it took both arms to handle it. He watched Andy puffing at his side and smiled.

  “Stick with it, kid,” he said, walking steadily through the watching natives. “You may earn your pay yet.”

  Andy muttered something under his breath and blinked to get the sweat out of his eyes.

  When they reached the clearing in the center of the village, they stopped and put their boxes down. Ren, the eldest son of the chief Ra Renne, approached them at once and offered them a drink from a large wooden bowl. Conan drank and passed the container on to Andy, who grinned broadly and took a long swallow of the warm fluid. It was sweet, although not too sweet, and it burned pleasantly on the way down. It was, Conan decided instantly, a great improvement over some native fermented horrors he had been subjected to in times past.

  The natives gathered around them in a great circle. There must have been nearly five hundred of them—far more than the small village could accommodate for any length of time.

  “We’re celebrities,” Conan Lang whispered out of the side of his month as he waited to be presented ceremonially to the chiefs.

  “You want my autograph?” hissed Andy, his face just a trifle flushed from the drink he had taken. “I make a real fine X.”

  The feast followed a pattern familiar to Conan Lang. They were presented ceremonially to the tribe, having identified themselves as ancestors of four generations ago, thus making themselves kin to virtually all the tribe with their complicated lineage system, and also making refutation impossible since no one remembered that far back. They were seated with the chiefs, and ate the ritual feast rapidly. The food was good, and Conan Lang was interested in getting a good taste of the ricefruit plant, which was the basic food staple of the Oripesh.

  After the eating came the drinking, and after the drinking the dancing. The Oripesh were not a musical people, and they had no drums. The men and the women danced apart from each other, each one doing an individual dance—which he owned, just as the men from Earth owned material property—to his own rhythm pattern. Conan Lang and Andy Irvin contented themselves with watching, not trusting themselves to improvise an authentic dance. They were aware that their conduct was at variance with the somewhat impulsive conduct usually attributed to ancestors in native folklore, but that was a chance they had to take. Conan was very conscious of one old chief who watched him closely with narrowed eyes.

  Conan ignored him, enjoying the dancers. The Oripesh seemed to be a happy people, although short on material wealth. Conan Lang almost envied them as they danced—envied them for their simple lives and envied them their ability to enjoy it, an ability that civilized man had left by the wayside in his climb up the ladder. Climb—or descent? Conan Lang sometimes wondered.

  Ren came over, his color high with the excitement of the dance. Great fires were burning now, and Conan noticed with surprise that it was night.

  “That is Loe,” he said, pointing. “My am-ren, my bride-to-be.” His voice was filled with pride.

  Conan Lang followed his gesture and saw the girl. Her name was a native word roughly translatable as fawn, and she was well named. Loe was a slim, very shy girl of really striking beauty. She danced with diffidence, looking into Ren’s eyes. The two were obviously, almost painfully, in love—love being a part of the culture of the Oripesh. It was difficult to realize, sometimes, even after years of personal experience, that there were whole worlds of basically humanoid peoples where the very concept of romantic love did not exist. Conan Lang smiled. Loe was, if anything, a trifle too beautiful for his taste. Dancing there, with the yellow moon in her hair, moving gracefully with the leaping shadows from the crackling fires, she was ethereal, a fantasy, like a painting of a woman from another, unattainable century.

  “We would give gifts to the chiefs,” Conan Lang said finally. “Your Loe—she is very beautiful.”

  Ren smiled, quickly grateful, and summoned the chiefs. Conan Lang rose to greet them, signaling to Andy to break open the boxes. The chiefs watched intently. Conan Lang did not speak. He waited until Andy had opened both boxes and then pointed to them.

  “They are yours, my brothers,” he said.

  The natives pressed forward. A chief picked the first object out of the box and stared at it in disbelief. The shadows flickered eerily and the night wind sighed through the village. He held the object up to the light and there was a gasp of astonishment
.

  The object was a ricefruit—a ricefruit the likes of which had never before been seen on Sirius Ten. It was round, fully a foot in diameter, and of a lush, ripe consistency. It made the potato-sized ricefruits of the Oripesh seem puny by comparison.

  It was then that Conan Lang exploded his bombshell.

  “We have come back to show you, our brothers, how to grow the great ricefruit,” he said. “You can grow them over and over again, in the same field. You will never have to move your village again.”

  The natives stared at him in wonder, moving back a little in fear.

  “It cannot be done,” a chief whispered. “The ricefruit devours the land—every year we must move or perish.”

  “That is over now,” Conan Lang said. “We have come to show you the way.”

  The dancing had stopped. The natives waited, nervous, suddenly uncertain. The yellow moon watched through the trees. As though someone had flipped a switch, sound disappeared. There was silence. The great ricefruit was magic. They looked at the two men as though seeing them for the first time. This was not the way of the past, not the way of the ancestors. This was something completely new and they found themselves lost, without precedent for action. Ren alone smiled at them, and even he had fear in his eyes.

  Conan Lang waited tensely. He must make no move; this was the crisis point. Andy stood at his side, very still, hardly breathing.

  A native walked solemnly into the silence, carrying a young pig under his arm. Conan Lang watched him narrowly. The man was obviously a shaman, a witch doctor, and his trembling body and too-bright eyes were all too clear an indication of why he had been chosen for his role in the society.

  With a swiftness of motion that was numbing, the shaman slit the pig’s throat with a stone knife. At once he cut the body open. The blood stained his body with crimson. His long, thin hands poked into the entrails. He looked up, his eyes wild.