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She
wandered lonely through the wood, a
human child.
The
Hybroxi chattering over their tasks in
the high branches heard her, and came
leaping down to gather in the family
bundles, each tangled into a lumpy brown
mass, like a Christmas pudding dotted
with huge black raisin eyes.
They
watched till she passed and then,
exploding into random fragments, bounded
over and under and past each other from
branch to branch to cohere again in
front, until they reached the boundary
of their allotted territory, where
another tribe waited patiently.
Then
there was such a dance, a splitting and
spinning and bounding from forest floor
to sky ceiling, from the food trees to
the sleep trees to the work-a-day dream
trees; such a singing, such a storm of
whirling sounds that swept together and
then ripped apart, a shred of sadness
left clinging to the ragged edge of joy,
a whole nugget of fear embedded in a
matrix of awe.
A
human child in the wood alone, and a
she-child too.
High,
high above, Falkenhyr hung balanced on
the circling tide of the world wind.
Lonely in the distance sailed his
brothers, one and one, and beyond them,
though he could not see, he knew that
others lifted and sank on the swell of
the invisible ocean which was their
element, knots in the gossamer web
stretched by the Shining Ones around
Their world.
He
saw the commotion in the wood below, and
reluctantly withdrew a small portion of
his mind from the tapestry of logic,
spun thread by abstruse thread around
its premise, and being woven now in
intricate inevitable designs, to form a
symbolic universe that would earn him
honour among his peers at the next
gathering.
The
Hybroxi were unusually excited, yet this
was no holiday. As he watched, the
disturbance spread from tribe to tribe
and the pattern became clear. Something
was moving through the wood, a Hyrka
perhaps. He pictured - coldly, he had
little emotion even for his own kind and
none for the earthbound - the gaudy
terror rippling over the grass.
The
Hyrka too were part of the design - like
the Hybroxi, like the Falkentribe, even
the Shining Ones themselves, who wove
their own lives into the world's woof -
but the Hyrka pattern had a discordant
element; there were too many of them,
and they were becoming too bold. It was
of little personal interest to him - he
had already explored all the logical
possibilities of the real world - but it
was his part to watch and record. He let
himself swing down in a great looping
spiral till he was gliding just above
the topmost leaves, and his interest
quickened. The Hybroxi were not dancing
fear this time; their excitement was
linked to a new creature on the world,
one of those who had come from the
stars.
His
great shadow swam before him over the
foliage, heaving up over the crests and
sliding down in a spreading stain over
the hollows, and where it passed the
dance ended and the families clung
together in quivering, fascinated
bundles to find what the Watcher for the
Shining Ones would do.
Back
on the grass covered meadow (split by a
stream and ringed by the forest) where
the colonists' ship had crashed, Emma's
mother was being comforted by a small
group of the other women. Her hysterics
had quietened into moaning self-excuses
for leaving the child alone.
John
Hirst, the nominal leader of the colony,
keeping a tight grip on his jangling
nerves, turned away. It only needed
this; they had been plagued by
misfortune. First in space, when most of
the officers had died in the same
explosion that destroyed the instruments
that should have led them to join the
established colony on Centaurus III.
Then, when by a miracle they had chanced
on this Earth-like world, continual
squabbles had split them into sullen
factions, whose hostility only grew more
bitter when an exploring party was torn
to bloody shreds by something in the
forest.
His
mind veered hastily away from that
nauseating memory, and he turned his
eyes to the fields, painfully
cultivated, where the remains of their
first crop rotted. He would have to try
again to make them see that they must
clear and replant them; maybe ditch
around and divert the stream into it,
that might keep the monkey-creatures
away, or a high fence.
"Come on,
Hirst, stop dreaming. It'll be dark
soon. Let's go, boys."
Some of the men started off with Carter,
but the majority hesitated, waiting for
Hirst.
"Wait,
men!" He knew his voice
was shrill and tried to control it.
"Carter,
you can't just go barging into that
forest without a plan. We'll have to
split into small parties, go around the
edge and try to pick up her tracks, then
at dawn we'll organize a search party to
follow her in."
"In the
morning?" Carter looked
at him with contempt. "The
kid's only seven years old. Are you
going to leave her alone in there all
night? Have you forgotten what happened
to Evanson?" He turned
to the others. "I'm
going after her whether any of you are
coming or not." He
started off without looking back, and
this time all but a few of the older men
followed him.
Hirst's
shoulders slumped, and suddenly he felt
old and helpless. What was the use, they
were none of them qualified to be the
first explorers of a new world. They
were farmers, shopkeepers,
schoolteachers like himself, not
specialists, and too high a proportion
were women and children. This world
might look like Earth but it was not.
Those huge birds, or whatever they were,
hardly moving in the sky; the
monkey-things in the trees with their
continual chattering and sometimes that
weird, broken piping; the sparkling
incandescence drifting over the hills at
night, which Lieutenant Evanson had
started out to investigate; whatever
monstrosities had left him and his party
a pitiable scrabble of torn fragments;
no, this was not Earth. He did not like
to think what would happen when their
food supply ran out. They might be
better off dying now, at least Evanson
had been killed quickly.
He
broke through the circle of women who
had gathered around him, ignoring their
complaining questions, and walked
heavily to his hut, a makeshift affair
like the others, thrown up as a token
protection, without plan or pride.
"Late
- late in the evening Kilmeny came home,
For Kilmeny had been she could not tell
where,
And Kilmeny had seen what she could not
declare."
There
was laughter and an antiphonal chorus of
comments from the humans spread at ease
up the cropped grass slopes of the
meeting place. The quotation had been
delivered at every birthday celebration
for Emma for the last nine years, and
they greeted it as an old friend.
Hirst
beamed around at them, and waited
tolerantly for the Hybroxi gransers to
scold the childer back into the
wait-watch-listen bundles on the
branches overhanging the hollow.
"Emma
didn't know where she'd been either.
Remember, Carter, what she said when you
found her asleep that next day back at
the edge of the forest?"
This
was part of the ritual too, and Carter
looked up grinning with his arms still
around his mate. "Said
she'd been carried off by the stork to
see fireworks." This
year he varied the customary response,
and added as he patted his woman's
swollen belly. "Stork's
had a long holiday, but he's goin' to be
kept busy now, eh, Hirst?"
There
was a shriek of laughter - many of the
younger women were in various stages of
pregnancy - which was joined by the
deeper laughter of the men when, very
much on cue, one of the Falkentribe
swooped grandly over the clearing and
away.
Hirst
held out his hand for quiet and they
settled back again, the thick grass warm
against their flesh, ready to enjoy
every minute of their holiday.
"Yes, this
year we have many things to celebrate.
Emma's birthday, the child she had last
month, the first to be born here, all
the other children soon to be born. But
we should remember also how we were when
we first came home, how ignorant we
were, how foolish."
They
were listening quietly now though none
of them, even Hirst, really remembered.
He was using words which had become
tradition and though essentially
meaningless were still respected. "That
is why Emma's birthday is kept as a
holiday by all of us. From the time she
came back to us, even then, our luck
changed. and later, who was it who
learned how to communicate with the Hybroxi, who persuaded them to help us?
Emma!"
He
flung out his hands to where she stood
smiling with her mate's hand on her
shoulder, her naked brown body dappled
by the late afternoon sun, striking
through the leaves and twinkling in her
baby's eyes until he scrambled higher up
her back to avoid it.
Hirst
was getting old and beginning to feel
the coolness as the sun went down. He
shrugged the cloak of Hyrka fur closer
around him and went on. "It
has not been easy for us, many died
before we learned how to deal with the
beasts." There was a low
unconscious growl from the younger men
as they stiffened instinctively into the
fighting crouch and hands tightened on
spears. "But
it grows easier every day, and when
Emma's son is grown this will be his
world, a human world."
He
stepped off the tree stump and the
clearing dissolved into a welter of
spinning bodies, as the young men in one
ring, and the young girls not yet with
child in another, began the birthday
dance, the words of their song blending
with the excited piping of the Hybroxi
as they slowed the tempo of their own
dance to form a counterpoint through the
human movements.
High,
high above them Falkenhyr hung balanced
on the circling tide of the world wind.
With a small part of his mind he thought
of the Humans and Hybroxi dancing below,
with detached admiration for the Shining
Ones. They made mistakes, as they had
with the Hyrka, but they corrected them
ingeniously, with whatever material came
most readily to hand, however
unpromising it might at first appear.
He
wondered briefly - now that the Hyrka
were no longer a problem,what would the
Shining Ones use to control these new
Humans? Ah, yes, of course. He felt a
moment's strong sardonic amusement
before he turned his mind to more
interesting matters. |
