West Of The Sun Part 8

I'm scared, but--"

Wright glanced helplessly at Paul. "We--"

Dorothy said quickly, "_My_ decision." Holding the locket up for the sun to gleam on it, she walked into the meadow and waited in the brightness. Paul's hand sweated on the rifle stock. He saw Wright patting Mijok's arm, heard his restraining murmur: "Quiet, Mijok--keep your shirt on, Mijok, old man--man...." Mijok searched the face of his G.o.d with a mute desperation and remained as he was.

The pygmy woman halted fifty feet away in still-faced musing. As Paul had seen through the binoculars, she was elaborately tattooed and young. The pause was long. Dorothy stepped nearer to the place where Wright had left the bones, displaying the locket, her open left hand waving down at her body to demonstrate that she carried no weapons.

For the first time Paul realized she had left her holster belt behind.

The blue-skirted woman shrilled a word; her two followers fell back.

She thrust the blunt end of her spear in the ground and came forward steadily until she was only a few feet from the woman of the twenty-first century; mask-faced, she met Dorothy's smile with a long scrutiny. Now and then the green eyes shifted to study the clearing, the lifeboat, the quiet shapes of Paul and Wright. And Mijok. Perhaps she stared longest at Mijok, but by some heavy discipline her face refused to tell of anything but dignity and caution.

She spoke at last. It was complex, in a tone like the piping of a tree frog. There were pauses, studied inflections, no gestures: her seven-fingered hands hung limp against the blue gra.s.s skirt. The closing words seemed to have a note of questioning and of sternness; she waited.

Dorothy's contralto was startlingly deep in contrast: "Darling, I would like to know where you picked up that perfectly adorable wrap-around, only I don't think it would suit me. I'm, to put it frankly, a shade too hippy for such. In case you're wondering, I'm a female sample of man"--she touched herself and pointed to the pygmy lady--"man--"

"Oh!" Wright whispered. "Good girl, good--"

"--and it does seem to me us girls ought to stick together, because"--she held out the locket--"well, just because. And anyway look: I have only ten toes, fastened on to the ends of my feet, and if I had more, Heaven knows (just count 'em and _see_ how each grows!) I'd have trouble in keeping them neat. Pome. There now, sweetie pie, please take it, huh?" And she opened the locket--Paul remembering in lessening panic how much the unknown portrait did resemble her--and held it face out to the woman of Lucifer. A tiny palm came up dubiously; Dorothy placed the locket in it. "It won't bite, baby." The pygmy woman turned it about, puzzling at the hinge. Dorothy stooped to demonstrate the mechanism a few times. "I'm Dorothy, by the way, more widely known as the Dope, which is a t.i.tle of uncommon distinction among my people, achieved only after long study of the art of saying the right thing at the wrong time, burning the bacon, and preserving at all times an air of sweet and addled dignity--Dorothy...." She indicated herself plainly and pointed, with questioning eyebrows.

The tree-frog voice, with no sternness, but a hint of friendliness: "Tor-o-thee...?" She imitated Dorothy's motions. "Abro Pakriaa--"

"Pakriaa."

"Abro Pakriaa." There was sternness again in that correction.

"Abro Pakriaa...."

Wright muttered, "Royalty, I believe. Don't dare do any coaching.

Trust Dot's instinct. Ah, here we go--"

The pygmy woman had taken off her sh.e.l.l necklace. She crushed the dainty blue and yellow against her upper right breast; she set it for a moment on her shining hairless skull, and then offered it. Wright sighed, shaken, "It _had_ to work--exchange of gifts--a universal--"

When Dorothy dropped on one knee to take it, the mask relaxed for the first time in a wintry smile. Over the proud bald head went the chain of the locket, and Abro Pakriaa watched Dorothy put the necklace on--fortunately it was long, even drooping a little below Dorothy's throat. A flutter of red hands seemed to mean that Dorothy was to stand back; another motion brought forward the woman who carried the hide, her face a chip of red stone. The hide was unrolled, and the bones placed on it. There was more intricate speech, with touching of the locket and graceful, apparently kindly waving of thin arms.

Dorothy responded: "Four score and seven years ago...." She went on to the end without mirth or hesitation, fondling the sh.e.l.l necklace, giving the words the power of music that belongs to them even apart from knowledge of their meaning. When she was silent, Abro Pakriaa motioned the woman with the hide to go and held up her two hands clasped together, the Chinese salutation. She waited till Dorothy had done the same and strode away, recovering her spear without a backward look, vanishing under the trees.

Dorothy collapsed in the shadow of the barrier. Tentatively she groaned: "How'm I doing?"

Wright snarled; "Suppose you know that d.a.m.n bowman had an arrow trained on you the whole time?"

She glanced at him, lips quivering. "I was kind of aware of it."

"Can I," said Paul, "touch the hand that touched the hand--"

"Oh no. I ain' gonna 'sociate with no common sc.u.m no mo'."

Mijok stared in wonder at their sudden paroxysms of hysterical laughter. He rumbled in doubt. Then the contagion caught him. Whatever his own interpretation might be, he was bellowing, hammering his chest, rolling over on the moss and scattering handfuls of it while he roared.

He did not sober until he saw Wright drawing pictures on the earth--three stylized but obvious human figures, one small, one medium-sized, one large. Only the middle one had five fingers. Wright gouged a circle around all three. He said, "C'm'on, Mijok--language lesson."

7

The trail was obvious only to the pygmies, through a border region of meadow and forest that was full of dappled light, a warm hurry of life feeding, struggling, wandering. Aware of his own power and readiness, able now to enjoy the shifting scents and noises of this new trail, Paul watched Ann's quick slenderness and the swing of Spearman's solid shoulders. They, and Sears Oliphant, had emerged unharmed from the illness. During a week unmeasurably long in retrospect, all six of the party had found the ease and sureness of physical acclimation. Their bodies rejoiced in the hot clean air of day and the moist moderate nights; the only rebel was the Earth-born brain--grudging, frightened, trailing, making endless reservations and timid of shadows. In Sears Oliphant it was an almost open battle between a brave and curious mind and flesh that could not hide its wincing from pain and danger. His "Oh my, yes" had a tremor which angered himself and oppressed his natural garrulity.

When Ann Bryan had drifted out of the sleep of illness, Ed Spearman was petting her hands, sponging her forehead. Paul had seen something happen in Ann at that moment, like an innocent putting forth of leaves when winter is not surely gone. Ann had never taken a lover. On the ship, not so much unawakened as unwilling, she had rejected all that; Spearman, making no secret of wanting her, had not been insistent. Nor had he seemed outwardly much distressed, but (at a time when Earth-harbored youth of his nature would have been in their liveliest and most demanding prime) he had buried himself in _Argo's_ technical library to the point of red-eyed exhaustion, a desperation of unceasing study in the technologies that Captain Jensen would have helped him explore if Jensen had lived. Ann had read other matters after the violin strings were gone, read and daydreamed. If she'd wept (and Paul thought she had) she had done it alone, in that pocket of a room sacred to herself. To the others, she was a pa.s.sionately silent adolescent turning into a tiredly silent woman, who made too much point of doing her own work and asking for nothing.

Yes, Ann was different now. The thin beauty of her face, vivid white under heavy black hair, was still too quiet, but with a troubled radiance. During this long week she had talked much with Dorothy--talk superficially inconsequential, but Paul a.s.sumed it had a meaning below words, as if Ann had only just realized, probably without envy, that the brown girl was a thousand years older in heart and mind.

Beyond Ann and Spearman were the six bowmen of the escort, bodies bright with a sour-smelling oil, grouped around Abro Pakriaa at a deferential distance. The princess wore Dorothy's locket. "Abro," Paul had learned, was best translated as "princess" or "queen." A flame-red flower behind her ear caught sunlight from the early afternoon. Five others were following Paul--women, with skirts of every tint but Pakriaa's blue, taller than the men, carrying spears with blades of a white stone resembling quartz. The men were unvaryingly soft, rounded in contour, lacking the women's tough-sinewed vigor. It was plain, merely from the manner of Abro Pakriaa and her spear bearers, that among this people to be a woman was to be a leader and soldier, no doubt a hunter and head of the household by virtue of size and strength. In muscular power, a male pygmy was to a female as the weakest of Earth's women was to the toughest male athlete. These of the bodyguard were soldiers of a sort: the bows were small, the arrows only big darts. The bowmen never spoke except meekly in response to some patronizing word of the princess. Pakriaa's height topped forty inches; none of the bowmen was quite three feet tall. Paul's fingers itched for brush and palette. They were available in the lifeboat. The fact that he had not even unpacked them he blamed on a preoccupation with the daily work needed for mere survival, but there was a deeper reason: perhaps a fear of finding his moderate ability vanished if he should once try to hint with oil at the welling profusion of color and line that was Lucifer. Now he found himself trying to measure the quality of Pakriaa's rich copper against the softness of leaves that were burnt umber, malachite green, saffron, purple, and he thought: _I must be recovering. Wake up, ego, and look around._

Spearman was carrying rifle and automatic; Paul had preferred to leave his rifle behind; Ann, hating firearms, had only her knife.

Abro Pakriaa had entered the camp at noon, her fourth visit in the week. Her gloomy majesty unchanging, she had indicated that she wished them to come to her village. But Dorothy had turned her ankle the evening before and it still pained her. Wright, no doubt hungering more than any of the others for a sight of Pakriaa's way of living, had fretted and b.u.mbled and elected to remain with Dorothy and Sears, urging Paul needlessly to remember his anthropology. Sears, sweating out a microsection of a water insect from Lake Argo, had flapped a fat hand and boomed: "You be sure 'n' telephone, d.a.m.n it, if you're staying for dinner, hey?"

Remaining uneasily close to Wright, as he did whenever the pygmies appeared, Mijok had said carefully, "Telephone?"

"Word without meaning," said Wright gently, patting the huge arm.

"Noise word for fun."

The att.i.tude of Pakriaa's people to Mijok suggested the studious ignoring of an indecency. They would not harm the ugly animal, their manner said, so long as he was the property of the important sky people....

Life was generously abundant in this thinner forest. Things buzzed and flew; Paul noticed a few webs cunningly extended before burrows in the humus. Ann's ocean-gray eyes glanced back, brave and uncertain. "Those girls are too quiet. Paul, how much _do_ they know of our language?"

"Not much." He moved up to walk on her other side. "Doc and I have made only those two efforts to swap languages. A lot of that time had to be wasted on theirs, a dead end for us."

Spearman grunted, "Why? They've got a civilization, as Doc says."

"Our voices are wrong. Pitch effects meaning for them. You've noticed there's no pitch difference between their male and female voices.

Their language is tied to one section of the scale; a full octave of it is above the range of even Ann's voice. They can shape our words though, if they're willing. Basic English may appeal to the princess when she condescends to take it seriously."

"They could have picked up more than we suspect. They could have been eavesdropping outside the camp."

"No, Ed. Mijok would have known and told us."

"Yeah--Fido. Can hardly speak freely in front of him now."

"Don't think anything you wouldn't want him to hear."

"Paul, I swear, sometimes you're worse than Doc." But Spearman wanted to cancel the ill temper of the remark, and added: "You know, I thought _I_ knew something about Basic English--we all had drill enough in it. Beats me, the things Doc can do with it--the man's a wizard."

Paul was silent with unappeased annoyance. It was true: Mijok appeared to be a natural student too, already far beyond Basic English in a week of keen listening. "Nan," Paul said, "how did you like Mijok's humming when you were singing for us yesterday evening?"

"Good." She flashed him an almost cheerful smile. But when Ann spoke of her singing--and in the singing itself--there was, in spite of her, an aching wordless reminder of the violin gone silent. Her voice was sweet but without strength or resonance, and she took no ardent pleasure in using it. Her love was the violin--covered as well as might be in the comparative safety of the lifeboat, waiting for a distant day. If the day ever came (Sears had already dissected out, dried, and oiled some long leg-tendon fibers of a deerlike animal in a humble experiment aimed chiefly at Ann's morale)--if the day came, there would still be no piano, no answering of other strings, no splendid cry of bra.s.s. Crude wood winds, perhaps, sometime.... "Yes, he was good," said Ann, smiling. "Organ point in the tonic, and right in our own scale. Once he even upped to the dominant. Instinct, huh?

Sounded good, Paul, even with you trying to fill in the middle."

"h.e.l.l, I didn't think you heard me," Spearman snorted.