The Nearest Fire (V1.0), page 10
Clothing:I “Tunic” of fine unseamed gray cloth, ?wool/linen mixture, circular shape, worn with right shoulder free. Undergarment of gray cloth, overgarment of tanned decorated leather descending past the hips. Soft leather boots, side fastening.
His name sounds like “Yoro-harren.” Intelligent, highly civilized. Not, as I believed at first sight, a primitive or forest dweller. This proved by Second Anthropoid. Older male. 1.76m, heavier build, graying hair on the head, traces of facial hair, growth of thick down on neck, shoulders and upper arms. Left leg amputated below the knee.I This guy is definitely some kind of chief, leader, soldier,I name:I Tsaw-oo-Tsaw. •
It seems crazy but they may have come looking for us. They are castaways, alone; they came here over the sea. Some kind of refugees from fighting?I Tsaw has seen the shuttle.Oh Scott … oh after this long time. I can’t take much more of it, and I can’t stop hoping. There’s a world out there, now we know it, you were right. Maybe these are your “Moraia of Torin” that your granddad heard about in that old “alien-hoax” on a moon of Mars. After seeing the stonework on this island, and after seeing Yoro stand before me on the path and that game old Tsaw pointing at the map like some general, I can believe anything. I can believe they found you, and that you are safe and will come back to us again. Sam can’t leave now, that is certain. We will extend communication with these two and work on a plan for taking the ship to the continent. Wherever you are, Scott, hear me, think of me, as II think of you….
7
The Dream and the Awakening
Tsorl had done what he set out to do:I he had found the strangers, their camp and their ship. Yet he had done it at the cost of his strength; he was very weak for days, as if the trials of the voyage on the raft and of his operation itself had finally taken their toll. He lay in the small tent or came out and sat in the sun and watched the activity of the camp.
The next morning, and on many other mornings, I went to the cove beyond the camp and caught fish. It was a pleasant cove with a thin crust of land protecting it from the open sea and the Round Current. The waters were teeming with fish that no one had ever disturbed; it was a fisher’s dream place.
The humans were in one of their worry-nets about the fish. This was rare precious Torin fish, they argued; it should be preserved rather than eaten or captured only on film. On the other hand it was surely right that Tsorl and I, two castaways on our own home world, should have a right to its bounties and be able to eat the fish we caught Another point was that the fish was delicious. The humans had plenty of food, but not much was fresh, and they valued freshness above everything.
Finally Sam came to the cove and saw the way the fish swarmed; he watched me with the lace-leaf net, baited with fat flies. Then he sat on a rock with a deep sigh of pleasure and took out a roll of tough white thread. He tied a fat fly to its end and cast it into the blue water. We sat side by side and caught, slowly and deliberately, about fifteen good-sized fish, more than twice the number I had taken before. When Sam reentered the camp carrying his catch,I the two other humans shrieked and shook their fists at him, but it was only play-acting. We all had a fish feast that day, and afterward fished moderately for our needs.
We were still in a world of few words and some half-guessed thoughts. The routine the strangers kept explained itself by degrees. Tsorl, as he grew stronger, went to the ship and sat gazing at it for hours, with an expression like Sam when he caught fish. Even I grew bold enough to draw near and touch its metal skin. When some of its engines were tested and the whole of Tsabeggan seemed to thrum with the sound, I ran away and hid my head, but Tsorl drew closer, bristling with interest. Sam and Karen took him inside the ship the first time. I pretended to be busy with some digging but I was pleased when Tsorl came out again. Lisa looked at me and blinked one of her little slanted brown eyes as if to say: “There, you see;I nothing to worry about!”
The next part of our life together, Human and Moruian, had to do with the machines in the blue tent. We went there at the strangers’ invitation and saw moving pictures in a small box, about four fists by three and shaped like the tent windows—a square with the corners rounded. When we came to accept the colors and shapes of this film, we saw a world, the strangers’ world. Sometimes the images or scenes followed one upon the other, people—were they people?—walked about in thousands, buildings crowded higher than the sky-houses of Rintoul, trees or something very like them, thrust up to the glassy screen.
Better still, there were the sets of separate images: one man, one woman, one child, one tree growing out of the ground. We could control the images ourselves by pressing knobs on small gray boxes that felt like horn. We pressed the button and brought back the man, the woman, the child. We stared at them for a long time.
Finally Tsorl said: “Sam is a male, a man. Are the others, Karen and Lisa, really shaped in that strange way?”
“Yes, I think they are,” I said. “Why don’t we ask them?”
“Pah! You’re an impolite wretch, Yolo Ham.”
“Karen and Lisa will not swim where I am. They have a shyness. They are females.”
“Shyness is not a characteristic of females on Torin,” said Tsorl, “but I suppose you may be right. The point is why are they so shaped?”
It took several boxes of educational pictures before we found out. There was a terrible image on the screen. I leaped up clutching my own body and ran out into the sunlight. I thought I must become ill. The image, which I could not drive away, showed a woman with a full-grown child, ready for showing, still within its mother’s body. How would it get out? How would it breathe? How had it been fed during the growing time? The humans could not understand why I was upset, and I could not explain. I did not go back into the tent for a day and a half, and then Only because Tsorl called me urgently.
He had found an image of a strange animal. Yet not so strange. It was tall and resembled a smooth-furred wool-deer. It had a young one in its pouch. We were very pleased with the picture.
“Surely that looks something like the old ancestor, the Wild Enmor of the west, whose bones are found and preserved,” said Tsorl.
“It is a dear creature,” I said, “and looks rather like an old neighbor in Tin Lane who sold shellfish.”
“I have almost solved the mystery,” said Tsorl. “Look at this picture….”
It was another animal—a monstrous hairy sort of giant weljin, going upon two legs. We switched between the two pictures, and the humans came to watch too. They were pleased at the sight of the hairy one; obviously they felt the same kinship with it as we did with the pouched one. Between “Yes” and “No,” we came to a dim understanding. We accepted that the humans were not pouched and this was their ancestor; they found it difficult to believe that things worked differently with us.
“Short of having you strip off your clothes,” remarked Tsorl, “I do not think we can get much further.”
“I will do no such thing,” I said. “Even a Moruian female has its shyness and modesty, Deputy.”
“You know, of course, that our friends all think of you as a young male!”
“What does that matter?”
Yet perhaps it did matter. It made for less communication and understanding. Next morning when Lisa and Karen went off to their place on the harbor to swim, II followed them. They huddled in the water when I came dose; they were clothed in strange wisps of cloth shaped to their strange bodies. I felt shy but I stood on the bank and took off all my clothes. Moruians always swim unclothed and the idea of wearing cloth in water by choice is very odd.
Lisa and Karen understood at last. They saw that I was a “pouched female without breasts,” as they wrote in the reports. I was becoming accustomed to reading their faces,I and I saw all kinds of thoughts flitting over them this morning. I dived in and swam about, and afterward we all sat in the sun on the bank. We were all very polite and did not stare or ask questions until we knew each other much better. But the mystery was solved.
Even now that the state of knowledge between the two peoples has advanced a long way, Moruians And the birth of human children a subject of profound discomfort and disbelief. Humans, so far as I can gather, think that Moru-ian birth is easy but a little primitive.
In these first days I went on an expedition with Karen and Sam to the other side of the island. We followed the old Tsatroy road back to the villa, and they marveled in their turn at the stonework. I collected all the poor possessions of Tsorl and myself. We went down the steps of the villa and there was our raft still beached. I felt that it was an old friend: the days on the ocean leading to freedom seemed far away, and I remembered them with a kind of sadness.
We had our food on the headland overlooking the inland sea and stared at the islands with Sam’s seeing glasses. I could barely squint through the double glass, but the one-eyed glass, like the ones used by Moruian sailors,I was easy for me to use and brought the islands very close. We saw more camp smoke, but that was the only sign of the true Islanders. No trading ships sailed among the islands; no Mattroyan steam vessel disturbed the air.
Tsorl had recovered his strength and with it his independence. We moved out of camp to a smaller cove beside the Fish Cove. This was the human name of the fishing-place, and our camp was called Little Fish Cove. Our friends begged us to keep the small blue tent, and with our own few pots and mats and blankets, we made ourselves very comfortable without any unseemly off-world luxury. We ate the food we gathered ourselves, but very often we gathered enough fruit or salad grasses or crabs for the humans as well and shared their food at a general feast.
By this time we spoke a strange mishmash of Moruiao and Human speech, still interwoven with hand and body signals. Almost every day Tsorl and I sat before the screen in the main tent and looked at the pictures. We noticed that the screen had strong mind-powers of its own. Flashing lights or certain-notes of music or singing rang in my head, and once or twice I found myself falling into a trance or sleep.
The question of mind-powers had barely been raised, but already we suspected the truth, namely that the humans were “thought-blind.” We watched them at a game called “cards” and could not understand how a player could keep his collection of numbers and pictures secret from the others. We learned to play a child’s game called “Snap”I and another called “Memory,” and as we feared, it was no contest. Working together or separately, Tsorl and I simply knew what the little stiff pieces of card had upon them.
The humans were enchanted with this simplest power and tested us with another set of symbol cards. When Tsorl, from any place in the camp, “sent” the cards to me,I I heard him plainly and scored a perfect round. When II sent to him, the results were nearly as good. We tried with Tsorl sending to the humans: Karen tested very much better than the two others, but still it was a human score,I irregular, changing with her mood. I knew that my own mind-powers were not strong and in any case they were “green-thoughts,” the powers possessed by a young person. Tsorl, however, though he set no store by such things,I had considerable mind-powers.
When I saw this, I begged him to keep sending his thoughts to his friends on the mainland: to Vel Ragan, his scribe, or to the proud Dohtroy highness Tilje. He agreed,I but without much hope.
“Yolo Harn,” he said, “you have saved me, but at some cost. They will think I am dead.”
Still the daily life, that old devil routine went on, and one morning I went into the big tent, all unsuspecting, at the summons of Tsorl and Lisa.
‘‘Be brave,” said Tsorl, “and we will solve the problem of communication.”
“What kind of net have you made for me?” I asked warily.
Lisa had put a new attachment onto the screen, and part of it was a kind of wire hat with two soft parts to fit over human ears. After some persuasion and adjustment,I I allowed them to fit it to my head and a strange voice,I like the voices of the films, said to me gently: “Go up.”I On the screen was a curious moving symbol that I recognized as a stick-man; the stick-man climbed a stepped line and I realized that he was in fact going up. “Go up,”I murmured the voice in my ear and then, after a moment,I “Go down,” and the stick-man went down.
I looked at Tsorl and Lisa, and they motioned me to speak the human words. I managed this easily enough, and saw Lisa touch another switch; a little demon of red light danced on the screen and I felt it boring into my mind. I snatched off the wire cap and shook my head to clear away the voice.
“Please …” said the Deputy.
“It is a terrible thing!” I cried. “It is hateful and will turn me against metal forever. Deputy, how could you!”
“Yolo Harn,” he said, “it is a Teaching Machine and contains what Lisa-Child calls ‘speech tapes.’ You could learn in a short time a version of their speech.”
Lisa was persuading me too in words I could not understand.
“Believe me,” said Tsorl, “I would do it first if I could. In fact I will do it … I will be taught by this machine,I but more slowly.”
“Why is that?”
“It is a kind of sleep teaching,” explained Tsorl. “As I understand it from her, humans must take sleeping medicine as well as the light to use the thing at all.”
“I know it would make me sleep, and I am afraid, Deputy.”
“There is nothing to fear. I cannot do it properly … I think it is because I am too old and too stubborn. My mind fights against the sleeping; I go at an ordinary learning pace.”
“Great Fire of Ullo!” I exclaimed. “How fast would I go? Their speech is as wide as ours … it would still take ages!”
“Not so long,” he replied. “This is a shortened version of the speech to assist foreigners.”
I sat there, sullen, with the wire cap still in my hands. Lisa caught my eye; she went to one of the store sacks in the tent and drew out a small brown package … another of their miracles. She indicated that the package was for me and said what was, for me, a magic word.
“Boat…”
I was being bribed, I knew it, but it was a very good bribe. The brown package was a small boat that inflated at the tugging of a ring and had its own “power-pack.”I I had already scooted all around the harbor in one of these marvelous boats and would have gone around the island if Sam had allowed it.
“There, you see,” said Tsorl with some disapproval, “you are being given toys, like a child….”
I answered like a child too; perhaps I had been acting the grown-up for too long.
“Would the boat be mine to keep?”
I acted this out to Lisa, clutching an imaginary boat-package to my chest, and she nodded a firm “Yess.” I sighed deeply and sent a prayer to the fire spirits and made the averting sign to ward off evil. Then I settled the wire cap on my head and fixed my eyes on the screen.
The red light flashed and the stick-man began to walk up and down while the soft voice … I believe it was a female voice … sounded in my ears. In no time I was far away; I floated, I swam, I was a bodiless spirit. I knew nothing but the light and the pictures on the screen. The soft voice was everywhere about me, and my own voice repeated the strange words. “Go up … go down … go back…”
Even the light went away and I remained in timeless emptiness with the voice. Finally the voice stopped too;I perhaps it said farewell; I was asleep.
I saw a haze of blue overhead like the summer sky, but it quickly turned into the roof of the blue tent. I had slept, lying back on one of the long chairs; the wire cap was off my head; the Teaching Machine slept too. Everyone was in the tent watching me wake up. Lisa held orange juice to my lips; Tsorl held out his hands in the gesture that inquired:
“Are you recovered?”
I blinked to reassure him and got up from the chair. I felt an overpowering desire to get into the fresh air.
“Do you want to sleep?” asked Lisa.
“No!”I I said. “I go out from tent.”
I staggered into the sunlight and took great breaths of air. I hardly realized why the others all followed me,I clapping their hands to show pleasure.
I went onto the Teaching Machine every day for two camp-clock hours, and in twenty days I had learned Basic English. Tsorl plodded along, and as he went, he attempted more difficult things. He tried to prepare a list of exchange sound-symbols, English and Moruian; he spoke the Moruian word or expression onto another collecting tape when he thought he had a good equivalent. This was a work that fascinated him, but he often complained that it was not exact. Many of the translations of Moruian words, especially those dealing with traditional ways of life, our “old threads,” have been hammered out and agreed upon as something that comes closest to the right sense.
Little by little I was able to speak to the humans and to understand what they said to me. But we did not speak enough or exchange the right words. It was a long holiday,I a dream time; once I sailed around the island with Karen;I once I led Sam and Lisa on an expedition to the central mountain. We exchanged songs, games, jokes; we swam and collected seeds and dried out bunches of leaves for Karen to pack into her “dry garden” folder.
Tsorl and I were able to retell the little we knew of Scott Gale; he was often in the thoughts of the humans. His musical instrument hung silent on the wall of his sleeping place in the blue tent. It was a wooden guitar, something between a harp and a box harp. He had been the singer among them, and his favorite melodies were very ancient songs of Earth. We spoke to his friends in tones of guarded hope, but Tsorl was not really so hopeful.
