Anywhen (11 page)

I missed the chow whistle too. Captain Motlow had to send up an orderly to fetch me.

Dr. Roche's patience was phenomenal, especially when you remembered the pressure of urgency under which he was laboring. Once he was able to talk to his eight charges with some facility, he did try at once to explain the situation to them. But it turned out that they were not in any mood to listen.

Nor could I blame them. After all, they were in the tank, which, provided though it was with every need Roche had been able to anticipate, was still utterly unlike any environment they had ever imagined, let alone encountered. As for Dr. Roche himself, he was to them a
grossly magnified face on a wall—a face like those of the demons who had brought the plague in the first place, but huge and with a huge, disembodied voice to go with it. Roche was careful not to let any of the rest of us—the subsidiary demons—go drifting across the background of the screen, but it seemed to be too late for such precautions. The savages had already decided that they had been taken into the Underworld. They stood silently with their visible pairs of arms folded across their narrow chests, looking with sullen dignity into the face of the archdemon, waiting for judgment. They would not respond to any question except by giving their names, in a rapid rattle which went right around the circle, always in the same direction:

"Ukimfaa, Mwenzio, Kwa, Jua, Naye, Atakufaa, Kwa, Mvua."

Dr. Roche spoke briefly, was greeted by more silence, and turned the screen off, mopping his brow. "A stubborn lot," he said. "I expected it, but—I can't seem to get through it."

"Two of them have the same names," Doc Bixby noted.

"Yes, sir. They're all related—a clan, which is also a squad. 'Kwa' means `if-then'; signifies that they're bound to each other, by blood and duty. That's the trouble."

"Do all the other names mean something too?" I asked.

"Yes, of course. Standard for this kind of society. The total makes up the squad, the functional fighting unit. But I don't have nearly enough data to work out the meanings of the connections. If I did, I could figure out which one of them is senior to the others, and concentrate on him. As it is, all I'm sure of is that neither Kwa can be; that's obviously a cousin-cousin crossover."

I almost didn't ask the next question. After all, I didn't know the language, and Dr. Roche did. But since he was obviously stumped, I couldn't see what harm it would do to introduce a little noise into the situation.

"Could it be grammatical? The connection, I mean?"

`What? Certainly not. No culture of this . . . Uh. Wait a minute. Why did you ask that, Hans?"

"Well, because they always name themselves in the same order. I thought just maybe, if the names all mean something, it might make up a sentence."

Roche bit his lip gently. After a few seconds, he said: "That's true, dammit. It does. It's condensed, though. Wait a minute."

He pulled a pad to him and wrote, very slowly and with the utmost effort, and then stared at what he had written.

"It says: RAINY SEASON/SOMEONE/HELP/HIM/IF-THEN/DRY SEASON/MAYBE/YOU. By God, it's—"

"The Golden Rule," Doc Bixby said softly. "Games theory; non-zero-sum theorem one."

"More than that. No, not more than that, but more useful to us right now. All these words are related, you see. You can't show that in English, but Savannahan is a highly inflected language; each of these eight words stands in a precise hierarchical relationship to all the other seven. The only grammatically unique word is `help'; the others are duplicates, either in meaning or in function."

He took a deep breath and snapped the screen back on. "MWENZIO!" he shouted into the tank.

One of the tall tubular torsos stood abruptly as straight as a ramrod and came forward, the bullet head exalted. "Mpo-kuseya," the savage cried, and waited.

"What's that mean?" Bixby whispered, offstage. It was a gross violation of Roche's rules, but Roche himself could not resist whispering back.

"It means:
I cannot fail."

The savage and the U.N.R.R.A. man stared at each other, as intently as though they were face to face, instead of watching images of each other. Then Roche began to speak once more, and now his urgency showed through at last.

I doubt that I could have followed him and Mwenzio even if I'd known the language; but I know now how it went, from the transcripts:

"Warrior, I charge you hear me, for the love of your children who may be kings. We have not come into the world to condemn. We have come to help."

"That is my name, demon."

"Then I bind you by it, for your children's sake."

"I am conquered," Mwenzio said. "Sorcery is sorcery; I bow the head. But my children are not yours to command, nor ever shall be."

"I promise you, in the name of your name, that I seek no such thing. It is the ill that I brought before that I come here to undo. To this I bind myself by my own name."

Both Captain Motlow and Doc Bixby stiffened at Roche's assumption of blame for what the first expedition had done, but Roche sensed it at once and drove them back with a slashing gesture, just below the level of the screen. Mwenzio said:

"What may I call your

"Mbote." ["Life."]

"Lokuta te?" ["This is no lie?"]

"Lokuta te, Mwenzio."

There was a long silence. Mwenzio stood still, with head bowed. Finally he said:

"Notice me, Mbote, your servant."

"Then it is this. I have told you of the plague and what
needs to be done to combat it. Credit me now, for the time is very short. We will release you and all your clan, and you must carry the word to all the tribes and kingdoms. You must persuade your kings and chieftains that those who brought the plague have come back with the cure, but only if all do exactly as we say it must be done. Above all, it must start at once, before the children are born. It would be best if all the mothers in the area where we put you down, all that can reach it by hard riding, should come to us."

"As we have done," Mwenzio said. "But then it is already too late."

"No, it can't be. Not for everyone. If we make haste—"

"No one can make haste backwards," Mwenzio said, and with a quick motion the short arms crossed above the bullet head, pulled the rough shirt up and off, and threw it to the floor of the tank. Without any visible signal, the other seven warriors shucked their shirts too, at the same moment.

In the cradle of each middle pair of arms, held low and flat across each narrow ventrum, six to eight Savannahan cubs squirmed over each other in a blind, brainless fury of nursing. They were about the size of chipmunks.

"We are the mothers," the warrior said. "And here are our children. They are already born. If it is not too late, then we give them to you, Mbote; cure them."

Nobody can know everything. The data about the Savannahans which the remains of the first expedition had brought back were reasonably complete—good enough to let Dr. Roche fill the parameters of his equations almost completely. But only
almost.
The first expedition hadn't been on Savannah long enough before the explo
sion to find out that the savages were six-limbed, let alone that the women were the warrior caste. As for us, we were culpable too—Doc Bixby most of all, for he had known the essential biological facts before Roche did, and had been keeping them to himself for the simple stupid pleasure of seeing Roche's face turn grey when the truth came out. I had felt that impulse myself now and then on Savannah, as I've already confessed, but I never did understand why the surgeon let it drive him —and all of us—so close to the rim of disaster. Roche only irritated me by being so knowing; but Bixby must really have hated him.

Bixby isn't with us any more, so I can't ask questions. Luckily for him, he had a great deal more up his sleeve than a simple surprise; otherwise he might have lost his licence, as well as been transferred, when the
Chisholm
got home. He took only a moment or so to savour Dr. Roche's shock and despair, and then said, loud enough for the savages to hear him ( though not to understand him, because he said it in English):

"It's all right. The cubs are born as far as the savages are concerned, but medically they won't be born for another month yet."

"What do you mean?" Roche said. "Dammit, Clyde, you'll pay for this. If you'd spoken earlier—"

"I spoke soon enough," Doc Bixby said, but he retreated a little from the savagery in Roche's voice. "The cubs are embryologically immature, that's all. From the point of view of development, they're still foetuses. They seem to get born as soon as they can control their muscles, and then they crawl up into the dam's arms to be nursed the rest of the way to `term'—like marsupials on Earth. I knew it would be that way as soon as I realized that these creatures had to have two functional pelvic gir
dies. If those bones are to be in balance well enough to serve as fulcrums for
two
pairs of hind limbs—and you can see that that's what the original situation was by looking at the 'horses'—then neither of them could simultaneously be flexible enough to pass a full-term cub. It was much more likely that they littered very early and maintained the whelps
outside
the womb until they reached term. They probably have many more children than they ever manage to raise; the weak ones just don't manage to make it into the nursing arms, and fall off to die. A good system for selecting out weak sisters—brutal for the spawn, but kind to the race. That's evolution for you every time."

"Very like the marsupials," Roche said in a flat, quiet voice.

"Yes, just as I said."

"What did evolution ever do for the marsupials? Opossums and kangaroos are notably inefficient animals. They've shucked off their weak sisters that way for millions of years, and still they're no better equipped to survive than they ever were! But never mind, we can't change that. What I want to know is, can we still immunize these cubs? Are they still unborn in
that
sense? In short, Clyde, now that your practical joke is over—is
there still time?
I've made promises. Can I keep them?"

"I didn't . . . Sure you can. I took blood samples and ran antibody titers on one of the cubs when I first discovered this. They're naturally immune until they're `born'; they're getting the appropriate beta-globulins from their mothers' milk. You can save them."

"No thanks to you," Roche said in a raw, ragged whisper.

"No," Bixby said. Abruptly, he looked quite haggard. "I suppose not. All I can say is, I would have spoken bef
ore you promised anything if it had really been too late.

But there is still time."

In the tank, the warriors held out their children.

It went very well after that, all things considered. By the time we left, the plague was greatly slowed down, and Roche and the computer between them were convinced that it would cease to be an important pandemic on Savannah not long after the
Chisholm
left. It wouldn't be exterminated, of course. Now that it had been established in so many living cells, the virus would be passed on, from generation to generation, protected in its intracellular environment from any possible concentration of antibodies circulating in the extracellular fluids of the body. But by that same token, this chronic infection would keep the antibody titers high, and prevent the virus from causing any overt illness. The immunity would stick, which was what we had sought, and what we brought about.

It was over.

Except that I have come up at last with what it was that had been bothering me the whole time. And it was not just a fantasm, not just a crotchet. It was real, and came crawling into my head in all its unavoidable dread and revulsion at the moment that I opened my new orders, and found that I was again assigned to be the astrogator of the
Chisholm.

At that instant, I remembered that the Conestoga wagon was the machine that brought tuberculosis to the Indians . . . and the orders say that we are on our way back to Savannah.

Nietzsche's book of the same title was of course the main source of this story, which won one of Judith Merril's round one hundred Honorable Mentions for its year, but the approach—as several readers noticed—is out of Conrad, with Marlowe thrown in for misdirection. Since there's no money to be divided up, presumably they get the Honor and I get the Mention.

A DUSK OF IDOLS

I can tell you now what happened to Naysmith. He hit Chandala.

Quite by coincidence—he was on his way home at the time—but it caught him. It was in all respects a most peculiar accident. The chances were against it, including that I should have heard anything about it.

Almost everyone in Arm II knows that Chandala is, pre-eminently among civilized planets, a world in mortal agony—and a world about which, essentially, nothing can be done. Naysmith didn't know it. He had had no experience of Arm II and was returning along it from his first contact with the Heart stars when his ship (and mine) touched Chandala briefly. He was on his way back to Earth (which technically is an Arm II planet, but so far out in the hinterlands that no Earthman ever thinks of it as such) when this happened, and since it happened during ship's night, he would never have known the difference if it hadn't been for an attack of simple indigestion which awakened him—and me.

It's very hard to explain the loss of so eminent a surgeon as Naysmith without maligning his character, but
as his only confidant, more or less, I don't seem to have much of a choice. The fact is that he should have been the last person in the Galaxy to care about Chandala's agony. He had used his gifts to become exclusively a rich man's surgeon; as far as I know, he had never done any time in a clinic after his residency days. He had gone to the Heart stars only to sterilize, for a very large fortune in fees, the sibling of the Bbiben of Bbenaf—for the fees, and for the additional fortune the honor would bring him later. Bbenaf law requires that the operation be performed by an off-worlder, but Naysmith was the first Earthman to be invited to do it.