HARM (10 page)

It was evening. The spire of a church showed from behind one of the hills. The sun was about to set behind the hill, spilling a golden radiance over a gospel-generated landscape.

The scene was a vision of pious tranquillity which represented an England as the artist wished it had once been.

The prisoner stared at it with open mouth. He began to sob uncontrollably.

W
HEN NOT WORKING,
Fremant returned to wandering. He was drawn to the very territory where he believed the phantom cavalry had ridden. Sometimes he crawled on all fours, sniffing the ground. This was where the herb salack grew. He studied it with interest, to find that its tiny purple flower blossomed only for two days, and only one flower per plant showed at a time; then a bud on a nearby plant would burst into flower. In time, the nature of flowering was such that the first plant would receive another turn. During a Dimoff, no flower appeared.

This odd behavior Fremant ascribed to the scarcity of pollinators. The pollinator was more like a beetle than a bee, and a slow flier. It gave an almost inaudible click as it flew.

He buried his face in the low growth, lying full length, and inhaled its fragrance. Lurking in the minty-sweet scent was something oddly pungent, almost a sexual smell. He felt the mystic connection between all life and the soil of a planet. Yet the patch of salack covered only a small area before dying out. Just as there were few pollinators, so there were few microorganisms in the soil to make it viable. From that it followed that life was sparse and strange.

A soft chattering returned his attention back to his surroundings.

Still prone, he looked up to stare into a pair of deep-set eyes, a dark muzzle, and a row of small, sharp teeth set in an open jaw. The face was furry and sharp. Two ears at the back of the skull were raised in an alert manner.

Fremant froze. It was a kind of dog, most likely hostile, and he was in a most vulnerable position.

“Good boy,” he said, almost by instinct. “I won’t hurt you.”

The jaws moved as if in speech and the gentle chattering noises came again. At the same time, the head was cocked to one side as if in interrogation.

It’s trying to talk, Fremant thought in surprise. He tried to flick away a curious occlusion of sight. It was as if he experienced a sudden glaucoma. His sight remained clouded.

Tentatively, the creature stretched a leg forward and placed a paw on the man’s shoulder. Fremant tried to wriggle backward. It was then he became aware that a second animal stood at his feet. It uttered something that sounded like a command. Fremant stopped wriggling.

“Well? What are you up to? Are you going to attack me?”

He could not understand, staring through the cloud in his sight into that strange face—animal, yet also, in the concentration of its stare, aligned to human and to insect. He struggled against its chatter, becoming confused.

Slowly, a white shelf unrolled itself before his vision. It was made of an indeterminate material, featureless and flat, dull and matte. As he watched it extend, he saw small stones appear to dimple its surface, each immeasurably distant from the other.

In his bafflement, he knew he was experiencing synesthesia. If this doglike thing was attempting to communicate with him, he could perceive the stimulus received by one sensory system only in a different sensory mode. In the extreme incompatibility of systems, sound became transformed to vision. It was an ultimate in alienation.

Moved by a xenophobic impulse, he sprang up onto his knees and hit the dog-thing on the jaw. It gave a yelp and fled. Its companion ran off with it. Slowly the illusion of endless white shelf faded from Fremant’s brain. Slowly, he could see normally again.

From that moment on, his fear of the unexplored planet became submerged in the wonder of it.

H
E COULD NOT STOP TALKING
about this experience, mainly to young Wellmod. Ragundy was mocking. Utrersin could merely scratch his head and say, “We know what we know. We do what we do.” It was Wellmod who said, with a sigh, “These dogs have drawn something from their long insistence—no, I mean existence—here. If only we could unnerstand their commucations, we might learn something.”

“You say ‘drawn something.’ So you think they have intelligence of a kind?”

“Unless what they perjected on you was a kind of dream. That doesn’t mean intelly gents, does it?”

“Well, intelligence at least of a basic kind. Anyhow, it wasn’t like a dream. At least not the kind of dreams we have. It was—what’s the word?—it kept on being the same. Sustained. Not like a dream is…”

Utrersin said, “It’s no use going on talking like this. It don’t help.”

“But we have to know,” said Fremant.

“Why, when the thing has buggered off?” said Ragundy in his jeering way.

Fremant rounded on him.

“It’s important, you fool! Why can’t you see that? This alien thing was trying to get in touch with me. To speak to me. So I believe. We’re stuck here on this planet and we know almost nothing about it. It has a long prehistory, it has a biomass—about which we know nothing. What are we doing but fooling around, fighting one another? We should be trying to come to terms, to an understanding, with the planet we live on.”

Ragundy jeered. “Okay, wise guy, so you sock this animal on the jaw! You’re as bad as the rest of us.”

F
REMANT AND
B
ELLAMIA
lived uncomfortably in one partitioned room, with Ragundy living next door. They had a low-ceilinged attic room over the forge, where Wellmod also lived, in a few square feet allocated by Frereshin, the owner of the building.

“I can’t think why you go on about this vision business,” Bellamia told Fremant over their meager supper. “I reckon it was nothing to do with this dog-thing, nothing at all. I reckon you had a sort of an attack. You know, a stroke. A seizure.”

“That’s rubbish, my dear. It was the dog, a Dogover’s dog. Maybe not a dog at all.”

“So what was it if it weren’t a dog?”

“That’s exactly what I want to find out. I regret I hit it. I was so startled, I just struck out.”

She waved her spoon at him. “You know that Astaroth had all the Dogovers wiped out, wiped right out. You seem to have forgotten that.”

“Yes, yes…But one or two dogs ran off and escaped.”

Bellamia threw up her arms in despair. “Oh, you’d argue the hind leg off a jackrat!”

Then silence fell. Having finished the meal, Fremant rose to leave the table. Bellamia, who had been frowning, lifted a cautionary finger. “Yes, two dogs! All them horsemen galloping, spread out. So they dogs was comm—comm—what’s that word you use, Fremant, love?—commpunicating with each other.”

He was impressed. “You’re right. Yes! They were communicating together. Their version of talking. If only we could understand…”

He bedded down on his straw-filled mattress and was immediately asleep. He was in another world, undergoing torture. Someone was crawling over him.

“Come on, Free, love, wake up.” She was thrusting herself against him. “You’d need a dog at each end, like you need two people to hold a long banner, two at least.”

He felt her warmth and her aroma. He remained only half-awake. “But the horsemen…”

“I dunno. Maybe they got them from your mind. Since they got this mental power?”

“Oh, this bruddy planet…” He turned on his side, away from her. She seized her opportunity and more than that. His response was immediate.

“Get into me, will you?” she whispered. “I’m not that old, am I? Besides, it’s dark, so you can’t tell.” She still smelled of salack, and something darker.

“Bluggeration, Bellamia, get off me! I’m tired.”

“Come on, rouse yourself, love! You’re a man, aren’t you? What’s this you’ve got here? Dearie, I could suck it! Just do me, will you? I’m dying for it. What harm can come of it?” She pulled him back against her, coaxing one of her ample breasts into his face, while rubbing her body against his.

He felt himself getting interested. “Rather than argue…”

“Ohhh, that’s more like it.” She opened her legs. “Much more like…ohhh, I’d forgotten…ohhh…”

He gave in to his senses and entered her.

And so the night passed, not unpleasantly.

The repercussions of that night, however, proved difficult to deal with. When Fremant looked at Bellamia by daylight, he thought her old and frumpy, and wondered how he had enjoyed so greatly what they’d done. He felt himself tainted. And yet…He breathed in her teasing aromas. She herself was subtly changed. Her face was dreamy on the pillow, and held the beauty of satiety.

“Oh, my sunny sugar stick…” she breathed. He loved her as a human being. He had yet properly to value closeness.

Not only did he love Bellamia, he became something of her slave because of those lips that could not speak, that mouth without a tongue, which yet in its enfolding ecstasy met him in an exulted state of feeling. No sooner did he slide his hand down to touch its rough, hairy coating than the secret lure in all women cast its spell upon him, making him mindless with desire.

In the following days, Bellamia did her hair differently. She seemed to tread more lightly. She wore a mysterious smile. He knew from her embrace how womanly she was. He felt again the pervasive healing power of a woman’s satisfaction. She had ceased her continuous chewing of the herb salack. She slept in his bed as a matter of course.

She clung to him, even when he didn’t want it.

He fended her off. “You make me feel human, dearest,” Bellamia said. “I somehow never felt this human before, never before.”

“Don’t be silly!”

“Can’t you say nothing more loving than that, you poor fool?”

He thought she was right. He was a poor fool.

“Is love a silliness?” She kissed him smackingly. “Then silliness is sub—surblime. Tell me again how we came to be on the starship. So little do I know…”

Fremant confessed he did not know the scientific details. He said that the great ship, the
New Worlds,
had traveled for many years, at first through a wormhole and then at near-light speeds. In all that time, the starship was empty, empty of human life. Only a few androids worked on its decks, maintaining services.

DNA patterns of many people were filed away in a vitaputer. There were also what were popularly known as “flesh banks,” which contained a slurry of stem cells, biochemicals, proteins, and fats. In the last few years of the long voyage, as the ship was decelerating on its approach to the Stygia sun, individual DNA codes were imprinted into the life-matter of the flesh banks. LPR made them alive again, reconstituted. Humans of various ages were produced, new-minted, and trained to be ready for landing on the new planet.

“So I can’t really grasp it all, but I was right not to feel human,” Bellamia said. “Oh, kiss me again, do! Again a kiss…Let me linger, linger ever…”

He kissed her. As he turned on his heel to go, he said, “We’re human right enough. We brought that from the planet Earth. What we did not bring were all the various organizations, the web of relationships which had been built up between groups of people and nations.”

Bellamia called after him, “Where did you get all that wisdom? It explains a lot!”

He could have admitted that he had heard Astaroth say those very words; but why give the bastard any credit?

He had asked her why she was away so much. He felt he wanted her near him. Bellamia said she worked for a man who made clothes, a hermit who lived above the potter’s shop in the square.

“What do you do there?” Fremant asked, with a touch of jealousy.

“I make clothes, of course.”

“Oh? What else?”

She told him she had contrived a way to weave the wool of goats and sheep-things into a mat. She smiled proudly as she explained, but he was not really interested.

While Fremant labored over his gun stocks in the forge, sweating in the heat of the fire, another fire burned within him, as he conjured up his intimacies with Bellamia.

If the gunsmith noticed these subtle changes, he said nothing. He was a simple and closed man—for which Fremant was grateful.

But more hostile eyes spied on the new intimacy and chose to mock.

“You’re shagging that fat lump, aren’t you?” said Ragundy with a snicker.

Fremant threw a punch at his face, but Ragundy dodged and struck back, landing a glancing blow. Fremant flung himself at the other, punching savagely. Ragundy coiled an arm about Fremant’s neck and they fell struggling to the ground, snarling and fighting.

“Oh no!” cried Bellamia. “My darling, stop, you’ll get hurt!”

They were outside, on rough ground. Utrersin came out from the forge with a tub of dirty water. He flung it over the two fighters.

“No brawling! Get up, the pair of you!”

They stood up, sheepish now.

“You started it,” said Ragundy, with a sulky glare at his opponent.

“Never mind that,” said Utrersin sharply. His eyes gleamed below his overhanging hair. “Clear out, you!”—to Ragundy, who slouched away. “I know a troublemaker when I sees one.”

He said to Fremant, “Get inside, you ruffian. There’s someone coming. Visitor.”