Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II (97 page)

Rachel flung her arms out as she finished. Eric looked at her pounding, sweating bosom. Then he followed the direction of her bowed head and stared once more at the transparent cages filled with human beings that dotted the white space beneath them, cages here, cages there, and cages into the furthermost distance.

Eric learned many things. He learned about love, for example. He learned about the Aaron People.

Love he found very, very sweet. It started with lust and then became much more complicated. Some parts of it—some of the best parts—were downright incomprehensible.

He marveled that Rachel Esthersdaughter, beside whom he was still little more than a bare ignoramus, should defer to his decisions in all matters more and more every day—once she had made the initial decision of giving herself to him. He marveled at the delight she showed in deferring to him, and at the admiration and pleasure she displayed in everything he said and did, he, a brash barbarian who had only discovered from her recently—and then with open-mouthed astonishment—that the burrows in which he had spent most of his life were no more than air spaces in the insulating material with which the Monsters protected their homes from the unpleasant chills of Earth.

He wondered constantly at other changes in her, the way her mad, wild humor seemed to dissolve in his embrace, the way her flashing grin would be insensibly replaced by an intense, caressing smile and her customary twinkle by the most searching of looks in suddenly serious brown eyes. Those looks tore at his heart: they seemed to express a hope that he would treat her well, along with a calm acceptance of the fact that it was entirely his decision to treat her well or ill—and that whatever his decision, she would cheerfully abide by it.

He was entranced by the differences in her body, not the differences he had always noted between man and woman so much as the unexpected ones: the smallness of her fingernails, the otherness of her skin texture, the incredible lightness of her vast length of brown hair.

"Most of the Aaron People have your kind of coloring, don't they?" he asked, holding her hair in his right hand and winding froths of it round and round upon his forearm.

Rachel snuggled closer and rubbed the top of her head up and down along his arm. "Most," she agreed. "We're a bit inbred, I'm afraid. It's been pretty much the same genetic pool for generations. We don't capture many women from other tribes and our Male Society rarely initiates an outside warrior."

"But they would take me? I mean, if we ever made it back to them?"

"They would, darling. They'd have to. I have too much knowledge and training for my people to lose. And they wouldn't get me again without you. 'You take my Eric,' I'd tell them, you take my Eric and make him feel nice and welcome and loved or I'll get so unhappy that I'll forget everything I ever knew.' That's what I'd say, and there wouldn't be anything at all to worry about. Especially these days, with their plans about the Monsters and my very specialized and useful set of facts."

"These plans, Rachel: can't you give me some idea what they are? Hitting back at the Monsters in a new and different way—it's so exciting, but every time I try to figure out what they could be—"

She rolled away abruptly and sat up facing him. "Eric," she said, "I can't, and by now you know better than you ever did before that I can't. Don't keep asking me. It's a secret that has to do with the future of my people. I've been entrusted with it, and I can't discuss it with anyone who isn't a member of my people. When you are, you'll know—and you'll also be a part of the Plan."

Eric held up his hand in the gesture of peace. "All right," he begged, smiling. "Sorry and never again." He waited for her to come back to his arms, but she continued to sit a distance away, in thought.

"You were talking about making it back to my people," Rachel said at last, still looking off in the white distance, through the transparent walls of the cage. "Have you thought of how we might do it?"

"Escape, you mean?"

"I mean escape. From this cage."

"No, but I have a couple of ideas. One that I think might be good. It needs a lot of working out."

Her eyes swung back and met his. "Work it out then, darling," she said in a low, steady voice. "Work it out soon. We're liable to be pressed for time."

They sat and stared at each other. Then Rachel rose and Eric did too. She came into his arms.

"I haven't wanted to say anything—I thought—I wasn't certain. I am certain now."

"You're pregnant!"

She nodded, placed her hands on either side of his face and kissed him slowly, softly. "Listen, darling," she whispered, her cheek against his. "Any method of escape is bound to involve a certain amount of gymnastics. And at some time in the not too distant future, little Rachel is going to be a lot less limber than she is now. She's going to be very clumsy about climbing from one place to another—and she's going to be awfully slow if any running has to be done. If we make a move, it has to be well before that."

Eric held her tight against him. "Those damned Monsters!" he swore. "Their damned laboratory! Their damned experiments! They are not going to get my child."

"It could be children," Rachel reminded him. "You may be a singleton, but a real litter is still a definite possibility."

"There'd be no escape, then," he said soberly. "You're right: we've got to get out of here before you give birth. The sooner the better."

Rachel pushed herself away from him and turned aside. "Yes," she whispered, mostly to herself. "It was one thing to save our necks by giving the Monsters what they wanted: a breeding pair. But to give them the results of the breeding—"

"Stop it, Rachel! We're not at that point yet." And Eric moved off to make yet another circuit of the cage, yet another examination of Monster territory as it was visible through the transparent walls and floor. He had to be a warrior again, watching for an advantage, looking for a soft spot at which to aim an attack.

All of the plans for escape he had discussed with Jonathan Danielson and Walter the Weapon-Seeker had been inadequate; but here there was a new factor, something that had been nibbling at his mind for weeks. So far it had been only a nibble, not a bite. He concentrated on it demandingly, impatiently, both outer and inner eyes wide open.

There were no more lessons, at least none where the studies were guided wholly by the girl. Now he sat at her feet and asked her questions, pulling her back and forth in the areas of knowledge that corresponded to the places where he felt the nibbling sensation in his mind.

"Rachel, I must know about every single item in the pockets of your cloak. That small, pointed thing, for example—"

"You told me once what your people think this entire Monster dwelling looks like. Could you draw a picture of it for me—"

"Can you cut up a few small sections of the cloak? Can they be sewn together? You said you had some kind of adhesive, didn't you—"

"Rachel, darling, can you tell me in simple, noncomplicated language what you know of the principles behind the various vehicles our ancestors used? Automobiles, boats, airplanes, spacecraft. Whatever you know about them, whatever you can explain—"

Sometimes he amused her. Sometimes he almost terrified her. Always he ended by exhausting her. "There
is
a difference between men and women," she would mutter as she fell back finally, locking her arms behind her head and closing her eyes. "And now I know what it is. Women have to rest. Men don't."

Truly, Eric seemed to have no need of rest. He would prowl up and down the cage in long, springy, nervous strides, shaking a single fist over and over again, as if he were trying to hammer an idea open in mid-air. Or he would sit in a corner, staring down at a Monster going by—but while he sat and stared, his whole body would vibrate, faster, faster, faster. Or he would get involved in experiments: experiments with the properties of some piece of equipment in the cloak, experiments that could be conducted only when food was being dropped in, or only when the cage was being flooded and washed, or only when one of their immense captors had come by to look them over.

In the beginning, Rachel worked with him and tried to help him—that is, when she could find out what it was that he was investigating: frequently he had no idea of the goal himself. But more and more she tended to leave him to his own researches. She would answer the questions he suddenly snapped at her, giving him relevant data or her carefully considered opinions. Otherwise, she was content to lie and watch him work, smiling at him fondly whenever he turned a look murky with concentration in her direction. And more and more, she spent her time stretched out at full length, dozing.

He understood, even though it was infuriating not to have the full, alert services of her well-stocked mind. First, he was her man: she had put herself and their mutual problem in his hands—and she trusted him. But more important, something was at work that he had seen many times before among the females of Mankind: pregnancy usually created a certain placid euphoria in a woman; it was as if her thoughts were pledged exclusively to the helpless thing growing slowly within her body. With Rachel it was starting early.

Eric understood, but the understanding only made him more frenzied, more restless, more probing and determined. It was up to him and him alone whether his family were ever to wander in the burrows as free creatures—or whether they were to be forever caged and at the mercy of the Monsters' agony-filled investigations. He would escape, he told himself, beginning yet another new line of experimentation. He would. He would.

One day there was an interruption. A Monster came by and dropped Roy the Runner into their cage.

At first, Eric had scrambled for a spear as the strange human, released from the green rope, had struggled to his feet near where Rachel sat, both hands over her mouth and her eyes wide with fear. Then he recognized Roy and called out his name. All three of them relaxed and exhaled prodigiously. They grinned weakly at each other.

The Monster, satisfied after a period of watching that no mayhem was to be committed, rumbled its tremendous bulk away on other business.

Eric had told Rachel about Roy. Now he introduced the Runner to his mate. Roy was enormously impressed. A woman of the Aaron People, willingly, without coercion... His voice, when he began telling the history of the other cage since Eric had left, was low and almost greasily respectful.

"After they took you out, we didn't have a leader for a while—the men had lost the habit of following Arthur the Organizer. He'd lost something also: he wasn't very eager to give orders anymore. So I tried removing my head straps and letting my hair hang free again. You know, to look like you. I figured if I looked like you, maybe the men would take orders from me as if you were giving them. Only it didn't work. Walter the Weapon-Seeker took over for a while, until the—"

"That's it, Eric," Rachel broke in. "The loose hair. That's why they brought him here." She tumbled the hair at her neck with the back of a hand. "The loose hair. You, me, the Wild Men. The Monsters don't know I'm pregnant. They're still trying to get me mated."

Eric nodded, but Roy the Runner looked very puzzled and stared first at one and then at the other of them. "Go on, Roy. I'll explain it all later. How many of the expedition are left?"

"Practically none. About six, besides me. And not all in those Monster experiments, either. A lot of them died in the fighting."

"Fighting? You started fighting among yourselves?"

The tall thin Runner shook his head impatiently. "No—what was there to fight over? Lots of food and no women. What happened was the Monsters put a whole flock of strange men in our cage, men like you've never seen or heard about. I mean not Wild Men even. Little brown men, about half our size, but strong, strong as hell. They didn't use spears. They had clubs and something they called slingshots. It was hard to understand them. They talked—I don't know, they talked funny, not like other human beings at all. None of the Strangers had ever seen men like them before, not Arthur the Organizer, not anybody. They had names like Nicky Five and Harry Twelve and Beelzebub Two. All of them had names like that—it was crazy."

A small noise from Rachel. Eric looked at her. "I know about them," she said. "They're not from this house at all. They're from another house, the one next to ours. Naturally, another house—they're almost a totally different breed of humanity. Men from my people have visited them and brought back some strange, strange tales."

"What does she mean, 'another house'?"

"A Monster house," Eric told Roy. "All of us—Mankind, the Strangers, the Aaron People—we all live in the walls of one particular Monster house. Actually, we all live in just one wing of that one house. In the other wings, there are lots of other peoples, some like us, some different. But people who live in another house entirely have to be very different from us. They've been breeding away from us for centuries, and their language and culture have been changing." At the Runner's bewildered expression, he said: "All right, Roy, I'll explain that later, too. Don't worry about it now. These men came into the cage and started fighting?"

"They did, from the moment they arrived," Roy answered, relieved to get back to a matter that was familiar and somewhat understandable. "They were screaming, just as we were, when the Monsters dropped them into the cage. Then they calmed down: they stopped screaming and they started fighting with us. They didn't like anything we did. They said we didn't even know how to eat: the only right way to eat, according to them, was stretched out at full length on the floor of the cage, face down. And you weren't supposed to touch the food with your hands—you had to eat it off the floor. There were lots of other things: the way we slept, the way we talked, the way we moved our bowels. Everything had to be done their way—they were like lunatics! Day after day we lived in opposite corners of the cage with sentries posted while we slept, and every time we were fed—or watered—or anything—there'd be a full-scale battle in the middle, spears against clubs and slingshots, and three, four corpses for the Monsters to dispose of."