The Cult of Loving Kindness (11 page)

The elders of the village sat cross-legged on a single mat in the middle of the floor, five old men in a line. Kurt Sofar, the youngest member of the team, squatted in front of them. As Blendish turned to watch him, he rolled down onto his rear. A black plastic notebook was open by his side.

“You understand what we are doing,” he said after a pause. “You understand the implication. I realize it must seem intrusive. Threatening. But I tried to explain… .”

“We were expecting it,” the old unraveler said gently. “It was inevitable—you want more than you have.”

“Again,” said Kurt Sofar. “That’s not the point. It is not a question of our own production, which is ample. We are thinking of the future. We anticipate enormous climatic changes in your children’s lifetime. What will you eat, when winter comes?”

The old man smiled. “We will be dead.”

Kurt Sofar scratched his leg. Dr. Cathartes, seated in his armchair, had a different response. Blendish watched him turn his head toward Langur Bey, an inquiring expression on his thick red lips. Always watchful for the devil’s mark, he was interested in the old man’s smile. “According to your religious faith,” he said. “In some circumstances is death considered beneficial?”

The old men sat in a line: Langur Bey, Canan Bey, Mayadonna, Palam, Sarnath. Their alien, chinless faces were so hard to read, yet Deccan Blendish sensed a terrible sadness there, a terrible sadness in their delicate, weak smiles.

“We have no religious faith,” said Langur Bey.

In the paddy field, in the rain, the agronomist was smoking a cigar. Turning to the rail again, Blendish watched him take it from his mouth, stare at the end of it, cast it away. “We’re straying from the point,” said Kurt Sofar. “As I told you—we’re trying to build up a big supply of food, to prepare for the cold weather here and elsewhere. We’re planning big repositories of grain that will be available to the entire region. The logistic problem is enormous and requires sacrifices. That’s a larger consideration which does not concern you. The fact is, by adopting the measures we have suggested, you’ll be able to triple your output of essential foods. That’s good for us and good for you.”

Canan Bey smiled. “We will be dead. Now I see—it is inevitable.”

Exasperated, Sofar slapped his knee. “It’s true—you may not live to see this program in effect. It may not benefit you directly. But maybe, just maybe, a decision you make now might make it easier for your children, when this land is under snow.”

Deccan Blendish turned away from the veranda, and stepped inside the open screen. “You don’t understand,” he said to Kurt Sofar. “He’s saying the changes you’ve suggested will require the destruction of the village. They know what you’ve been doing in this area.”

Sofar stretched his legs out on the floor. He was stretching out his hamstrings. “You shut up,” he said. “That’s not true and you know it. Besides, this is our project. You’re here as an observer.”

There was silence in the room, and Deccan Blendish could hear the scattering of rain upon the roof. Then Palam Bey spoke for the first time. “ ‘It does not benefit the rat, when three dogs fight over its carcass.’ ”

Blendish recognized a quotation from the master’s book of aphorisms. Dr. Cathartes recognized it too. “ ‘Therefore work to reconcile your enemies,’ ” he said. He leaned forward in his chair and touched his hands together. “Let me make it clear to you,” he said to Palam Bey. “My colleague is with the department of agronomy, and his only concern is with the grain augmentation program. Mr. Blendish is here by chance. I am with the department of theology, of the University of Charn, and my interest is different. In a sense I am the senior member of this team. So you will pay special attention to my questions, and do not answer flippantly.”

His voice was strong, mellifluous, and reassuring. It seemed to Deccan Blendish an extension of the rest of him, a tool perfectly suited to his hand. Cathartes was a handsome man, tall, with thick brown hair.

 

It stopped raining as suddenly as it had started. As soon as he could, Deccan Blendish left the house, partly in disgust, and partly for more pressing, private reasons. Ever since he had come out from Charn he had been sick. His first days in the village he had spent in bed. It was the change of diet; in distress, he groped his way toward the latrine, situated on the outskirts of the village in a grove of thick japonica. Once there, perched on the high seat of the first cubicle, he stayed a long time. He listened to the villagers come and go.

 

The wall to his left was almost covered by the web of an enormous spider—fat-bellied, yellow, red, immobile, suspended near his hand. Above him, a sprig of japonica had forced its way through a crack in the palm roof.

He was beginning to distrust these overburdened forest blossoms, beautiful as they were. All through his journey, especially since he had left the farms behind and come into the forest, he had been made miserable by growths and itches and rots and funguses which seemed to sprout over his body. This outhouse when he had first visited it had seemed to stink of alien creatures; now as if by silent agreement the Treganu had abandoned it to him, and he was conscious of a new smell that was all his own, sickeningly sweet, as if his stomach and intestines were packed full of flowers.

For consolation during the long wait he pulled out of his shoulder bag the master’s book of aphorisms, wrapped in the square of ikat fabric that had led him to this place—remote, exotic, the lair of the hypnogogic ape, perhaps. Since his arrival in the village he had not spoken to one person who had seen the beast. Langur Bey, to whom he had quoted the master’s reference, had given him a metaphorical interpretation.

He spread the piece of cloth out on his knees. Each thread was dyed separately in a different pattern. Woven together, they made the picture of a butterfly. Around the edge a row of multicolored triangles in cross-stitched embroidery. He remembered the triumph when he had solved the clue, when he had stood in the peddler’s shop in Charn and heard him say, “It’s a language, sir. Those triangles. Each one has a special meaning.”

“What does it say?”

The peddler had frowned, and pointed with his dirty finger. “Bird,” he had said. “Arrow. Sky.”

Sitting in the outhouse, Deccan Blendish leafed forward toward the beginning of the book, although he knew the quote from memory: “The hawk falls like an arrow from the sky. What are the reasons for its fierceness. There are three reasons at least …” Then, his mind had been full of triumph. Now, he remembered the peddler’s doubtful frown, the way he’d scratched his chin and said, “Might be. It just might be. They’re all unravelers up there.”

He laid the book and the cloth aside. Turning slightly on the seat, he checked the wall behind him for corrosive slugs. Then he fell into a waking daze, which gradually subsided into sleep; he settled back against the outhouse wall. And when he opened his eyes, his dream was still inside his mind. It was a noise that had disturbed him, a faint intake of breath, and he sat staring at a girl, a woman dressed in white, framed by the outhouse door. She looked in on him and then she disappeared. And through the afterimage of his dream he saw her different than she was. For an instant she became the hypnogogic ape, the shape-changer come to mock at him, so unexpected was the sight of her in her white dress.

 

Part 5:
By Moonlight
I
n fact, on the night of his arrival at the village, Blendish had been so sick that he was actually relieved to hear that someone from the university had preceded him. Dr. Cathartes had arrived the month before, and was staying in a house near the south barricade. It was a house apportioned for his use. He gave directions that Deccan Blendish be guided there and put to bed.

 

That first evening he had taken Blendish’s temperature himself, and had sat up with him during the worst hours. He had sat beside him on the bed, touching him often. At the time, Blendish wondered if it was a symptom of his fever that made his impression of the man so intense. Cathartes seemed to be sitting very close to him, his face loomed very close, and even at his moments of greatest discomfort Blendish was aware of the man’s personal beauty. A kerosene lantern burned on a chair beside the bed. It cast a roseate glow, which seemed to coat one half of the man’s face, and when he turned his head the outline of his profile seemed unnaturally distinct.

When Blendish was well enough, he moved out of the professor’s house. He rented a room in the house of a Treganu family. After an argument over the destruction of forest habitats, he ignored the other members of the professor’s team—agriculturalists from Caladon and Charn. But Cathartes was different from them. Cathartes at least seemed interested in the unravelers—he was putting in a grant proposal to study them, their culture, their history, their religion. Cathartes always had remained friendly, and on the morning after he had seen the girl dressed in white, framed in the outhouse door, Blendish went to the professor’s house to search him out.

He found Cathartes shaving in his room. “There is a human woman here,” said Blendish.

“How do you know?”

“I saw her.”

Cathartes had nailed his traveling mirror to the wall. He stood in front of it, washing a long, straight razor in a bowl of water. Already in the early morning, the weather was intolerably hot; the steaming water on its stand had filled the air to saturation, so that instantly on entering, Blendish’s skin was covered with a flush of sweat. His shirt was soaked under his arms. By contrast, the professor’s shirt was clean and freshly ironed.

He rubbed his fine jaw not with soap, but with a scented grease. Holding the razor at a prudent angle, he stroked his face with brisk, energetic strokes.

“She’s pretty, isn’t she?” he said presently.

“Who is she?”

“Sarnath kidnapped her from Caladon. Her and a boy. That’s the story I’ve pieced together from the others.”

The morning sunlight spilled over the windowsill into the room. It spattered through the screen. In spite of the heat, Blendish shuddered.

“Ah,” he said, concentrating on the razor’s stroke. Then he turned away and looked instead around the room, noticing without admiring the perfect luxury of the professor’s personal belongings: the expensive luggage, the gilt-edged books, the silver combs and brushes on the palm-leaf chest.

“What do you think?” Cathartes asked. He turned toward Blendish with the razor in his hand.

When Blendish said nothing, he continued: “What would it be like? To be stolen away from home at birth and raised by alien primitives.”

The pout of his red lips seemed both mesmerizing and repellent, and again Deccan Blendish turned away. “Is that what they are?”

“In a manner of speaking. Who knows what they are, or where they come from, really? A man in my department claims they are of extrasolar origin. He has the proof, he claims. They are fundamentally unlike ourselves, and for this reason they disgust us. Have you read Thanakar Starbridge’s autobiography?”

The house that the council had given to Cathartes and the others was at the outskirts of the village. Separate from the other buildings, it was separate also from the forest, unalleviated by any shade, a squat block of palm-leaf thatch, crushed by the pressure of the insistent sun. Inside, Blendish listened to the buzzing of the flies upon the windowsill. He found himself nodding and smiling.

“It’s a peculiar book,” continued the professor. “Peculiar and instructive. For a while the author was held captive on the Caladonian frontier—Thanakar Starbridge was definitely a liberal, by prerevolutionary standards. An atheist, even. But I don’t think I’ve ever read anything more full of loathing than his descriptions of these people. Part of it is just aristocratic prejudice, an instinctive hatred for all civil servants. But that’s not all. There’s more to it than that.”

He had replaced his razor on the stand. Now he was standing by his bed, a towel around his neck. He had taken a book from his bedside table and was holding it out; for an instant Deccan Blendish felt a spasm of dumb fear. For an instant he was afraid that the professor would require him to read the whole fat, boring book right there, right then, in that stupefying heat. Smiling, he shook his head and put his palms up in appeal.

Cathartes shrugged. “It’s interesting. For my survey I am reading all the references that I can find. In every one, the tone’s the same—the same unmitigated loathing. Most of them are from a time when the unravelers were far more common in the cities than they are now. Canan Bey tells me that Sarnath was a customs officer in Caladon. If that’s true, he must have been one of the last.”

The buzzing of the flies seemed very loud. Blendish put his hand up to his face. “What could it be, I wonder,” said Dr. Cathartes, replacing the book upon his table. He was buttoning up his shirtfront, fingering as he did so the emblem of the university upon his collar. “Why such hatred? It is not their physical peculiarities. If anything, it is their similarity to us that makes them seem grotesque. It’s certainly not their manners—they’re an inoffensive lot. And there is nothing in the teachings of the master that explains it—superficially.”

Perhaps the flies were attracted to the sweetness of his voice, the smell of his minted breath. In his mind’s eye, Blendish saw an image of the house, circled by a swarm of flies. The teachings of the master … he thought. In this matter you are like the monkey in the sand, our predecessor, which can disguise itself with lies …

He cleared his throat. “There are others who think differently,” he said aloud. “There is another theory of their evolution.”

Cathartes didn’t seem to hear. “These woods are crowded with reactionaries,” he said. “I’ll be relieved when they are all cleared out. Listen: not sixty miles from here there is a village near a lake. Old men and women, mostly—honey gatherers, harmless, peaceful. But they had priests—I found them hiding in a cave. I was doing my dissertation, and it was my coup—they had carved a wooden statue of the devil Angkhdt, and they had lined their palms with colored berry juice.” He gave an elaborate shudder. “I’ll be glad when this whole forest is clear-cut.”