The Loafers of Refuge (2 page)

He paused for breath, and Harvey asked, “You mean their
ability to make nature furnish them with what they need, Carey?”

“That’s one big point, yes. We call them Loafers because they play a lot and spend hours just sitting around daydreaming. But if Dad could have controlled the grogrocs the way they do he’d be alive today. We could learn a lot from them if we weren’t so blindly opposed to seeing what they
can
do instead of what they can’t.”

“We know they walk around in warm weather like naked savages and wouldn’t hit a lick at a snake,” said Robert stubbornly, sticking to fundamentals. “We had to bar them coming into town in summer because they refused to wear clothes, and they just laughed at us when we tried to hire them to work on the farms. I think they’re a bunch of lazy heathen devils and you haven’t any business being seen with one, much less taking part in their god-awful primitive rites.”

“And think of the danger, Son,” added Maud. “As your uncle said, two or three fail every year, and they’ve been learning that Controller stuff since they were babies. What chance would you have?”

Carey got to his feet, his face weary. “If they fail, Mom, they either starve themselves to death or go wandering around looking for a tribe that will take them in and let them try again next year. If I don’t make it all I have to do is come home and forget it. As for my chances, I’ve been studying for years. I probably know as much as anyone else in the group. Now I’m going to Loafertown to get my final coaching, so goodnight.”

Carey got up, put on his coat and cap and walked out of the front door, leaving a dumbfounded silence behind him. He decided to walk rather than re-saddle his horse, and headed towards the coastline and the little community called Loafer-town, two miles from the Sheldon farm. The sun was setting, its dying rays reflecting brightly off the snow-covered hills to the north-east.

He reached the path along the shore just below the town and paused, struck by the tableau before him. A young Loafer woman and two small children stood on a rockwall that jutted a hundred feet into the turbulent water. She was singing in a
high clear voice, a song of purpose and power; before her in the water, its great black bulk tossing uneasily in the waves, was a
whampus
, a giant pelagic mammal for which the colonists had discovered no conceivable use.

Carey recognized the woman as Tharee, sister of Nyyub the Head Councillor and aunt of his best friend, Timmy. Her husband had been killed in an accident two years before and according to Loafer custom she was raising her children without re-marrying. As Carey watched, in sudden understanding, the woman’s song changed, became low and caressing, and the whampus moved forward until it was brushing the rocks. Tharee stopped singing and reached forward to pet the great black head reassuringly, and then there was an agitated swirling in the water and the whampus seemed to sink beneath the waves. A moment later its body re-appeared, subtly altered now in outline. It was lying on its back in the tossing waves.

Protruding out of the water on the whampus’s underside were four swelling black mounds. The two children, watching their footing carefully, stepped off the rock on to its belly. Carey raised his eyes and saw what he knew must be there, three small black forms a hundred feet off shore, tumbling and playing in the calmer water. He turned back to the children and saw that each crouched low over one of the mounds. Their small heads bent forward, and each took a great black teat into its mouth.

The children drank.

Carey had drunk whampus milk before, though never direct from the source. It kept well without refrigeration and the Loafers, when the whampus females were lactating, milked them often. The liquid was remarkably rich; he had run an analysis in school and discovered it had roughly twice the food value of cow’s milk.

The larger animals such as the whampus were usually controlled by men, but it was not uncommon for a woman alone, like Tharee, to control even the giant grogroc.

When the children had satisfied their hunger Tharee handed them deflated hide bags and the two youngsters milked them full. The heaving, tossing motion of their host seemed not to bother them at all. The whole operation took
less than five minutes, and the whampus could easily stay submerged for ten.

The children scrambled back to the rock. When they were safely ashore their mother leaned over and patted the giant mammal on its soft black belly. It flipped over in the water with a great splashing, righted itself and headed for the open sea. The three small calves came rushing inshore to meet their mother, the water foaming behind them, and dived beneath her to start their own meal. In a moment there was only the gently tossing bulk of the whampus visible above the waves as she swam slowly through the breakwater and headed out to the open sea.

Carey waited at the foot of the rocks until Tharee and her children stepped ashore, and greeted them politely. The Loafers were completely human in appearance except for a thick coat of hair over most of their bodies, and some of their women were beautiful.

Tharee wore the heavy
wirtl
cloak that was the Loafers’ standard winter garment; she was a grave, unsmiling woman, but her face relaxed into friendliness when she recognized her nephew’s friend. Micka and Sanda scampered to him and noisily demanded to be carried.

He stooped and lifted a child in each arm, carrying them and their milkbags easily as he walked the short distance to the town with Tharee. He told her of his argument with his family and she nodded in grave sympathy.

“Your people do not understand ours, Car-ree, but this will change. We are starting some children in your school next year, in the beginning grade. Our elders have decided that, although your people have much to learn of the mind and its powers, your accomplishments in the physical world deserve study. And if you succeed in becoming a Controller we hope to convince your elders of our ability to offer useful knowledge in return.”

As they reached the first houses they heard the muffled, grumbling roar of a working grogroc somewhere deeper in the village, and Carey hastily put the children down and said goodbye to Tharee. He followed the sounds through the
twisting, curving paths between houses and soon located the great beast.

A Controller was building a new home. The Loafers had various methods of securing housing, but one of their favourite was to select a grove of the giant
waquil
, a trailing plant which grew on the ground, and hollow out the interiors of the huge fruits. The waquil fruits looked something like oversize melons, as much as twelve feet high and thirty feet long, and their tough hides were several inches thick. Once the soft interior was removed and the walls scraped to prevent rotting a waquil-house could be used for years.

He found Timmy and several other pre-initiates there, intently watching the work. Timmy was half a head taller than Carey but much lighter of frame, a lean, hard-muscled youth who usually wore a pensive, thoughtful expression on his thin face. He and Carey had been friends since early childhood, to the dismay of most of the Earth population.

The Controller was standing calmly by the great shoulder of the ten-ton monster, directing it with a gentle voice and guiding hands. The heavy, ugly head, crowned with a circle of forward-tilted horns, plunged again and again into the waquil. The grogrocs were the largest land animals on Refuge. They had been fairly well cleared away from the areas inhabited solely by Earthmen, but the Loafers used them for many purposes.

When the Controller had the door he was cutting outlined he guided the huge beast to the centre of the panel and had him lock his circular set of horns in it. A sharp twist of the massive head ripped the cut section loose. The grogroc backed away, snorting, and the Controller swiftly and expertly removed the fragmented mass. Then he led the giant herbivore back to the fruit and it began to eat the soft, pulpy interior. The door it had made was large enough to get the head and neck inside, and the hungry beast would eat half the pulp before the sun rose in the morning. The grogrocs had appetites as big as the fatbirds. The Controller would bring in smaller herbivores to finish the job of consuming the pulp and cleaning the walls. His wife and children would weave
a curtain of the soft, heavy wirtl leaves, hang it over the door, and the family would be at home.

There was a huge fire burning in the grove. A group of older women were sitting around it, singing in low voices a chant as ancient as the sea before them. As Carey and Timmy walked towards it Carey felt the hairy arm of his friend encircle his shoulders. Timmy and Carey had received most of their final coaching together, from Nyyub, Timmy’s father.

Carey would be the first Earthman ever to take the manhood rites of the Loafers, but that too was right. Of the forty thousand humans on Refuge he was the eldest actually born on Refuge soil, the only one who had grown up with Loafers as constant companions. And he was quite certain that if he were not the only Earthman on Refuge who liked and respected the Loafers he was a member of a very small minority. They were generally looked upon with utter contempt by the industrious Earthmen busily engaged in turning Refuge into an Arcadian paradise. The Loafers had got their name from a corrupt pronunciation of their own word for themselves. It fitted so closely with the colonists’ evaluation of the aborigines that it had been adopted and gone into common usage.

Carey and Timmy found a seat near the warmth and sat quietly, listening to the beauty of the old, old songs. The other youths, both male and female, began to gather, and after a time the songs changed. The old tales were replaced by songs of instruction, some of them recited by the elders who were the governing body of the tribe. Most of what they had to say was repetition of what he had been taught and Carey found his attention wandering.

“Do you think we’ll pass, Timmy?” he whispered.

“If you do not it will be your own fault,” said Timmy, low voiced. “My father says you have the power, as much as any of us, and you have received the same instruction as the rest.”

“Yes, but I’m not a Loafer. I wasn’t born to this, I don’t—”

“Hush, foolish friend. The power is within all of us, as much a part of Doreen as Tharee, of you as my father. It must be brought out and strengthened, trained and put to use. Do not worry, you will be fine.”

“I wish I could agree with you,” said Carey, and subsided.
After a time the teachers finished and two young, nubile girls shed their cloaks and danced nude in the firelight, a dance as old as the songs, and as beautiful. Carey watched their whirling limbs, the happy faces, the shapely breasts peeping out of their nests of fine hair, and felt a strong surge of affection for these people. Somewhere in the past they had taken a separate path from that of Earthmen, setting their energies towards controlling their environment rather than changing it. They had not developed the prime ability that had brought mankind up from darkness: a capacity for dull work. In its place they had developed their minds. They were telepathic to a fair degree, and worked hard towards strengthening this quality in themselves. They had eliminated want as a factor in their lives and their time was their own, though the manner in which they used it was sometimes beyond his understanding.

After the girls sat down Nyyub rose and said a few brief words, and the coaching session was over. Carey said goodbye to Timmy and struck out for home, walking alone through the crisp, cool air, alone and full of doubts.

When the sun peeped over the edge of the purple world next morning it found Carey back in Loafertown.

T
HERE WERE SEVEN
young Loafers standing by the dead ashes of last night’s fire, three female and four male. They were naked, as bare of covering or ornament as new-born babes, and shivering in the cold. Carey stripped and walked among them, his tanned brown body conspicuous among their hairy forms. It had snowed again in the night and the fresh white flakes lay on the ground in a thin blanket, unbearably cold to the feet.

There were no adults present but Nyyub. The old Councillor nodded his greeting to Carey and smiled when he saw him shivering. There was a woven basket behind Nyyub, and from this he took a heavy, brightly-coloured robe—the one item an initiate was allowed to carry into the woods—and gave it to Carey. He draped it around his shoulders gratefully, waiting while Nyyub gave one to each person. They were of wirtl leaves, as always, but so closely and heavily woven that they were unusually warm.

The sun was rising swiftly, and it was time to be gone. Nyyub paused a last moment, surveying the small group, and said, “You are today children, and you will leave our presence, turn your faces to the great woods, the bountiful woods, and in time you will come back, and you will be men and women. A human’s strength is in himself, and each person must find his own and put it to use. Now go forth, and wrestle with the spirit that is within you, and come back Controllers.”

He lifted a hand in sharp dismissal, then turned and strode away. The group of young people hesitated, collectively, and then turned as one and ran towards the encircling shadow of the deep woods, their feet falling softly in the fluffy snow. At
the edge of the trees they began to separate, each going alone into the wilderness.

No tools or weapons of any sort were allowed, but Carey knew that anything available in nature was his to use as he saw fit, and he stopped at the first wirtl tree and hastily plucked enough leaves to weave into coverings for his feet. His fingers were numb with cold but he managed fairly well, at least achieving something that would keep the skin of his feet off the snow. The Loafers had no such problems. Their feet had never known shoes, and cold could not hurt them.

The heavy woods of Refuge, mantled in their blanket of snow, lay before him, and out of these woods he must come back a man.

The carnivores who made these woods a terror for humans were largely nocturnal creatures, but this was the winter season and food was scarce. He kept a wary eye overhead as he ran, looking for the dreaded flying cat, but saw nothing. And after a time the cold penetrated his blanket so that he felt a creeping numbness in his limbs and knew it was time to find shelter.