Back | Next
Contents

IV


The dance ended in a final exultant jump, wings fluttering iridescent and the bird head turned skyward. The men who had been playing music for it put down their pipes and drums. The dancer’s plumage swept the ground as she bowed. She vanished into a canebrake. The audience, seated and crosslegged, closed eyes for an unspeaking minute. Tolteca thought it a more gracious tribute than applause.

He looked around again as the ceremony broke up and men prepared for sleep. It didn’t seem quite real to him, yet, that camp should be pitched, supper eaten, and the time come for rest, while the sun had not reached noon. That was because of the long day, of course. Gwydion was just past vernal equinox. But even at its mild and rainy midwinter, daylight lasted a couple of sleeps.

The effect hadn’t been so noticeable at Instar. The town used an auroral generator to give soft outdoor illumination after dark, and went about its business. Thus it had only taken a couple of planetary rotations to organize this party. They marched for the hills at dawn. Already one leisurely day had passed on the trail, with two campings; and one night, where the moon needed little help from the travelers’ glowbulbs; and now another forenoon. Sometime tomorrow—Gwydion tomorrow—they ought to reach the upland site which Dawyd had suggested for the spaceport.

Tolteca could feel the tiredness due rough kilometers in his muscles, but he wasn’t sleepy yet. He stood up, glancing over the camp. Dawyd had selected a good spot, a meadow in the forest. The half-dozen Gwydiona men who accompanied him talked merrily as they banked the fire and spread out sleeping bags. One man, standing watch against possible carnivores, carried a longbow. Tolteca had seen what that weapon could do, when a hunter brought in an arcas for meat. Nonetheless he wondered why everyone had courteously refused those firearms the Quetzal brought as gifts.

The ten Namerican scientists and engineers who had come along were in more of a hurry to bed down. Tolteca chuckled, recalling their dismay when he announced that this trip would be on shank’s mare. But Dawyd was right, there was no better way to learn an area. Raven had also joined the group, with two of his men. The Lochlanna seemed incapable of weariness, and their damned slithering politeness never failed them, but they were always a little apart from the rest.

Tolteca sauntered past the canebrake, following a side path. Though no one lived in these hills, the Gwydiona often went here for recreation, and small solar-powered robots maintained the trails. He had not quite dared hope he would meet Elfavy. But when she came around a flowering tree, the heart leaped in him.

“Aren’t you tired?” he asked, lame-tongued, after she stopped and gave greeting.

“Not much,” she answered. “I wanted to stroll for a while before sleep. Like you.”

“Well, let’s go into partnership.”

She laughed. “An interesting concept. You have so many commercial enterprises on your planet, I hear. Is this another one? Hiring out to take walks for people who would rather sit at home?”

Tolteca bowed. “If you’ll join me, I’ll make a career of that.”

She flushed and said quickly, “Come this way. If I remember this neighborhood from the last time I was here, it has a beautiful view not far off.”

She had changed her costume for a plain tunic. Sunlight came through leaves to touch her lithe dancer’s body; the hair, loosened, fell in waves down her back. Tolteca could not find the words he really wanted, nor could he share her easy silence.

“We don’t do everything for money on Nuevamerica,” he said, afraid of what she might think. “It’s only, well, our particular way of organizing our economy.”

“I know,” she said. “To me it seems so . . . impersonal, lonely, each man fending for himself—but that may just be because I am not used to the idea.”

“Our feeling is that the state should do as little as possible,” he said, earnest with the ideals of his nation. “Otherwise it will get too much power, and that’s the end of freedom. But then private enterprise must take over; and it must be kept competitive, or it will in turn develop into a tyranny.” Perforce he used several words which Gwydiona lacked, such as the last. He had introduced them to her before, during conversations at Dawyd’s house, when they had tried to comprehend each other’s viewpoints.

“But why should the society, or the state as you call it, be opposed to the individual?” she asked. “I still don’t grasp what the problem is, Miguel. We seem to do much as we please, all the time, here on Gwydion. Most of our enterprises are private, as you put it.” No, he thought, not as I put it. Your folk are only interested in making a living. The profit motive, in the economists’ sense of the word, isn’t there. He forebore to interrupt. “But this unregulated activity seems to work for everyone’s mutual benefit,” she continued. “Money is only a convenience. Its possession does not give a man power over his fellows.”

“You are universally reasonable,” Tolteca said. “That isn’t true of any other planet I know about. Nor do you need to curb violence. You hardly know what anger is. And hate—another word which isn’t in your language. Hate is to be always angry with someone else.” He saw shock on her face, and hurried to add, “Then we must contend with the lazy, the greedy, the unscrupulous—Do you know, I begin to wonder if we should carry out this project. It may be best that your planet have nothing to do with the others. You are too good; you could be too badly hurt.”

She shook her head. “No, don’t think that. Obviously we are different from you. Perhaps genetic drift has caused us to lose a trait or two otherwise common to mankind. But the difference isn’t great, and it doesn’t make us superior. Remember, you came to us. We never managed to build spaceships.”

“Never chose to,” he corrected her.

He recalled a remark of Raven’s, one day in Instar. “It isn’t natural for humans to be consistently gentle and rational. They’ve done tremendous things here for so small a population. They don’t lack energy. But where does their excess energy go?” At the time, Tolteca had bristled. Only a professional killer would be frightened by total sanity, he thought. Now he began, unwilling, to see that Raven had asked a legitimate scientific question.

“There is much that we never chose to do,” said Elfavy with a hint of wistfulness.

“I admit wondering why you don’t at least colonize the uninhabited parts of Gwydion.”

“We stabilized the population by general agreement, several centuries ago. More people would only destroy nature.”

They emerged from the woods again. Another meadow sloped upward to a cliff edge. The grass was strewn with white flowers; the common bush of star-shaped leaves grew everywhere about, its buds swelling, the air heady from their odor. Beyond this spine of the hills lay a deep valley and then the mountains rose, clear and powerful against the sky.

Elfavy swept an arm in an arc. “Should we crowd out this?” she asked.

Tolteca thought of his own brawling unrestful folk, the forests they had already raped, and made no answer.

The girl stood a moment, frowning, on the clifftop. A west wind blew strongly, straining the tunic against her and tossing sunlit locks of hair. Tolteca caught himself staring so rudely that he forced his eyes away, across kilometers toward that gray volcanic cone named Mount Granis.

“No,” said Elfavy with some reluctance, “I must not be smug. People did live here once. Just a few farmers and woodcutters, but they did maintain isolated homes. However, that is long past. Nowadays everyone lives in a town. And I don’t believe we would reoccupy regions like this even if it were safe. It would be wrong. All life has a right to existence, does it not? Men shouldn’t wear more of a Night Face than they must.”

Tolteca found some difficulty in concentrating on her meaning, the sound was so pleasant. Night Face—oh, yes, part of the Gwydiona religion. (If “religion” was the right word. “Philosophy” might be better. “Way of life” might be still more accurate.) Since they believed everything to be a facet of that eternal and infinite Oneness which they called God, it followed that God was also death, ruin, sorrow. But they didn’t say much, or seem to think much, about that side of reality. He remembered that their arts and literature, like their daily lives, were mostly sunny, cheerful, completely logical once you had mastered the complex symbolisms. Pain was gallantly endured. The suffering or death of someone beloved was mourned in a controlled manner which Raven admired, but Tolteca had trouble understanding .

“I don’t believe your people could harm nature,” he said. “You work with it, make yourselves part of it.”

“That’s the ideal.” Elfavy snickered. “But I’m afraid practice has no more statistical correlation with preaching on Gwydion than anywhere else in the universe.” She knelt and began to pluck the small white flowers. “I shall make a garland of jule for you,” she said. “A sign of friendship, since the jule blooms when the growth season is being reborn. Now that’s a nice harmonious thing for me to do, isn’t it? And yet if you asked the plant, it might not agree!”

“Thank you,” he said, overwhelmed.

“The Bird Maiden had a chaplet of jule,” she said. By now he realized that the retelling of symbolic myths was a standard conversational gambit here, like a Lochlanna’s inquiry after the health of your father. “That is why I wore a bird costume this time. It is her time of year, and today is the Day of the River Child. When the Bird Maiden met the River Child, he was lost and crying. She carried him home and gave him her crown.” She glanced up. “It is a seasonal myth,” she explained, “the end of the rains, lowland floods, then sunlight and the blossoming jule. Plus those moral lessons the elders are always quacking about, plus a hundred other possible interpretations. The entire tale is too complicated to tell on a warm day, even if the episode of the Riddling Tree is one of our best poems. But I always like to dance the story.”

She fell silent, her hands busy in the grass. For lack of anything else, he pointed to one of the large budding bushes. “What’s this called?” he asked.

“With the five-pointed leaves? Oh, baleflower. It grows everywhere. You must have noticed the one in front of my father’s house.”

“Yes. It must have quite a lot of mythology.”

Elfavy stopped. She glanced at him and away. For an instant the evening-blue eyes seemed almost blind. “No,” she said.

“What? But I thought . . . I thought everything means something on Gwydion, as well as being something. Usually it has many different meanings—”

“This is only baleflower.” Her voice grew thin. “Nothing else.”

Tolteca pulled himself up short. Some taboo—no, surely not that, the Gwydiona were even freer from arbitrary prohibitions than his own people. But if she was sensitive about it, best not to pursue the subject.

The girl finished her work, jumped to her feet, and flung a wreath about his neck. “There!” she laughed. “Wait, hold still, it’s caught on one ear. Ah, good.”

He gestured at the second one she had made. “Aren’t you going to put that on yourself?”

“Oh, no. A jule garland is always for someone else. This is for Raven.”

“What?” Tolteca stiffened.

Again she flushed and looked past him toward the mountains. “I got to know him a little in Instar. I drove him around, showing him the sights. Or we walked.”

Tolteca thought of the many times in those long moonlit nights when she had not been at home. He said, “I don’t believe Raven is your sort,” and heard his voice go ragged.

“I don’t understand him,” she whispered. “And yet in a way I do. Maybe. As I might understand a storm.”

She started back toward camp. Tolteca must needs follow. He said bitterly, “I should think you, of everyone alive, would be immune to such cheap glamour. Soldier! Hereditary aristocrat!”

“Those things I don’t comprehend,” she said, her eyes still averted. “To kill people, or make them do your bidding, as if they were machines—But it isn’t that way with him. Not really.”

They went down the trail in stillness, boots thudding next to sandals. At last she murmured, “He lives with the Night Faces. All the time. I can’t even bear to think of that, but he endures it.”

Enjoys it, Tolteca wanted to growl. But he saw he had been backbiting, and held his peace.




Back | Next
Framed