VII
Rain came the following afternoon; first thunderheads banked over Kolumkill like blue-black granite, lightning livid in their caverns, then cataracts borne on a whooping east wind, finally a long slacking off when the Gwydiona romped nude on turf that glittered where sunbeams struck through the pillars of slowly falling water. Tolteca joined the ball game, as vigorous a one as he had ever played. Afterward they lounged about indoors, around a fire built on a hearth improvised from stones, and yarned. The men probed his recollections with an insatiable wish to learn more about the galaxy. They had tales to give in exchange, nothing of interhuman conflict—they seemed puzzled and troubled by that idea—but lusty enough, happenings of sea and forest and mountain.
“So we sat in that diving bell waiting to see if their grapple would find us before we ran out of air,” Llyrdin said, “and I never played better chess in my life. It got right thick in there, too, before they snatched us up. They could have had the decency to be a few minutes longer about it, though. I had such a lovely end game planned out! But of course the board was upset as they hauled on the bell.”
“And what might that symbolize?” Tolteca teased him.
Llyrdin shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m not much of a thinker, myself. Maybe God likes a joke now and then. But if so, Vwi has a pawky sense of humor.”
After the storm had passed, the party went on to the spaceport site. Tolteca put in a busy day and night investigating the area. It would serve admirably, he decided.
Though Bale time was drawing near and the Gwydiona were anxious to get home, Dawyd ordered a roundabout route. The rain had laid the volcanic dust, but more precipitation would be needed to purify the ground entirely. It would be foolish to retrace their path across that tainted soil. He aimed for a shoulder of the mountains which jutted out of the massif on the north, between the expedition and the coast. The pass across it rose above timberline, and travel was rugged. They stopped for some hours in the uppermost woods to rest before the final ascent. That was in the middle morning.
After he had eaten, Tolteca left camp to wash in a pool further down the stream which flowed nearby. Glacier-fed, the water numbed him, but after he had toweled himself he felt like a minor sun. He donned his clothes and wandered restlessly in search of a fall he could hear in the distance. A game trail led through the brush toward its foot. He was about to emerge there when he heard voices. Raven and Elfavy!
“Please,” the girl said. Her tone trembled. “I beg you, be reasonable.”
The distress in her shocked Tolteca. For a moment of rage he wanted to burst forth and have it out with Raven. He checked himself. Eavesdropping was ungentlemanly. Even if—or perhaps especially because—those two had been so much in each other’s company since the first night in the Holy City. But if she was in some difficulty, he wanted to know about it so he could try to help her, and he didn’t think she would tell him what the matter was if he put a direct question. There were cultural barriers, taboo or embarrassment, which only Raven was callous enough to hammer down.
Tolteca wet his lips. His palms grew sweaty and the pulse thuttered in his ears, nearly as loud as the stream that jumped over the bluff before him. To Chaos with being a gentleman, he decided violently, slipped behind a natural hedge and peered through the leaves.
The water foamed down into a dell filled with young trees. Their foliage made a shifting pattern of light and shadow under the deep upland sky. Rainbows danced in the water smoke, currents swirled about rocks covered with soft green growth, the stones on the riverbed seemed to ripple. Cool and damp, the air rang with the noise of the fall. High overhead wheeled a single bird of prey.
Raven stood on the bank, a statue in a black traveling cloak. The harsh face might have been cast in metal as he regarded the girl. She kept twisting her own gaze away from his, and her fingers wrestled with each other. Tiny droplets caught in her hair broke the sunlight into flaming shards, but that unbound mane was itself the brightest thing before Tolteca’s eyes.
“I am being reasonable,” Raven snapped. “When my nose is rubbed in something for the third time running, I don’t ignore the smell.”
“Third time? What do you mean? Why are you so angry today?”
Raven gave an elaborate sigh and ticked the points off on his fingers. “We’ve been over this ground before. First: your houses are built like fortresses. Yes, you tell me that’s a symbol, but I have trouble believing that rational people like you would go to so much trouble and expense for something that was nothing but a symbol. Second: nobody lives alone any more, especially not in the wilderness. I can’t forget that place where it was tried once. Those people were killed with weapons. Third: while we were looking over the port site, your father made a remark about caves in the cliff being easily made into Bale time shelters. When I asked him what he had in mind, he suddenly discovered he had an urgent matter to attend to elsewhere. When I asked a couple of the others, they grew almost as unhappy as you and mumbled something about taking insurance against unforeseeable accidents.
“What tore it for me was when I pressed Cardwyr for a real explanation, a few hours ago on the march. He’d been so frank with me in every other respect that I felt he’d continue that way. But instead, he came as near losing his temper as I’ve ever seen a Gwydiona do. I thought for a minute he was going to hit me. But he just stalked off telling me to improve my manners.
“Something is wrong here. Why don’t you give us fair warning?”
Elfavy turned as if to depart. She blinked very fast, and a wetness glinted on her cheek. “I thought you . . . you invited me to go for a walk,” she said. “But—”
He caught her by the arm. “Listen,” he said more gently. “Please listen, I’m picking on you because, well, you’ve honored me with reason to think you won’t lie or evade when something is really important to me. And this is. You’ve never seen violence, but I have. Much too often. I know what comes of it, and—I have to do what I can to keep it from you. Do you follow me? I have to.”
She ceased pulling against him and stood shivering, her head bent so that the locks fell past her face and hid it. Raven studied her for a while. His mouth lost its hardness. “Sit down, my dear,” he said at last.
Elfavy lowered herself to the ground as if strength had deserted her. He joined her and took one small hand in his. There went a stabbing through Tolteca.
“Are you forbidden to talk about this?” Raven asked, so low that the brawling of the fall nearly drowned the question.
She shook her head.
“Why won’t you, then?”
“I—” Her fingers tightened around his palm, and she laid her other hand over it. He sat cat-passive while she gulped for breath. “I don’t know. We don’t—” Some seconds passed before she could get the words out. “We hardly ever talk about it. Or think about it. It’s too dreadful.”
There is such a thing as an unconscious taboo, Tolteca remembered through the tides in his brain, laid by the self upon the self.
“And it’s not as if the bad things happen very often, now that . . . that we’ve learned how to take . . . precautions. Long ago it was worse—” She braced herself and looked squarely at him. “You live with greater hazards and horrors than ours, all the time, do you not?”
Raven smiled very slightly. “Ah-ah, there. I decline your counter-challenge. Let’s stick to the main issue. Something occurs, or can occur, during Bale. That’s plain to see. Your people must have wondered what, if they don’t actually know.”
“Yes. There have been ideas.” Elfavy seemed to have recovered her nerve. She frowned at the earth for a space and then said almost coolly, “We are not much given on Gwydion to examining our own souls, as you from the stars seem to be. I suppose that is because we’re simpler. Miguel said to me once that he would not have believed there could be an entire race so free of internal conflicts as us, until he came here.” She spoke my name! “I don’t know about that, but I do know that I’ve little skill in reading my own inmost thoughts. So I can’t tell you with certainty why we so loathe to think about the danger at Bale time. However, might it not be that one hates to associate the most joyous moments of one’s life with . . . with that other thing?”
“Might be,” said Raven noncommittally.
She raised her head, tossing the tresses down her back, and went on. “Still Bale is when God comes, and God has Vwi Night Faces too. Not everyone returns from the Holy City.”
“What happens to them?”
“There is a theory that the mountain ape is driven mad by the nearness of God and comes down into the lowlands, killing and destroying. That would account for the facts. Actually, I suppose if you forced every person on Gwydion to give you an opinion, as you forced me, most would say this idea must be the right one.”
“Haven’t you tried to check up on it? Why not leave somebody behind in the towns, waiting in ambush, to see?”
“No. Who would forego his trip to the Holy City, for any reason?”
“Hm. One might at least leave automatic cameras. But I can find out about that later. What’s this mountain ape like?”
“An omnivore, which often catches game to eat. They travel in flocks.”
“I should think a closed door and a barred window would serve against animals. And don’t you keep guard robots at your sanctuaries?”
“Well, the idea is that the beast may be half intelligent. How could it be found on so many islands, if it did not sometimes cross the water on a log?”
“That could happen accidentally. Or the islands may be the remnants of an original continent. There must at least have been land bridges now and then, here and there, in the geological past.”
“Well, perhaps,” she said reluctantly. “But suppose the mountain ape is cunning enough to get by a guard robot. That needn’t happen very often, you see, to cause trouble. Suppose it has gotten to the point of using tools that can break and pry. I don’t believe that anyone has ever really investigated its habits. It usually stays far out in the wilderness. Only communities which lie near the edge of a great forest, like Instar, ever glimpse a wandering flock. Remember, we are only ten million people, scattered over a planet. It’s too big for us to know everything.”
She seemed entirely calm now. Her gaze went around the dell, up the tumbling river to the sky and the hunting bird. She smiled. “And it is right that the world be so,” she said. “Would you want to live where there is no mystery and nothing unconquered?”
“No,” Raven agreed. “I suppose that’s why men went to the stars in the first place.”
“And must keep looking ever further, as they suck the planets dry,” Elfavy said with compassion tinged by the least hint of scorn. “We keep the frontiers that we already have.”
“I like that attitude,” Raven said. “But I don’t see any sense in letting an active menace run loose. We’ll look into this mountain ape business, and if that turns out to be the trouble, we’ll soon find ways to deal with the brutes.”
Elfavy’s mouth fell open. She stared at him in a blind fashion. “No,” she gasped, “you wouldn’t exterminate them!”
“Um-m . . . that’s right, you’d consider that immoral, wouldn’t you? Very well, let the species live. But it can be eradicated in inhabited areas.”
“What?” She yanked her hands from his.
“Now, wait a bit,” Raven protested. “I know you don’t have any nonsense here about the sacredness of life. You fish and hunt and butcher domestic animals, not for sport but quite cheerfully for economic reasons. What’s the difference in this case?”
“The apes may be intelligent!”
“On a very low plane, maybe. I wouldn’t let that bother me. But if you’re so squeamish, I suppose they could simply be stunned and airlifted en masse to a distant plateau or some place. I’m sure they wouldn’t much mind.”
“Stop.” She raised herself to a crouch. Through the close-fitting tunic, on the bare sun-gold arms and legs, Tolteca could see the tension that shook her. “Can you not understand? The Night Faces must be!”
“Brake back, there,” Raven said. He reached for her. “I only suggested—”
“Let me alone!” She sprang to her feet and fled up the trail, almost brushing Tolteca but unaware of him in her weeping.
Raven swore, the word was less angry than hurt and bitter, and started to follow. That’s plenty, Tolteca thought in a gust of temper, and stepped forth. “What’s going on here?” he demanded.
Raven glided to a halt. “How long have you been listening?” he murmured in a tiger’s voice.
“Long enough. I heard her ask you to let her be. So do it.”
They confronted each other a little while. Shadow and sunlight speckled Raven’s black shape. A breeze blew spray from the fall into Tolteca’s face. He tasted it frigid on his lips, but a smell akin to blood was in his nostrils. If he jumps me, I’ll shoot. I will.
Raven let out a deep breath. The heavy shoulders slumped noticeably. “I suppose that is best,” he said, and turned around to stare at the river.
The swift end of the scene was like having a wall collapse on which Tolteca had been leaning. He knew with horror that his hand had been on his pistol butt, and snatched it away. Ylem! What’s happened to me?
What would have happened, if—He needed his whole courage not to bolt.
Raven straightened. “Your chivalrous indignation does you credit,” he said sarcastically, around the back of his head. “But I assure you I was only trying to keep her from getting murdered one fine festival night.”
Still shaken, Tolteca grasped at the chance to smooth things over. “I know,” he said. “But you have to respect the sensitivities of people. Different cultures have the damnedest geases.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Did you ever hear why trade with Orillion was abandoned, why nobody goes there any more? It seemed one of the most promising of the isolated worlds that we’d come upon. Honest, warmhearted people. So warmhearted that we couldn’t possibly deal with them if we kept on refusing their offers of individual friendship . . . which involved homosexual relations. We couldn’t even explain to them why it wouldn’t do.”
“Yes, I’ve heard of that case.”
“You can’t go bursting into the most important parts of people’s lives like an artillery shell. Such compulsions have their roots in the very bottom of the unconscious mind. The people themselves can’t think logically about them. Suppose I cast doubts on your father’s honor. You’d probably kill me. But if you said something like that to me, I wouldn’t get resentful to the point of homicide.”
Raven faced him again, cocking one brow upward. “What are your touchy points, then?” he asked dryly.
“Eh? Why, well—family, I guess, even if that relationship isn’t as strong as for a Lochlanna. My planet. Democratic government. Not that I mind discussing any of those things, arguing about them. I don’t believe in fighting till there’s a direct physical threat. And I can entertain the possibility that my notions are completely mistaken. Certainly there’s nothing that can’t be improved.”
“The autonomous individual,” Raven said. “I feel sorry for you.”
He went on rapidly: “But there is something dangerous on Gwydion, especially at that so-called Bale season. I’ve learned that a certain animal, the mountain ape, is generally believed to be responsible. Do you have any information about the creature?”
“N-no. In most languages, ‘ape’ means a more or less anthropoid animal, fairly bright though without tools or a true speech. The type is common on terrestroid planets—parallel evolution.”
“I know.” Raven reached a decision. “Look here, you’ll agree that action must be taken, for the safety of base personnel if nothing else. Later on we can worry about how to do it without offending local prejudices. But first we have to know what the practical problem is. Could the apes really be the destroyers? Elfavy was so irrational on the subject that I can’t just take her word, or any Gwydiona’s. I’ll have to investigate for myself. You mentioned to me once that you’ve been on long hunting trips in the forests of several planets. And I suppose you are better than I at worming things out of people, especially when it involves their sore spots. So could you quietly find out what the spoor of the apes looks like, and so on? Then if we get a chance we can go off and have a look for ourselves. Agreed?”