“That means one of us killed Cat,” he said.
There was a sudden silence, apart from the climax of shrilling beyond the ship. Strange are His ways, thought David.
“Yes. Man,” said Skunk in his laboriously produced groan. “Something. Odd . . . Cat. Dead . . . Must. Know. How . . . Why?”
“Sorry, I can’t help,” said David. “I don’t know.”
“Come off it,” snapped Bird. “You’ve got to know. That’s what you’re there for, to classify and analyse information. That’s why we bother to cart you around with us—it’s your function.”
“I’m afraid I’m not functioning very well today,” said David.
“Feeling all right?” hooted Doc. “Like me to have a squint inside you?”
“Not on your life,” said David. “I’m fine. Only . . .”
“Only you’re not kissing well going to bother,” said Bird.
“Sister Bird,” hissed the Whizzers. “You must modify your language or we desert.”
There was a moment of shock. Nobody ever deserted. Nobody ever joked about it. By the same token Bird always remembered not to swear in front of the Whizzers.
“Yet the Lord has revealed to Brother/Sister Skunk that the duty has fallen on us to discover how and why Brother Cat was called to his Maker,” said one Whizzer.
“Blessed is His name,” said the other.
“All right,” said Mole, “let’s go along with that. We can all analyse a bit, I suppose. We don’t have Men around at home, do we? Doc, sober up and pay attention. Bird, go and see if the Bandies have finished whatever it is they do . . .”
David withdrew into himself. He was not Man, he was David. He felt enormous reluctance to take part in analytic processes. It didn’t matter who had killed Cat, or why, and the others were only discussing it because Skunk said it was important—they were accepting Skunk’s dictum out of habit, because they were used to the idea of Skunk being right about that sort of thing, just as they were used to the idea of Bird being right about the threat of a particle-storm. Those were part of their functions but it didn’t mean that Skunk was in command—no one was, or they all were. They collected information through their nine senses, relayed it if necessary through the Bandicoots, and David collated it with what he knew and interpreted the resulting probabilities. Then, always till now, it had become clear what they should do next, and there had been no point on taking a vote, or even discussing the issue. They were a crew, a unit like a beehive or a termite nest. They had lost their previous Hippo because they’d landed on a quaking planet and the only way to take off from its jellylike surface was for that Hippo (a young one, male, mauve) to hold the ship upright from the outside while they blasted clear. At the time it had seemed sad, but not strange, to leave poor Hippo roasted there, and Hippo seemed to think so too. The Whizzers had sung a hymn as they’d blasted off, he remembered. But now . . .
Now he sat in the ring of creatures round the campfire and felt no oneness with them. They were aliens. They squeaked and boomed and lowed and rasped in words he could scarcely understand, though they were all speaking standard English. The fire reflected itself from the facets of Bird’s eyes: her mandibles clashed like punctuation marks in the flapping talk from her wing-cases. Doc had withdrawn his pseudopod from Cat’s drained body and the surface of his water was frothy with the by-products of his feast. The Bandicoots had joined the circle and were engrossed in the talk, all four heads perking this way and that as if joined by a crank-rod. The Whizzers lay half folded together, like a pair of clasped hands. Mole had absentmindedly dug himself down and was listening with his elbows at ground level and his snout resting on his little pink palms with their iron-coloured claws Skunk, too, had forgotten himself enough to be producing vague whiffs and stinks, as if trying to supplement the difficult business of speech with the communication system he used among his own kind.
I belong on Earth, thought David. What am I doing here? Being part of a crew, that’s what. But what is the crew doing here? Prospecting, with a bit of piracy when the chance offers, that’s what. But why? Why any longer? He was rich—they all were, enormously rich in the currency of their home planets. Or were they? All those claims. Were they valid? Had anyone exploited them? That jade, hijacked in Altair—a share of that would have been enough to buy David twenty wives and islands for all of them, but without argument they had traded it for less than a thousandth of its value in fuel—to what end? More exploration, more claims . . .
David knew all this quite well. It was part of his memory—of all their memories—and there had seemed to be quite good reasons for it at the time. None of them had been the real reason, the need to stay together as a crew . . . And now the knowledge and the memory were strange, as strange as the ring of aliens who had fallen silent and were staring at him—those that had eyes to stare with.
“Man,” groaned Skunk. “Why. You. Kill. Cat?”
David barely understood the blurred syllables.
“Me?” he said. “Oh, rubbish. And my name’s David.”
“Come off it,” clattered Bird. “It’s got to be you. Doc was in his bucket, with no transport. Hippo was with the base-camp Bandy.”
“The base-camp Bandy was asleep,” said David. “Hippo could have done it.”
“Do you really think so?” said Hippo.
“No. Go on, Bird.”
“The rest of us were scouting, none alone. You were alone. You left the camp. Why?”
“I wanted to go over to the rocks. I can’t remember why.”
“Not functioning again?”
“I suppose so.”
“Two possibilities suggest themselves. Either you are suffering brain damage, which would account for your failure to function, and your killing Cat, and your not remembering that you had done so or why you went to the rocks. Or you are functioning, killed Cat for your own reasons and are concealing this by pretending not to function.”
“That’s easy to check,” said David. “Ask the Bandies. Am I functioning, Bandies?”
The eight eyes swivelled towards him on short stalks.
“Yesyesyesyes,” shrilled the Bandicoots. “Man’s functioning fine.”
It was true. The hesitation, the slither, the blur of thought of the last two hours had been sucked away like mist sucked off autumn meadows by the sun, leaving the normal clarity of instant connections, of each detail of knowledge and experience available at the merest whisper of a wish. Except that in this shadowless illumination David could see for the first time that the state was not normal. It was what he was used to, yes; but for a member of the genus homo sapiens it was abnormal. The sapience had been distorted into grotesque growth, like the udder of a dairy cow.
“OK, I’m functioning now,” he said. “But was I functioning when you got back to camp, Bandies?”
“Don’t remember,” they said. “Busybusybusy.”
“Are we sure it matters?” said Hippo. “We’ve only lost a Cat, and look, we’ve got another one,”
David saw their heads turn, but himself, caught in the rapture of returned illumination, barely glanced at the newcomer crouching at the fringe of the circle of firelight. A large Cat, almost twice the size of the old one, sidled towards Doc’s bucket, trailing one hind leg. It had a fresh wound in its shoulder. As Doc’s glimmering pseudopod rose and attached itself to the wound, David placed these new facts in their exact locations on the harsh-lit landscape of his knowledge.
“Yes, it matters,” he said. “Skunk was right. It matters immensely to all of us. Look at me. Did I kill Cat?”
He willed their attentions away from the wounded Cat and onto him.
“All right,” he said. “You be the jury. You decide, You aren’t my peers, any of you, because we’re all so different, but we’ve got one thing in common which is more important than any difference. Now, listen. Think. There isn’t much time. What’s happened since sunset? Up to then we were all functioning normally. The survey parties were out. The reports were coming in, everything as usual. Then, just as it began to get dark, Bird found a wreck, and her Bandy didn’t report it. Instead all three Bandies told their parties to come home. About the same time I got an urge to visit the rocks, where I found Cat’s body. 1 got back and found Hippo scratching herself on a support strut and saying that she was pregnant. If that was true, it meant that she had delayed implantation for an incredible length of time. Next, Doc started eating Cat, instead of trying to restore him to life; he also complained about his hypochondria. Hippo was shocked, though she normally manages not to worry about the carnivores in the crew. As soon as Mole got back he started saying he wanted to go home, and Bird and Doc said the same, and the Bandicoots went into their mating behaviour, which they’ve never done before when we’ve been landed—though it’s only natural that they should—the presence of a four is immensely stimulating to Bandies—and Bird swore in front of the Whizzers and the Whizzers complained, and I realized I’d stopped functioning . . . How are you feeling, Hippo?”