“Oh.” Dejerine paused. “Do you wish to discuss it?”
Jill shook her head. Why should I trust him this much, this fast? He’s the enemy, isn’t he? “No, I’d rather not; for now, anyway.”
“Of course,” he said gently.
She remembered—
Big land animals are rare on Ishtar. Each thousand years, food becomes too scarce in most regions. Central and southern Beronnen can support a few, like the tree lion and the almost elephantine valwas. But in its farther north, the continent turns into a reach of dry savannahs known as the Dalag. There lesser game abounds, in between Anu passages: at least fifty kinds of azar, for instance, several quite large. The beasts which kill them for food are dog-size or less, running in packs, though with massive jaws capable of frantically fast devouring; and no scavengers are visible to the naked eye other than certain swift small invertebrates. The sophont population is thin, mostly herders who do not do much hunting. Yet here and there cyclopean ruins rise out of the burnt-yellow sea of lia; and it is thought that civilization was invented in this country.
The thing which binds together these paradoxes is the sarcophage.
For her eleventh birthday, which on Earth would have been a few months short of her twelfth, Jill got leave to join Larreka’s party on a trip to the Dalag. Aside from sport, the commandant planned to look over sites of possible strong points against barbarian incursions when the red sun came. An adult human went along too, Ellen Evaldsen, Jill’s well-beloved young aunt, a planetologist who wanted to study rock formations besides adventuring around inside new horizons.
They marched merrily overland. Often the girl rode on Larreka or a friend of his. Ellen said they spoiled her rotten, but didn’t interfere. And in camps firelit, starlit, moons-lit, ominously Anu-lit, the woman traded stories from Earth for native tales until Jill could not decide which were more wonderful. Then they reached the Dalag, and it was grander than anything that could be said.
Whispering, billowing golden reaches, broken only by darker shrubs and single flamelike trees; mysterious shadowy coolness of a water hole beneath a mineral-painted bluff; hard blue glare overhead and unmerciful heat, before night brought chill and a diamond swarm of stars; encounters with herder folk, a few words and a cup of herb tea under a felt canopy, the noble sight of a wo bounding skillfully to round up its master’s els and owas; then onward to seek an immensity of wild grazers, whose hoofbeats boomed from the bottom of the world— Oh, yes, cruel sights as well, less her comrades chasing down an animal and cleanly killing it with bow or spear, than a pack of tartars driving an azar into a stand of the bush called claw, then ripping flesh from it while it hung there hooked and screaming—
“But they’ve got to,” Larreka told Jill. “We can save meat by quick-like soaking it in gut juice. Animals can’t. Or, those that make gut juice inside themselves, they can, by eating fast, Tartars aren’t able to. If they couldn’t eat most of a prey alive, they’d have to kill eight times as many to get a square meal. And… if there were no beasts of prey, the rest ’ud chew the range bare and starve.”
“But why do things have to be awful right here?” she protested. “Meat doesn’t rot away this fast anywhere else, does it?”
Larreka appealed to Ellen, who repeated in different words what Jill had been warned of beforehand. The airborne mold named sarcophage by humans is harmless to living tissue. But it settles instantly on dead flesh, multiplies explosively, and in two or three hours reduces the hugest animal to bones. It seems to require a particular climate, for it exists only in the Dalag and the nearer Fiery Sea islands. Or is climate what limits it?
And what strange adaptations to it has evolution brought forth? “It’s not a horror, Jill, dear, it’s a mystery for us to solve.”
“I’ve heard as how it caused the first civilizations,” Larreka added.
Jill gave him a wide-eyed look through the furious sunlight.
“Well, a notion,” Larreka said. “An old mudfoot like me can’t judge. However, some of our philosophers and your scientists think it might’ve happened like this. When people first tried living in these parts, they had to be vegetarians; couldn’t keep any meat to speak of. But then they found, certain beasts of prey make juices in their guts that kill the, uh, sarcophage. ’Course, all those people knew was, the juice’d make the meat last. They needed apparatus, like kettles for boiling down the animal guts and bowls for soaking slaughtered critters in. Those had to be herd critters; treatment isn’t very practical for hunters. You’ve seen that, watching us. The apparatus is pretty heavy, being made out of stone or pottery. So those early people settled down in sod huts— which helped ’em stay cool, anyway—and kept flocks, and started raising feed… Later on, these ideas about houses and ranches moved south, where life is easier, and South Beronnen’s been the heartland of civilization ever since. But here’s where it began, maybe.”
“Including a great many myths, religions, rituals, concepts of life and death alike, from Valennen to Haelen,” added Ellen Evaldsen. “The transience of the flesh may be as basic, as widespread on Ishtar, as the dying god is on Earth.”
“Huh?” grunted Larreka. “Well, if you say so, lady.” And thus wonder had kindled in Jill, too. She had already known that ruin visited the world, again and again and again. As far back as she could remember, Larreka had been matter-of-factly preparing for the next time, and humans planned ways to make it less dreadful than before. She was quick to accept the Dalag for what it was.
Until the day when Ellen died.
It happened brutally fast. The woman had climbed a high black rock thrust out of the savannah which, she laughed, had no business being there. It appeared safe. But it held an invisible weakness (from the heat and storms of a million years of Anu passage?). In the camp beneath, they saw the stone break, they saw her fall.
She lay with her head at a grisly angle. By the time Larreka reached her, dissolution had begun. Flesh bloated, stank, shone iridescent blue-green, collapsed into foul liquid, and puffed away. The Ishtarians couldn’t dig a grave speedily with their limited tools. What they buried was white bones and hair which remained Anu-red.
Larreka sought Jill. He gathered her curled-together body in his arms and trotted off, beyond sight of the camp. Bel set in fire, the stars bloomed forth, Ea burned like a candle. He settled down in sweet-smelling mildness of air and lia, drew her close against his breast, and stroked her for a long time.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he said. “I didn’t think. We shouldn’t’ve let you see.”
Jill wept.
“But you belong to the legion,” he said. “Don’t you, soldier?” He laid fingers below her chin and raised her face toward his and the stars.
She nodded violently, for there was nothing else.
“Then listen,” Larreka said, almost too low to hear. “You may have heard, when we four-leggers lose a person we care about, it hits us harder than it does you humans. If you’ve known somebody for a few hundred years… Well, we’ve had to learn how to take it. Let me tell you what we do in the legions.”
And first he told her of banners, rewoven century after century, which bear the names of the fallen; and then he told her of much else; and when dawn broke, she danced the dance of farewell with them, as best she could, at the grave: the earliest step away from grief.
Jill rose. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get packed and be on our way. I want to show you a typical ranch, but if we stall too long, the most interesting members will be off to hell and gone on the range.”