“Will you believe that I, too, have been close to nonhumans?” Dejerine asked softly.
Sparling nodded.
It flashed in Dejerine: He is becoming better disposed to me. Perhaps he will carry an olive branch to Jill?
Am I in love with her? Or is it merely charm that met a longstanding celibacy, like steel meeting flint? I don’t know. I never will know unless I can see her again. Often.
He said with care, “Would you mind mentioning that to Miss Conway, if opportunity should arise? I’m afraid she is angry at me because I couldn’t help her native official. She gave me no chance to explain how sorry I was.”
Abruptly Sparling froze over. “How can I do that?”
A hand took hold of Dejerine’s heart and squeezed. “Is something wrong with her?”
“No way to tell,” Sparling clipped. “She’s gone north with Larreka. They’ve been on the trail for days.”
“What? Why, that is crazy!”
“How’d you stop her? If she chooses to do research in Valennen before it’s closed to us, who has the right to forbid her? At that, she sent notes to her parents and me by a messenger who was not to deliver them till she was welt on her way. I flitted over the route but saw nothing. Didn’t really expect to, that small a party in that big and rugged a landscape. I called, but naturally they’d switched off their transceivers when they passed beyond ordinary relay range.”
“Why in cosmos would she do so mad a thing?”
“Because she’s Jill, and wants to help. Yeah, ‘intervention.’ But she calls it research, and you’d have a sweet time proving different, Dejerine. She’ll phone when she reaches Port Rua, and quite likely I’ll find a research project for myself in those parts at that time. Now dog your hatch! Haven’t you done enough harm?”
THIRTEEN
Jill finished the ancient words which she had put into the tongue of Sehala—for Ishtarians who didn’t know English were often eager to hear the music of Earth—and kept her guitar ringing on while she whistled in the way of a wind over cold seas. It flitted through her awareness that she had always taken such performances for granted; but what would the unknown maker of the ballad think, could he be called from the dust and across a thousand light-years to this night?
In it, Larreka’s party were camped on the northern slope of the Red Hills. Ahead of them reached the Badlands, the Dalag. and at last the’ coast where they would take a legionary ship. In that open tropical country, under two suns most of the day, they would travel after dark as much as might be. But here they had forest to shade them, and to make them half blind, thus slow, when stars and moons alone gave light. Therefore, they rested.
A low fire tinged faces, manes, forequarters of her companions, where they reposed in a circle and every eye gleamed toward her. Further off among shadows glinted the spearheads of the watch; if nothing else, tree lions might be made sufficiently desperate by dwindling game to attack sophonts. Closer hunched the bales of supplies and a tent raised for her protection against any sudden, flayingly violent storm. She didn’t expect one. The forest wailed this glade in unstirring murk, stars smoldered above, the air hung warm and tull of heavy pungencies. She planned to shed her few garments and sleep outside on top of her bag. Still, nobody could tell for sure what weather Anu might bring.
Her tones died away. For a time, legionaries and porters lay thoughtful, only switching their tails in the male sign for “Thank you.”
Finally a young trooper asked, “What did the females do?”
“Eh?” Jill was brought from a reverie. Ah, well, just speculating about what it all means, life and death, suns and worlds, the kind of question which has to get asked over and over but I don’t suppose can ever be answered. “The human females in the song? They mourned.”
“Yes, but how?”
“Oh. I see. At first, when someone they love dies, most humans sob and, uh, shed water from their eyes. Afterward they carry on their lives as best they’re able.”
“Who helps them through?”
“We… we don’t have institutions like yours to uphold the bereaved. Prayers and some ceremonies are all, and not everyone uses them. The need is less.” Quickly, Jill added, “I don’t think this is because we care for each other less than your kind does. How could you measure?” Her mind presented an image of a dolorimeter, neatly crackle-finished for maximum sales, calibrated against the International Standard Snake whose belly people feel as low as (thus making the unit of grief a length). It did not quite undermine her seriousness. “Besides, when this particular song was composed, people believed they would meet again in an afterlife.”
“Like the Valennen barbarians,” observed a soldier. “I reckon that’s what keeps them going. They don’t seem to have much else, except for eating their dead if they can.”
Larreka sat up on his haunches, abruptly looming over Jill, who was on the ground leaned back against a leatherbark bole. “Don’t despise ’em for that, son,” he drawled. An Ishtarian voice carried so many nuances that the other might just as well have spoken words of open contempt. “Giving your body is your last service in a hungry land; and they think that eating it is a service to you, freeing the soul faster than ordinary decay would.” Reflectively: “My guess is, the notion got started in the Dalag, same as a lot of different religious notions did. And there are a lot of them, never forget. Who’re we to say any system—including what humans have worked out—is better than the rest?”
“Well, sir, I’ve seen a few practices myself, and heard of more,” the trooper replied. “Most make sense. But who could take some of them seriously? Like, ng-ng, in the back country on Little Iren they torture themselves after a death. I’ve actually seen an old female stick her hand into boiling water.”
“Certain humans used to practice self-mutilation in sorrow,” Jill told them. “Less extreme; but then, our bodies can’t repair themselves as fast or fully as yours. Pain in the flesh—in your case, the effort to control it—covers pain in the spirit. Not that I’d try it myself, understand.”
Larreka took forth pipe and tobacco pouch and began to stuff the bowl. “What’s right is what works for you,” he said, “and no two yous are alike. A good thing about the Gathering, maybe the best thing, is it gives you a chance to look around and find what way of life suits you the closest—or start a new way, if you can corral a few disciples.”
Without being preachy, his tone was unwontedly earnest. Jill thought: I read you. Uncle. You want to strengthen the faith in these males. They’re young, they don’t have your perspective on civilization, throughout their lives they’ve known only that it’s likely to go under in the time that’s now on us. In such a case, a legionary in his first or second eight-year enlistment might wonder if it’s worth standing fast and dying for. Especially when it won’t support us in the lonely place where we’re bound. You’ll take every chance you can get to tell them.
She felt sure she was correct when he went slowly on:
“Take me. If it weren’t for the Gathering I might’ve become a bandit, or at best dragged out a pretty dreary existence. Instead, well, life’s done me right, chopped me up a bit here and there but no more than was reasonable for all I’ve gotten out of it.”