Fuzzy sapiens zarathustra — he was glad they’d gotten rid of the Fuzzy fuzzy holloway thing; people were beginning to call him Fuzzy-Fuzzy — had made one hell of a cultural jump since the evening he’d heard something say, “Yeek,” in his shower stall.
Little Fuzzy, across the shed, saw him and waved, and he waved back. Little Fuzzy had a class too, on how to behave among the Big Ones. For a while, he talked with Corporal Carstairs and his pupils. The crowd he’d brought in with him wanted to stay there; he managed to get them away and over to where his own Ko-Ko and Cinderella and the van Riebeeks’ Syndrome and Superego were giving vocal lessons.
It had been the Navy people, temporarily sheltering his own family on Xerxes before the Fuzzy trial, who had found out about their ultrasonic voices and made special hearing aids. After the trial, when Victor Grego, once the Fuzzies’ archenemy, acquired a Fuzzy of his own and became one of their best friends, he and Henry Stenson, the instrument maker, designed a small self-powered hand-phone Fuzzies could use to transform their voices to audible frequencies. Then Grego discovered that his own Fuzzy, Diamond, was speaking audibly with the power-unit of his Fuzzyphone dead; he had learned to imitate the sounds he had heard himself making. Diamond was able to teach the trick; now his pupils were teaching others.
This class had several of the Stenson-Grego Fuzzyphones, things with Fuzzy-size pistol grips and grip switches. They were speaking with them, and then releasing the switches and trying to make the same sounds themselves. Ko-Ko seemed to be in charge of the instruction.
“No, no!” he was saying. “Not like that. Make talk away back in mouth, like this.”
“Yeek?”
“No. Do again with hold-in-hand thing. Hold tight, now; make talk.”
The van Riebeeks’ Syndrome didn’t seem to be doing anything in particular; Holloway spoke to her:
“You make talk to these. Tell about how learn to make talk like Big Ones.” He turned to the Fuzzies who had come in with him. “You stay here. Do what these tell you. Soon you make talk like Big Ones too. Then you come to Pappy Jack, make talk; Pappy Jack give something nice.”
He left them with Syndrome and went over to where Little Fuzzy sat on a box, smoking his pipe just like Pappy Jack. A number of the Fuzzies around him, one of the advanced classes, were also smoking.
“Among Big Ones,” he was saying in a mixture of Fuzzy language and Lingua Terra, “everything belong somebody. Every place belong somebody. Nobody go on somebody-else place, take things belong somebody else.”
“No place belong everybody, like woods?” a pupil asked.
“Oh, yes. Some places. Big Ones have Gov’men’ to take care of places belong everybody. This place, Hoksu-Mitto, Gov’men’ place. Once belong Pappy Jack; Pappy Jack give to Gov’men’, for everybody, all Big Ones, all Fuzzies.”
“But, Gov’men’; what is?”
“Big One thing. All Big Ones talk together, all pick some for take care of things belong everybody. Gov’men’ not let anybody take somebody-else things, not let anybody make anybody dead, not let hurt anybody. Now, Gov’men’ say nobody hurt Fuzzy, make Fuzzy dead, take Fuzzy things. Do this in Big-Room Talk-Place. I saw. Bad Big One make Goldilocks dead; other Big Ones take bad Big One away, make him dead. Then, all say, nobody hurt Fuzzy anymore. Pappy Jack make them do this.”
That wasn’t exactly what had happened. For instance, Leonard Kellogg had cut his throat in jail, but suicide while of unsound mind was a little complicated to explain to a Fuzzy. Just let it go at that. He strolled on, to where some of George Lunt’s family, Dr. Crippen and Lizzie Borden and Calamity Jane, were teaching carpentry, and stayed for a while, watching the Fuzzies using scaled-down saws and augers and drawknives and planes. This crowd was really interested; they’d go out for food after a while and then come back and work far into the evening. They were building a hand-wagon, even the wheels; nearby was a small forge, now cold, and an anvil on which they had made the ironwork.
Finally, he reached the end of the hut where Ruth van Riebeek and Pancho Ybarra, the Navy psychologist on permanent loan to the Colonial Government, sat respectively on a pile of cushions on the floor and the edge of a table. They had a dozen Fuzzies around them.
“Hi, Jack,” Ruth greeted him. “When’s that husband of mine coming back?”
“Oh, as soon as the agreement’s signed and the CZC takes over. How are the kids doing?”
“Oh, we aren’t kids anymore, Pappy Jack,” Ybarra told him. “We are very grown up. We are graduates, and next week we will be faculty members.”
Holloway sat down on the cushions with Ruth, and the Fuzzies crowded around him, wanting puffs from his pipe, and telling him what they had learned and what they were going to teach. Then, by pairs and groups, they drifted away. There was a general breaking-up. The vocal class was dispersing; Syndrome was going away with her group. If she could get them back tomorrow… What this school needed was a truant officer. The fire-making class had gotten a blaze started on the earthen floor, and the butchering-and-cooking class had joined them. The apprentice bowyers and fletchers had already left. Carpentry was still going strong.
“You know, this teaching program,” Ruth was saying, “it seems to lack unity.”
“She thinks there is a teaching program,” Ybarra laughed. “This is still in the trial-and-error, mostly error-stage. After we learn what we have to teach, and how to do it, we can start talking about programs.” He became more serious. “Jack, I’m beginning to question the value of a lot of this friction-fire-making, stone-arrowhead, bone-needle stuff. I know they won’t all be adopted into human families and most of them will have to live on their own in the woods or in marginal land around settlements, but they’ll be in contact with us and can get all the human-made tools and weapons and things they need.”
“I don’t want that, Pancho. I don’t want them made dependent on us. I don’t want them to live on human handouts. You were on Loki, weren’t you? You know what’s happened to the natives there; they’ve turned into a lot of worthless Native Agency bums. I don’t want this to happen to the Fuzzies.”
“That’s not quite the same, Jack,” Ybarra said. “The Fuzzies are dependent on us, for hokfusine. They can’t get enough of it for themselves.”
That was true, of course. The Fuzzies’ ancestors had developed, by evolution, an endocrine gland secreting a hormone nonexistent in any other Zarathustran mammal. Nobody was quite sure why; an educated guess was that it had served to neutralize some natural poison in something they had eaten in the distant past. When discovered, a couple of months ago, this hormone had been tagged with a polysyllabic biochemistry name that had been shortened to NFM p .
But about the time Terran humans were starting civilizations in the Nile and Euphrates valleys, the Fuzzies’ environment had altered radically. The need for NFM p vanished and, unneeded, it turned destructive. It caused premature and defective, nonviable, births. As a race, the Fuzzies had started dying out. Today, there was only this small remnant left, in the northern wilds of Beta Continent.
The only thing that had saved them from complete extinction had been another biochemical, a complicated long-molecule compound containing, among other things, a few atoms of titanium, which they still obtained by eating land-prawns — zatku, as they called them. And, beginning with their first contacts with humans, they had also gotten it from a gingerbread colored concoction officially designated Terran Federation Armed Forces Emergency Ration, Extraterrestrial Type Three. Like most synthetic rations, it was loathed by the soldiers and spacemen to whom it was issued, but after the first nibble Fuzzies doted on it. They called it Hoksu-Fusso, “Wonderful Food.” The chemical discovered in it, and in land-prawns, had been immediately named hokfusine.