All of the students were awake now, and some of them were standing.
“This is a poor world,” Obrien said, “but it’s got something that’s priceless. It’s a paradise. The beaches and ocean are wonderful. The climate is wonderful. Everything is beautiful.”
He lurched to his feet. Fornri hurried to keep him from falling, but Obrien recovered his balance and jerked away. He said with terrible earnestness, “The moment it occurs to anyone to put a vacation resort on this world, you’re doomed. That man is your enemy, and you’ve got to fight him to the death. If you let him build just one resort, there’ll be ten or a hundred more before you know what’s happening. You’ll have to move your villages back into the forest, and even if you’re allowed to use the sea there’ll be no more hunting. The resorts will drive away the koluf, and you’ll starve. And I can’t make you understand.”
He staggered back to the log. The students had not moved. “And this is what I have to work with,” Obrien said resignedly. “Banu, who remembers but never understands. Fornri, my great-great-grandson, who is being loyal even though he’d rather be hunting, and who understands but rarely remembers.”
Fornri was blinking back tears.
“And Dalla.” Obrien struggled to his feet and placed his arm about her affectionately, and she hid her face on his shoulder and wept. “She’s not here to learn, but to keep me from making myself sick, and I’m already sick beyond any of your understanding.” He turned. “And the rest of you, who’ll stay with me loyally until you find an excuse to leave. It’s all I have, and I’ll do my damnedest with it. Come here, all of you.”
He sat down on the log, and they gathered around him. He nodded to Fornri, who brought Obrien the smashed spaceship’s battered logbook. Sporadically, down through the years, Obrien had used it as a journal. Now it contained the laborious working out of a world’s one hope for survival.
“I’m going to give you the Plan,” he said. “You aren’t ready for it, and it’s long and complicated, and most of it you won’t understand. I can only hope that when you need it you’ll be able to figure out what I was talking about. If you can’t pay attention, at least keep Banu awake. Someone has got to hear this and remember it.
“I’ll give it to you over and over, with all of the details I can think of, and then I’ll give it to you over and over again. As long as I’m able to speak, I’ll tell you the Plan.
“And then, before God—before my God and yours—I’ll have done my best.”
3
From Fornri’s earliest memories the Langri had terrified him.
Few children possessed living great-great-grandfathers, and those who did had to care for doddering, decrepit oldsters who thought only of the fire of death.
The Langri was—the Langri. His was the rope spear in the koluf hunt, and his stroke never missed. He it was who launched the boat into one of the world’s rare storms to rescue the children caught out in it. When all feared to cross a swollen stream, it was the Langri who found a ford and went first to test it. Those who had broken arms or legs were brought to him, for only the Langri had the skill to deal with such tragedies.
All manner of adults came to ask his counsel, from a woman whose marriage was troubled to the village leaders and even the Elder; and when the Langri said, “Do this,” entire villages leaped to his bidding. Where the Langri led, everyone followed.
Such a great-great-grandfather was a frightful burden for a small boy. The Langri would say, “Why do you go upstream to cross the river? Why don’t you swim it here, like the older boys?” Or “The older boys dive from the cliff. Why do you walk down?” Fornri was terrified, but he swam, and he dived.
And when the Langri said, “Spearing marnl is child’s play. You should be hunting koluf,” Fornri joined the hunters—the youngest person by far in his boat, perhaps the youngest who had ever joined a koluf hunt. The others did not know until afterward that the Langri had sent him, but the custom was for an empty place to be filled by anyone who wanted it, so they did not turn him away. Instead, they mocked him. “Look at the mighty hunter who honors us! Surely our boat is destined for greatness on this day! His will be the rope spear—if he can stop trembling long enough to throw it!”
But Fornri’s trembling was from rage, not fear—rage at the Langri, for sending him, and at the hunters, for their mocking. He flung the rope spear with such fury that he fell overboard. The jeers stopped abruptly as the spear struck solidly in the best place of all, the notch just back of the head; and because Fornri was already in the water, he took the trailing rope and made the first loop about the koluf’s knife-like, threshing tail, and the others thought he had gone into the water purposely. No one ever mocked Fornri again, about anything.
As the Langri grew older, still first in anything he felt like doing, more and more frequently he felt like doing nothing at all except lie in his hammock in his favorite grove on the point and sip the drink of intoxication. This brought new responsibilities for Fornri. Whatever the Langri did not care to do, he sent Fornri to do for him. And when Fornri came to his Time of Joy, when his peers could devote whole days and nights to music and dancing, to song, to the tender turmoil of love and courtship, Fornri was merely the personal servant of a tyrannical old man. Other boys envied him, the great-great-grandson and support of the Langri’s declining years, and Fornri could not understand why.
Then the Langri’s health began to fail. The Elder wisely concluded that Fornri’s talents were more suitable to hunting than nursing, and he sent Dalla to the Langri. Her mother, a widow, had died of the Hot Sickness that sometimes followed the smallest cut or scratch and was invariably fatal, and Dalla and a young sister were left without relatives.
Fornri had never had a sweetheart. He could have had his choice of many—not only was he a young man of fire, but he was the Langri’s heir, already famed for his bravery and his many skills, and there was no village that did not have maidens pining for the great-great-grandson of the Langri.
But the Langri, lounging in his hammock, demanding that his gourd be refilled, or that the leader of the next village be reminded that it was his turn to conduct the berry harvest, or that Fornri carry the Langri’s acceptance to a feasting invitation—the Langri seemed unaware that Fornri had reached the Time of Joy. One of the most sublime of joys was young love and courtship, for which long-established customs required freedom and leisure and which could not be managed at all between errands run for a demanding and temperamental old man. The loveliest of maidens might sigh when Fornri passed her, but a youth entrusted with an urgent message from the Langri, with instructions to hurry back with the reply, had no time to suggest an assignation, or even the sharing of a song, and anyway no respectable maiden would have accepted the degradation of a hasty courtship.
Then Dalla came. No maiden surpassed her in loveliness, and they could conduct their courtship with proper leisure despite the Langri’s demands because their very bondage brought them together constantly.
Because the Langri was sometimes seriously ill and racked with frightful stomach pains, it was decided that he needed more mature care. The adults took charge of him in spite of his objections, and they sympathetically gave Fornri and Dalla as much freedom as possible and found a younger boy to run the Langri’s infrequent errands.
At last Fornri and Dalla had the full pleasure of their Times of Joy. They sang and danced with the other youths, and they passed both days and nights of sweetness on the Bower Hills, the hills reserved for courtship. Most who had Fornri’s years were already betrothed. Because Dalla had not yet reached the age of betrothal, he was forced to wait; but in his belated pleasure of his Time of Joy he did not mind.