The Trap-Smasher’s chest heaved: a strange, long noise came out of it. “They brought me back here. My wives—they were working on my wives. Those bitches from the Female Society—Ottilie, Rita—this part of it is their business—they had my wives pegged out and they worked on them in front of me. I was blanking out and coming to, blanking out and coming to: I was conscious while they—”
He dropped to a bloody mumble again, his head falling forward loosely. His voice became clear- for a moment, but not entirely rational. “They were good women,” he muttered. “Both of them. Good, good girls. And they loved me. They had their chance to become more important—a dozen times Franklin must have offered to impregnate them, and they turned him down every time. They loved me, they really loved me.”
Eric almost sobbed himself. He’d had little to do with them once he’d reached the age of the warrior initiate, but in his childhood, they’d given him all the mother love he ever remembered. They’d cuffed him and caressed him and wiped his nose. They’d told him stories and taught him the catechism of the Ancestor Science. Neither had sons of his age who had survived the various plagues and the Monster-inflicted calamities that periodically swept through Mankind’s burrows. He’d been lucky: he’d received much of the care and affection that their own sons might have enjoyed.
Their fidelity to the Trap-Smasher had been a constant source of astonishment in Mankind. It had cost them more than the large, healthy litters for which the chief had a well-proven capacity: such eccentric, almost nonwomanly behavior had inevitably denied them the high positions in the Female Society they would otherwise have enjoyed.
And now they were dead or dying, and their surviving babies had been apportioned to other women whose importance would thereby be substantially increased.
“Tell me,” he asked his uncle. “Why did the Female Society kill them? What did they do that was so awful?”
He saw that Thomas had lifted his head again and was staring at him. With pity. He felt his own body turn completely cold even before the Trap-Smasher spoke.
“You still won’t let yourself think about it? I don’t blame you, Eric. But it’s there. It’s being prepared for us outside.”
“What?” Eric demanded, although a distant part of him had already worked out the terrible answer and knew what it was.
“We’ve been declared outlaws, Eric. They say we’re guilty of ultimate sacrilege against Ancestor-Science. We don’t belong to Mankind anymore—you, me, my family, my band. We’re outside Mankind, outside the law, outside religion. And you know what happens to outlaws, Eric, don’t you? Anything goes. Anything. ”
8
Ever since early childhood, Eric remembered looking forward to ceremonies of this sort. A Stranger would have been caught by one of the warrior bands, and it would be determined that he was an outlaw. Nine times out of ten, such a man was easy enough to identify—no one but an outlaw, for example, would be wandering the burrows by himself, without a band or at least a single companion, to guard his back. The tenth time, when there was the slightest doubt, a request for ransom to his people would make the prisoner’s position clear. There would be a story of some unforgivable sacrilege, some particularly monstrous crime that could be punished by nothing but complete anathema and the revocation of all privileges as a human being. The man had escaped the punishment being prepared for him. Do with him as you will, his people would say: he is no longer one of us; he is the same as a Monster; he is something nonhuman so far as we are concerned.
Then a sort of holiday would be declared. Out of the bits and pieces of lumber stolen from Monster territory and set aside by the women for this purpose, the members of the Female Society would erect a structure whose specifications had been handed down from mother to daughter for countless generations—all the way back to the ancestors who had built the Record Machines. It was called a Stage or a Theater, although Eric had also heard it referred to as The Scaffold. In any case, whatever its true name, most of the details concerning it were part of the secret lore of the Female Society and, as such, were no proper concern of males.
One thing about it, however, everyone knew. On it would be enacted a moving religious drama: the ultimate triumph of humanity over the Monsters. For this, the central character had to fulfill two requirements: he had to be an intelligent creature as the Monsters were, so that he could be made to suffer as some day Mankind meant the Monsters to suffer; and he had to be nonhuman as the Monsters were, so that every drop of fear, resentment and hatred distilled by the enormous swaggering aliens could be poured out upon his flesh without any inhibition of compunction or fellow-feeling.
For this purpose, outlaws were absolutely ideal since all agreed that such disgusting creatures had resigned their membership in the human race.
When an outlaw was caught, work stopped in the burrows, and Mankind’s warrior bands were called home. It was a great time, a joyous time, a time of festival. Even the children—doing whatever they could to prepare for the glorious event, running errands for the laboring women, fetching refreshment for the stalwart, guarding men—even the children boasted to each other of how they would express their hatred upon this trapped representative of the nonhuman, this bound and shrieking protagonist of the utterly alien.
Everyone had their chance. All, from the chief himself to the youngest child capable of reciting the catechism of Ancestor Science, all climbed in their turn upon the Stage—or Theater—or Scaffold—that the women had erected. All were thrilled to vent a portion of Mankind’s vengeance upon the creature who had been declared alien, as an earnest of what they would some day do collectively to the Monsters who had stolen their world.
Sarah the Sickness-Healer had her turn early in the proceedings; thenceforth, she stood on the structure and carefully supervised the ceremony. It was her job to see that nobody went too far, that everyone had a fair and adequate turn, and that even at the end there was some life left in the victim. Because then, at the end, the structure had to be completely burned—along with its bloody occupant—as a symbol of how the Monsters must eventually be turned into ash and be blown away and vanish.
“And Mankind will come into its own,” she would chant, while the charred fragments were kicked out the burrow contemptuously. “And the Monsters will be gone. They will be gone forever, and there will be nothing upon all the wide Earth but Mankind.”
Afterward, there was feasting, there was dancing, there was singing. Men and women chased each other into the dimmer side corridors; children whooped and yelled around the great central burrow; the few old folks went to sleep with broad, reminiscent smiles upon their faces. Everyone felt they had somehow struck back at the Monsters. Everyone felt a little like the lords of creation their ancestors had been.
Eric remembered the things he himself had done—the things he had seen others do—on these occasions. A tremendous tic of fear rippled through his body. He had to draw his shoulders up to his neck in a tight hunch andtense the muscles of his arms and legs. Finally, his nerves subsided.
He could think again. Only he didn’t want to think.
Those others, those outlaws in previous ceremonies of this sort in auld lang synes long past—was it possible that they had experienced the same sick, bewildered dread while waiting for the structure to be completed? Had they trembled like this, had they also felt wetness running down their backs, had they felt the same pleading squirm in their intestines, the same anticipatory twinges of soft, vulnerable flesh?