Ramchandra stared into the fire and said nothing.
“Ram,” Tamara said, profoundly irritated with him, “Bob should know about this thing we talked about the other night. The derivation of Young Ndif.”
He went on staring into the fire, mute.
“You can explain it better than I can.”
After a moment he merely shook his head.
“You’ve decided it was a mistake?” she demanded, more exasperated than ever, but also with a flash of hope.
“No,” he said. “The documentation is in that notebook I gave you.”
She fetched the notebook from her hut, lighted the oil lamp, and sat down on the floor by Bob’s cot so he could read over her shoulder. For half an hour they went over Ramchandra’s orderly and exhaustive proofs of the direct derivation of Young Ndif from Modem Standard English. Bob laughed at first, taking the whole thing as a grand scholarly joke; then he laughed at the sheer lunacy of it. It did not seem to disturb him, as it disturbed Tamar.
“If it’s not your hoax, Ram, it’s still a hoax—a terrific one.”
“By whom? How? Why?” Tamara asked, hopeful again. A mistake made sense; a hoax made sense.
“All right. This language,” and he tapped the notebook, “isn’t authentic. It’s a fake, a construct—invented. Right?”
Ramchandra, who had not said a word all this while, agreed in a remote, unwilling tone: “Invented. By an amateur. The correspondences with English are naive, unconscious, as in ‘speaking in tongues.’—But Old Ndif is an authentic language.”
“An older one, an archaic survival—”
“No.” Ramchandra said “No” often, flatly, and with satisfaction, Tamara thought. “Old Ndif is alive. It is based upon Young Ndif, has grown out of it, or over it. like ivy on a telephone pole.”
“Spontaneously?”
“As spontaneously as any language, or as deliberately. When words are wanted, needed, people have to make them. It ‘happens,’ like a bird singing, but it’s also ‘work,’ like Mozart writing music.”
“Then you’d say the Old Ones are gradually making a real language out of this fake one?”
“I cannot define the word ‘real’ and therefore would not use it.” Ramchandra shifted his position, reclasping his arms round his knees, but did not look up from the fire. “I would say that the Old Ndif seem to be engaged in creating the world. Human beings do this primarily by means of language, music, and the dance.”
Bob stared at him, then at Tamara. “Come again?” Ramchandra was silent.
“So far,” Tamara said, “working in three widely separate localities, we’ve found the same language, without major dialectical variations, and the same set of very rudimentary social and cultural patterns. Bob hasn’t found any legends, any expressions of the archetypes, any developed symbology. I haven’t found much more social structure than I’d find in a herd of cattle, about what I might find in a primate troop. Sex and age determine all roles. The Ndif are culturally subhuman; they don’t exist fully as human beings. The Old Ndif are beginning to. Is that it, Ram?”
“I don’t know,” the linguist said, withdrawn.
“That’s missionary talk!” Bob said. “Subhuman? Come on. Stagnant, sure. Maybe because there’s no environmental challenge. Food falls out of the trees, game’s plentiful, and they don’t have sexual hangups—”
“That’s inhuman,” Tamara interjected; Bob ignored her.
“There’s no stimulus. O.K. But the Old Ones get shoved out of the fun and games. They get bored; that’s the stimulus. They start playing around with words and ideas. So what rudiments of mythopoetics and ritual they’ve got are their creation. That’s not an unusual situation, the young busy with sex and physical competitions, the old as culture transmitters. The only weird thing is this English-Ndif business. That needs explaining. I just don’t buy telepathy, you can’t build a scientific explanation on an occultist theory. The only rational explanation is that these people—the whole society—are a plant. A quite recent one.”
“Correct,” Ramchandra said.
“But listen,” Tamara said with fury, “how can a quarter of a million people be ‘planted’? What about the ones over thirty? We’ve only had FTL spaceflight for thirty years! The Exploratory Survey to this system was unmanned, and it was only eight years ago! Your rational explanation is pure nonsense!”
“Correct,” Ramchandra said again, his clear, dark, sorrowful gaze on the flickering fire.
“Evidently there’s been a manned mission, a colonising mission, to this planet, which the World Government doesn’t know about. We have stumbled into something, and it begins to scare me. The So-Hem faction—”
Bob was interrupted by the sudden entrance (the Ndif never knocked) of Bro-Kap, two other Old Men, and two baliya dancers, beautiful half-naked sixteen-year-olds with flowers in their tawny hair. They knelt by Bob’s cot and made soft lamenting sounds. Bro-Kap stood as majestically as he could in the now very crowded hut, and gazed down at Bob. He was clearly waiting for the girls to be quiet, but one of them was now chattering cheerfully and the other was drawing circles around Bob’s nipples with her long fingernails. “Uvana Bob!” Bro-Kap said at last. “Are you Bik-Kop-Man?”
“Am I—Askiös, Wana!—No. Askiös, Bro-Kap, I don’t understand.”
“Sometimes Man comes,” the old Ndif said. “He has come to Hamo, and to Farwe. Never to Gunda or to Akko. He is strong and tall, golden-haired and golden-skinned, a great hunter, a great fighter, a great lover. He comes from far away and goes away again. We have thought that you were He. You are not He?”
“No, I am not,” Bob said decisively.
Bro-Kap took a breath that heaved his wrinkled chest. “Then you will die,” he said.
“Die?” Bob repeated without comprehension.
“Die how? Of what?” Tamara demanded, standing up so that in the press of people in the little hut she was brought face to face with the old man. “What do you mean, Bro-Kap?”
“Gunda challengers use poisoned knives,” the old man said. “To find out which ones from Hamo are Bik-Kop-Man. Poison doesn’t kill Bik-Kop-Man.”
“What poison?”
“That’s their secret,” Bro-Kap said. “Gunda is full of wicked people. We of Hamo use no poisons.”
“For Christ’s sake,” Bob said in English, and in Ndif, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“The Young Men thought you knew. They thought you were Man. Then when you let Pit-Wat wound you, when you threw away your knife, when you killed him but he came back to life, they weren’t sure. They came to the Old Men’s House to ask. Because we in the Old Men’s house have peremensoe about Man.” There was pride in the old man’s voice. “Thus I came to you. Askiös, Uvana Bob.” Bro-Kap turned and pushed his way out; the other old men followed him.
“Go away,” Bob said to the smiling, caressing girls. “Go on now.” They left, reluctant, swaying, their pretty faces troubled.
“I’ll go to Gunda,” Ramchandra said, “see if there’s an antidote.” And he was off at a run.
Bob’s face was dead white.
“Another damned hoax,” he said, smiling.
“You bled a lot, Bob. Probably bled out the poisonright away, if there really was any. Let me have a look at it… It looks absolutely clean. No inflammation.”
“My breath’s been coming short,” the young man said. “Most likely shock.”