One of their men stepped forward also; and his whole line followed him. He too shook his spear.
"Hooooo."
"Hoooooo,"
"Hooooooo."
She Who Knows and Keeps The Past looked at each other in wonder. All they were doing on both sides was making foolish noises at each other down there! Was this how a battle was supposed to begin? Perhaps it was: she couldn't be sure. But it was a silly way to go about things, if it was.
Maybe the men down there weren't sure of what they were supposed to do, either. These warriors, She Who Knows realized, had never fought against the Other Ones before, had never even encountered them until this moment. She was the only one of the tribe who had, that time when she had met the lone Other One by the icy pool. And that one time, so long ago, the Other One had turned and run from her.
Now these Other Ones were simply standing there looking worried, and mimicking the silly noises that the men of the War Society were making. Even though the Other Ones outnumbered the men of the Killing Society and seemed to have better weapons.
Why? Were the dreaded Other Ones a race of cowards?
"Hooooo."
"Hooooo."
"Hooooo."
"Hooooo,"
"Listen to them," She Who Knows said, snickering. "Like owls, they sound."
Just then there was a litde movement down below. The entire line of War Society men had turned ever so slightly, so that it was now at a little angle from the front of the shrine. And the Other Ones had turned also at the same angle, still staying in formation, continuing to face die War Society men.
There was more hooting. The lines moved a litde more, without actually going anywhere. Then diey moved back. Spears were raised and shaken, but were not thrown.
"They're afraid of each other!" Keeps The Past said, in astonishment.
"Hoooo."
"Hoooo."
"We should just charge at them," She Who Knows muttered. "They'd turn and run in a moment!"
"Hoooo."
"Hoooo."
"Like owls," said Keeps The Past.
It was maddening. The stalemate could go on forever. She Who Knows was unable to take it any longer. She went across to the place where Mammoth Rider was sitting, with the two bowls of warpaint on the ground in front of him, and stripped away her robe. Mammodi Rider looked up at her, puzzled.
"Give me the paint," She Who Knows said.
"But you can't-"
"I can."
She bent and quickly snatched up the bowl of blue pigment, and splattered some carelessly on each of her breasts. Then she took up die red, and drew a big triangje on her middle, across die base of her belly and up both her thighs, and one splash on the dark hair at her loins.
Everyone was staring at her now. She didn't bother asking Mammoth Rider to put stripes of warpaint on her back; she doubted that he would do it, and she didn't want to waste time discussing it with him. It didn't matter. She wasn't planning to turn her back on any of the enemy down there.
Other Ones! she thought fiercely. Cowards, all of them!
Silver Cloud was coming toward her now, moving hesitantly, favoring his sore leg.
"What are you doing, She Who Knows?"
"Getting ready to fight your war for you," she said. And put her robe back on and started down the hill toward the place of the shrine of the shining rocks.
Chapter Seven. Resisting
SAM AICKMAN said, "Play the bastard's call one more rime, will you, Jerry?"
Hoskins slipped the transcript cube into the access slot. On the screen at the front end of the boardroom Bruce Mannheim's face appeared, reproduced just as it had been on the screen of Hoskins' own telephone at the rime of the call. An insistendy blinking green rosette at the lower right-hand corner of the screen signaled that the call had been recorded with die knowledge and permission of the caller.
Mannheim was a youngish, full-faced man with dense waves of thick red hair clinging close to his scalp and a ruddy, florid complexion. Though beards had been out of fashion for some years except among extremely young men and very old ones, he wore a short, neatly trimmed goatee and a bushy little mustache.
The well-known advocate for the rights of children looked very sincere, very earnest, very serious.
To Hoskins he also looked very annoying.
On-screen, Mannheim said, "The situation is, Dr. Hoskins, dial our most recent discussion was not at all fruitful, and I simply can't take your word any longer that the boy is being held under acceptable conditions."
"Why?" die Hoskins on the screen replied. "Has my word suddenly become untrustworthy?"
"That's not the point, doctor. We have no reason to doubt your word. But we have no reason to take it at face value, either, and some members of my advisory board have begun to feel that I've been too willing up to now to accept your own evaluations of the boy's status. The point is that diere's been no on-site inspection."
"You speak of die child as though he's some kind of hidden weapon, Mr. Mannheim."
Mannheim smiled, but there wasn't much amusement visible in his pale gray eyes. "Please understand my position. I'm under considerable pressure from die sector of public opinion diat I represent, Dr. Hoskins, Despite all your publicity releases, many people continue to feel that a child who was brought here as this one was and who is kept in what amounts to solitary confinement for an indefinite period is a child who is being subjected to cruel and inhuman punishment."
"You and I have been through all this more dian once," said Hoskins. "The child is receiving the best care in the world, and you know it. He has twenty-four-hour-a-day nursing attention and daily medical checkups and he's on a perfectly balanced diet that has already done wonders for his physical condition. We'd be crazy to do tilings any other way, and whatever else we may be, we aren't crazy."
"I grant you that you've told me all that. But you still aren't allowing any outside confirmation of the things you claim. And the letters and calls that I'm receiving daily- the outcries, the pressure from concerned individuals-"
"If you're under pressure, Mr. Mannheim," said Hoskins unceremoniously, "may I suggest that it's because you've stirred this matter up by yourself in the first place, and now your own people are turning on you a little of the heat that you singlehandedly chose to generate?"
"That's the way to talk to him, Jerry-boy!" said Charlie McDermott, the comptroller.
"Maybe a bit on the blunt side, seems to me," Ned Cassiday said. He was the head of Legaclass="underline" it was his job to err on the side of prudence.
The recorded conversation was proceeding on the screen.
"-neither here nor there, Dr. Hoskins. We have to keep returning to one basic point here, which is that a child has been ripped away from his parents and his home-"
"A Neanderthal child, Mr. Mannheim. Neanderthal Man was a primitive, savage, nomadic form of humanity. It's anybody's guess whether or not Neanderthals had homes of any real sort, or even that they understood the concept of the parent-child relationship as we know it. For all we know we may have pulled this child out of an absolutely brutish, hostile, miserable existence-much more likely, I'd say, than the picture you offer of our callously yanking him out of his idyllic little Christmas-card family life back there in the Pleistocene."
"Are you telling me that Neanderthals are no more than animals?" Mannheim asked. "That the child you've brought back from the Pleistocene is actually just some kind of ape that walks on his hind legs?"
"Certainly not. We aren't trying to pretend anything of the sort. Neanderthals were primitive but they were unquestionably human."
"-Because if you're going to try to claim that your captive has no human rights because he isn't human, Dr. Hoskins, then I must point out that scientists are completely unanimous in their belief that Homo neanderthatensis is in fact simply a subspecies of our own race, Homo sapiens, and therefore-"
"Jesus Suffering Christ," Hoskins exploded, "aren't you listening to me at all? I just got through saying that we concede the point that Tirnmie is human."
"Timmie?" Mannheim said.
"The child has been nicknamed Timmie around here, yes. It's been in all the news reports."
From the sidelines Ned Cassiday murmured, "Which was probably a mistake. Creates too much identification with the child as child per se. You give them names, you start making them seem too real in the eyes of the public, and then if there happens to be any sort of trouble-"
"The child is real, Ned," Hoskins said. "And there's not going to be any trouble."
On screen Mannheim was saying, "Very well, doctor. We both agree that we're talking about a human child. And we have no real disagreement on another basic point, which as I said a few moments back is that you've taken custody of this child by your own decision and you have no legal claim to him. You've essentially kidnapped this child, I could quite accurately say."