The Right to Arm Bears (dilbia) Page 13
“Lucky for us you weren’t,” said Joshua. “Actually, Ty and I never intended matters to go so far.”
“We estimated that the emotional value of your simply coming after me would have a good effect on the Dilbian group opinion where humans were concerned,” put in Ty. “We wouldn’t have blamed you a bit if you had let Joshua take the blame of Gulark-ay’s story and let the grandfathers send us back without a fight. We didn’t expect that kind of courage.”
“What do you mean—courage?” said John. “If I hadn’t thought of the belt trick, and at that, it was a crazy fool stunt because I’d gotten so used to the Dilbians I’d forgotten how strong they could be. Don’t ask me to try it again.” He thought of something, suddenly. “The Terror never said anything about being beaten by a weapon, like my belt?” Joshua shook his head.
“He’s got his own reason, perhaps,” said Ty. “The Dilbian personality—oh, look!”
John and Joshua looked and saw One Man approaching, enormous in the morning light.
“Is he the one going with us?” said John. But One Man joined them before Joshua could answer.
“Greetings to you all,” rumbled One Man.
“Greetings to you as well,” replied Joshua. They smiled at each other, it was rather like a mouse and an orangutan exchanging the time of day.
“Uh—” said John to Ty, “how’d you get that smudge on your nose?”
“Smudge?” said Ty. “Nose?” She effected some feminine sleight of hand which caused a large compact to appear and open in her fingers. She peered into the mirror inside its lid. “Where? I don’t see it.”
“On the side of your nose there,” said John. “It looks,” he added, “sort of greasy…”
“Greasy!” Ty Lamorc snapped the compact shut indignantly and headed toward the terminal building. “Just a minute—tell the shuttle to wait,” she called over her shoulder. The two human men and the single Dilbian one watched her go.
“Attractive girl,” murmured Joshua.
“Is she?” inquired One Man.
“By our Shorty standards, very,” replied Joshua. “Our young friend here, the Half-Pint—”
“Oh, well,” said John, and cleared his throat meaningfully. He looked at One Man. “If I could have a word with you—”
“Excuse me,” said Joshua; and discreetly wandered off toward the far fence of the port.
“I wanted to thank you,” said John.
“Thank me?” rumbled One Man, in mild basso astonishment.
“For your help.”
“Help? Why, Half-Pint,” said One Man. “I can’t take any credit for helping you. I’m too old to go engaging in help to anyone, and if I did, of course it would be one of my own people. I can’t guess what you could be talking about.”
“I think you know,” said John.
“Not at all. Of course, now that you’ve given my people a clearer picture of what Shorties are like— Nothing wins like a winner, you know,” said One Man, pontifically. “In fact, I’m surprised it took you Shorties so long to realize that. As I said to you once before, who asked you all to come barging into our world, anyway?”
“Well—” said John, uncomfortably.
“And what made you think we all had to like you, and welcome you, and want to be like you? Why, if when you were a pup, some new kid had moved into your village; and he was half your size but had a lot of playthings you didn’t have, but came up and tapped you on the shoulder and said from now on I’m going to be your leader, and we’ll play my games, how would you have felt?”
He eyed John shrewdly out of his huge, hairy face.
“I see,” said John, after a moment. “Then why did you help me?”
“I tell you I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said One Man. “How could I help a Shorty, even if I wanted to?”
“Well, I’ll tell you how,” said John. “Back home where I come from, we’ve got a trick with something called a city directory. It’s about this thick,” John measured several inches between finger and thumb, “and it’s about as much a job for one of us Shorties to tear it in half as it is for one of you Dilbians to break that stick of yours. So—”
“Well, now, I can believe it,” broke in One Man in a judicious tone. “Directories, sticks of wood, or first class hill-and-alley scrappers; there’s a trick, I imagine, to handle almost any one of them. Of course,” said One Man, gazing off at the pure snow of the far mountain peaks, “nobody like you or I would stoop to using such tricks, even in a good cause.”
There was a moment’s dead silence between them.
“I guess,” said John at last, “I’ll never make a diplomat.”
“No,” said One Man, still gazing at the mountain peaks. “I don’t believe you ever will, Half-Pint.” He returned his gaze to John’s face. “If you take my advice, you’ll stick to your own line of Shorty work.”
“I just thought,” said John awkwardly, “since you were coming back to earth with us—”
“I?” said One Man. “What an idea, Half-Pint! An old man like me, exposed to all those new-fangled contrivances and being taught to act like a Shorty so I could come back and tell people about it? Why, I’d be just no good at all at something like this.”
“Not you?” John stared. “Then who—?”
“I thought you knew,” said One Man; and looked past John toward the terminal building. “Look; here he comes now.”
John turned and blinked. Coming toward them from the terminal and holding his pace down to accommodate his stride to that of Ty, who was walking alongside him, was none other than the Streamside Terror.
“But—” said John. “I thought he—”
“Appearances,” said One Man, “are often deceiving. If you were somebody with brains, among us real people on this world here, and nothing much else but a good set of reflexes, what would you do? Particularly if you were ambitious? Unfortunately, our society is a physically-oriented one, where muscles win more attention than wisdom. Streamside is the very boy to visit your Shorty worlds and begin to set up connections. Temperamentally, I can admit to you now, I suppose, you Shorties are a lot more akin to us than those Fatties. But you know how it is,” One Man paused and sighed, “close relatives squabble more often than strangers do.”
The Terror and Ty were almost to them. There was only time for a private word or two more.
“I hope he isn’t feeling a little touchy,” said John. “With me, I mean. After our fight, and so forth.”
“You mean they didn’t tell you?” said One Man. “Why that was one of the Terror’s conditions before he agreed to go. You see, evidently you Shorties have high hopes of setting up Dilbian-Humans teams—” John looked at One Man in surprise. He had never heard a Dilbian refer to either his own people, or any others by the human names for them “—and after initial contact work has been done, the Terror wants to pioneer that field, as well.”
John frowned.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“Why, the Terror’s condition was that he be trained in your field and you be drafted to work with him, of course,” said One Man. Staring up at the big face in astonishment, John was overwhelmed to see it contort suddenly in what, he realized after a second, was a pretty fair Dilbian imitation of the human expression known as a wink.
“You see,” said One Man. “After the little episode in the water at Glen Hollow, he thinks you’re pretty well capable. With you he feels safe.”
Spacepaw
Chapter 1
Spiraling down toward the large, blue world below, in the shuttle boat from the spaceship which had delivered him here to Dilbia. Bill Waltham reflected dismally upon his situation. Most of the five-day trip he had spent wearing a hypno-helmet. But in spite of the fact that his head was now a-throb with a small encyclopedia of information about the world below and its oversize inhabitants—their language, customs, and psychology—he felt that he knew less than nothing about this job into which he had been drafted.
The shuttle boat would land him near the Lowland village of Muddy Nose. There, presumably, he would be met on disembarking by Lafe Greentree, the human Agricultural Resident here, and by Greentree’s other trainee-assistant—an Earth girl named Anita Lyme who had, incredible as it seemed, volunteered for her pre-college field training here, just as Bill had originally volunteered himself for the Deneb-Seventeen terraforming project. These two would introduce Bill to his native associate—an Upland Dilbian named the Hill Bluffer. The Hill Bluffer would in turn introduce him to the local Lowland farmers who had their homes in Muddy Nose, and Bill could get down to the apparently vital job for which he had been drafted here. He could hear himself now…
“…This is a spade. You hold it by this end. You stick the other end in the earth. Yes, deep in the earth. Then you tilt it, like this. Then you lift it up with the dirt still on it and put the dirt aside. Fine. You are now digging a hole in the ground…”
He checked the current of his thoughts sharply. There was no point, he told himself grimly, in being bitter about it. He was here now, and he would have to make the best of it. But in spite of himself, his mind’s eye persisted in dwelling on the succession of days stretching ahead through two years of unutterable dullness and boredom. He thought again of the great symphony of engineering and development that was a terraforming project—changing the surface and weather of a whole world to make it humanly habitable; and he compared that with this small, drab job to which he was now headed. There seemed no comparison between the two occupations—no comparison at all.
But once more he took a close rein on his thoughts and emotions. Some day he would be a part of a terraforming project. Meanwhile, it would be well to remember that he would be given an efficiency rating for his work on Dilbia, just as if it was the job he had originally intended to do. That efficiency rating could not be high if he started out hating everything about the huge, bearlike natives and everything connected with them. At least, he thought, the Dilbians had a sense of humor—judging by the names they gave each other.
This last thought was not as cheering as it might have been, however. It reminded Bill of something the reassignment officer had said at the space terminal on Arcturus Three, where his original travel orders had been lifted and new ones issued. The officer had been a tall, lath-thin, long-nosed man, who had taken Bill’s being drafted away from the Deneb-Seventeen Project much more calmly than had Bill.
“…Oh, and of course,” the reassignment office had said cheerfully, “you’ll find you’ve been given a Dilbian name yourself, by the time you get there….”
Bill scowled, remembering. His only experience previously with a nickname had not been a happy one. On the swimming team at pre-engineering school, he had failed to rejoice in the given name of “Ape”—not so much because of anything apelike about either his open and rather ordinary face under its cap of black hair, or his flat-muscled, square-boned body. The name had arisen because he was the only member of the team with anything resembling hair on his chest. Bill made a mental note to keep his shirt on when Dilbians were about, during the next two years—just in case. Of course he reflected now, they had hair all over their own bodies…
The chime of the landing signal rang through the shuttle boat. Bill looked out the window beside his seat behind the pilot and saw they were drifting down into a fair-sized meadow, perhaps half a mile away across plowed fields alternating with stands of trees from a cluster of buildings that would probably be the village of Muddy Nose. He looked down below him, searching for a glimpse of Greenleaf or his assistant—but he saw no human figures waiting there. In fact, he saw no figures there at all. Where was his welcoming committee?
He was still wondering that, five minutes later, as he stood in the clearing alone, with his luggage case at his feet and the shuttle boat falling rapidly skyward above his head. The shuttle-boat pilot had not been helpful. He knew nothing about who was to meet Bill, he had said. Furthermore, he was due back at the ship as soon as possible. He had handed Bill’s luggage case out the hatch to him, closed the hatch, and taken off.
Bill looked up at the rich yellow of the local sun, standing in the midafternoon quarter of the sky. It was a beautiful, near-cloudless day. The air was warm, and from the stand of trees surrounding him a little distance, some species of local bird or animal was singing in high liquid chirpings. Well, thought Bill, at least one good thing was the fact that Dilbia’s gravity was a little lighter than Earth’s. That would make carrying his luggage case up to the Residency a little easier. He might as well get started. He picked up the luggage case and headed off in the general direction of the village as he remembered seeing it from the air.
He trudged out of the clearing, through the trees, and had just emerged into a second clearing when he heard a shouting directly ahead of him through the farther stand of trees. He stopped abruptly.
The shouting came again, in a chorus of incredibly deep bass voices, deeper than any human voice Bill had ever heard, and, it seemed to him in that first moment, more threatening.
He was about to change course so as to detour prudently around the noisy area, when his hypnoed information of the Dilbian language somewhat belatedly rendered the shouts into recognizable words and the words into parts of a song. Only “song” was not exactly the word for it, Dilbian singing being a sort of atonal chanting. Very crudely translated into English, the so-called singing he heard was going something like this:
Drink it down, old friend Tin Ear,Drink it down!Drink it down, old friend Tin Ear,Drink it down!Here’s to you and your sweet wife,May you have her all your life!Better you than one of us.Drink it down!Drink it down… etc.Here’s to you and your new plow!Does it make your back to bow?Well, better you than one of us.Drink etc…
Bill abruptly changed his mind. If the song was any indication, a happy gathering of some sort was in progress on the other side of the trees. All the hypnoed information he had absorbed on the way to Dilbia had indicated that the Dilbians were normally good-humored and generally friendly enough—if somewhat boisterous and inclined to take pride in observing the letter of the law, while carefully avoiding the spirit of it. Besides, Muddy Nose Village had a treaty agreement with the human members of the Agricultural Assistance Program, and that officially put him under the protection of any member of that local community.
So there should be no reason not to join the gathering and at least get directions to the Residency, if not some help as well in carrying his luggage to the village. The situation would also give him a chance to size up the natives before Greenleaf gathered him in and gave him Greenleaf’s own, possibly biased, point of view about them. Bill was still not clear why a pre-engineering student with a prospective major in mechanical engineering should be needed to explain simple things like hoes and rakes to the Dilbians.
Accordingly, he picked up his traveling case from where he had put it down, and tramped ahead in under the trees before him. The grove was not more than fifty to seventy-five feet thick, and he reached the other side shortly, stepping out into what appeared to be the front yard of a log farmhouse.
In the yard a plank table had been set up on trestles, and at that table were half a dozen towering, bearlike individuals, nearly nine feet tall, and covered with brown-black hair plus a few straps, from which each had hung a monstrous sword, as well as various pouches or satchels. The crowd at the table was eating and drinking out of large wooden mugs refilled constantly from a nearby barrel with its top broken in. A dozen feet or so from the table was a pile of what appeared to be sacks of root vegetables, half a carcass resembling a side of beef, and an unopened barrel like the one from which they were drinking—together with some odds and ends, including a three-legged wooden stool. A small piglike animal was tied by a cord to one of the heavy vegetable sacks, and it was grunting and chewing on the cord. It was plain the creature would soon be loose.
But no one in the farmyard was paying any attention to the animal as Bill joined them.
They had stopped singing and their attention was all directed to a smaller, more rounded—you might actually say fat—native, a good head shorter than the nine-footers at the table, and with a voice a good octave or two higher than the rest. From which, in addition to the fact that this one wore no sword, Bill concluded that she was a female. She was standing back a dozen feet from the table and shouting at the others—at one in particular who Bill now noticed was also not wearing a sword, but who sat rather more drunkenly than the others, at the head of the table facing down at her.
“…Look at him!” she was shouting, as Bill stepped into the yard and approached the table without any of them apparently noticing him. “He likes it! Isn’t it bad enough that we have to live here outside the village because he won’t speak up for our right to live at the Inn, when he knows I’m More Jam’s dead wife’s own blood cousin. No, he’s got to sit down and get drunk with rascals and no-goods like the rest of you. Why do you put up with it, Tin Ear? Well, answer me!”
“They’re making me,” muttered the individual at the top of the table who was evidently called Tin Ear. His tongue was a little thick, but his expression, as far as Bill could read it on his furry face, was far from unhappy.
“Well, why do you let them? Why don’t you fight them like a man? If I was a man—”
“Impolite not drink guests,” protested Tin Ear thickly.
“Impolite! Guests!” shouted the female. “Ex-Upland runagates, reivers, thieves…”
“Hold on, there, Thing-or-Two! No need to get nasty!” rumbled one of the sworded drinkers warningly. “Fair’s fair. If there’s something in that stack there”—he pointed to the pile to which the animal was tied—“you really can’t spare, you’re free to trot yourself over and talk to Bone Breaker—”