Hugo awards the short st.., p.127
Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 1), page 127
"Where's your daddy at?"
Without taking his eyes off my face, he half-turned and pointed away through the opening into the larger field.
"All right," I said. 'We'll go see him about this." I unclipped the handmike from my belt and told my six men to close up and follow me in. Then I set my telemeter beacon and turned to go with the boy to find his daddy—and I stopped dead.
For there were two of the Klahari young men standing just inside the edge of the small clearing about twenty feet off. They must have been there before I stepped through the last ferns myself, because my scanner would have picked them up if they had been moving. They were seniors, full seven feet tall, with their skins so green that they would have been invisible against the jungle background if it hadn't been for the jewels and weapons and tall feather headdresses.
When you were this close it was obvious that they were humanoid but not human. There were knifelike bony ridges on the outer edge of their fore and upper arms, and bony plates on their elbows. Their hands looked attenuated and thin because of the extra joint in their fingers. Although they were hairless their greenish-black crests were rising and quivering a bit. Whether from alarm or just excitement I couldn't tell. They were nothing to bother me, just two of them and out in the open that way—but it gave me a shock, realizing they'd been standing there listening and watching while I took the gun from the boy and then talked to him.
They made no move now, as I nudged the boy and started with him out of the clearing past them. Their eyes followed us; but it was not him, or me either, they were watching. It was the DeBaraumer. And that, of course, was why I'd jumped like I had to get the weapon away from the boy.
We came out on to a plowed field and saw a planter's home and buildings about six hundred yards off, looking small and humped and black under the bright white dazzle of the pinhole in the sky that was Achernar, old Alpha Eridani. The contact lenses on my eyes had darkened up immediately, and I looked at the boy, for he was too young to wear contacts safely—but he had already pulled a pair of goggles down off his sun-cap to cover his eyes.
"I'm Corporal Tofe Levenson, of the Rangers," I said to him as we clumped over the furrows. 'What's your name?"
"Jean Dupres," he said, pronouncing it something like "Zjon Du-pray."
We came finally up to the house, and the door opened while we were still a dozen paces off. A tall, brown-haired woman with a smooth face looked out, shading her eyes against the sunlight in spite of the darkening of her contacts.
"Jean…" she said, pronouncing it the way the boy had. I heard a man's voice inside the house saying something I could not understand, and then we were at the doorway. She stood aside to let us through and shut the door after us. I stepped into what seemed to be a kitchen. There was a planter at a table spooning some sort of soup into his mouth out of a bowl. He was a round-headed, black-haired, heavy-shouldered type, but I saw how the boy resembled him.
"Corporal—?" he said, staring at me with the spoon halfway to the dish. He dropped it into the dish. "They're gathered! They're raiding—"
"Sit down," I said, for he was half on his feet. "There's no more than four Klahari young men for ten kilometers in any direction from here." He sat down and looked unfriendly.
"Then what're you doing here? Scaring a man—"
"This." I showed him the DeBaraumer. "Your boy had it."
"Jean?" His unfriendly look deepened. "He was standing guard."
"And you in here?"
"Look." He thought for a minute. "Corporal, you got no business in this. This is my family, my place."
"And your gun," I said. "How many guns like this have you got?"
"Two." He was out-and-out scowling now.
"Well, if I hadn't come along, you'd have only had one. There were two Klahari seniors out by your boy—with their eyes on it."
"That's what he's got to learn—to shoot them when they get close."
"Sure," I said. "Mr. Dupres, how many sons have you got?"
He stared at me. All this time, it suddenly struck me, the woman had been standing back, saying nothing, her hands twisted up together in the apron she was wearing.
"One!" she said now; and the way she said it went right through me.
"Yeah," I said, still looking at Dupres. "Well, now listen. I'm not just a soldier, I'm a peace officer, as you know. There's laws here on Utword, even if you don't see the judges and courts very often. So, I'm putting you on notice. There'll be no more letting children handle lethal weapons like this DeBaraumer; and I'll expect you to avoid exposing your son to danger from the Klahari without you around to protect him." I stared hard at him. "If I hear of any more like that I'll haul you up in Regional Court, and that'll mean a week and a half away from your fields; even if the judge lets you off—which he won't."
I understood him all right. He was up out of the chair, apologizing in a second; and after that he couldn't be nice enough.
When my squad came in he insisted we all stay to dinner and put himself out to be pleasant, not only to us, but to his wife and boy. And that was that, except for one little thing that happened, near the end of dinner.
We'd been comparing notes on the Klahari, of course, on how they're different from men; and the boy had been silent all through it. But then, in a moment's hush in the talk, we heard him asking his mother, almost timidly… "Mama, will I be a man when I grow up?—or a Klahari?"
"Jean—" she began, but her husband—his name was Pelang, I remembered and hers was Elmire, both of them Canadian French from around Lac St, John in Quebec, Canada, back home—interrupted her. He sat back in his chair, beaming and rubbing the hard fat of his belly-swell under his white glass shirt, and took the conversation away from her.
"And what would you like to be then, Jean?" he asked. "A man or a Klahari?" and he winked genially at the rest of us.
The boy concentrated. I could see him thinking, or picturing rather, the people he knew—his mother, his father, himself, struggling with this macerated earth reclaimed from the jungle—and the Klahari he had seen, especially the senior ones, slipping free through the jungle, flashing with jewels and feathers, tall, dark and powerful.
"A Klahari," Jean Dupres said finally.
"Klahari!" His father shouted the word, jerking upright in his chair; and the boy shrank. But just then Pelang Dupres must have remembered his guests, and caught himself up with a black scowl at Jean. Then the man tried to pass it off with a laugh.
"Klahari!" he said. 'Well, what can you expect? He's a child. Eh? We don't mind children!" But then he turned savagely on the boy, nonetheless. "You'd want to be one of those who'd kill us—who'd take the bread out of your mother's mouth—and your father's?"
His wife came forward and put her arms around the boy and drew him off away from the table.
"Come with me now, Jean," she said; and I did not see the boy again before we left.
As we did leave, as we were outside the house checking equipment before moving off, Pelang was on the house steps watching us, and he stepped up to me for a moment.
"It's for him—for Jean, you understand, Corporal," he said, and his eyes under the darkened contact glasses were asking a favor of me. "This place—" he waved an arm at cleared fields. "I won't live long enough for it to pay me for my hard work. But hell be rich, someday. You understand?"
"Yeah. Just stay inside the law," I said. I called the men together and we moved out in skirmish order into the jungle on the far side of the house. Later, it came to me that maybe I had been a little hard on Pelang.
I didn't pass by that area again that season. When I did come by at the beginning of next season I had a squad of green recruits with me. I left them well out of sight and went and looked in from behind the fringe of the jungle, without letting myself be seen. Pelang was seeding for his second crop of the season, and Jean, grown an inch or so, was standing guard with the De-Baraumer again. I went on without interfering. If Pelang would not give up his ways on the threat of being taken in, there was no point in taking him in. He would simply pay his fine, hate me, and the whole family would suffer, because of the time he was absent from the planting and the place. You can do only so much with people, or for them.
Besides, I had my hands full with my own job. In spite of what I had told Pelang, my real job was being a soldier, and my work was not riding herd on the planters, but riding herd on the Klahari. And that work was getting heavier as the seasons approached the seventeen-year full-cycle period.
My squad had broken out mealpaks and were so involved in eating that I walked up on them without their being aware of it.
"And you want to be Rangers," I said. "You'll never live past this cycle."
They jumped and looked guilty. Innocents. And I had to make fighting men out of them.
"What cycle?" one of them asked. All of them were too young to have remembered the last time it came around. "That and more. You are going to have to understand the Klahari. Or die. And not just hate them. There is nothing evil in what they do. Back on Earth, even we had the Jivaros, the headhunting Indians of the Amazon River. And the Jivaro boys were lectured daily while they were growing up. They were told that it was not merely all right to kill their enemies, it was upstanding, it was honorable, it was the greatest act they could aspire to as men. This code came out of the very jungle in which they were born and raised—and as it was part of them, so the way of the Klahari young men is out of their world and part of them, likewise.
"They were born outside of this jungle, well beyond tne desert. They were raised in cities that have a civilization just above the steam-engine level, boys and girls together until they were about nine years old. Then the girls stayed where they were and started learning the chores of housekeeping the cities. But the nine-year-old Klahari boys were pushed out to fend for themselves in the desert.
"Out there, it was help one another or perish. The boys formed loose bands or tribes and spent about three years keeping themselves alive and helping each other stay alive. Their life was one of almost perfect brotherhood. In the desert, their problem was survival and they shared every drop of water and bite of food they could find. They were one for all and all for one, and at this age they were, literally, emotionally incapable of violence or selfishness.
"At about twelve or thirteen, they began to grow out of this incapability, and look toward the jungle. There it was, right alongside their sandy wastes with nothing to stop them entering it—nothing except the older Klahari from age thirteen to seventeen. At this stage the young Klahari males shoot up suddenly from five to about six and a half feet tall, then grow more gradually for the remaining four years in the jungle. And, from the moment they enter the jungle, every other Klahari boy is potentially a mortal enemy. In the jungle, food and drink are available for the reaching out of a hand; and there is nothing to worry about—except taking as many other lives as possible while hanging on to your own."
"Klahari lives," a worried Ranger protested. "Why should they trouble us?"
"Why shouldn't they? It's eat or be eaten. They even join into groups, of up to a dozen, once they get older and more jungle-experienced. In this way they can take single strays and smaller groups. This works well enough—except they have to watch their backs at all times among their own group-members. There are no rules. This jungle is no-man's-land. Which was why the Klahari did not object to humans settling here, originally. We were simply one more test for their maturing young men, trying to survive until manhood, so they can get back into the cities."
They digested this and they didn't like it. Jen, the brightest in the squad, saw the connection at once.
"Then that makes us humans fair game as well?"
"Right. Which is why this squad is out here in the jungle. Our job is simply that of a cop in a rough neighborhood—to roust and break up Klahari bands of more than a half-dozen together at once. The young Klahari know that their clubs, crossbows and lances are no match for rifles, and there has to be at least a half dozen of them together before they are liable to try assaulting a house or attacking a planter in his fields. So the arrangement with planters, soldier squads and Klahari is all neat and tidy most of the time—in fact all of the time except for one year out of every seventeen that makes up a generation for them. Because, once a generation, things pile up.
"It's the five-year Klahari that cause it. Post-seniors some people call them, as we call the younger Klahari freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors, according to the number of years they have been off the desert and in the jungle. Post-seniors are Klahari who are old enough to go back to the cities and be allowed in—but are hesitating about it. They are Klahari who are wondering if they might not prefer it being top dog in the jungle to starting out on the bottom again, back in the cities. They are Klahari toying with the idea of settling down for life in the jungles and their impulse to kill any other Klahari is damped by maturity and experience. They, unlike those of the first four years of jungle experience, are capable of trusting each other to gather in large bands with a combined purpose—to seize and hold permanently areas of the jungle as private kingdoms."
They were listening closely now—and no one was smiling.
"In the old days, before we humans came, this process once a seventeen-year generation would end inevitably in pitched wars between large bands largely composed of post-seniors. These wars disposed of the genetic variants among the Klahari, and got rid of those who might have interrupted the age-old, cities-desert-jungle-cities-again pattern of raising the Klahari males and eliminating the unfit of each generation. Before we came, everything was tidy. But with us humans now in the jungle, the post-seniors in their bands every seventeen years turn most naturally against us."
My talk had some good effect because the ones who stayed on made good Rangers. They knew what they were doing—and why.
One season followed another and I had my hands full by the time I saw young Jean Dupres again. My squad of six men had grown by that time to a platoon of twenty, because we were now closing the second and final season of the sixteenth year of the cycle and we were having to break up Klahari gangs of as many as fifty in a group. Not only that, but we had the cheerful thought always with us that, with the post-seniors running things, most of the groups we broke up were re-forming again, the minute we'd passed on.
It was time to begin trying to hustle the planters and their families back into our Regional Installations. Time to begin listening to their complaints that their buildings would be burned and leveled, and half their cleared land reclaimed by the jungle when they returned—which was perfectly true. Time to begin explaining to them why it was not practical to bring in an army from Earth every seventeen years to protect their land. And time to try to explain to them once again that we were squatters on a Klahari world, and it was against Earth policy to exterminate the natives and take over the planet entire, even if we could—which we could not. There were millions of the mature Klahari in the cities, and our technical edge wasn't worth that much.
So by the time I came to the Dupres' property, my patience was beginning to wear thin from turning the other cheek to the same bad arguments, dozens of times repeated. And that was bad. Because I knew Pelang Dupres would be one of the stubborn ones. I came up slowly and took a station just inside the ferns at the edge of one of his fields to look the place over—but what I saw was not Pelang, but Jean.
He was coming toward me, a good cautious thirty yards in, from the edge of the field this time, with his scanner hooked down over his eyes and that old, all-purpose blunderbuss of a DeBaraumer in his arms. Three years had stretched him out and leaned him up. Oddly, he looked more like his mother now—and something else. I squatted behind the ferns, trying to puzzle it out. And then it came to me. He was walking like a Klahari—in the cautious, precise way they have, swinging from ball of foot to ball of other foot with the body always bolt upright from the hips.
I stood up for a better look at him; and he was down on his belly on the earth in an instant, the DeBaraumer swinging to bear on the ferns in front of me, as my movement gave me away to his scanner. I dropped like a shot myself and whistled—for that is what the Klahari can't do, whistle. The muscles in their tongue and lips won't perform properly for it.
He stood up immediately; and I stood up and came out onto the field to meet him.
"You're a sergeant," he said, looking at my sleeve as I came up."
"That's right," I said. "Sergeant Tofe Levenson of the Rangers. I was a corporal when you saw me last. You don't remember?"
He frowned, puzzling it over in his mind, then shook his head. Meanwhile I was studying him. There was something strange about him. He was still a boy, but there was something different in addition—it was like seeing a seven-year-old child overlaid with the adult he's going to be. As if the future man was casting his shadow back on his earlier self. The shadow was there in the way he carried the rifle, and in his stance and eyes.
"I'm here to see your daddy," I said.
"He's not here."
"Not here!" I stared at him, but his face showed only a mild curiosity at my reaction. "Where is he?"
"He and my ma—mother"—he corrected himself—"went in to Strongpoint Hundred Fourteen for supplies. They'll be back tomorrow."
"You mean you're here alone?"
"Yes," he said, again with that faint puzzlement that I should find this odd, and turned back toward the buildings. "Come to the house. I'll make you some coffee, Sergeant."
I went to the house with him. To jog his memory, on the way I told him about my earlier visit. He thought he remembered me, but he could not be sure. When I spoke to him about the Klahari, I found he was quite aware of the danger they posed to him, but was as strangely undisturbed by it as if he had been a Klahari himself. I told him that I was here to warn his father to pack up his family and retire to the Strongpoint he was currently at for supplies—or, better yet, pull back to one of our base installations. I said that the post-senior Klahari were grouping and they might begin raiding the planters' places in as little as three weeks' time. Jean corrected me, gravely.
