Rork! (4 page)

“It’s a good body. Be better in a few years. But it’s nice, I mean, right now. I hope to get to know it very well.”

She nodded, tossed her foam-flecked hair. “Your’s is good, too.
I
hope … Do you think you’d get tired of it in less than a year? My body, I mean.”

“My life,
no.
Less than a
year
?” What could she mean? Nothing was measured in mere years, here. The pulse of the Station had a five-year beat. Lustrum, lustrum … A sort of spark flashed through his mind. “Oh. Who — ?”

Her lips moved before she spoke. “Mantosen. My lover. He never would acknowledge me. Oh, everybody knew. But he never danced with me the first or stayed overnight, or let
me
stay overnight or wore my ring, or anything. It was too near to Q time. He was afraid — he said so — he’d be pressured, asked to marry me, because his old meadowmate died, you see, there’d be room for me on the Q.
Pressured!
How much pressure — ” Scornfully, she left the phrase unfinished. “I was just a stopgap. I had a gap and he stopped it. And I was, oh, I was so meek and mild and sweet and soft. Oh, I was so
sure!
That he’d change his mind, you know, at the last minute. I was all packed!” Her eyes gleamed, her breath was quick.

But it didn’t need Mantosen’s failure to tell her it was all no use. She knew that, finally, in enough time. “Oh, what I felt like — and what I felt like doing. I was all burning one minute, all freezing the next. And I made plans in my mind. I’d drug him and hire some Tocks and we’d carry him out, tied up, way out past Last Ridge, and stake him down. And I’d sit in the niche, all safe, you’ve got to know just where it is, and I’d wait and I’d listen while the rorks came, listen to him scream and scream and
scream —
”

Her voice stopped with a sick sort of jerk. She gazed at him, brimming, resentment covering anything male. And then she cleared her throat. They were dry enough by then to dress; they dressed in silence. No, for sure, for sure, there was nothing like Lindel on Old Earth. There might be on other colonial, scantily peopled worlds, but Lomar wouldn’t know.

Back in his U they showered and scrubbed. No trace of past sorrows or hates on her face now, she came un-summoned to his arms. But not undesired, oh no, not undesired. Afterwards she idled with her fingers in the sweat-slicked hairs on his chest and belly, and she sang old Tocky songs in a clear, untrained but sweet voice. They showered again, and while he was dressing she left him and the house without a single word or backward glance.

• • •

The SO must have known. It may have been swift gossip, or he may have known just by Lomar’s lessened tension or by any one of a half-score of ways of knowing, but Tan Carlo Harb made no fluty suggestions, by word or eye or hand. He was a good host with a good table and a good bar. His house was full of interesting things, his conversation — ranging from the Third Canto of the Galactiad to hunting trips with the Wild Tocks — was easy and entertaining. By the time they set to talk of the major business of the evening Lomar had no desire to raise his voice again.

“Why do you think redwing production has slipped so much these last ten years?” he asked.

Harb pursed his lips, raised his brows, dropped a pinch of pnath into his drink, watched the powder — made from a Lichenoid that grew on the trees of Island L’Vong in the P’Vong Cluster, far off in the Lace Pattern — swell and dance about and then lie still; drank and smacked his lips. “It’s the Tocks, my boy.
Why
the Tocks? Ahah … For one thing, they have never recovered, they have never recovered from their years alone. Hundreds of years ago: truuue … but … oh … something happened to them, then. Something went out of them that’s never been put back in. Oh, it’s easy to say, everybody says it, ‘The Tocks are lazy.’ I grant you that. I might as well grant you the specific gravity of — oh anything you care to mention. It’s a fact. But
why
is it a fact?

“The Tocks no longer
care.
They have slipped so far that they can’t get up again. Moral, physical, emotional degeneration. It’s self-augmenting. Won’t eat properly. Can’t live on tockyrot alone,
you
know it,
I
know it. Do
they
know it? If they do, they don’t care. Result, my boy? What’s the result? A prey to every disease. Or maybe it’s all one disease, I don’t know — ‘Tock fever,’ they call it here. No pride, no energy,” he said, lolling back in his chair and squinting up at the fresco of naked boys on the near wall of the room. “Inbred, disgustingly so. I wish I had the authority to make every Guildsman who sets foot here throw away his null-fer pills — get some fresh
blood
into the Tocks….”

But he hadn’t the authority. Policy was policy. One took the pill as habitually as brushing one’s teeth and eating breakfast. A policy which might have made sense — probably
did,
probably
did
— hundreds of years ago. But (a sigh) it wasn’t for him to take it upon himself to change things, although there was certainly no danger of overpopulation
now.
No. Mustn’t rock the boat. No point in doing more than dropping a sort of hint, a mere speculation, as it were, not even a suggestion….

“In my report. Not the next one. The last one. Before I pension out. Have some grilled quirk?”

He pushed the tray-laden cart the hand’s breadth needed for Lomar to reach it without stirring. The name, rather than the unfamiliar but pleasant taste of the crispy seafood brought the afternoon’s little adventure back to Lomar’s mind.
We’ll have it with our supper,
she’d said. He’d forgotten his appointment, she’d said no more about hers. A strange girl … Fresh, new, good in bed, possibly dangerous. There must be others. Best to look around before becoming too involved. Yes …

Much the best….

• • •

The days passed, the long, long days of Pia 2. Now the air was heavy and rank with curing redwing, now it was fresh and had the tang of the sea, now it lay cool and quiet and smelled of taranth-trees and
pi
-vines. Ran Lomar never made his look-see trip, barely ever thought about his plans of making it. Not that he was busy-busied with his work, for he had no work. No other duties had been assigned to him, and as for his formal, Guild-directed duties, nothing ever seemed to come of them. And the empty parade of Station life stood now revealed for the silly little pomp it was: two hundred men pretending to do the work which could have been done by two dozen with time to spare.

He spent much time devising plans for the redwing and much less time realizing why none of them would do, working himself into torques and furies which put him into prime shape for loving Lindel —

— if
love
was (it really wasn’t, altogether, or very much) if
love
was really the proper word for the bouts and matches in which his frenzied, questing body was pitted against hers and against time, when there seemed no time, yet it seemed no time dared wait for time. And then, afterwards, marvelously at peace, murmuring murmuring marvelous peace —

— when he could find her. Or when she chose to find him.

One day when he couldn’t or she didn’t (forgotten his prior notions of not getting too involved, his intention of looking for other girls, women, maybe even Tocky girls), enraged at his own inability to achieve the detachment and disinterest that he felt could be so easily attained when he came here; enraged at this as much as at the Station which he found stupidly squared and cubed, exceeding anything on Old Earth — what price now,
Escape
? — in such a mood and on sudden impulse, he took off on a shorter version of the long explorations he had promised himself.

He put on field clothes, picked up a Tock guide, drew rations for a few days easily enough, was charily issued one (count it), one weapon by the reluctant armorer, and found himself outside Station limits almost before he grew calm again. It wasn’t until the rasping noise of the whip grass against his boots made him aware of the reason why the Tocks always had rags bound around their legs that he recognized the occasion for what it was — a breach, a break.

A dividing mark.

Rango the guide, swinging his staff in one hand and his hack in the other, said, as they approached the first hill toward the South, “Ist good you gahst a gun.”

Lomar grunted. Swung his staff and dug it into the ground.

“1st good fro
you.
I doe need em. I gahst a charm.” He nodded, tapped his chest proudly, where a leather thong vanished under the ragged tunic.

“Yace. We seece a spider,” spitting three times and dabbing his toe, “You cah shoot em. You assen gah no charm, you ber shoot em quick-quick.
Me
— I squahs down, hole my charm, an I sace em words, you-know. Eh spider cahn brahther me. No-no. I gesta charm, oh two-three week ago. I gest em fro ladydoctor. Cost me losta redwing, losta chist fro store.” The spirit of enterprise, seemingly, was far from extinct in Rango. For close to a year he had made extra-special efforts, passing up big drunks, paying to “the ladydoctor” most of the store chits for the redwing he’d gathered.

A small flicker of interest arose in Lomar. If the desire for a charm against rorks could do this for Rango, why not for the other Tocks? The flicker died down. It wouldn’t work. Nothing would work.

From the hilltop, crowned with flowering purpleweed, he took a final look at the Station. That small reticulation was all there was on this whole forsaken planet, of knowledge, science, dvilization. And much it cared for any of it. Down a ways off was the jumbled scar of Tockeytown. What would happen — another thought like another spark flashed in his mind, made him jump a bit — what would happen if for any reason no more Q Ships ever came here?

For a moment he almost hoped it would happen. Let the whole stupid, frozen-minded clot of them perish. For damned sure, he wouldn’t perish with them! Let them huddle and hope and wait and fall into decay, death, madness, despair, scanning the skies while things crumbled around them. But
he
wouldn’t be there. Damn the Station, damn redwing, routine, closed minds and all of that. Plans, half-formed adventurous notions, wiggled and flapped in his mind. He would find the old maps, build a boat, find the other continents or islands. Lindel with him…. A few brighter Tocks….

It wouldn’t work. Nothing worked here.

Suppose, just suppose,
he’d suggested,
that we pay the Tocks
more
for redwing. Then maybe they’d have an incentive to bring in more.

Blank looks. The click of closing minds.
Wouldn’t work couldn’t work couldn’t be done foolish damnfool notion no. Give the Tocks more know what they’d do they’d work less that’s all. Give the Tocks a little food and fermentables they’ll go on a bust as soon as the ‘rot is ready they’ll keep it up for days then they won’t work for days afterward.

Lomar and Rango planting their staves into the hillside, went on an angle down and along, down and along. Here and there on the yellow-green slopes crimson-scarlet splashes of redwing showed. Here and there a chipmunk-sized leaper hopped quickly from one clump of growth to the concealment of another. Station and Tockeytown alike fell out of sight and the staves served to balance the men as they made the stiff descent. Here and there a tumble of bark and branches — a housey — with sometimes a dirty face framed in matted hair….

Give the Tocks
more?
More
what?
Everything you give them has to come out of Station stores. Want
us
to do without so you can wrap their dirty hides in fine clothes?

So much for giving the Tocks more, say, twice as much, in hopes they’d gather twice as much. What then? Give the Tocks only half as much — ? in hopes they’d gather twice as much in order to make as much as they’d been making before?

No that’s no good the stupid bastards would starve to death before they’d figure out what was what no no good nothing is any good lazy stupid.

Here and there they passed gatherers — sometimes an individual, more often (as they got farther from the Station) a group — pulling up the redwing plants, making their bundles, dragging them back, singing their melancholy songs. But there were not many of them and, indeed, it seemed to Lomar that there was not exactly an abundance of redwing either. Was the whole fault entirely one of Tock laziness or incapacity? Had North Tockland been overgrazed, as it were? If so, why did the rank smell of the plant seem to stick in his nostrils?

They paused to eat and, later, to dip and splash and wash in a spring-fed pond half in the sunlight and half in the shadow; Rango giggling as if at some great joke as he succumbed to the unexpected experience of soap and lather. Washed and combed, but not yet clad in his rags again, Rango — for as long as a transient serious thought wiped the usual Tock grin from his face — might have been anybody, anyplace … not an “autochthonous person” but a “man.”

Some remotely cognate thought was what had evidently just occurred to Rango, for, turning to Lomar, he said, “Youce a real man, yace.”

“How’s that?”

Rango’s long arms waved with the effort of framing his thought in other words. “Youce fro Old Earth.”

“Oh, yes. I am.”

Rango nodded with satisfaction. “Yace. Youce a
real
man. Comes fro Old Earth….”

Ran was mildly tickled at this conceit or fancy of the unlettered Tock, but not sufficiently so as to want to trace it to its source. He got to his feet, Rango scrambled up, they dressed and went on. The last part of last afternoon was spent in a sidewise ascent of an mtermin-able upthrust of the land, barbed with raw rock. Once, as they paused to relieve themselves, Rango said, “Mist Ran — this Last Ridge.”

Ran grunted something about being damn glad it
was
the last, and the knowledge put a little fresh vigor into his tired leg muscles. He hadn’t even lifted his eyes for a long time when Rango stopped and drew in his breath with a hiss. Slowly, Lomar raised his head. His glance followed the guide’s pointing finger.