Gordon Dickson - The Right to Arm Bears

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—”

“Oh yes!” cried Thing-or-Two. “Talk to Bone Breaker, is it? He’s no better than the rest of you—letting Sweet Thing stick her nose in the air and treat him the way she does! If there were any real men around here, they’d have settled the hash of men like him and you, long ago! When I was a girl, if a girl didn’t want to leave home just yet, much she had to say about it. The man who wanted her just came in one day and swept her off her feet and carried her off—”

“Like Tin Ear, here, did to you? Is that it?” interrupted the male with the sword—and the whole table exploded into gargantuan laughter that made Bill’s ears ring. Even Tin Ear choked appreciatively on the contents of the wooden mug from which he was swallowing, in spite of being, as far as Bill could see, in some measure the butt of the joke.

Thing-or-Two shouted back at them, but her words were lost in the laughter, which took a few minutes to die down.

“Why, I heard it was you , Thing-or-Two, who broke into Tin Ear’s daddy’s house one dark night and carried him off!” bellowed the speaker at the table, as soon as he could be heard, and the laughter mounted skyward again.

This last sally apparently had the unusual effect of rendering Thing-or-Two momentarily speechless. Taking advantage of this, and the gradual diminishing of the laughter, Bill decided it was time to call the attention of the gathering to himself. He had been standing in plain daylight right beside the table all this time, but for some strange reason no one seemed to have noticed him. Now he stepped up to the side of the Dilbian who had been trading insults with Thing-or-Two and poked him in the ribs.

“Hey!” said Bill.

The head of the Dilbian jerked around. Seated, his hairy face was on a level with Bill’s and he stared at Bill now from a distance of less than three feet. His jaw dropped. Behind him, the laughter and other sounds died out, giving way to a stony silence as everyone at the table goggled incredulously at Bill.

“Sorry to bother you,” said Bill, stiffly, in his best Dilbian, “but I’ve just got here, and I’m on my way to the Shorty Residency building, in Muddy Nose Village. Maybe one of you would be kind enough to point me in the right direction for the village, and maybe even one of you wouldn’t mind coming along and giving me a hand with my luggage case?”

He waited, but they only continued to stare at him in fascinated silence. So he added, cautiously, knowing that bargaining was as much a part of Dilbian culture as breathing:

“I could probably scrape up a half-pint of nails for anyone who’d like to help me.”

Again he waited. But there was no answer. Amazingly, the silence of the Dilbians persisted. They were still staring at Bill as if he were some strange creature, materialized out of thin air. Bill felt a slight uneasiness stir inside him. It seemed to him they were gaping at him as if they had never seen a human before, which was strange. His hypnoed information plainly informed him that Shorties—as humans were called by the Dilbians—were well known to the Muddy Nosers. Perhaps he had made a mistake in stopping here, after all.

“A Shorty!” gasped the Dilbian he had spoken to, finally breaking the silence. “As I live and breathe! A real, walking, talking, little Shorty! Out here, all by himself!”

He turned about in his seat and slowly reached out a long arm, which Bill avoided by backing away out of reach.

“Come here, Shorty!” said the Dilbian.

“No thanks,” said Bill, now fully alerted to the fact that there was something very wrong in the situation. He kept backing away. “Forget I asked.” It was high time to remind them of his protected status, he decided. The sworded individual he had been speaking to was already beginning to rise from the table with every obvious intention of laying hands upon him.