William Tenn - Of Men And Monsters

How could he stop her? He couldn’t counterattack—there was the danger of hurting or killing the girl. Alien-Science or Ancestor-Science, whatever you believed in, you always accepted as axiomatic that a nubile woman, a woman of child-bearing age, was untouchable with a deadly weapon, was automatically holy. A warrior who killed such a one ceased to be human: even if he were a chief, his tribe would declare him outlaw.

But she was liable to get through his guard sooner or later. And he couldn’t try to take the spear away from her. He’d have to let go of his own spears in order to do that, and the moment be stopped parrying her thrusts she’d run him through.

Meanwhile, all he could do was protect himself. And she was so damned determined! They were both breathing heavily to the rhythm of weapon hitting against weapon. Eric jumped as the girl’s long spearpoint missed his eyes infinitesimally.

“Almost got me that time,” he muttered.

The girl stopped in the middle of a lunge. She teetered a moment, barely holding her balance, staring at him with widened eyes.

“What did you say?” she breathed. “You said something.”

Eric stared back, wondering if she were insane. Should he take the chance now, while her mind was busy with some unexpected problem, should he drop his spears, leap at her and try to take her weapon away?

“Yes, I said something,” he told her, watching the spear in her hands carefully. “So what?”

She lowered the spear and stepped back a few paces, strain going out of her face. “I mean you can talk. You have a language.”

“Of course I have a language,” Eric said irritably. “What the hell do you think I am—a Wild Man?”

The girl answered by flinging her spear aside and dropping to the floor of the cage. She lowered her head to her knees and rocked herself back and forth.

Eric walked away and retrieved the spear. He slung it, along with his own weapons. When he came back to the girl, she was sobbing. And, puzzled as he was, it was evident to him that the sobs were relief and not pain or sorrow.

He waited. Now that she was disarmed, he could afford to be patient. If she turned out to be crazy after all, he’d have to decide what to do with her. Sharing a cage with nobody but a murderous lunatic was a very disagreeable prospect. On the other hand, even a crazy woman was still sacrosanct…

She stopped crying finally and wiped her eyes with the back of one arm. Then she leaned back, locked her arms behind her head and grinned at him cheerfully. Eric felt more disturbed than ever. This was a real odd one.

“Do you know,” she said, “that’s exactly what I thought you were. A Wild Man.”

Eric was astounded. “Me?”

“You. And I wasn’t the only one who thought so.”

He looked around the cage. There was nobody else in it. This girl was a lunatic beyond any doubt.

She had followed his glance. She chuckled and nodded. “No, I’m not referring to anyone in the cage. I’m referring to that fellow up there. He thought you were a Wild Man too.”

Eric looked up along the line of her pointing thumb. The Monster who had brought him still stared down into the cage, the enormous purple eyes unwinking, the prehensile pink tentacles perfectly still. “Why? Why should he—it—think I’m a Wild Man? Why should you?”

A part of him was deeply outraged. To be mistaken for the mythic, terror-inspiring Wild Men—that was too much! You frightened naughty children with stories about hordes of semihuman, hairy creatures who had sunk below the level of language, below the level of weapon and artifact, who had lost, long auld lang synes ago, the universal burrow taboo against cannibalism. You hazed gagling young apprentice warriors with tales of vast, ravaging mobs that came out of nowhere and fought your spears with teeth and nails, mobs that fought not for victory, for territory or for women, but for the ripped-off arms and bloody, broken haunches of their antagonists. And when you asked an older warrior how could there really be such a thing as Wild Men, since nobody you knew had ever seen them, he told you that they were a plague peculiar to the back burrows. Wild Men, he would tell you as he himself had been told by the warriors under whom he had studied, Wild Men did not live in Monster territory and they did not live in the burrows. They lived in another place entirely, a place called the Outside. And when you asked him to explain or describe this Outside, he’d shrug and say, “Well, the Outside is a place where the Wild Men live.” You’d go away, proud of your maturity for having at last realized that Wild Men were strictly horror-story stuff, as improbable as any of the other burrow legends of lurking creatures: the blood-sucking Draculas, the packs of vicious police dogs, the bug-eyed men from Mars, and, worst of all, the oil-seeking wildcats who drilled for all eternity from one burrow to another.

But Wild Men were not merely the stuff of legend; they were the material of curses and opprobium. A severely retarded child might be called a Wild Man, as might a warrior who disobeyed his band leader or a woman who was expelled from the Female Society. When someone in the tribe perpetrated a particularly ugly crime and managed to escape to distant burrows before punishment, you said: “May the Wild Men get him. He belongs with them.” A Wild Man was anyone who had failed the test of humankind.

But what right did this girl have to pass such a judgment on him? She couldn’t possibly know that his own people had declared him outlaw. And she herself—look at her!—a woman in Monster territory where no woman had a legitimate reason to be—she was a fine one to go around insulting people.

“So that’s the primary reason I thought you were a Wild Man,” the girl was saying. “Because the big fellow did. He’s already deposited two Wild Men in here with me. Luckily, he dropped them in one at a time. I was able to kill each of them the moment they landed, before they could collect their faculties and see how pink and edible I was.”

“You mean—There really are such things as Wild Men?”

“Really are such things as Wild Men? You’ve never seen one? Sweet Aaron the Leader, where are you from?”

From Mankind, Eric started to say, with his old, stiff-backed pride. Then he remembered how it sounded to Strangers—he had learned a lot lately. “I’m from a front-burrow tribe,” he said. “A rather small one. I don’t think you’ve heard of us.”

The girl nodded. “A front-burrow tribe—that would explain your unlaced hair. And anyone with hair hanging loose is somehow related to the Wild Men as far as the Monsters are concerned. They seem to know enough about me to suspect I’m female—one of the few fully human females they’ve ever caught, I guess—but because my hair hangs loose they keep hauling Wild Men in here for-me to mate with. And it’s gotten pretty hectic, let me tell you! The way I feel about myself, a mate for someone maybe, a dinner no. I’d been conditioned to expect nothing but Wild Men, and the moment I saw you with all that flopping hair, I said to myself, Rachel, here we go again. If I’d had any sense, I’d have paid some attention to the fact that you were carrying spears and knapsacks and all kinds of fully human equipment.”

“Your name is Rachel? Mine’s Eric, Eric the Eye.”

She scrambled to her feet and held out a small hand warmly. “Hello, Eric. I’m Rachel Esthersdaughter, Rachel for short. It’s good to have someone to talk to. A front-burrower,” she mused. “Naturally, you’ve never seen Wild Men. They practically never get to the front burrows—it’s too far from the Outside for their comfort. But my people have to be battling them back to their wide open Spaces all the time. The Monsters have apparently been picking up a Iot of them, though, for experimental purposes; they must have traps all over the Outside. Hey, look.”