Robert Silverberg - The Longest Way Home

Not to be going forward was the same thing as to be sliding backward. So Joseph knew that this phase of his journey, the phase in which he had tried to make his way back to his home across Manza as the chattel of helpful Indigenes, was coming to an end. They had ceased to be helpful, now. He would never reach Helikis if they went on shipping him around the central highlands forever in this lateral way. He saw that he was going to have to break away from them and proceed on his own.

But he hesitated to take the step. The notion of setting out through these mountains alone, in winter, with cold rain falling every day and now and then snow, was a troublesome one. What would he eat? Where would he sleep? How would he keep from freezing to death?

And also he wondered whether it might anger the last villagers in the sequence if he were to slip away from them before they had had a chance to strike a deal for him, thus cheating them of the opportunity to turn a profit, or at the worst break even, on their temporary ownership of him. Would they go in pursuit of him? He had never heard of Indigenes becoming angry over anything. But these Indigenes of the mountains were very little like the ones he had known in Keilloran, or in the Manza lowlands. They might not take his disappearance lightly. It was entirely possible that he would become the first Master to be a fugitive not just from rebel Folk but from Indigenes as well.

I will wait a little longer, he told himself. Perhaps the winter will end soon, or they will start selling me southwards again, or at least I will be sent the next time to some village in the foothills, so that when I escape I will be able to find my way down into the lowlands, where it is warmer and I will have some hope of foraging for food.

And indeed it began to seem as if they were moving him south again. There were two big leaps, one long ride that took him to a mountaintop village gripped by such terrible cold that not even snow would fall and the ground was locked in an iron rigidity and seemed to clang when you walked on it, and then another down the far slope to an easier place of leaping brooks and green gullies thick with ferns; and each of these places, the frostbound one and the ferny one, appeared to be well south of its predecessor. Joseph took heart from that. Two more such leaps and he might be out of the mountains altogether.

But he had rejoiced too soon. When he left the Indigenes of the fern-gully village, it was by way of a winding route up and up into the ridge above their sheltered district and down the other side, and then, all day long on a day of clear crisp weather and a second day just like it following, along a straight road with the sun sitting in the southern sky behind them like a great mocking eye. Joseph waited for the road to swing about, but never once did it deviate from that northward bearing. When at last they handed him over to his newest purchasers, he noted that the village to which he had been brought lay in a sloping saddle facing west, with mist-shrouded lowlands in the valley below, and a lofty chain of peaks rising like a wall behind him to the east. So he had gained a little by getting closer to the western side of the high country, where he expected that the descent into the lowlands would be easier, but he had lost a great deal through backtracking northward, and who was to say where they would send him after this? The earlier sidewise shuttling had been bad enough; but now he was going in circles. Regardless of the risks, it was time for him to take matters into his own hands.

It was the evening of Joseph’s third day in this latest village. There was very little medical work for him here: a case of what looked like frostbite, and an inflamed jaw, and an infected hand. In general he found the place cheerless and unwelcoming. It was a small village and its people seemed sullen and morose, although Joseph had seen often enough before the unwisdom of trying to interpret the postures and facial expressions of Indigenes according to what he understood of human postures and expressions. He reminded himself that these people were not human and it was wrong to think of them as though they were.

But it was hard to regard them as anything but unfriendly. They never said anything to him except out of necessity, as when informing him of things he had to know in order to find his way around the village. Nor did they seem ever to look directly at him; instead they turned their heads sideways and gave him oblique slitted glances. They did appear to have some curiosity about him, but not of the kind that would lead to any sort of real communication between him and them. Perhaps they had never seen a human before, in this remote, isolated place. He was nothing but a freakish anomaly to them, an intruder from a part of the world they wanted nothing to do with. Well, that made it all the easier for him to leave with a clear conscience.

He thought he would try the combinant one more time before setting out. Joseph had not so much as touched it for many weeks, but it had navigational functions as well as being a communications device, and he had some hope that it might work better at this altitude than it had in the lowlands. He activated it and it gave him the same odd pink glow and meaningless sputtering sounds that he had been getting from it since the village of the Ardardin. But as he started to put it back in his pack a long double-jointed hand reached out from behind him and gently but firmly took the device from him.

He had not heard them come in, but three Indigenes had entered his room. Joseph thought he recognized the one who had taken the combinant from him as the head man of the village, but he was not sure, since they were so uncommunicative here; village chieftains in this region wore no special regalia, and it was too soon after Joseph’s arrival for him to have learned to tell one villager from another.

It was holding the combinant in the palm of its hand and was prodding its buttons carefully with two fingers of the other.

“That’s a communications device,” Joseph said. “But it hasn’t been working right for a long time.”

The Indigene continued to poke at the combinant’s control panel. It was as though Joseph had not said anything at all. Apparently the Indigene was trying to replicate the pink glow that Joseph had drawn from it.

“Do you want me to show you how to do it?” Joseph asked, holding out his hand. He did not think it was wise to try to take the device from the Indigene by direct action.

But the Indigene had found the right button. The pink glow appeared, and the sputtering began. That seemed to interest it very much. It brought the combinant up within a couple of inches of its flat-featured face and studied it with what looked like keen fascination; then it turned and displayed the little machine to its two companions; and then it began to turn the thing over and over in its hand, as if searching for some way to make it do something else besides glow and sputter.

This is very atypical of you, Joseph thought. You people are not supposed to have any interest in our machines. Indeed you scorn them, is that not so? You regard them as the illusory products of an illusory race.

But either he had misunderstood some of the things the Ardardin had been telling him, or it was an error to imagine that all Indigenes had the same set of philosophical beliefs, or else this mountaineer simply thought the combinant was a particularly pleasing trinket. The three of them were passing it around, now, each taking a turn at pushing its buttons. Joseph felt uneasy about that. The combinant had not been working properly for a long while, either because it was itself broken or the entire worldwide communications system had been brought down, and in any case he doubted that these people could do any further harm to it. But he did not like to see the device in their hands. You were told not to make any artifacts of human technology available to Indigenes. That was the rule. It had been explained to him, once: doing so might tend to dilute the purity of their culture, or some such thing. Although Joseph could not see how letting the inhabitants of this remote village play with a broken combinant could do any harm to the purity of Indigene culture, some vestige of his sense of himself as a Master recoiled from this violation of custom.