H. Piper - Fuzzy Sapiens

“Harpy patrol,” Lunt was explaining to Casagra. “The Fuzzies cleaned out all the zatku, landprawns, around the camp, and they’ve been hunting farther out each day. Harpies like Fuzzies the way Fuzzies like zatku, so we have to give them air-cover. That’s been since you left, Pancho; we’ve shot about twenty harpies since then. Four up to noon today; I don’t know how many since.”

“Lost any Fuzzies yet?”

“Not to harpies, no. We almost had a lot of them massacred yesterday; two of these families or whatever they are got into a shoppo-diggo fight about some playthings. A couple got chopped up a little; there’s one.” He pointed to a Fuzzy with a white bandage turbaned about his head; he seemed quite proud of it. “One got a broken leg; Doc Andrews has him in the hospital with his leg in a cast. Before I could get to the fight, Little Fuzzy and Ko-Ko and Mamma Fuzzy and a couple of my crowd had broken it up; just waded in with their flats as if they’d been doing riot-work all their lives. And you ought to have heard Little Fuzzy chewing them out afterward. Talked to them like an old sergeant in boot camp.”

“Oh, they fight among themselves?” Casagra asked.

“This is the first time it’s happened here. I suppose they do, now and then, in the woods, with their wooden zatku-hodda. They have a regular fencing system. Nothing up to Interstellar Olympic epee standards, but effective. That’s why half of them weren’t killed in the first five seconds.” Lunt looked at his watch. “Well, Captain, suppose you come with me; we’ll go to Protection Force headquarters and go over what we’ve been doing and how your Lieutenant Paine and his men can help out.”

Casagra went over to the car and spoke to the sergeant at the controls, then he and Lunt climbed in. Ybarra fell in with Gerd and they started in the direction of the lab-hut.

“One of the pregnancy cases lost her baby,” Gerd said. “It was born prematurely and dead. We have the baby, fetus rather, under refrigeration. It seems to be about equivalent to human six-month stage. It wouldn’t have survived in any case. Malformed, visibly and I suppose internally as well. We haven’t done anything with it, yet; Lynne wanted you to see it. The Fuzzies were all sore; they thought it rated a funeral. We managed to explain to Little Fuzzy and a couple of others what we wanted to do with it, and they tried to explain to the others. I don’t know how far any of it got.”

The Fuzzies with them ran ahead, shouting “Mummy Woof! Auntie Lynne! Unka Panko bizzo do-mitto!” They were all making a clamor inside the lab-hut when he and Gerd entered, and Ruth, who was working at one of the benches making some kind of a test, was trying to shush them.

“Heyo, Unka Panko,” she greeted him, hastening through with what she had at hand. “I’ll be loose in a jiffy.” She made a few notes, set a test-tube in a rack and made a grease-pencil number on it, and then pulled down the cover and locked it. “I hadn’t done this since med school. Lynne’s back in the dispensary with a couple of volunteer native nurses, looking after the combat casualty.” She got cigarettes out of her smock-pocket and lit one, then dropped into a chair. “Pancho, what is this about Ernst Mallin?” she asked. “Do you believe it?”

“Yes. He’s really interested, now that he doesn’t have to prove any predetermined Company policy points about them. And he really likes Fuzzies. I’ve seen him with that one of Grego’s, and with Ben’s Flora and Fauna, and Mrs. Pendarvis’s pair.”

“I wouldn’t believe it, even if I saw it. I saw what he did to Id and Superego and Complex and Syndrome. It’s a wonder all four of them aren’t incurably psychotic.”

“But they aren’t; they’re just as sane as any other Fuzzies. Mallin’s sorry for doing what he did with them, but he isn’t sorry about what he learned from them. He says Fuzzies are the only people he’s ever seen who are absolutely sane and can’t be driven out of sanity. He says if humans could learn to think like Fuzzies, it would empty all the mental hospitals and throw all the psychiatrists out of work.”

“But they’re just like little children. Dear, smart little children, but…”

“Maybe children who are too smart to grow up. Maybe we’d be like Fuzzies, too, if we didn’t have a lot of adults around us from the moment we were born, infecting us with non-sanity. I hope we don’t begin infecting the Fuzzies, now. What was this fight all about, the other day?”

“Well, it was about some playthings, over in the big Fuzzy-shelter. This new crowd that came in that day saw them and wanted to take them. They were things that were intended for everybody to play with, but they didn’t know that. There was an argument, and the next thing the shoppo-diggo were going. The crowd who started it are all sorry, now, and everybody’s friends.”

Lynne came through the door from the dispensary at the end of the hut. A couple of Fuzzies were running along with her. Some of the Fuzzies who had come in from outside with them drifted in through the dispensary door, to visit their wounded friend. Lynne came over and joined them. Gerd asked about the patient; the patient was doing well, and being very good about staying in bed.

“How about the girl who lost her baby?” he asked.

“She’s running around as though nothing had happened. It was heartbreaking, Pancho. The thing — it was so malformed that I’m not sure it was male or female — was born dead. She looked at it, and touched it, and then she looked up at me and said, ‘Hudda. Shi-nozza.’ ”

“Dead. Like always,” Gerd said.

“She acted as though it were only what she’d expected. I don’t think more than ten percent of them live more than a few days. You want to see it, Pancho?”

He didn’t, particularly; it wasn’t his field. But then, Fuzzy embryology wasn’t anybody’s field, yet. They went over to one of the refrigerators, and Gerd got it out and unwrapped it. It was smaller than a mouse, and he had to use a magnifier to look at it. The arms and legs were short and underdeveloped; the head was malformed, too.

“I can’t say anything about it,” he said, “except that it’s a good thing it was born dead. What are you going to do with it?”

“I don’t want to dissect it myself,” Lynne said. “I’m not competent. That’s too important to bungle with.”

“I’m no good at dissection. Take it in to Mallorysport Hospital; that’s what I’d do.” He rewrapped the tiny thing and put it back. “The more of you work on it, the less you’ll miss. You want to find everything out you can.”

“That’s what I’m going to do. I’ll call them now, and see who all can help, and when.”

Half a dozen Fuzzies came in from outside; they were carrying a dead land-prawn. Some of the Fuzzies already in the hut ran ahead of them, into the dispensary.

“Come on, Pancho; let’s watch,” Gerd said. “They’re bringing a present for their sick friend. They must have dragged that thing three or four miles.”

THERE WERE FIVE Fuzzies and two other people in the west lower garden of Government House, as the aircar came in. The other people were Captain Ahmed Khadra, ZNPF, and Sandra Glenn, so the five Fuzzies would be the host and hostess, Fauna and Flora, and Pierrot and Columbine Pendarvis and Diamond Grego. They had a red and gold ball, two feet, or one Fuzzy-height, in diameter, and they were pushing and chasing it about the lawn. Every once in a while, they would push it to where Khadra was standing, and then he would give it a kick and send it bounding. Jack Holloway chuckled; it looked like the kind of romping he and his Fuzzies had done on the lawn beside his camp, when there had been a lawn there and when there had just been his own Fuzzies.