Frederik Pohl - Jem

He twitched, snorted, and woke up. “Ah, Ana! Then I did not dream this!”

“No, Ahmed.” She hesitated and then said in a softer voice, “But I have had that dream many times… No! Not so quickly again, please, dear Ahmed — or yes, whenever you like; but first let me look at you.” She shook her head and scolded, “You are so thin! Have you been ill?”

The black-bead eyes were opaque. “Ill? Yes, sometimes. Also sometimes starving.”

“Starving! How terrible! But — but—”

“But why starve? That is simple to answer. Because your people shot down our transports.”

“But that is quite impossible!”

“It is not impossible,” he contradicted, “because it happened. Food for many days, scientific instruments, two ships — and thirty-four human beings, Ana.”

“It must have been an accident.”

“You are naive.” He got up angrily, pulling his clothes together. “I do not blame you, Ana. But those crimes are a fact, and I must blame someone.” He disappeared behind a many-tree, and after a moment she could hear the splashing of his urine against the bole.

And also another sound: the Krinpit’s rattle and moan, growing close again. If only she had had more time with the tapes at Detrick! But even so, she could distinguish a pattern that was repeated over and over. Sssharrn — , and then two quick notes: eye-gone,

She called weakly, “Ahmed?” and heard his laugh.

“Ah, Ana, does my friend frighten you? He will not harm us. We are not good for him to eat.”

“I did not know you had such friends.”

“Well, perhaps I have not. No. We are not friends. But as I am the enemy of his enemies, we are allies at least. Come along, Sharn-igon,” he said, like a householder strolling a puppy, and came back into view.

Scuttling lopsidedly behind him was a great nightmare creature, rattling and moaning. Ana had never been so close to an adult, live Krinpit, had never quite realized their size and the loudness of their sounds. It did not have a crab’s claws. It had jointed limbs that waved above it, two that tapered to curved points like a cat’s claw, two that ended in fistlike masses of shell.

It paused, seeming to regard Nan, although as far as she could tell it had no eyes. And among the sounds, she recognized words in Urdu! Syllable by syllable, it scratched and grumbled out a sentence.

“Is this one to die?”

“No, no!” said Ahmed quickly. “She is—” He hesitated, then emitted sounds in the Krinpit language. Perhaps it was his accent, but Ana could not understand a word. “I have told him you are my he-wife,” he explained.

“He-wife?”

“They have a very rich sexual life,” he said.

“Please, Ahmed. I am not ready for a joking little chat. The Krinpit said ‘to die,’ and what does it mean?”

“Naive Ana,” he said again, looking at her thoughtfully. Then he shrugged. He did not reply, but he unwrapped a ruddy-brown leaf from an object he had been carrying. It was a flat metal blade, broader at the end, the edge razor-sharp. The hilt was sized to fit a man’s hand, and the whole thing half a meter long.

“Ahmed! Is that a sword?”

“A machete. But you are right; it is a sword also now.”

“Ahmed,” she said, her heart pounding harder than the throbbing in her head, “some days ago three persons from the Food camp were killed. I have thought it was an accident, but now I am not sure. Shall I ask you if you know anything of this?”

“Ask what you like, woman.”

“Tell me!”

He thrust the machete into the loamy ground. “All right, if you will have it so, I will tell you. No. I did not kill those Fats. But yes, I know of their death. I do not mourn them, I hope many more will die. And if it is necessary for me to kill a few, I shall not shrink from it!”

“But — but — But Ahmed,” she babbled, “dear, gentle Ahmed, this is murder! Worse than murder, it is an act of war! Suppose the Food Bloc retaliates? Suppose our homelands do not accept this as a mere struggle far away, but themselves retaliate on each other? Suppose—”

“Have done with your supposing!” he shouted. “What can they do to retaliate? Bomb Pakistan? Let them! Let them destroy Hyderabad and Multan, let them bomb Karachi, let them wipe out all the cities and burn the whole coast. You have been there, Ana. How much of Pakistan can be destroyed? What bombs can blast through mountains? The people will survive. The leeches that flock to the cities to beg, the government parasites — yes, the intellectuals, the proud bloodsuckers like you and me — what do I care if they all die? The people in the valleys will live!”

She was silent, frightened, searching for words that might sway him and finding none. “Ah,” he said in disgust, “what is the sense of this? But do not be angry with me.”

“Angry? That is not what I feel,” she said miserably.

“Then what? Hatred? Fear? Ana, what are we to do? Let them starve us? We have one small ship to save us, and what have the Fats and the Greasies? Navies! And if the fighting spreads—” He hesitated and then burst out, “Let it! Let all the rich ones kill each other. What do we care? Remember, six out of ten human beings on Earth are ours! If there is war on Earth — if only a million survive, then six hundred thousand of them will be citizens of the People’s Republics. And here—”

She shook her head, almost weeping. “And here? Sixty percent too?”

“No. More. On Son of Kung — if anyone survives — one hundred percent ours.”

THE RAINS were all around, squall clouds driving toward them, squall clouds already past them, up toward the Heat Pole, where the raindrops fell a kilometer or two and then evaporated, never striking the hot, salt ground. The flock was spread out over a kilometer of sky, and grumbling in dissonant chords.

“Have patience,” Charlie scolded them. “We must stay, must stay.”

And they echoed, “We must stay,” but it was poorly sung.

No matter. Charlie had promised his two-legged friend that they would stay on station, waiting to observe certain strange and incomprehensible events, and the flock would do as he vowed.

Still, it was uncomfortable to him, like an itch or a sunburn to a human being, to have the swarm in such disarray. The place he had promised to watch was upwind of the camp of the Big Sun. It did not do to come too close to that. Many of his flock, and even more of other flocks, had been punctured or burned by the far-striking missiles of that camp, and so he had to try to keep the flock from drifting toward it, seeking every counterflowing gust, and still avoid the squalls as much as possible. Dalehouse had told him that it would be difficult. But he had also said it was important.

Charlie rotated his eye patches over the entire horizon. No sign of the aircraft he had been told to expect. But he did see a vagrant drift of thistledown and spinner silk moving across the hills below. A crosscurrent! He sang his flock together and vented gas.

The swarm followed, dropping into a level where the wind took them away from the rain to a likely-looking area of up-draft. They followed well, everything considered. Expertly he guided them under the base of a fair-weather cumulus, and they rose with the drift.

The song of the swarm became contented. It was at the top of these invisible pillars of rising air that the best feeding was found: pollen and butterfly-seed capsules, the small, soft creatures that filled the same ecological niche that insects did on Earth, dried salt particles from the wavelets of landlocked seas, and even tinier things. A flock at feed was queer-looking, with every fin and frill extended to trap whatever touched it. It was also at risk, or once would have been. It was a favorite time for the ha’aye’i to knife in, slashing every bag they passed and tearing the life out of the victims before the helpless gaze of their flock-mates. Helpless no more! Charlie sang a boastful song of his great friend Danny Dalehouse, who had given them the far-striking weapons that drove the ha’aye’i a hundred clouds away. Or sometimes did. Now each male and some of the females in his own flock had the weapons, and the ha’aye’i had come to recognize Charlie’s swarm and avoid it.