Larry Niven - Footfall

“I thank you.” They walked across the hard surface. Gravity pulled at Fookerteh. The sky was so big, stretching distances he had not seen since he left the war in Kansas. “Can you not-is there no way to bury the dead?”

Birithart-yamp sniffed. “I had nearly forgotten. You will not notice the smell after a few days. Perhaps at night, or when you come from the clean air of the mudrooms. Fookerteh, we have buried the dead within our domain. Beyond—” He swept his digits in a wide arc toward that endlessly distant sky. “The waves drowned numbers you cannot hold in your head. When the wind blows from that way or that, it is strongest. Today the smells are faint.”

Fookerteh shuddered.

“It will pass. In a season, in two seasons.” They had left the hard-surfaced spaceport. Soft loam sank under their feet, and a new smell was in the air. Spiral plants stood as tall as their knees. Winterfiowers were just visible as loops of vine above the soil. In a year they would be blooming.

“See, death makes the land fertile. The flying scavengers — they are called aasvogel in the dominant language, vultures in English. They do their work, as do the running creatures, and the worms and insects. They do their work, that the Garden will be green. Is it not always so?”

“You sound like a priest,” Fookerteh said.

Birithart-yamp flailed digits across his friend’s shoulder. “Mocker! Here is the mudroom. My officers await us inside, all but one who will join us presently. You know him. Chintithpitmang.”

“Yes.” Chintithpit-mang was a dissident; Fookerteh had avoided him.

“Before we go in-why.are you here?” Birithart-yamp asked urgently.

“It is as you suspect. My mother’s mate wishes to smell through my nostrils and feel through my digits. He trusts Koothfektil-rusp but he wishes another view. I was sent.”

“Good. It is as I hoped. The Herdmaster will sniff your thoughts and believe. We are winning, Fookerteh. The path is long and twisted, but we can follow it-and the domain is endless!”

The mudroom had a random, primitive look. Of course it lacked the curve of spin gravity; but it was shapeless, a mere hole dug in the dirt, filled with water, churned and heated. It was twice the size of Message Bearer’s communal mudroom. On the far side was an endless cascade of water plummeting into a separate pool.

This was the way a mudroom should be! Fookerteh sagged in the warmth, resting muscles strained by Winterhome gravity, eyes half-closed, his snnfp just above the surface. He was glad to be out of the stinking wind. “We were told of an animal. Large, resembling the fithp—”

“They call it elephant,” Birithart-yamp said. “Imagine a tremendous fi’ with only a single digit. These creatures are truly enormous. I will show you one that masses more than eight times your weight.”

Fookerteh snorted incredulity.

“I agree, but it is true.”

“And these are not the dominant species of this planet?”

“They are not. Many humans believe them to be the most intelligent of all species living on the Earth, save for themselves.”

“Of course. Even a single digit may manipulate tools.”

“Yes, but badly. Their digit is primitive compared to ours, and our digits are—”

“Yes?”

“It is not important. They are large and powerful, but the human called Botha said that unless these elephants were protected, they would all be killed.”

“Killed? By what?”

“By the lesser humans, for food. By those we fight in the wild areas. Fookerteh, we win, but you do not yet know the valor of their warriors, and ours.”

Fookerteh let warm mud flow along his sides. A creature that massive should be unstoppable… yet humans killed them. Technology?

He sensed a mass above him, and reached up to clasp digits with Chintithpit-mang.

“Well met, companion of my youth.” There was a strangeness, a distance in Chintithpit-mang’s voice. The fi’ bore new scars. He was armed, and wore the harness of an eight-cubed leader. Infrared night-seeing goggles, and other equipment Fookerteh did not recognize, hung from his harness. He stood like a wall in the gravity — that had — Fookerteh sagging. His look made Fookerteh uneasy.

“Well met,” Fookerteh responded. “Will you not join us?”

Birithart-yamp said, “Chintithpit-mang is one of the elite jungle warriors. Most of them are sleepers. You’ve seen reports—”

“I have. Chintithpit-mang, have you seen these elephants?”

“I have. They are large.”

“And fearsome?”

“Not so fearsome as the humans, who kill elephants and fithp alike.”

Machines speak with as much warmth as you. “The reports say that we have lost many fithp in the jungles. Many more simply refuse to fight there. Why?”

“Death and madness wait in the jungle,” Chintithpit-mang said. “Winterhome is strange enough to fithp who know only the closed spaces of Message Bearer.”

Two young warriors came to take their leader’s weapons, and aid him in removing his harness. Fookerteh recognized members of the Year Zero — fithp. They looked like each other, but not like the Year Zero dissidents that Fookerteh had just left on Thuktun Flishithy.

Chintithpit-mang might not have seen his subordinates. His eyes looked past the walls of the mudroom. “We are warriors, and our enemies find us all too conspicuous in the open. The jungles — you haven’t seen them, Fookerteh, but you’ve seen the spiral plant in the Garden. Picture that as average size, and eight to the eighths of them growing, and smaller plants swarm at their feet—”

It sounded strange and terrible. But Chintithpit-mang was saying, “At first the jungle felt safe. We couldn’t see that terrible infinity of sky and landscape. We could hide from human rogue snipers among these huge plants.” He snorted, a sound like a gun going off. “In the jungles the humans move where we stand fast, tangled, trapped. There is a strangling creature like a length of rope. The plants hide human snipers far more easily than they hide us. They use arrays of pointed sticks planted butt down, angled, and smeared with poisonous substances. Throw yourself out of the path of a spray of missiles, and you will find yourst impaled on pungi sticks hidden in the low vegetation.

“We learned. There came revolts among warriors who refusd to enter a jungle. We ended with the elite jungle-warrior fithp. But most spaceborn simply cannot find the right mind-set. Fookerteh, you may Inform your father that sleepers will eventual hold the highest ranks among the African warriors.”

“But you adjusted.”

“I did. Do you notice anything strange about me, Fookerteh’, “You have surely changed.” Fookerteh had been avoiding it he thought. Now he could not: Chintithpit-mang behaved like incipient rogue.

“Some warriors hunt alone. We move through the jungles as on the plains, seeking human rogues. When we find them we call down laser fire from the digit ships. An octuple would find the rogues. The best hunters are those who go alone or in pain Without those we must needs cede the jungles to the humans, yet I fear what it does to our minds. Fithp minds are not geared for such wholesale killing. We don’t speak of the numbers of the dead, not among ourselves and not to the lesser warriors. Rumor spreads, and there is always the stink. We are always aware of what our foothold here has cost both humans and ourselves.

“The wholesale killing of whole human tribes due to the rogue behavior of one or two members has been forbidden by your father and the Attackmaster both. It continues nonetheless, for it is effective. Day by day the humans become more submissive. Many now cooperate with us.”

“And so we are winning,” Fookerteh mused.