Judith Merril - The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6

Die here. Not fair. He heard the priests coming and his back muscles crawled with terror. Die fighting. He scrabbled in the water for a stone. Face to the spears. He cringed lower.

Jim and Leo came back down the cascade and helped him up it. “Find your guts, Cordice!” Jim said. They jerked him along, panting and swearing, until the ravine widened to make a still pool under a towering rock crowned red with the last of sunset. Twenty-odd Robadurian youths huddled whimpering on a stony slope at left. Then priests came roaring and after that Cordice took it in flashes.

He had a guardian devil, a monstrous priest with clay in white bars across his chest. White Bar and others drove him up the slope, threw him spreadeagled on his back, and staked down his wrists and ankles with wisps of grass. They placed a pebble on his chest. He tried to remember that these were symbolic restraints and that White Bar would kill him if he broke the grass or dislodged the pebble. Downslope a native boy screamed and broke his bonds and priests smashed his skull. Cordice shuddered and lay very quiet. But when they pushed the thorn in front of his left Achilles tendon he gasped and drew up his leg. The pebble tumbled off and White Bar’s club crashed down beside his head and he died.

He woke aching and cold under starlight and knew he had only fainted. White Bar sat shadowy beside him on an outcrop, club across hairy knees. Downslope the native boys sang a quavering tone song without formed words. They were mood-sharing, expressing sorrow and fearful wonder. I could almost sing with them, Cordice thought. The pebble was on his chest again and he could feel the grass at his wrists and ankles. A stone dug into his back and he shifted position very carefully so as not to disturb the symbols. Nearby but not in view Jim and Leo began to talk in low voices.

Damn them, Cordice thought. They’ll live and I’ll die. I’m dying now. Why suffer pain and indignity and die anyway? I’ll just sit up and let White Bar end it for me. But first—

“Leo,” he said.

“Mr. Cordice! Thank heaven! We thought—how do you feel, sir?”

“Bad. Leo—wanted to say—a fine job here. Your name’s in for stat-3. Wanted to say—this all my fault. Sorry.

“No, sir,” Leo said. “You were in rapport, how could you—”

“Before that. When I let Martha come and so couldn’t make you juniors leave your wives behind.” Cordice paused. “I owe— Martha made me, in a way, Leo.”

Her pride, he thought. Her finer feelings. Her instant certainty of rightness that bolstered his own moral indecision. So she ruled him.

“I know,” Leo said. “Willa’s proud and ambitious for me, too.”

Martha worked on Willa, Cordice thought. Hinted she could help Leo’s career. So she got her spy screen. Well, he had been grading Leo much higher than Jim. Martha didn’t like Allie’s and Jim’s attitude.

“I’m going to die, boys,” Cordice said. “Will you forgive me?”

“No,” Jim said. “You’re woman-whipped to a helpless nothing, Cordice. Forgive yourself, if you can.”

“Look here, Andries, I’ll remember that,” Cordice said.

“I’m taking Allie to a frontier planet,” Jim said. “We’ll never see a hairless slug like you again.”

Leo murmured a protest. I’ll live just to get even with Andries, Cordice thought. Damn his insolence! His heel throbbed and the stone still gouged his short ribs. He shifted carefully and it felt better. He hummed the native boys’ song deep in his throat and that helped too. He began to doze. If I live I’ll grow my body hair again, he thought. At least the pubic hair.

Jim’s voice woke him: Cordice! Lie quiet, now! He opened his eyes to hairy legs all around him and toothed beast faces in torchlight roaring a song and White Bar with club poised trembling-ready and no little finger on his right hand. The song roared over Cordice like thunder and sparks like tongues of fire rained down to sear his body. He whimpered and twitched but did not dislodge the stone on his chest. The party moved on. Downslope a boy screamed and club thuds silenced him. And again, and Cordice felt sorry for the boys.

“Damn it all, that really hurt!” Jim said.

“This was the ordeal that boy Arthur failed, only he got away,” Leo said. “Mrs. Cordice kept him on the screen until I could rescue him.”

“How’d he act?” Jim asked.

“Trusted me, right off. Willa said he was very affectionate and they taught him all kinds of tricks. But never speech— he got wild when they tried to make him talk, Willa told me.

I’m affectionate. I know all kinds of tricks, Cordice thought. Downslope the torches went out and the priests were singing with the boys. White Bar, seated again beside Cordice on the outcrop, sang softly too. It was a new song of formed words and it disturbed Cordice. Then he heard footsteps behind his head and Jim spoke harshly.

“Hello, Featherface, we’re still around,” Jim said. “Mrs. Cordice called you a name. Krebs, wasn’t it? Just who in hell are you?”

“Roland Krebs. I’m an anthropologist,” the devil’s voice said. “I almost married Martha once, but she began calling me Rollio just in time.”

That guy? Cordice opened his mouth, then closed it. Damn him. He’d pretend a faint, try not to hear.

“You can’t share the next phase of the ritual and it’s your great loss,” Krebs said. “Now each boy is learning the name that he will claim for his own in the last phase, if he survives. The men have a crude language and the boys long ago picked up the words like parrots. Now, as they sing with the priests, the words come alive in them.”

“How do you mean?” Jim asked.

“Just that. The words assort together and for the first time mean. That’s the Robadurian creation myth they’re singing.” Krebs lowered his voice. “They’re not here now like you are, Andries. They’re present in the immediacy of all their senses at the primal creation of their human world.”

“Our loss? Yes... our great loss.” Jim sounded bemused.

“Yes. For a long time words have been only a sickness in our kind,” Krebs said. “But ideas can still assort and mean. Take this thought: we’ve found hominids on thousands of planets, but none more than barely entered on the symbol-using stage. Paleontology proves native hominids have been stuck on the threshold of evolving human minds for as long as two hundred million years. But on Earth our own symbol-using minds evolved in about three hundred thousand years.”

“Does mind evolve?” Jim asked softly.

“Brain evolves, like fins change to feet,” Krebs said. “The hominids can’t evolve a central nervous system adequate for symbols. But on Earth, in no time at all, something worked a structural change in one animal’s central nervous system greater than the gross, outward change from reptile to mammal.”

“I’m an engineer,” Jim said. “The zoologists know what worked it.”

“Zoologists always felt natural selection couldn’t have worked it so fast,” Krebs said. “What we’ve learned on the hominid planets proves it can’t. Natural selection might take half a billion years. Our fathers took a short cut.”

“All right,” Jim said. “All right. Our fathers were their own selective factor, in rituals like this one. They were animals and they bred themselves into men. Is that what you want me to say?”

“I want you to feel a little of what the boys feel now,” Krebs said. “Yes. Our fathers invented ritual as an artificial extension of instinct. They invented a ritual to detect and conserve all mutations in a human direction and eliminate regressions toward the animal norm. They devised ordeals in which normal animal-instinctive behavior meant death and only those able to sin against instinct could survive to be human and father the next generation.” His voice shook slightly. “Think on that, Andries! Human and animal brothers born of the same mother and the animals killed at puberty when they failed certain ordeals only human minds could bear.”