Nova 1 Read online

  So by the time I came to the Dupres’ property, my patience was beginning to wear thin from turning the other cheek to the same bad arguments, dozens of times repeated. And that was bad. Because I knew Pelang Dupres would be one of the stubborn ones. I came up slowly and took a station just inside the ferns at the edge of one of his fields to look the place over—but what I saw was not Pelang, but Jean.

  He was coming toward me, a good cautious thirty yards in from the edge of the field this time, with his scanner hooked down over his eyes and that old, all-purpose blunderbuss of a DeBaraumer in his arms. Three years had stretched him out and leaned him up. Oddly, he looked more like his mother now—and something else. I squatted behind the ferns, trying to puzzle it out. And then it came to me. He was walking like a K’ahari—in the cautious, precise way they have, swinging from ball of foot to ball of other foot with the body always bolt upright from the hips.

  I stood up for a better look at him; and he was down on his belly on the earth in an instant, the DeBaraumer swinging to bear on the ferns in front of me, as my movement gave me away to his scanner. I dropped like a shot myself and whistled—for that is what the K’ahari can’t do, whistle. The muscles in their tongue and lips won’t perform properly for it.

  He stood up immediately; and I stood up and came out onto the field to meet him.

  “You’re a sergeant,” he said, looking at my sleeve as I came up.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Sergeant Tofe Levenson of the Rangers. I was a corporal when you saw me last. You don’t remember?”

  He frowned, puzzling it over in his mind, then shook his head. Meanwhile I was studying him. There was something strange about him. He was still a boy, but there was something different in addition—it was like seeing a seven-year-old child overlaid with the adult he’s going to be. As if the future man was casting his shadow back on his earlier self. The shadow was there in the way he carried the rifle, and in his stance and eyes.

  “I’m here to see your daddy,” I said.

  “He’s not here.”

  “Not here!” I stared at him, but his face showed only a mild curiosity at my reaction. “Where is he?”

  “He and my ma—mother”—he corrected himself—“went in to Strongpoint Hundred Fourteen for supplies. They’ll be back tomorrow.”

  “You mean you’re here alone?”

  “Yes,” he said, again with that faint puzzlement that I should find this odd, and turned back toward the buildings. “Come to the house. I’ll make you some coffee, Sergeant.”

  I went to the house with him. To jog his memory, on the way I told him about my earlier visit. He thought he remembered me, but he could not be sure. When I spoke to him about the K’ahari, I found he was quite aware of the danger they posed to him, but was as strangely undisturbed by it as if he had been a K’ahari himself. I told him that I was here to warn his father to pack up his family and retire to the Strongpoint he was currently at for supplies—or, better yet, pull back to one of our base installations. I said that the post-senior K’ahari were grouping and they might begin raiding the planters’ places in as little as three weeks’ time. Jean corrected me, gravely.

  “Oh, no, Sergeant,” he said. “Not for the rest of this season.”

  “Who told you that?” I said—snorted, perhaps. I was expecting to hear it had been his father’s word on the subject.

  “The K’ahari,” he said. “When I talk to them.”

  I stared at him.

  “You talk to them?” I said. He ducked his head, suddenly a little embarrassed, even a little guilty-looking.

  “They come to the edge of the fields,” he said. “They want to talk to me.”

  “Want to talk to you? To you? Why?”

  “They . . . He became even more guilty-looking. He would not meet my eyes, “want to know . . . things.”

  “What things?”

  “If . . . he was miserable, “I’m a . . . man.”

  All at once it broke on me. Of course, there could only be a few children like this boy, who had never seen Earth, who had been born here, and who were old enough by now to be out in the fields. And none of the other children would be carrying rifles—real ones. The natural assumption of the K’ahari would of course be that they were young versions of human beings—except that in Jean’s case, to a K’ahari there was one thing wrong with that. It was simply unthinkable—no, it was more than that; it was inconceivable—to a K’ahari that anyone of Jean’s small size and obvious immaturity could carry a weapon. Let alone use it. At Jean’s age, as I told you, the K’ahari thought only of brotherhood.

  “What do you tell them?”

  “That I’m . . . almost a man.” Jean’s eyes managed to meet mine at last and they were wretchedly apologetic for comparing himself with me, or with any other adult male of the human race. I saw his father’s one-track, unconsciously brutal mind behind that.

  “Well,” I said harshly. “You almost are—anyone who can handle a scanner and a rifle like that.”

  But he didn’t believe me. I could see from his eyes that he even distrusted me for telling such a bald-faced lie. He saw himself through Pelang’s eyes—DeBaraumer, scanner, and ability to talk with the K’ahari notwithstanding.

  It was time for me to go—there was no time to waste getting on to the next planter with my warnings. I did stay a few minutes longer to try and find out how he had learned to talk K’ahari. But Jean had no idea. Somewhere along the line of growing up he had learned it—in the unconscious way of children that makes it almost impossible for them to translate word by word from one language to another. Jean thought in English, or he thought in K’ahari. Where there were no equal terms, he was helpless. When I asked him why the K’ahari said that their large bands would not form or attack until the end of the season, he was absolutely not able to tell me.

  So I went on my way, preaching my gospel of warning, and skirmishing with the larger bands of K’ahari I met, chivvying and breaking up the smaller ones. Finally I finished the swing through my district and got back to Regional Installation to find myself commissioned lieutenant and given command of a half company. I’d been about seventy percent successful in getting planters to pull back with their families into protected areas— the success being mainly with those who had been here more than seventeen years. But of those who hesitated, more were coming in every day to safety, as local raids stepped up.

  However, Jean turned out to be right. It was the end of the season before matters finally came to a head with the natives— and then it happened all at once.

  I was taking a shower at Regional Installation, after a tour, when the general alarm went. Two hours later I was deep in the jungle almost to the edge of the desert, with all my command and with only a fighting chance of ever seeing a shower again.

  Because all we could do was retreat, fighting as we went. There had been a reason the K’ahari explosion had held off until the end of the season—and that was that there never had been such an explosion to date. An interracial sociological situation such as we had on Utword was like a half-filled toy balloon. You squeezed it flat in one place and it bulged someplace else. The pressure our planters put on the maturing K’ahari made the five-year ones, the post-seniors, organize as they had never needed or wanted to do before.

  The number of our planters had been growing in the seventeen years since the last K’ahari generation. Now it was no longer possible to ignore the opposition, obvious in the cleared fields and houses and Strongpoints, to any post-senior K’ahari’s dream of a jungle kingdom.

  So the K’ahari had got together and made plans without bunching up. Then, all in one night, they formed. An army-well, if not an army, a horde—twenty to thirty thousand strong, moving in to overrun all signs of human occupancy in the jungle.

  We, the human soldiers, retreated before them, like a thin skirmish line opposed to a disorganized, poorer armed, but unstoppable multitude. Man by man, sweating through the depths of that jungle, it wa
s hardly different from a hundred previous skirmishes we’d had with individual bunches—except that the ones we killed seemed to spring to life to fight with us again, as ever-fresh warriors took their place. There would be a rush, a fight, and a falling back. The half an hour, or an hour perhaps, in which to breathe—and then another rush of dark forms, crossbow bolts and lances against us again. And so it went on. We were killing ten—twenty—to one, but we were losing men too.

  Finally, our line grew too thin. We were back among the outermost planters’ places now, and we could no longer show a continuous front. We broke up into individual commands, falling back toward individual Strongpoints. Then the real trouble began—because the rush against us now would come not just from the front, but from front and both sides. We began to lose men faster.

  We made up our ranks a little from the few planters we picked up as we retreated—those who had been fool enough not to leave earlier. Yes, and we got there too late to pick up other such fools, too. Not only men, but women as well, hacked into unrecognizability in the tom smoke-blackened ruins of their buildings.

  . . . And so we came finally, I, the three soldiers and one planter who made up what was left of my command, to the place of Pelang Dupres.

  I knew we were getting close to it, and I’d evolved a technique for such situations. We stopped and made a stand just short of the fields, still in the jungle. Then, when we beat back the K’ahari close to it, we broke from the jungle and ran fast under the blazing white brilliance of distant Achemar, back toward the buildings across the open fields, black from the recent plowing.

  The K’ahari were behind us, and before us. There was a fight going on at the buildings, even as we ran up. We ran right into the midst of it; the whirl of towering, dark, naked, ornamented bodies, the yells and the screeches, the flying lances and crossbow bolts. Elmire Dupres had been dragged from the house and was dead when we reached her.

  We killed some K’ahari and the others ran—they were always willing to run, just as they were always sure to come back. Pelang seemed nowhere about the place. I shoved in through the broken doorway, and found the room filled with dead K’ahari. Beyond them, Jean Dupres, alone, crouched in a corner behind a barricade of furniture, tom open at one end, the DeBaraumer sticking through the barricade, showing a pair of homemade bayonets welded to its barrel to keep K’ahari hands from grabbing it and snatching it away. When he saw me, Jean jerked the rifle back and came fast around the end of the barricade.

  “My mama—” he said. I caught him as he tried to go by and he fought me—suddenly and without a sound, with a purposefulness that multiplied his boy’s strength.

  “Jean, no!” I said. “You don’t want to go out there!”

  He stopped fighting me all at once.

  It was so sudden, I thought for a moment it must be a trick to get me to relax so that he could break away again. And then, looking down, I saw that his face was perfectly calm, empty and resigned.

  “She’s dead,” he said. The way he said them, the words were like an epitaph.

  I let him go, warily. He walked soberly past me and out of the door. But when he got outside, one of my men had already covered her body with a drape a K’ahari had been carrying off; and the body was hidden. He went over and looked down at the drape, but did not lift it. I walked up to stand beside him, trying to think of something to say. But, still with that strange calmness, he was ahead of me.

  “I have to bury her,” he said, still evenly empty of voice. “Later we’ll send her home to Earth.”

  The cost of sending a body back to Earth would have taken the whole Dupres farm as payment. But that was something I could explain to Jean later.

  “I’m afraid we can’t wait to bury her, Jean,” I said. “The K’ahari are right behind us.”

  “No,” he said, quietly. “We’ll have time. I’ll go tell them.”

  He put the DeBaraumer down and started walking toward the nearest edge of the jungle. I was so shaken by the way he was taking it all that I let him go—and then I heard him talking in a high voice to the jungle; words and sounds that seemed impossible even from a child’s throat. In a few minutes he came back.

  “They’ll wait,” he said, as he approached me again. “They don’t want to be rude.”

  So we buried Elmire Dupres, without her husband—who had gone that morning to a neighbor’s field—with never a tear from her son, and if I had not seen those piled K’ahari dead in the living room before his barricade, I would have thought that Jean himself had had no connection with what had happened here. At first, I thought he was in shock. But it was not that. He was perfectly sensible and normal. It was just that his grief and the loss of his mother were somehow of a different order of things than what had happened here. Again it was like the K’ahari, who are more concerned with why they die than when, or how.

  We marked the grave and went on, fighting and falling back —and Jean Dupres fought right along with us. He was as good as one of my men any day—better, because he could move more quietly and he spotted the attacking K’ahari before any of us. He had lugged the DeBaraumer along—I thought because of his long association with it. But it was only a weapon to him. He saw the advantage of our jungle rifles in lightness and firepower over it, almost at once—and the first of our men to be killed, he left the DeBaraumer lying and took the issue gun instead.

  We were three men and a boy when we finally made it to the gates of Strongpoint Hundred Fourteen, and inside. There were no women there. The Strongpoint was now purely and simply a fort, high, blank walls and a single strong gate, staffed by the factor and the handful of local planters who had refused to leave before it was too late. They were here now, and here they would stay. So would we. There was no hope of our remnant of a band surviving another fifty kilometers of jungle retreat.

  I left Jean and the men in the yard inside the gates and made a run for the factor’s office to put in a call to Regional Installation. One air transport could land here in half an hour and pick us all up, planters and my gang alike. It was then that I got the news.

  I was put right through to the colonel of the Rangers before I could even ask why. He was a balding, pleasant man whom I’d never spoken three words to in my life before; and he put it plainly and simply, and as kindly as possible.

  “. . . This whole business of the jungle K’ahari forming one single band has the city K’ahari disturbed for the first time,” he told me, looking squarely at me out of the phone. “You see, they always assumed that the people we had here were our young men, our equivalent of the K’ahari boys, getting a final test before being let back into our own civilization elsewhere. It was even something of a compliment the way they saw it—our coming all this way to test our own people on their testing ground here. Obviously we didn’t have any test area to match it anywhere else. And, of course, we let them think so.”

  “Well, what’s wrong with that, now—sir?” I asked. “We’re certainly being tested.”

  “That’s just it,” he said. “We’ve got to let you be tested this time. The city K’ahari, the older ones, have finally started to get worried about the changes taking place here. They’ve let us know that they don’t intervene on the side of their boys—and they expect us not to intervene on the side of ours.”

  I frowned at him. I didn’t understand in that first minute what he meant.

  “You mean you can’t pick us up from here?”

  “I can’t even send you supplies, Lieutenant,” he said. “Now that it’s too late, they’re working overtime back home to figure out ways to explain our true situation here to the K’ahari and make some agreement on the basis of it with them. But meanwhile—our investment in men and equipment on this world is out of reach—too much to waste by war with the adult K’ahari now.” He paused and watched me for a second. “You’re on your own, Lieutenant.”

  I digested that.

  “Yes, Colonel,” I said, finally. “All right. We’ll hold out here. We’re twenty
or so men, and there’s ammunition and food. But there’s a boy, the son of a local planter . . .”

  “Sorry, Lieutenant. He’ll have to stay too.”

  “Yes, sir . . .”

  We went into practical details about holding the Strongpoint. There was a sergeant with the remnants of a half company, maybe another twenty men, not far west of me, holding an unfinished Strongpoint. But no communications. If I could get a man through to tell that command to join us here, our situation would not be so bad. One man might get through the K’ahari . . .

  I finished and went outside. Three new planters were just being admitted through the gate, ragged and tired—and one was

  Pelang Dupres. Even as I started toward him, he spotted Jean and rushed to the boy, asking him questions.

  “. . . but your mama! Your mama!” I heard him demanding impatiently as I came up. One of my men, who had been there, pushed in between Pelang and the boy.

  “Let me tell you, Mr. Dupres,” he said, putting his hand on Pelang’s arm and trying to lead him away from Jean. I could see him thinking that there was no need to harrow up Jean with a rehearsal of what had happened. But Pelang threw him off.

  “Tell me? Tell me what?” he shouted, pushing the man away, to face Jean again. “What happened?”

  “We buried her, Daddy,” I heard Jean saying quietly. “And afterward well send her to Earth—”

  “Buried her—” Pelangs face went black with congestion of blood under the skin, and his voice choked him. “She’s dead!” He swung on the man who had tried to lead him away. “You let her be killed; and you saved this—this—” He turned and struck out at Jean with a hand already clenched into a fist, Jean made no move to duck the blow, though with the quickness that I had seen in him while coming to the Strongpoint, I am sure he could have. The fist sent him tumbling, and the men beside him tried to grab him.