She looked around without a trace of animosity. “I wouldn’t bite you, Kip, no matter what you did. But if you’re going to be stuffy—oh, well, I doubt if he’ll come out for an hour or so. We’ll come back.”
“Okay.” I pulled her away.
But we did not leave. I heard a loud whistle and a shout: “Hey, buster! Over here!”
The words were not English, but I understood—well enough. The yell came from an archway across the corridor and a little farther on. I hesitated, then moved toward it because Peewee did so.
A man about forty-five was loafing in this doorway. He was no Neanderthal; he was civilized—or somewhat so. He wore a long heavy woolen tunic, belted in at the waist, forming a sort of kilt. His legs below that were wrapped in wool and he was shod in heavy short boots, much worn. At the belt and supported by a shoulder sling was a short, heavy sword; there was a dagger on the other side of the belt. His hair was short and he was clean-shaven save for a few days’ gray stubble. His expression was neither friendly nor unfriendly; it was sharply watchful.
“Thanks,” he said gruffly. “Are you the jailer?”
Peewee gasped. “Why, that’s Latin!”
What do you do when you meet a Legionary? Right after a cave man? I answered: “No, I am a prisoner myself.” I said it in Spanish and repeated it in pretty fair classical Latin. I used Spanish because Peewee hadn’t been quite correct. It was not Latin he spoke, not the Latin of Ovid and Gaius Julius Caesar. Nor was it Spanish. It was in between, with an atrocious accent and other differences. But I could worry out the meaning.
He sucked his lip and answered, “That’s bad. I’ve been trying for three days to attract attention and all I get is another prisoner. But that’s how the die rolls. Say, that’s a funny accent you have.”
“Sorry, amigo, but I have trouble understanding you, too.” I repeated it in Latin, then split the difference. I added, in improvised lingua franca, “Speak slowly, will you?”
“I’ll speak as I please. And don’t call me ‘amico’; I’m a Roman citizen—so don’t get gay.”
That’s a free translation. His advice was more vulgar—I think. It was close to a Spanish phrase which certainly is vulgar.
“What’s he saying?” demanded Peewee. “It is Latin, isn’t it? Translate!”
I was glad she hadn’t caught it. “Why, Peewee, don’t you know ‘the language of poetry and science’?”
“Oh, don’t be a smartie! Tell me.”
“Don’t crowd me, hon. I’ll tell you later. I’m having trouble following it.”
“What is that barbarian grunting?” the Roman said pleasantly. “Talk language, boy. Or will you have ten with the flat of the sword?”
He seemed to be leaning on nothing—so I felt the air. It was solid; I decided not to worry about his threat. “I’m talking as best I can. We spoke to each other in our own language.”
“Pig grunts. Talk Latin. If you can.” He looked at Peewee as if just noticing her. “Your daughter? Want to sell her? If she had meat on her bones, she might be worth a half denario.”
Peewee clouded up. “I understood that!” she said fiercely. “Come out here and fight!”
“Try it in Latin,” I advised her. “If he understands you, he’ll probably spank you.”
She looked uneasy. “You wouldn’t let him?”
“You know I wouldn’t.”
“Let’s go back.”
“That’s what I said earlier.” I escorted her past the cave man’s lair to our suite. “Peewee, I’m going back and see what our noble Roman has to say. Do you mind?”
“I certainly do!”
“Be reasonable, hon. If we could be hurt by them, the Mother Thing would know it. After all, she told us they were here.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“What for? I’ll tell you everything I learn. This may be a chance to find out what this silliness means. What’s he doing here? Have they kept him in deep-freeze a couple of thousand years? How long has he been awake? What does he know that we don’t? We’re in a bad spot; all the data I can dig up we need. You can help by keeping out. If you’re scared, send for the Mother Thing.”
She pouted. “I’m not scared. All right—if that’s the way you want it.”
“I do. Eat your dinner.”
Jo-Jo the dogface boy was not in sight; I gave his door a wide berth. If a ship can go anywhere in no time, could it skip a dimension and go anywhere to any time? How would the math work out? The soldier was still lounging at his door. He looked up. “Didn’t you hear me say to stick around?”
“I heard you,” I admitted, “but we’re not going to get anywhere if you take that attitude. I’m not one of your privates.”
“Lucky for you!”
“Do we talk peacefully? Or do I leave?”
He looked me over. “Peace. But don’t get smart with me, barbarian.”
He called himself “Iunio.” He had served in Spain and Gaul, then transferred to the VIth Legion, the “Victrix”—which he felt that even a barbarian should know of. His legion’s garrison was Eboracum, north of Londinium in Britain, but he had been on advance duty as a brevet centurion (he pronounced it “centurio”)—his permanent rank was about like top sergeant. He was smaller than I am but I would not want to meet him in an alley. Nor at the palisades of a castra.
He had a low opinion of Britons and all barbarians including me (“nothing personal—some of my best friends are barbarians”), women, the British climate, high brass, and priests; he thought well of Caesar, Rome, the gods, and his own professional ability. The army wasn’t what it used to be and the slump came from treating auxiliaries like Roman citizens.
He had been guarding the building of a wall to hold back barbarians—a nasty lot who would sneak up and slit your throat and eat you—which no doubt had happened to him, since he was now in the nether regions.
I thought he was talking about Hadrian’s Wall, but it was three days’ march north of there, where the seas were closest together. The climate there was terrible and the natives were bloodthirsty beasts who dyed their bodies and didn’t appreciate civilization—you’d think the Eagles were trying to steal their dinky island. Provincial…like me. No offense meant.
Nevertheless he had bought a little barbarian to wife and had been looking forward to garrison duty at Eboracum—when this happened. Iunio shrugged. “Perhaps if I had been careful with lustrations and sacrifices, my luck wouldn’t have run out. But I figure that if a man does his duty and keeps himself and his weapons clean, the rest is the C.O.’s worry. Careful of that doorway; it’s witched.”
The longer he talked the easier it was to understand him. The “-us” endings turned to “-o” and his vocabulary was not that of De Bello Gallico—“horse” wasn’t “equus”; it was “caballo.” His idioms bothered me, plus the fact that his Latin was diluted by a dozen barbarian tongues. But you can blank out every third word in a newspaper and still catch the gist.
I learned a lot about the daily life and petty politics of the Victrix and nothing that I wanted to know. Iunio did not know how he had gotten where he was nor why—except that he was dead and awaiting disposition in a receiving barracks somewhere in the nether world—a theory which I was not yet prepared to accept.
He knew the year of his “death”—Year Eight of the Emperor and Eight Hundred Ninety-Nine of Rome. I wrote out the dates in Roman numerals to make sure. But I did not remember when Rome was founded nor could I identify the “Caesar” even by his full name—there have been so many Caesars. But Hadrian’s Wall had been built and Britain was still occupied; that placed Iunio close to the third century.
He wasn’t interested in the cave man across the way—it embodied to him the worst vice of a barbarian: cowardice. I didn’t argue but I would be timid, too, if I had saber-toothed tigers yowling at my door. (Did they have saber-tooths then? Make it “cave bears.”)
Iunio went back and returned with hard dark bread, cheese, and a cup. He d
id not offer me any and I don’t think it was the barrier. He poured a little of his drink on the floor and started to chomp. It was a mud floor; the walls were rough stone and the ceiling was supported by wooden beams. It may have been a copy of dwellings during the occupation of Britain, but I’m no expert.
I didn’t stay much longer. Not only did bread and cheese remind me that I was hungry, but I offended Iunio. I don’t know what set him off, but he discussed me with cold thoroughness, my eating habits, ancestry, appearance, conduct, and method of earning a living. Iunio was pleasant—as long as you agreed with him, ignored insults, and deferred to him. Many older people demand this, even in buying a thirty-nine-cent can of talcum; you learn to give it without thinking—otherwise you get a reputation as a fresh kid and potential juvenile delinquent. The less respect an older person deserves the more certain he is to demand it from anyone younger. So I left, as Iunio didn’t know anything helpful anyhow. As I went back I saw the cave man peering out his cave. I said, “Take it easy, Jo-Jo,” and went on.
I bumped into another invisible barrier blocking our archway. I felt it, then said quietly, “I want to go in.” The barrier melted away and I walked in—then found that it was back in place.
My rubber soles made no noise and I didn’t call out because Peewee might be asleep. Her door was open and I peeped in. She was sitting tailor-fashion on that incredible oriental divan, rocking Madame Pompadour and crying.
I backed away, then returned whistling, making a racket, and calling to her. She popped out of her door, with smiling face and no trace of tears. “Hi, Kip! It took you long enough.”
“That guy talks too much. What’s new?”
“Nothing. I ate and you didn’t come back, so I took a nap. You woke me. What did you find out?”
“Let me order dinner and I’ll tell you while I eat.”
I was chasing the last bit of gravy when a bellhop robot came for us. It was like the other one except that it had in glowing gold on its front that triangle with three spirals. “Follow me,” it said in English.
I looked at Peewee. “Didn’t the Mother Thing say she was coming back?”
“Why, I thought so.”
The machine repeated, “Follow me. Your presence is required.”
I laid my ears back. I have taken lots of orders, some of which I shouldn’t have, but I had never yet taken orders from a piece of machinery. “Go climb a rope!” I said. “You’ll have to drag me.”
This is not what to say to a robot. It did.
Peewee yelled, “Mother Thing! Where are you? Help us!”
Her birdsong came out of the machine. (“It’s all right, dears. The servant will lead you to me.”)
I quit struggling and started to walk. That refugee from an appliance dealer took us into another lift, then into a corridor whose walls whizzed past as soon as we entered. It nudged us through an enormous archway topped by the triangle and spirals and herded us into a pen near one wall. The pen was not apparent until we moved—more of that annoying solid air.
It was the biggest room I have ever been in, triangular, unbroken by post or pillar, with ceiling so high and walls so distant that I half expected local thunderstorms. An enormous room makes me feel like an ant; I was glad to be near a wall. The room was not empty—hundreds in it—but it looked empty because they were all near the walls; the giant floor was bare.
But there were three wormfaces out in the center—Wormface’s trial was in progress.
I don’t know if our own Wormface was there. I would not have known even if they had not been a long way off as the difference between two wormfaces is the difference between having your throat cut and being beheaded. But, as we learned, the presence or absence of the individual offender was the least important part of a trial. Wormface was being tried, present or not—alive or dead.
The Mother Thing was speaking. I could see her tiny figure, also far out on the floor but apart from the wormfaces. Her birdsong voice reached me faintly but I heard her words clearly—in English; from somewhere near us her translated words were piped to us. The feel of her was in the English translation just as it was in her bird tones.
She was telling what she knew of wormface conduct, as dispassionately as if describing something under a microscope, like a traffic officer testifying: “At 9.17 on the fifth, while on duty at—” etc. The facts. The Mother Thing was finishing her account of events on Pluto. She chopped it off at the point of the explosion.
Another voice spoke, in English. It was flat with a nasal twang and reminded me of a Vermont grocer we had dealt with one summer when I was a kid. He was a man who never smiled nor frowned and what little he said was all in the same tone, whether it was, “She is a good woman,” or, “That man would cheat his own son,” or, “Eggs are fifty-nine cents,” cold as a cash register. This voice was that sort.
It said to the Mother Thing: “Have you finished?”
“I have finished.”
“The other witnesses will be heard. Clifford Russell—” I jumped, as if that grocer had caught me in the candy jar.
The voice went on: “—listen carefully.” Another voice started.
My own—it was the account I had dictated, flat on my back on Vega Five.
But it wasn’t all of it; it was just that which concerned wormfaces. Adjectives and whole sentences had been cut—as if someone had taken scissors to a tape recording. The facts were there; what I thought about them was missing.
It started with ships landing in the pasture back of our house; it ended with that last wormface stumbling blindly down a hole. It wasn’t long, as so much had been left out—our hike across the Moon, for example. My description of Wormface was left in but had been trimmed so much that I could have been talking about Venus de Milo instead of the ugliest thing in creation.
My recorded voice ended and the Yankee-grocer voice said, “Were those your words?”
“Huh? Yes.”
“Is the account correct?”
“Yes, but—”
“Is it correct?”
“Yes.”
“Is it complete?”
I wanted to say that it certainly was not—but I was beginning to understand the system. “Yes.”
“Patricia Wynant Reisfeld—”
Peewee’s story started earlier and covered all those days when she had been in contact with wormfaces while I was not. But it was not much longer, for, while Peewee has a sharp eye and a sharper memory, she is loaded with opinions. Opinions were left out.
When Peewee had agreed that her evidence was correct and complete the Yankee voice stated, “All witnesses have been heard, all known facts have been integrated. The three individuals may speak for themselves.”
I think the wormfaces picked a spokesman, perhaps the Wormface, if he was alive and there. Their answer, as translated into English, did not have the guttural accent with which Wormface spoke English; nevertheless it was a wormface speaking. That bone-chilling yet highly intelligent viciousness, as unmistakable as a punch in the teeth, was in every syllable.
Their spokesman was so far away that I was not upset by his looks and after the first stomach-twisting shock of that voice I was able to listen more or less judicially. He started by denying that this court had jurisdiction over his sort. He was responsible only to his mother-queen and she only to their queen-group—that’s how the English came out.
That defense, he claimed, was sufficient. However, if the “Three Galaxies” confederation existed—which he had no reason to believe other than that he was now being detained unlawfully before this hiveful of creatures met as a kangaroo court—if it existed, it still had no jurisdiction over the Only People, first, because the organization did not extend to his part of space; second, because even if it were there, the Only People had never joined and therefore its rules (if it had rules) could not apply; and third, it was inconceivable that their queen-group would associate itself with this improbable “Three Galaxies” because people do not contract with
animals.
This defense also was sufficient.
But disregarding for the sake of argument these complete and sufficient defenses, this trial was a mockery because no offense existed even under the so-called rules of the alleged “Three Galaxies.” They (the wormfaces) had been operating in their own part of space engaged in occupying a useful but empty planet, Earth. No possible crime could lie in colonizing land inhabited merely by animals. As for the agent of Three Galaxies, she had butted in; she had not been harmed; she had merely been kept from interfering and had been detained only for the purpose of returning her where she belonged.
He should have stopped. Any of these defenses might have stood up, especially the last one. I used to think of the human race as “lords of creation”—but things had happened to me since. I was not sure that this assemblage would think that humans had rights compared with wormfaces. Certainly the wormfaces were ahead of us in many ways. When we clear jungle to make farms, do we worry if baboons are there first?
But he discarded these defenses, explained that they were intellectual exercises to show how foolish the whole thing was under any rules, from any point of view. He would now make his defense.
It was an attack.
The viciousness in his voice rose to a crescendo of hatred that made every word slam like a blow. How dared they do this? They were mice voting to bell the cat! (I know—but that’s how it came out in translation.) They were animals to be eaten, or merely vermin to be exterminated. Their mercy would be rejected if offered, no negotiation was possible, their crimes would never be forgotten, the Only People would destroy them!
I looked around to see how the jury was taking it. This almost-empty hall had hundreds of creatures around the three sides and many were close to us. I had been too busy with the trial to do more than glance at them. Now I looked, for the wormface’s blast was so disturbing that I welcomed a distraction.
They were all sorts and I’m not sure that any two were alike. There was one twenty feet from me who was as horrible as Wormface and amazingly like him—except that this creature’s grisly appearance did not inspire disgust. There were others almost human in appearance, although they were greatly in the minority. There was one really likely-looking chick as human as I am—except for iridescent skin and odd and skimpy notions of dress. She was so pretty that I would have sworn that the iridescence was just make-up—but I probably would have been wrong. I wondered in what language the diatribe was reaching her? Certainly not English.