Lockhart hated the planet, hated the
service, hated the uniform they gave him to wear; most of all he hated the
Karteans, each and every one of whom--oh, they were intelligent enough---hated
him right back. You couldn't escape that
hatred. It followed you down every
street, through every alley, looked out every window, smoldered behind every
expressionless face, this seething hostility, this bottomless contempt.
It was midday in the City of Kartea, hot and steaming;
there were no seasons here, only endless unrelenting sun and the constant
humidity which got into and ruined everything brought from earth, even the
men. Four hours through the shift,
already the cooling unit in his cruiser
was beginning to fail, and the radio, never reliable, not with this unstable
sun, had become almost useless. Then he
got the call.
"516," the dispatcher said. "516.
You have some kind of a . . ."
The rest was static.
At the first possible open square he
pulled up, and raised his auxiliary antenna.
And immediately drew crowd of
Karteans. Let a cruiser stop, even for a
moment, and it would be surrounded by their flat brown faces, and somewhere
among them there would be a Ghalla clad in his shimmering silver robe, softly
exhaling hate.
"516, Central," he called.
"Try that message again."
This time he got the coordinates,
and something about an unknown situation.
Central kept the radio traffic cryptic for reasons only Central understood. Anyone could tell this was just going to be
another Kartean trick, call a cruiser halfway across the city and when it got
there, nothing. Nothing except a few
thousand brown faces and their Ghallas, waiting to remind the driver this was
their planet and he did not belong.
Lockhart pulled out of the square, easing
cautiously through the crowd. Even with
the windows turned up, he could hear them hissing. They were very clever, these non-violent
Karteans; they could hiss and hoot and whistle and make weird little skeleton
noises with their bones. They didn't
need speech to express their hatred.
Lockhart was a young man. This was his first planet, and he had never
felt so unwanted in his life, even in the barracks where the older men who had been
through it before liked to talk of planets whose populations had really
resisted. If you could believe them,
blood was always red, no matter whom or what it spilled from.
On the Avenue, he picked up
speed. The trick was to go just fast
enough to discourage anyone from stepping out in front of you, and slow enough
to stop if someone did. On either side,
Karteans whistled and hooted. They were
horrible creatures, short, brown, almost featureless, and yet they seemed all
too human. Certainly they had built this
city, all these low buildings and narrow nameless streets that curled in and
out and suddenly ended in blind stone walls; certainly they had made it as ugly
as any on earth.
The map showed his coordinates less
than a mile away, in what the Department called the "Blue Zone," blue
only on the map. Nothing in Kartea had a
name or number of its own. The place was
a maze, treacherous and bewildering, all the worse because this was the way the
Karteans wanted it.
On the radio--static. Lockhart could not raise Central, Central
could not raise him. The cooling unit
quietly ceased to operate and the temperature in the cruiser began to
climb. Lockhart opened a window and let
the smell of the city in. Now he could
hear them more clearly, the whistling, the hooting, the hissing. He would never get used to this hate.
They were waiting for him at the
Blue Zone coordinate which turned out to be one of the large open squares
Karteans used for their marketing. It
was lined with stalls today, but the crowd had something other than marketing
in mind. As soon as they saw the cruiser
they let out a furious hissing that stopped only when the silver robed Ghalla
who led them raised his arms.
Lockhart keyed his radio. "516, Central. I'm on the scene."
Static. Maybe Central had heard him. But only maybe. Now he was going to have to get out of the
cruiser and talk to this Ghalla whether he liked it or not.
He squared his hat, pocketed his
radio, and made sure his holster was snapped.
There was always a chance someone would try and snatch an officer's
weapon, even on a planet officially classified as "non-violent."
The crowd grew silent when it saw
him standing at full height. Any
earthman was tall compared to a Kartean, and Lockhart was tall compared to
other earthmen.
"Did anyone call for the
police?" he said, speaking into his
translator, hearing his words, turned into Kartean, clatter out of the
cruiser's speaker system. He wondered
how the word "police" translated into the language of creatures who had no such profession in
their culture. He wondered if he were
better off not knowing.
Then the crowd opened and the Ghalla
stepped forward, short and very brown but almost brilliant in his silver
robe. "Put away your science, man," he said in perfect English. "I can talk with you."
Lockhart slipped the translator into
his hip pocket. "Then you're the
complainant. Name?"
"There are no names on
Kartea," the Ghalla said.
"No Name? So what's the game, No Name? What's the game this time?"
The crowd stirred. They didn't need a translator to pick up
Lockhart's anger.
"Man," the Ghalla said, his face blank, brown and
expressionless. "You must come with
me."
"Must?"
"You must," the Ghalla repeated. "There is an Llifient."
There was nothing in the Ghalla's
expressionless gaze to suggest what a Llifient was, or why it would have a name
when nothing else on this planet
did. You want me to ask, Lockhart thought. Damn you if I will.
"Show me," he said.
The Ghalla nodded and the Karteans,
as if by signal, began a curious clicking sound that rose up out of their
bodies and echoed off the walls. There
was something especially hateful about that sound and they way they made it,
without moving their lips or changing the slightest feature in their
expressionless brown faces. Lockhart
fought the urge to leap back into his cruiser and slam the door. These creatures--this was the first rule--must
never see an officer show fear, indecision, or weakness.
The Ghalla walked swiftly into the
crowd. Touching a button on his uniform
belt, Lockhart activated his cruiser's security system, neatly and audibly
latching all four doors.
"No one will molest your
machine," the Ghalla said without
looking back.
Entering the crowd was like entering
a sea. The Karteans, waist deep and
brown, were so tightly massed they no longer seemed individuals but took on the
appearance of a substance, intelligent and purposeful with a will of its
own. Feeling that substance close behind
him, Lockhart knew he must not even think about turning back.
A Llifient could be anything. It
could be a brick, a stone, a blade of grass.
It could be a one of those harmless blue snakes that seemed to be the
only wildlife on the entire planet. No
wonder these people could boast of non-violence.
"What am I supposed to do about
this Llifient?" he asked the
Ghalla.
"Why, you must destroy
it."
"That is not for you to
decide."
"Nevertheless, you must. This way, quickly."
Where there had been nothing but
blank brick walls, an alley appeared, first turning this way, then that way,
widening into a street, and finally opening upon another square. Karteans were on the roofs, peering through
the walls, running ahead, and pressing close behind, all of them brown, all of
them in brown, male and female, one indistinguishable from the other.
"This is the place," the Ghalla
said.
The creature must have been there
before he spoke, but it was not until he actually pronounced the words that Lockhart
saw it, quite as large as a new born pony, crouched in the center of the
square, delicately drying its wings.
Lockhart, who had grown up in the
American north woods, suddenly remembered how it was to be hip deep in an icy
stream, casting for trout. There would
be special times when mayflies danced
over the water, when the trout rose hungry out of the shadows, when the
excitement gripped your chest. This was
the hatch, and people talked of it all winter, and it was often over in a
day. To hold a mayfly in your hand was
to hold something weightless, almost without substance, a creature which had
spent its entire life under water and at last was free. Such was the Llifient, its wings threaded
with silver and trembling in the sunlight, its body slender as a woman's waist,
crouched before him, mysteriously intent upon life. In his year on Kartea Lockhart had seen
nothing that could possibly have been called beautiful, and now incredibly,
this.
"It will fly soon," the Ghalla said. "You must destroy it first."
"It is not for you to tell me
what I must do," Lockhart said.
"I do tell you," the Ghalla insisted. "Do you not hear the people?" Hear them?
How not to hear the Karteans and their dreadful sounds, their
clattering, hissing, hooting, how not to hear them voicing their hatred?
"If you wait till it takes
flight," the Ghalla explained. "Then you will be too late."
Lockhart raised his radio to his
lips.
"We've got some kind of a
creature here. The natives want me to
destroy it."
For once Central answered loud and
clear:
"Take the proper action."
Then static.
Lockhart groaned. On this planet, you were on your own.
"What will happen if I don't
kill it?" he asked the Ghalla.
As if they understood his words, the
massed Karteans intensified their clattering.
"It will," the Ghalla said. "You must try to comprehend this--it
will complete its development. And when
it does, it will not be controlled."
Lockhart took a step forward. Like the mayflies back home, the Llifient
carried no weapons--no claws, no fangs, nothing that could sting; there was
tranquility in its jeweled eyes. Destroy
something so rare, so remarkable? Why
did men travel to the stars if not in search of beauty such as this?
"Be careful, man," the Ghalla said. "It will bewitch you."
The Llifient shook its wings and
beads of moisture, gleaming like pearls, glittered in the air.
"Quickly!" The Ghalla's voice was implacable. "Now, or you will have no chance at
all!"
The crowd intensified its clatter,
its hissing, its hooting. People who
could make sounds like these had devils for souls, non-violent or not. The racket built and swept through the square
and echoed off the stone walls and reached a nerve Lockhart never knew he
had. He drew his weapon.
The effect was immediate and
complete--silence, several thousand individual beings, not one of whom wished
him well, all waiting to see what he would do next.
What he could not do, Lockhart
realized with sinking heart, was return his weapon to its holster.
The Llifient began fanning its
wings. It was about to fly. "Kill
it, man," the Ghalla whispered, and
Lockhart, in spite of every instinct to the contrary, obeyed.
Tried to obey. He fired a single round, 38 caliber, high
impact--the old percussion weapons were still the best--and the bullet struck
the Llifient directly between its marvelous faceted eyes. Nothing happened. Only a sigh, very soft, very delicate, very
distinct.
Lockhart fired again. He could see a little puff of blue, a direct
hit. And another sigh, sharper, almost
profound. If there had ever been any
choices in this matter, there were none at all left now. What he had begun, could not be left
unfinished. The crowd, sensing
Lockhart's distress, began to howl. He
shifted his aim. If not the head, the
heart--somewhere, somehow, everything that lives has to be vulnerable.
ญญ
He fired three rounds into the
Llifient's slender body, three shots that echoed and reechoed throughout the
square and sent the crowd wild with glee.
The Llifient stood unchanged, deliberately fanning its wings. If anything, it was larger than before.
Another Kartean trick. Lockhart wanted to turn his weapon on the
crowd, and let this creature live. It was
larger, definitely larger than before, almost as if it had absorbed the energy
from his bullets.
"Why can you not kill it,
man?" the Ghalla asked.
Lockhart squeezed the trigger and
kept on squeezing until his weapon was empty.
By then he was looking up at a creature twice his height that reflected
his own image, again and again again, in every facet of its jeweled eyes. At last the crowd grew silent.
The Ghalla shrugged. "You have failed, man."
Lockhart was still struggling to
reload when the Llifient began its song.
First that same sigh, repeated, softened, sweetened, then a swift climb
up the scale that instantly brought memories of a high school band clarinet,
and a place where cheerleaders twirled their batons on football afternoons and
great brass tubas blazed in the sun. How
could such a sound travel across the stars?
It soared and took shape and became a melody he knew he would never
forget, and like all such melodies it seemed at once he had heard it
before. When the Karteans, robes
rustling, solemnly dropped to their brown knees, Lockhart almost dropped with
them. That was when the creature, slowly
fanning its wings, rose into the air.
Lockhart rammed a fresh clip in
place, raised his weapon and . . .
The Llifient was no longer
there. As a bubble bursts on a summer
afternoon, it vanished, leaving a cloud of glittering silver feathers twisting
and fluttering and slowly descending upon the kneeling Karteans.
Leaving its song.
As with a single voice, the Karteans
began to sing. From their bare brown throats
the song of the Llifient emerged as a thunderous bass chorus. Oh, how beautifully they could hate! One after another after another they began
rising until at last all were on their feet,
suddenly as tall as any man, swelling with song, shoulders back, each
clutching a brilliant silver feather.
Lockhart slid his weapon into his
holster and turned to the Ghalla who now stood a full head above himself,
gleaming like burnished gold.
The Ghalla shrugged. "You will write in your report, will you
not, man?"
"Write what?" Lockhart said.
"That I, the Ghalla of what you
call the Blue Zone, gave warning."
The Karteans, Lockhart could see,
were forming ranks. They were crisp and
military and there was very little doubt what they had in mind.
"I will write it," he said.
Hesitantly, he started back toward
his cruiser. The Karteans, still singing
the song of the Llifient, were stepping aside and permitting him to pass
through.
Home had never seemed so far away.