Rork! (11 page)

And yet he could not bring himself to plunge down the pike and then run for safety, knowing that safety was certain enough.

His flesh had been rigid while all this was going on. And then it shuddered and twisted and crawled, while the rork, finally “face” to face with him, made the old Tock tale come suddenly — frighteningly — shockingly true.

It spoke to him.

The rork’s internal apparatus, vocal, thoracic, and otherwise, must of course have been vastly different from the human; or even the mammalian. The sounds rumbled, echoed, clicked, did things for which he had no names. He felt as though he were reliving the dream in which a rork had talked to him, would perhaps in another second awake. The fact that the sounds seemed to settle into words, words which he understood, increased this sensation, driving him into a kind of vertigo in which his very mind was imperiled, for the words were similar to those of the dream.

Then, in a second, everything became real. There was a difference. The dream-rork had said,
I
kill.
And the real rork … what was it saying?

Not kill.

Not.

Muscles twitching and jerking, but growing calmer, he lowered the pike. Behind and above him he heard Norna’s shuddering breath break off, heard her fall. He half-swerved, legs tensed to mount the slope. And realized that the rork’s words might not have been addressed to him.

Two men were standing there, clad in what he presently realized were cast-off rorkskins, clubs in their hands. They were men as certainly as he was a man, nothing at all alien in the lineaments of their bodies. It was their faces that were utterly different, and the difference was not physical. Their eyes did not look at him as he knew his eyes to be looking at them. Their mouths were not fixed in the same lines, nor their cheeks, nor their brows. It was nothing that he could have been able to describe, that difference, but it was instantly obvious, and infinitely significant.

He knew that these men had never grown up among other men than themselves.

And he knew now what had been following him.

One of the men, looking at him with an expression which might have been serene — or might have been some thing so infinitely alien that he, Ran Lomar, had no conception of it — looked at him and said, “Not kill.” It was a human voice, but it was a quite strange voice, and there seemed somehow to be something of the rork in it. It meant that Lomar would not kill the rork, that the rork would not kill Lomar and the two new men would not kill each other. It was not a warning, not a plea. It was a statement.

And Lomar believed it.

He put down his pike, head first into the ground, “No …” he said, his voice unsure, his mind certain. “We won’t kill … Let me … I must go up to her….” He gestured at Norna, still unconscious. One of them reached out a hand, he took it, was helped up the slope. His knees stopped trembling. He knelt beside her.

“Dirl sick?” the man asked. And he made a commiserating, comforting sound with his lips, such as one makes to a child. To a baby.

To a baby!

Lomar’s head snapped with the shock of it. He knew in that moment of realization who these men were and why they were different. He cradled her head in his lap and patted her face. The other man made the same reassuring, regretful sound. “Poor dirl,” he said. Behind them, the old rork groaned painfully, grunted, settled down again into its nest. And Norna opened her eyes.

It was at first hard for them all to understand one another. Lomar’s vocabulary was a totally human one, and in this respect vastly larger than the two men’s. But they could speak the language of the rork, and often did, until they realized that he could not, then ceased. Some of their talk was in human tongue, though infinitely corroded — with effort, he could make it out. But they seemed to have words of their own, not rork-talk, yet unknown to him.
Yulloa,
for example, had something to do with food … or eating … or hunger. He could not quite understand what, though. And
ung-guoa-din
— or something like that — had to do with the land itself, or traveling over it; but however often they repeated it, gesturing, it never made sense to Lomar.

The taller of the pair — he called himself
Tun
— dimly remembered his own origins. There was a woman and she had had another, smaller child, one at her breast. And there was a man. A fire. He had gotten lost. He cried into the night and the darkness, and the night and the darkness had cried back at him. Terror, fright, wandering, and the thousand wailing voices of the night. And hunger. Then came a something out of the blackness and picked him up and took him away. Fed him, warmed him, with its own body. And in the daylight, played with him.

The other man of the two had been born — and with simple, vivid gestures which admitted of no misconception, he described the process of human birth — here in Rorkland, and knew nothing else. His mother? He pointed to the earth itself, calmly, with the slightest of shrugs. His father? His hand gestured, distantly.

Lomar thought of the difference between the fact and the fiction. Here were the “stolen children” of the old Tock legends. The lost infants. In the darkness no human ear could tell the sound of a human child from that of the crybabies. But —
the rorks could tell!
Far from having been eaten, the lost infants had been adopted. Far from having met with cruelty, they had met with kindness. He contrasted their treatment with that accorded the young rork captured by men, and the contrast made him shudder.

From time to time the old rork nearby groaned its pain and its discomfort; and the two rork-men spoke to it soothingly, caressed it where the touch would not be painful. Repulsive, frightful as it was to Lomar, the rork was obviously regarded with the utmost affection by the two other men. Evidently the relationship between them passed beyond mere symbiosis, although just what that relationship might consist of was more than he could guess at. He recalled his mother, on Old Earth, playing with a kitten…. No, it afforded little parallel.

If he was bewildered, Norna was terrified. She clung to him, understanding nothing of what he was trying to tell her. There was a rork! A rork! Nearer than she had ever been to a rork before! — nearer than anyone she had ever heard of had been to a rork … and lived. She wouldn’t look at it, covered her ears rather than have to hear it, trembled, trembled, trembled.

It was no wonder to her that the rork could speak; everyone in Wild Tockland knew that they could talk; it did not make them a bit less frightening. On the contrary.

“Leaves us run away,” she whispered, over and over. “Oh, leaves us run and hide … hide … Ranny …”

The presence of the two newcomers did nothing to reassure her. They were as naked as not, they touched the rork, spoke the rork’s language, wore the rork’s cast-off skin. How could one know that they were, in fact, not men at all? not
real
men — perhaps they were really rork! assuming for the moment and for some evil purpose, the form and shape of men.
Were-rork!
She did not know the phrase and only guessed at the concept. Lomar could see another Tock legend growing before his eyes.

Nor were matters made any easier when the smaller of the two (his name, as clearly as Lomar could master it, was
N’kof
) most matter-of-factly propositioned her. Her shuddering refusal, he received as calmly as he had made the offer. One proffered a drink to a guest, the guest declined the offer, it would be impolite as the host to notice the impoliteness — inexplicable as one might find it — of the refusal.

In the end they did go away; that is, Lomar and Norna and Tun did. Lomar had some notion that the departure was intended to relieve the old rork of the discomfort of their presence; but he was not sure. Communication between them was improving, but it was still largely a sometime thing as far as clarity went. N’kof was to remain behind until the process of casting the skin was completed. He and Tun attempted to explain why this should be so, but whether it was to guard the almost-helpless creature from physical harm, or merely to keep it company, or because there was some especial tie between them, either they could not make him know or they did not care to try.

So the three of them headed north, where only two had been bound before. Tun made no comment on Norna’s fear of him, but he walked on the other side of Lomar and at some little distance away; nor did he thereafter ever come closer to Norna or speak to her. The pace was slower now; it seemed quite clear to Lomar that the main reason for hurry no longer existed. The weather was even benign, and Tun knew of so many places where food was to be found — here, a cache of edible nuts; there, a hollow tree or a cave with fungus; a pond whose frozen waters, pierced, yielded fish — that they were hungry no longer.

They walked more slowly, they paused to eat, they paused to admire (or at least examine) views. But most of all they talked. There was much to talk about, but all of it was difficult, yet gradually became less so. And every hour that passed as they paced up snowy hills and strolled along glades lined with frost-browned redwing plants, under huge and ancient trees, Ran Lomar gave thanks in his heart that he had (for whatever reason) not killed the rork as it lay helpless before him. To this and to this alone he probably owed his life and Norna’s and the presence and guidance of Tun. For this man was no philosophical pacifist, no nobly savage vegetarian. His club cracked the skull of a rip which had once ventured too near — Norna clinging, shrieking, to the arm in which Ran held his pike — and more than once, skillfully thrown, brought down game.

Counting at first on their common humanity, Ran was a while in realizing that it was not this at all which made Tun not his enemy. In every way the latter regarded himself as closer to the rork than to other, strange men. It was because Lomar had not killed it when he could that Tun was now — if not his friend, then his companion. Ran reflected on the old principle that “a child raised among wolves will be a wolf” — not, of course, physically, but — in a way — mentally. How far did this hold trae of Tun and his like? He walked erect and not on all fours…. For one thing, Tun was not alone in being fostered by rorks. How many such “adoptions” there were or had ever been, neither he nor Ran Lomar had any idea. Nor did either know how old the oldest such foster child had ever been. But obviously some of them had been old enough to talk.

The small wanderlings, then, did not come altogether as so many
tabulae rasae
among the rork, and their human qualities and attributes and attitudes would have been in some measure maintained by the other humans they found in rorkland.
In some measure
… it would take years of close scientific testing and observation to determine even approximately how large that measure was. True, and inevitably, these people had been influenced by the rork among whom they grew up. But, just as a ray of light passing through a transulcent substance emerges tinged and colored by that substance, so the influences of the rork must have been transmuted by the vastly different nature of the human material.

It was a new and fascinating subject for research, but for now it must be confined to speculation. And speculation considered the matter that Ran had encountered none of these people in South Rorkland and had never heard of any in North Rorkland. He mentioned it to Tun, who mentally translated the reply into customary language.

“We stay in the heartland. We are afraid to be seen by the other men. If they kill our big ones they might kill us, too.”

Far from loathing the briar patch into which they had, so to speak, been thrown, they actually sought the safety of its deepest part. Far from the rorks being monsters and ravening man-eaters, the rorks were basically peaceful. But — Ran had to ask — did the rork never attack men? Were
none
of the stories true?

“Can you fly, Ran’
k
?” Tun asked, adding a rork-like click to his name as he always did when addressing him.

“No … of course not.”

Tun rumbled thoughtfully, seeking words. “No … you cannot fly. So, the big ones cannot attack you if you do not attack them. They cannot. They do not want to. They cannot. But if you attack them, they can. They do. Why not?” Why not indeed? Apparently, then, the rork were nonagressive by instinct.

From time to time as they progressed along their way, Tun, without a word, would sit down and become incommunicado, giving no sign that he either saw or heard them. Sometimes he was silent and sometimes he would rumble very softly, wordlessly, for all that Ran could tell; and always, at such times, he faced the sun. He was unable later, or unwilling, to explain this; merely shrugging slightly, smiling faintly his curious, indescribable and quite alien smile.

“Do the rork do this?” Ran asked.

A slight movement of the head, a slight movement of the hand, the little shrug, the mystic smile.

The rork … For centuries, men on Pia 2 had believed that the rorks were sharks. Now Ran was learning that they were actually much more like porpoises. There was much, much, much to learn.

Another man of the foundling sort, he was, thin and red-haired, red-bearded; and he had come down from a hill to speak to them. Tun had said nothing, nor Lomar, nor Norna — she hadn’t even moved or made a gesture. But, as if sensing her fear, the man approached cir-cuitously, avoiding her by some distance; and then, with unfamiliar sounds and incomprehensible gestures, came up to Tun and only then began to speak.

What he had to say was obviously distressing to him and to Tun. When their talk paused for a moment, Lomar interrupted to ask what was wrong.

“Up there — ” Tun gestured. “ — a man and three rorks. All shake.”

“Shake?” puzzled, Ran repeated the word.

The red-haired newcomer looked at him gravely, threw his head back a bit, said, hesitatingly, “Fee-ber.” Then, graphically, illustrated his meaning.

“Fever?” Sudden comprehension. “Tock fever?”

“Tah’
k
fee-ber,” agreed the red one. Tun made his familiar, regretful, consoling noise. There was nothing that anyone could do, no one suggested even trying to do anything, and so, with more antic gestures and sounds, they parted.

The country through which they now began to pass was one of broad meadows, with yellowed grass still thrusting forth above the thin snow. Ran reflected how different the history of the continent and those who dwelt upon it would have been, had cattle of any sort been introduced in the first settlement. But the Outside had apparently regarded it from the beginning merely as a source for redwing, and this it had remained. He wondered if the good which the plant had done the rest of the Galaxy made up for the ill it had done and was doing to its native world.