Rork! (12 page)

And then, almost with a click, he came back to the most immediate present. So — Tock fever had penetrated here; had perhaps been carried here in the person of some foundling child; and even the rorks were susceptible to it. A disease which afflicted different species was by no means unknown. Still, still, he was assuming, jumping to conclusions. Perhaps the malady had its origin among the rork and had passed from them to the Tocks. What its effects might be upon the rorks, he did not know. What its effects were on the Tocks, he knew full well.

Something else occurred to him, and he asked about it. When the rips swarmed —

“Not through here, not this part of the country,” Tun said. “Not this last time. Usually we have warning of when they are coming, which way they are going. And we get out … when we can.” As for the rorks “leading” the rips: never. Those which Ran and Harb had seen racing in advance of the swarm had been fleeing before them. Usually the big ones could amply hold their own against the smaller predatory creatures. It was only during the cyclical periods when the latter swarmed, that they were too many for the rork.

Thus the education of Ran Lomar continued as he and Norna and Tun advanced north. More could have been learned, more seen and experienced, if Norna had not been with them. Although her fears of the strange men seemed to abate considerably, they never entirely vanished. As for the rorks, her attitude changed sufficiently so that she would not run, screaming, at the near sight of one … if it were not so near … if Lomar was right next to her, if he did not move nearer to it. But more than that she did not change.

Nor did she ever develop any curiosity about them; this irked him the most, but his annoyance ebbed when he realized that the rorks did not seem to have a very great curiosity about them either. Perhaps because Tun was sufficient passport, and, beyond the guaranty of peace that his presence afforded, other questions did not much matter; perhaps because they were still affected by the cold and the changes their bodies were undergoing.

So they passed Hollow Rock, towering in the distance, and one day, walking down a narrow pass between overhanging ledges of rock and hearing the slow drip, drip of the waters, some few days before sighting Last Ridge, Norna herself put it into words.

“Ranny?” she said, pausing and looking at him with a mixture of pleasure and perplexity. “Ranny? Listen…. The snow is melting.”

“Yes. It usually does at this time of year…. Doesn’t it?”

Half-annoyed, half-playful, she hit him a light blow at the shoulder. “Yes,
it
does melts usually. But, Ranny, it means that Cold Time is just abouts over — and we be just about there, to North, to Guild.

“And we be still alive!”

Tun would go no farther when Last Ridge was sighted. He had told them that he would not, but his vanishing without a word was so unexpected that Ran called and they looked and waited for quite a while before accepting that he had really left them.

There was a smoke on the Ridge. The two of them greeted it with one of their own, and so they did not find that their coming was unexpected. The smoke had not been intended for their benefit. One Shortey, a Tame Tock, had taken a notion to go and fish the series of ponds fed by the same pool in which (it seemed a million years ago) Lomar and Rango had bathed. With him went his current woman and a half-grown boy who was certainly her son, possibly Shortey’s son, and possibly her own half-brother. The familial relationships of the Tame Tocks were often complex enough to baffle a combined team of anthropologists and geneticists. The fire had been kindled for nothing more far-sighted than grilling a meal.

The presence of a smoke way up in the middle of the air could not have created more alarm in Shortey’s housey than did the one emerging from Rorkland. Probably because of the prevalence of fever, no hunting party had gone thither that Cold Time. What the fire might portend, therefore, Shortey could not guess, and did not intend to try. He took off in the general direction of Tocky Town, followed at a very short distance by the morganatic Mrs. Shortey
de facto.
The boy, nicely calculating the distance of the other smoke against his adolescent appetite, remained behind to wait for the fish to finish.

Last Ridge had sunk into the twilight, emerged again from the dawn, and was gradually growing larger when Lomar’s attention was attracted to a drone from overhead. He loped off into a clear spot, dragging Norna with him, and waved wildly to the skimmer with the Station Officer’s banneret streaming from the fantail.

“Cute, you have given me one Hell of a winter,” said Tan Carlo Harb, his large face grave.

“We haven’t had such a pleasant one ourselves,” Lomar answered. “Oh — and allow me to introduce Miss Norna …” His voice trailed away. For the life of him, he could not remember her family name; she, seemingly stricken dumb, did not help him. “She’s the Mister Mal-lardy’s kinswoman, and Old Guns’s daughter.” Something made him add, “She’s my … not my
daughter,
damn it, but — ”

The SO said, “I quite understand. I
think. Well.
You had better hop aboard, don’t you think? Before something with eighty-seven legs comes bounding out of the bushes and does simply unspeakable things to us.
Hop!
”

They hopped.

Below and behind them Rorkland receded into a post-impressionistic mist. Seated once again in the sldmmer, with its familiar smell of fuel and preservative and the SO’s scented waters, the SO’s familiar presence and uniform, Ran felt a curious kind of was-it-all-a-dream sensation creep over him. Once again in his ears rang the coarse, loud shouts of Flinders and of Flinders’ men, the rumbling of the rorks, the singular intonations of Tun’s voice. On one side of him was the clean, well-tailored, well-nourished form of the SO. But on the other was Norna, still in the same dress she’d had on when kidnapped —

“I don’t wish to sound offensive in any way at all,” Harb said, his face turned away. “But the face of the matter is, you know, that I’m afraid you’ve been in recent contact with something, well, un-
pleasant,
and, well …”

Lomar laughed. “The fact is,” he said, “we both stink? Don’t we? It would be a miracle if we didn’t. Funny, though. On Old Earth I began to miss hot water if I’d been away from it for an hour. And — ”

“In the glove compartment,” Harb said, stiffly, “you will find an atomizer. Please do not take anything personally. Just
spray.
”

Spraying, Ran concluded, “ — and this time I never even thought about it…. There … How’s that?” A spicy, somewhat cloying odor settled around them.

Harb turned his head. “Oh, ever so much better. You will notice. That I have not asked you. One single word. About where you have
been.
Let alone
why.
But. If you contìnue. To say nothing. I. Shall scream.
Well?
”

Ran let his breath out slowly. “Well …” he began. Beside him Norna huddled, mute, afraid even to lean over the side or peer through the window.

“Common sense tells me that you cannot possibly have come all the way from the South on foot and with this young person. Not all through Rorkland. Impossible. But logic tells me that you must have. You are such a rather disgusting young hardnose, you know … I’m afraid that you did … even though you couldn’t.
Well?
”

The snowy fields, the smell of slow-burning match punk, the sour, starved stench of Flinders Camp, the sullen gaunt escarpments of the great black Crag, the freezing rain and stinging snow, the marvelous multicolored splendors of the Plain of Lights, the rork that talked, the archaic smiles of the men who lived among them like living legends: the whole unpremeditated fulfilment, and so much morel of his dream plans for his life on Pia 2 … He had not even realized that he had begun to talk until the SO brought the skimmer down, and in the unexpected silence he heard his own voice.

• • •

As far as any effect was concerned, he might as well have held his breath to cool his porridge. It would be too much to say that Tan Carlo Harb did not believe him, the man obviously did believe something of what he’d been told, but how much was questionable. The summing-up went about like this.

Lomar’s long absence
: “Obviously not your fault.”

Murder of Old Guns
: “Too bad; should have known better.”

Kidnapping of Ran and Norna
: “Rough notions of hospitality they have down there, eh, cute?”

Flinders’ scheme to attack Guild Station
: “Ha ha ha ha ha!”

The Plain of Lights
: “Quite a sight, eh?”

Rorks can speak
: “So can parrots, you know — ‘Polly wants a redweed,’ eh? Hee hee!”

The foundling-men
: “Fattening them for the kill. Tsk.”

And so it went, and so it went, until, finally, “Well, well, well, too bad. A whole winter shot to Hell. Worry?

“You have no idea how I worried about you. Now. What I want you to do. Take your nice hot shower … and don’t spare the soap. Get a good night’s, mmm, sleep — ” Sly side glance at Norna, “ — and in the morning get yourself down to the Medical Aide. You’ve had a bad spell of, well, something or other, and we want to make
sure,
don’t we, that there are no weeny bugs lingering on in your system. And then come to dinner. I’ve unpacked a new game I’m eager to play with someone of reasonable intelligence. Trot, now.”

No orders to call out the troops, no instructions, no questions, no plans, and barely any interest.

“I might have known,” he said to Norna. But it was just one incident among so many, and there was so much else to do and to think about.
A hot shower
… It was the first one that Norna had ever had which wasn’t a bucket and wash-rag affair, and Ran’s own eagerness in his own lustrations didn’t prevent him from teaching her how it was done. The shower lasted for several hours, with interesting sidelights and more than one new game which would have interested the SO, if only negatively.

No committee of indignant matrons called to protest Norna’s presence. Some ignored it, others found it a novelty justifying the irregularity, and many were too frozen by surprise to decide on any policy. Washed and groomed and dressed in hastily begged and borrowed clothes, invariably a trifle too big in some places and a trifle too small in others, Norna made a good appearance. When someone’s wife and someone’s daughter decided that she was safe enough to make friends with, her naive reactions to so much that they took for granted, and even were bored by, amused and enchanted them. She, in turn, was delighted to have for the first time in her life friends of her own sex who were part of a world previously glimpsed only via her father, and later, Lomar.

Norna, then, was no problem. Neither, it turned out, was the Medical Aide, a little grey mole of a man who botanized a bit and played the sarn a bit off-key, and drank more than a bit.

“Nothing wrong with you,” the MA said. “Just a bit under the norm for weight. Eat hearty. Care for a drink?”

“I haven’t had a drink for — how long? Yes. Certainly. By all means.”

Bottles and glasses were deftly and quickly produced from the medical cabinet and the tiny physician happily prepared two noggins. “Dead rorks,” he said.

“Cheers,” said Lomar, after a moment.

“What do you know about Tock fever?” he asked, after another moment.

The Medical Aide blinked. “Not very much. I don’t treat Tocks, you know. I’d need a well-staffed, well-stocked hospital to do that. Oh, once in a while I take care of a servant, glad to do another Guildsman a favor. Otherwise I’d be overrun, well, no, have another drink, I’ll have one with you, keep you company, no, actually, I wouldn’t be. Most of the real bush Tocks, you know, they’re scared to death of me, huh huh, can’t think why —

“So … Tock fever? Oh, it’s a sort of low-grade fever that stays on and on. Hard to shake off. Some die of it, some don’t. Why?”

The faint, foetal form of a notion was beginning its first stirrings in Lomar’s mind. “Do you have any records of the various outbreaks?” he asked.

Mildly puzzled, the little man stroked his lower lip. “No records,” he said. “Nooo…. That is. Well. What I mean to say — are you interested in botany? Oh. Pardon. I get carried away, hardly an-y-one is interested in botany, besides me. Ah, now, records. I keep a diary. Kept a diary, young man, for for-ty
years.
Whatdoyouthinkofthat?”

Marvelous. Ran thought it was marvelous. In fact, wonderful. The mousy little medico beamed. And in his diary he noted down, as a matter of course, the day’s events and the day’s reports. Including, when it occurred, outbreaks of Tock fever. It was all down in his diary, a volume per year. Could he go through them and make a sort of chart of the outbreaks, year, month, day? Why? yes … yes…. Yes, he could. And in fact, would.

“Take a little
time,
though,” he warned cheerfully. “After all, you know, huh huh, for-ty
years
— But I don’t mind. Glad to do a Guildsman a favor.

“Are you interested in botany? Oh, I asked — Have another drink.”

Ran descended on, rather than reported to, his work with an accumulation of energy that demanded not just relief but satisfaction. He found that during his absence his plans had been allowed to collapse entirely. Business was slower than ever. Old Cap still superintended the slow process of the redwing on its way through the drying shed, just as he always had, according to the book. The storekeeper took what the Tocks brought in, making the usual deductions for winter-nipped weed, and handed out the usual chits. The Tocks bought their clothes, their booze-makings, new hack blades, and so on, and went back to their feculent houseys for their usual hanky-panky.

And production had continued to go down, down, derry-down-dee.

He pored over the records, he haunted the curing sheds, he spoke to the Tocks coming in with their bundles of weed; he brooded over his memory of all Rorkland, ablaze with redwing, so it had seemed. And when done with this, he sat for hours at his desk, drawing up schemes … and then discarding them.

“Have a drink?” said Reldon.

“Have a drink?” said Arlan.

“Have a drink?” said Harb.

“Have a drink?” said Cap.

And Ran answered, “Why … yes … Thanks. I will …”

At nights there was Norna, like a little girl eager to tell of the day’s novelties; all, to her, great events. At first this was cute, then it grew dull, then tedious, and, finally, annoying. She ceased to bother him, let him tumble her, fall off to sleep.

One day that grizzled Tom Thumb, the Medical Aide, came trotting into his office, crying, “I’ve never showed you my mosses, have I? Look! Look! See how they’re mounted! All my own system, you know. Now, here we have — Oh, no; no we don’t, either. Ah —
here —
”

Memory stirred in Lomar’s mind, first dim, then glowing.

“Did you ever get around to checking your diary for me?”

Up from his mosses the little man looked, surprised. “Why, yes. Didn’t I ever give it you? Oh, I am sorry.” He rummaged in his pockets, triumphed. “
Here
we are. Now, yes, the mosses — ”

In his hands, the MA, mosses and all, finally gone, Lomar had what might be one of the most important pieces of documentation in the history of Pia 2. On the other hand, failing corroboration, it might be just an interesting piece of paper. He put it away, carefully, and went down to seek the corroboration.

• • •

The sunken building that held the massive generators seemed at first deserted, but after Ran had called and shouted a bit, a door slid open and the clean-up Tock appeared. He peered, pulled his head back in, finally reappeared, beckoning. Ran followed him down the shallow ramp and up the corridor, an odd and rather a strong scent growing odder and stronger, ending up in a room bare except for a table, chair, one jug, and some unfamiliar-looking equipment.

Elzel Eads, the Engineering Aide, looked up, wiping his brick-colored face. “Ho, an unexpected pleasure,” he said. “You are scientifically inclined, I presume. You should be interested in this little experiment.”

“Is that what smells?”

“ ‘Smells’? Smells, Hell. It stinks. We haven’t got all the what you might call bugs ironed out yet.” He held up the jug. “Know what this is?” Ran shook his head. A proud smile curved the EA’s moon-shaped face. “This is, well, what you might call the triumph of art over nature. Ever heard of tockyrot? Course you have. Turble stuff, isn’t it? Just full of
im
-pure-ities. No wonder those poor bastards, so to speak, are all the time sick and stuff. Right, Chid?”

The Tock nodded, solemnly, his eyes on the jug.

“Well, my heart bleeds for those poor sick bastards, so what I have done, I have taken and made a big batch of that stuff — tockyrot, I’m referring to — which is a fermented drink … you understand the process of fermentation, as it’s called? Right? And I have — get this now — I have
dis-tilled.
Yessir. Distilled all those turble impurities right out of it. And the result, it is as pure and mellow as mother’s milk, if you’ll pardon the expression. Here. Taste.”