The Loafers of Refuge (20 page)

T
HESE PEOPLE LIVED
in wooden houses, and Timmy saw with dismay that the wood had been cut and fashioned with powered wood-working tools. Those tools could only have come from Earthmen.

The village was prosperous and well kept, the streets clean, the houses laid out in neat and ordered rows, not at all like the natural disorder so evident in a waquil-fruit grove. In fact, it looked like a small and primitive town such as he had seen on faraway Earth in history books, not a Loafer village at all.

He arrived just as the sun was hiding its face beyond the edge of the forest, and was in time to see a large group of women coming into the village from a broad dirt road that started on the other side of town and vanished in the distance. Behind them walked a small band of men, laughing and joking with the women, Timmy saw with dismay that all were dressed in Earthly clothes.

“May I help you, strange one?” said a pleasant voice, and Timmy slowly turned from staring at the returning band of villagers to confront a man only a little older than himself who stood quietly watching him.

“Yes, I am Timmy, son of Nyyub, Head Councillor of the tribe of Lindorn. I am on havasid, seeking knowledge, and passing out what poor news I possess. For now, I would ask what is the meaning of this large group of women, and the smaller group of men, I see coming towards the village at the end of the day, dressed in clothes made by the people of Earth.”

A look of marked respect came into the young adult’s eyes, and he stepped forward and offered his hand in friendship.
“I am Karul, Head Councillor of these people since the death of my father two years ago. You are the first Controller on havasid we have seen in more years than I can remember, and I bid you welcome. To answer your first question—those women you see are the women of my tribe who work in the homes of the people from Earth, and the men work on the farms or in the stores in the town. It is the money they bring home which enabled us to buy the wood from which we built these fine homes, and the tools with which to assemble it.”

Timmy heard the words but they failed to register. It was as if they numbed him with their impact, leaving him free of emotion or pain. He looked again over the small village, and saw, everywhere, the unmistakable hand of the Earth-man.

“And what is this building, and the shiny tree that towers above it?” Timmy asked, pointing to a long, low building in the middle of the little town, where the silvery tracery of a tri-D antenna jutted into the sky.

“That is our Council House, where we meet when matters that affect us all must come before the attention of the people,” said the Chief earnestly. “The silvery thing is part of a gift of the Earthpeople to our village. The other part is inside, and connects to this one through a thin vine. The one inside is called a tri-D set, and has a clear face upon which pictures appear, and a voice with which the pictures can speak and tell us many things. It is a wonderful gift, and we gather almost every night to watch the people in it do those funny things the Earthpeople do.”

They had been walking as they talked, and now Karul opened a door and ushered Timmy into his home. A middle-aged woman rose from a chair by a long low table, where she had been munching fruit from a bowl in its centre, and smiled at the stranger. “My mother, Nancil, widow of Jo’ran. She is the mistress of the house of the Head Councillor, for I have not taken a wife.”

Timmy muttered a greeting to Nancil, then continued his questions. “In my tribe, O Chief, we have no tri-D, but the story tellers have the children gather round, and they recite
those tales of our people which have been passed from father to son back to the beginning, and while they talk they project the emotions of the people of whom they speak. This seems to us a more satisfying and complete story than those told on the tri-D. Do you still have projectors in this tribe?”

“No, that is a practice our people discontinued over a year back, when we stopped holding the Controller’s school for children,” said Karul, speaking the fateful words without a trace of emotion.

There was a moment of silence, which began to stretch out interminably. Karul waited impatiently for the next question, then finally asked, “And what else would my visitor on havasid know?”

“I have already heard more than my heart can easily stand,” said Timmy wearily, rising to his feet. “I thank you for your hospitality, but now I will bid you farewell, for you are dead as Loafers and I would not linger in the presence of death.”

He walked to the door, but stopped a moment before stepping out, and said sombrely, “I can only say there was once greatness in this tribe, and now the Earthmen’s machines have drained it away. Two days’ hard walking to the west is a food-grove, and in the centre of this grove is a great hollow breshwahr tree, and in this tree I held in my arms Shuhallah the Barren, while the spark of life in her wavered, flickered and died. She was one of the greatest Controllers I have ever known, and your father Jo’ran the greatest councillor of whom I have ever heard. Only a great man could have compelled eight Controllers to each father a child by Shuhallah, in hope that her wonderful gifts might be preserved. And now I find the tribe that produced these two great ones no longer teaches Controlling to its youngsters, and the son of the greatest chief in history leads his people to their own destruction.”

There was a shocked and stricken silence in the hut, and Timmy turned and headed for the village outskirts at a fast walk. A Loafer’s sensitivity to other people’s feelings kept them the most polite people in the universe, and Timmy had
just committed the cardinal sins of deliberately hurting other people’s feelings and insulting a host.

“Wait!” came a hard, taut voice behind him.

Timmy stopped, turned and waited, in stony silence. Karul marched down the street towards him, and in the young man’s face was a controlled anger, and great grief.

“I think you go upon havasid not to gather knowledge but to confirm that which you already believe,” said Karul when once more he faced Timmy. A small crowd of curious people quickly gathered around the two tense young men, and watched the verbal duel attentively. “I think, furthermore, that you know not too much of that subject on which you presume to speak. It is true Shuhallah was the greatest of Controllers, and it is true my father fought hard to perpetuate her gift. Yet you see the result of it all. She is dead, and not one child lives. She is dead after giving birth more times than a dozen normal women, and all, all was in vain. Yet it need not have been! I have talked about this with the medicine man in the nearby town of Hairless Ones, and he tells me he could easily have cured the woman, so that childbirth would have been as nothing to her, and the babies would have lived. Is it so bad, then, that we seek to learn the knowledge of these Hairless Ones?”

“You seek to learn at the cost of sacrificing your own knowledge,” said Timmy, keeping his voice cairn by a visible effort. “You grasp at strange fruit on the higher branches, and let those fruits of our own making rot and fall in decay from the branches just before your eyes.”

“Is this so evil a thing? The Earthmen trace back their origins only a few thousands of their years, a time much shorter than the history of our own people, which any child can recite by the hour. And yet today they are a great people, billions strong, spread out over a hundred stars, and they live lives of magnificence and splendour such as savages like ourselves can scarcely conceive. And we, in all our long years of striving, have produced a few like Shuhallah the Barren, and Micka of your tribe, of whom I have heard. The Earthmen have taken the right path, the path to true greatness, and ourselves the hard and stony trail to nowhere. Now
we have changed our direction, and we care not what any upstart such as yourself thinks of this, or of us.”

There was anger in Karul’s voice and, Timmy finally saw, iron in his backbone. This young man was a worthy successor to Jo’ran his father, and the greatness had not died with the older man.

“I confess myself in error,” said Timmy slowly, marshalling his thoughts as he spoke. There was a visible sigh of relief from the people gathered around the duellists. “I thought, in my ignorance, that you had unwittingly abandoned the ancient ways of your fathers, were being led like runners to the claws of the flying cats, to be devoured by the Earth-men’s great stomach. I see it is not so. You have thought out this problem, and deliberately set your feet on the course you think best, and are pursuing your way with vigour and determination. And yet, have you taken a wise step? Should the people who produced one like Shuhallah abandon the teachings that led to her greatness, when in starting to act like Earthmen you must begin at the bottom of a tall, tall tree, never knowing if someday your children’s children may reach the higher branches? Have you asked yourselves’ what a whole tribe of people such as Shuhallah and little Micka might be able to do? As for the Hairless Ones, it is true that as a people they are great, mighty indeed—and yet, have you ever known a single Hairless One who was happy, or content with his lot? I say that the individuals among the Earthmen lead lives of individual unhappiness, while the dissatisfied among our own people are a small number and of no account. These things should be thought through before you abandon an old way of life for one new and strange.”

“We have thought it through,” said Karul calmly. His voice was less emotional than before, but just as determined. “There will be no more Shuhallahs among our people, to give birth to dead babies in travail and great pain. There will be no more forcing of honest men into painful acts which are against their consciences and their desires. We go our way in peace. In peace, go you yours.”

Timmy gravely inclined his head, in mute respect, and turned away.

He followed the broad road towards the nearby matter-transmitter and the town that had grown around it, the nearest Hairless Ones town to Refuge. He had run and walked for many days to reach this town, and yet he knew that the Earthmen, in their flying ships, could speed from one town to the other in a matter of a few hours. Better yet, the towering transmitters could send goods back and forth instantly, not just from one town to another but from star to star at unthinkable distances from each other. Still, the problem of sending people themselves had not been solved until the Loafers and breshwahr lent the Earthpeople their wisdom. And was the transmitter really needed? Would Micka, when she was a little older, be able to move from one spot to another instantly, and without the machine? Could this ability be taught to everyone? Already Micka could fly, and she was a child only ten years old. What might she do when the changes brought by puberty strengthened her powers?

There was no sure answer save to wait and see, and train and nurse her new strength as well as their weaker powers allowed. Time and hard work would supply the final answer.

The town was extremely unprepossessing when he finally reached it, the houses dingy and not well kept. The familiar rounded bulk of the transmitter building towered into the air, obscuring some of the stars that filled the clear night sky. There was very little difference between this town and Refuge, save that Refuge was a trifle larger and older, and these people had a luxury not possessed by the older community: they had hairy servants.

Timmy finally reached the familiar circular road that surrounded the transmitter building. He walked a quarter way around the circle and took the dirt road north. The two small moons of Refuge were high in the sky when he finally crawled off the road into some heavy brush and wrapped his wirtl-cloak around himself.

Eight days later, days of hard and weary travelling, he walked into the next Earthmen’s town.

The way had been slightly east and hard north for most of the distance, and the land had changed from lush forests to
rolling hilly country of wide valleys and small streams, where only a few white mountain tops loomed dimly in the distance. The elevation had been rising steadily since he started north, and was now at least a thousand feet higher than at the village of the young chief Karul. This was not food farming land but was almost ideal for cattle raising, and the rounded hills were covered with their heavy forms. Too large for the small predators to attack, of no interest to the herbivorous grogrocs, the cattle gorged themselves on the thick grass and grew fat on the supplemental grains grown for them in the cultivated areas. And except during the rugged winters they required little care or attention. Pound for pound, Timmy knew, they could not be raised as quickly and cheaply as the native fatbirds, the specialty of Carey and the farmers of the Refuge region, but they were an excellent substitute.

This town was new and small, and Timmy found that he and his wirtl-leaf cloak, obviously something new in these surroundings, attracted many curious glances. No one said anything to him, however, and he went his way in peace. He saw two other Loafers, both women, buying goods in the wooden stores, but no Loafer men or children. The women were dressed in Earthly fashion, short skirts and split-neck blouses over their luxuriant body hair, and Timmy thought they looked ridiculous. They seemed quite sure of themselves, however, and were paying for their purchases with Earth Central credit notes.

He turned east at the transmitter circle and headed back into the open countryside. This particular village was a good distance from the town, and it was approaching dark. He had a night to spend on the road. Did the women he had seen, he wondered, spend their nights in town? If so this village was in worse shape than Karul’s.

Several of the streams which flowed south combined just east of the town to become a small river, one which wandered through valley after valley in a crooked course that led it two miles sideways for each mile of progress. Timmy stopped on its bank just before dark and took a net from his pack, waded into the shallow water and projected the image of a large, deadly riverfish with which he was familiar. He
focused the image a hundred yards upstream, and waited. The water boiled with the dark forms of fleeing fish, some of whom unavoidably passed close by Timmy. The net flashed, missed, flashed again, and a small specimen was in Timmy’s hand. He held the quivering form a moment, reluctant to do what he must, then broke its neck with a swift twist.