Fuzzies and Other People Page 2

  At first, he could persuade none of the others to climb to the top of the cliff, and so started up alone. Before he had reached the top, however, they were all following, ashamed to stay below. There were no trees at the top, only scattered bushes and sparse grass and sandy ground. Everything was still and, until he found the footprints, quite ordinary.

  They resembled no footprints any of them had ever seen or heard of; they were a little like the footprints of People, and whatever had made them had walked on two feet. But there were no toe-prints, only a flat sole that widened at the middle and tapered to a rounded end, and a heel-mark that looked like the backward print of some kind of hoof. And they were huge, three times as big as the footprints of People. Whatever had made them had walked with a stride longer than a person’s height. There were two sets, only slightly different in size and shape.

  He wondered for a moment if they might not have been made by some kind of giant People. No, that couldn’t be; People were People, and there were no other kind. At least, nobody had ever told about giant People. But then, nobody had ever told about something that killed flying gotza with noises like thunder, either.

  Something immense and heavy had rested on the cliff top not long ago; it had broken bushes and flattened grass, and even crushed some stones. The strange footprints were all around where it had been. Those who had made the strange footprints must have brought this huge and heavy thing with them, and taken it away again. That meant that they must be very strong indeed.

  And it meant that they must be People of some kind. Only People carried things about with them. One of the males, the one they called Stabber because he liked to use the pointed end of his killing-club instead of the knob, thought of that too.

  “Bring big thing here; take away. We look for tracks, see which way go. Then we go other way.”

  Stabber didn’t wait for Wise One to do all the thinking. He would remember that, teach Stabber all he knew. Then, if he died, Stabber could lead the band. They started away from where the heavy thing had been, to the edge of the cliff. It was there that Little She found the first of the bright-things.

  She cried out and picked it up, holding it out to show. She should not have done that; she did not know what it was. But as it had not hurt her, Wise One took it to look at it. It was not alive, and he did not think it had ever been, though he could not be sure. There were live-things, things that moved, like People and animals, and live-things that had “made dead.” Then there were growing-things, like trees and grass and fruit and flowers; and there were ground-things, stones and rocks and sand and things like that. Usually, one could tell which was which, but not this thing.

  It was yellow and bright, and glistened in the sunlight—straight, round through, and a little longer than his hand, open at one end and closed at the other. Near the open end it narrowed abruptly and then became straight again. There was a groove all around the closed end, and in the middle of the closed end was a spot, whitish instead of yellow and dented as though something small and sharp had hit it very hard. Around this spot were odd markings. He sniffed at the open end; it had a sharp, bitter smell, utterly strange.

  A moment later Stonebreaker found another, a little smaller and more tapered from the closed end to the shoulder. Then he found a third, exactly like the one Little She had found.

  Three thunder-noises, one less loud than the others. Three bright-things, one smaller than the others. And two kinds of bright-things, and two sets of big footprints. That might mean something. He would think about it. They found tracks all around where the heavy thing had been, and also to and from the edge of the cliff, but none going away in any direction.

  “Maybe fly,” Stabber said. “Like bird, like gotza.”

  “And carry great heavy thing?” Big She asked incredulously.

  “How else?” Stabber insisted. “Come here, go away. Not make tracks on ground, then fly in air.”

  There was a gotza circling far away; Wise One pointed to it. Soon there would be many gotza, come to feed on the three that had been killed. Gotza ate their own dead; that was another reason why People loathed gotza. Better leave now. Soon the gotza would be close enough to see them. He could hear its wing-sounds very faintly.

  Wing-sounds! That was what they had heard at the spring; the shrill, wavering sound had been the wing-sound of the flying Big Ones.

  “Yes,” he said. “They flew. We heard them.”

  He looked again at the bright-thing in his hand, comparing it with the other two. Little She was saying: “Bright-things pretty. We keep?”

  “Yes,” he told her. “We keep.”

  Then Wise One looked at the markings on the closed end of the one in his hand. All sorts of things had markings—fruit and stones, and the wings of insects, and the shells of zatku. It was fun to find something with odd markings, and then talk about what they looked like. But nobody ever found anything that was marked:

  He didn’t wonder what the markings meant. Markings never meant anything. They just happened.

  iii

  Jack Holloway signed the paper—authorization for promotion of trooper Felix Krajewski, Zarathustra Native Protection Force, to rank of corporal—and tossed it into the OUT tray. A small breeze, pleasantly cool, came in at the open end of the prefab hut, bringing-with it from outside the noises of construction work to compete with the whir and clatter of computers and roboclerks in the main office beyond the partition. He laid down the pen, brushed his mustache with the middle knuckle of his trigger finger, and then picked up his pipe, relighting it. Then he took another paper out of the IN tray.

  Authorization for payment of five hundred and fifty sols, compensation for damage done to crops by Fuz-zies; endorsed as investigated and approved by George Lunt, Major Commanding, ZNPF. He remembered the incident: a bunch of woods-Fuzzies who had slipped through George’s chain of posts at the south edge of the Piedmont and gotten onto a sugar plantation and into mischief. Probably ruined one tenth as many sugar-plant seedlings as the land-prawns which the Fuzzies killed there would have destroyed. But the Government wasn’t responsible for land-prawns, and it was responsible for Fuzzies, and any planter who wouldn’t stick the Government for all the damages he could ought to be stuffed and put in a museum as a unique specimen. He signed it and reached for the next paper.

  It was a big one, a lot of sheets stapled together. He pried out the staple. Covering letter from Governor-General Bennett Rainsford, attention Commissioner of Native Affairs; and then another on the letterhead of the Charterless Zarathustra Company, Ltd., of Zarathustra, signed by Victor Grego, Pres. He grinned. That “Charterless” looked like typical Grego gallows humor; it also made sense, since it kept the old initials for the trademark. And for the cattle-brand. Anybody who’d ever tried rebranding a full-grown veldbeest could see the advantage of that.

  Acknowledgment of eighteen sunstones, total weight 93.6 carats, removed from Yellowsand Canyon for study prior to signing of lease agreement. Copy of receipt signed by Grego and his chief geologist, endorsed by Gerd van Riebeek, Chief of Scientific Branch, Zarathustra Commission for Native Affairs, and by Lieutenant Hirohito Bjornsen, ZNPF. Color photographs of each of the eighteen stones: they were beautiful, but no photograph could do justice to a warm sunstone, glowing with thermofluorescence. He looked at them carefully. He was an old sunstone-digger himself, and knew what he was looking at. One hundred seventeen thousand sols on the Terra gem market; S-42,120 in royalties for the Government, in trust for the Fuzzies. And this wasn’t even the front edge of the beginning; these were just the prospect samples. This time next year…

  He initialed Ben Rainsford’s letter, stapled the stuff together, and tossed it into the FILE tray. As he did, the communication screen beside him buzzed. Turning in his chair, he flipped the screen on and looked, through it, into the interior of another prefab hut like this one, fifteen hundred miles to the north on the Fuzzy Reservation. A young man, with light hair and a pleasantly tough and weather-beaten face
, looked out of it. He was in woodsclothes, the breast of his jacket loaded with clips of rifle cartridges.

  “Hi, Gerd. What’s new?”

  Gerd van Riebeek shrugged. “Still sitting on top of ‘steen billion sols’ worth of sunstones. Victor Grego was up; you heard about that?”

  “Yes. I was looking at the photos of those stones a moment ago. How much flint did he have to crack to get them?”

  “About seventy-five tons. He took them out from five different locations, on both sides of the canyon. Took him about eight hours, after he got the sandstone off.”

  “That’s better than I ever did; 1 thought I’d hit it rich when I got one good stone out of six tons of flint. We can tell the Fuzzies they’re all rich now.”

  “They’ll want to know if it’s good to eat,” Gerd said.

  They probably would. He asked if Gerd had been seeing many Fuzzies.

  “South of the Divide, yes, quite a few in small bands, mostly headed south or southwest. We get more on the movie film than we actually see. North of the Divide, hardly any. Oh, you remember the band we saw the day we found the sunstone flint? The ones who’d killed those goofers and were eating them?”

  _ Holloway laughed, remembering their consternation when the three harpies had put in an appearance and been knocked down by his and Gerd’s rifle fire.

  “ ’Thunder-noise kill gotza; maybe kill us next,’” he quoted. “‘Bad place this, make run fast.’ Man, were they a scared lot of Fuzzies.”

  “They didn’t stay scared long; they were back as soon as we were out of there,” Gerd told him. “I was up that way this morning and recognized the place; I set down for a look around. The dead harpies were pretty well cleaned up—other harpies and what have you—just a few bones scattered around. I was up on top, where we’d been. It was three weeks ago, and it’d rained a few times since; so, no tracks. I could hardly see where we’d set the aircar down. But I know the Fuzzies were there from what I didn’t find.”

  Gerd paused, grinning. Expecting Holloway to ask what.

  “The empties, two from my 9.7 and one from your Sterberg,” Holloway said. “Sure. Pretty-things.” He laughed again. Fuzzies always picked up empty brass. “You find some Fuzzies with empty cartridges, you’ll know who they are.”

  “Oh, they won’t keep them. They’ve gotten tired of them and dropped them long ago.”

  They talked for a while, and finally Gerd broke the connection, probably to call Ruth. Holloway went back to his paperwork. The afternoon passed, and eventually he finished everything they had piled up on him. He rose stiffly. Wasn’t used to this damned sitting on a chair all day. He refilled and lighted his pipe, got his hat, and looked for the pistol that should be hanging under it before he remembered that he wasn’t bothering to wear it around the camp anymore. Then, after a glance around to make sure he hadn’t left anything a Fuzzy oughtn’t to get at, he went out.

  They’d built all the walls of the permanent office that was to replace this hut, and they’d started on the roof. The ZNPF barracks and headquarters were finished and occupied; in front of the latter a number of contra-gravity vehicles were grounded: patrol cars and combat cars. Some of the former were new, light green with yellow trim, lettered ZNPF. Some of the latter were olive green; they and the men who operated them had been borrowed from the Space Marines. Across the little stream, he couldn’t see his original camp buildings for the new construction that had gone up in the past two and a half months; the whole place, marked with a tiny dot on the larger maps as Holloway’s Camp, had been changed beyond recognition.

  Maybe the name ought to be changed, too. Call it

  Hoksu-Mitto—that was what the Fuzzies called it—“Wonderful Place.” Well, it was pretty wonderful, to a Fuzzy just out of the big woods; and even those who went on to Mallorysport, a much more wonderful place, to live with human families still called it that, and looked back on it with the nostalgic affection of an old grad for his alma mater. He’d talk to Ben Rainsford about getting the name officially changed.

  Half a dozen Fuzzies were playing on the bridge; they saw him and ran to him, yeeking. They all wore zipper-closed shoulder bags, with sheath-knives and little trowels attached, and silver identity disks at their throats, and they carried the weapons that had been issued to them to replace their wooden prawn-killers—six-inch steel blades on twelve-inch steel shafts. They were newcomers, hadn’t had their vocal training yet; he put in the earplug and switched on the hearing aid he had to use less and less frequently now, and they were all yelling:

  “Pappy Jack! Heyo, Pappy Jack. You make play with us?”

  They’d been around long enough to learn that he was Pappy Jack to every Fuzzy in the place, which as of the noon count stood at three hundred sixty-two, and they all thought he had nothing to do but “make play” with them. He squatted down, looking at their ID-disks; all numbered in the twelve-twenties, which meant they’d come in day before yesterday.

  “Why aren’t you kids in school?” he asked, grabbing one who was trying to work the zipper of his shirt.

  “Skoo?. What is, skoo?”

  “School,” he told them, “is place where Fuzzies learn new things. Learn to make talk like Big Ones, so Big Ones not need put-in-ear things. Learn to make things, have fun. Learn not get hurt by Big One things.” He pointed to a long corrugated metal shed across the run. “School in that place. Come; I show.”

  He knew what had happened. This gang had met some Fuzzy in the woods who had told them about Hoksu-Mitto, and they’d come to get in on it. They’d been taken in tow by Little Fuzzy or Ko-Ko or one of George Lunt’s or Gerd and Ruth van Riebeek’s Fuzzies, and brought to ZNPF headquarters to be fingerprinted and given ID-disks and issued equipment, and then told to go amuse themselves. He started across the bridge, the Fuzzies running beside and ahead of him.

  The interior of the long shed was cool and shady, but not quiet. There were about two hundred Fuzzies, all talking at once; when he switched off his hearing aid, most of it was the yeek-yeeking which was the audible fringe sound of their ultrasonic voices. Two of George Lunt’s family, named Dillinger and Ned Kelly, were teaching a class—most of whom had already learned to pitch their voices to human audibility—how to make bows and arrows. Considering that they’d only become bowyers and f(etchers themselves a month ago, they were doing very well, and the class was picking it up quickly and enthusiastically. His own Mike and Mitzi were giving a class in fire-making, sawing a length of hard wood back and forth across the grain of a softer log. They had a score or so of pupils, all whooping excitedly as the wood-dust began to smoke. Another crowd stood or squatted around a ZNPF corporal who was using a jackknife to skin a small animal Terrans called a zarabunny. Like any good cop, he was continuously aware of everything that went on around him. He looked up.

  “Hi, Jack. Soon as that crowd over there have a fire going, I’ll show them how to broil this on a stick. Then I’ll show them how to use the brains to cure the skin, the way the Old Terran Indians did, and how to make a bowstring out of the gut.”

  And then, after they’d learned all this stuff, they’d go in to Mallorysport to be adopted by some human family and never use any of it. Well, maybe not. There were a lot of Fuzzies—ten, maybe twenty thousand of them. In spite of what Little Fuzzy was telling everybody about all the Fuzzies having Big Ones of their own, it wouldn’t work out that way. There just weren’t enough humans who wanted to adopt Fuzzies. So some of this gang would go to the ZNPF posts to the south or along the edge of Big Blackwater to the west, and teach other Fuzzies who’d pass the instruction on. Bows and arrows, fire, cooked food, cured hides. Basketry and pottery, too. Seeing this gang here, it was hard to realize just how primitively woods-Fuzzies had lived. Hadn’t even learned to make anything like these shoulder bags to carry things in; had to keep moving all the time, too, hunting and foraging.

  Fuzzy sapiens zarathustra—he was glad they’d gotten rid of the Fuzzy fuzzy holloway thing; people were beg
inning to call him Fuzzy-Fuzzy—had made one hell of a cultural jump since the evening he’d heard something say, “Yeek,” in his shower stall.

  Little Fuzzy, across the shed, saw him and waved, and he waved back. Little Fuzzy had a class too, on how to behave among the Big Ones. For a while, he talked with Corporal Carstairs and his pupils. The crowd he’d brought in with him wanted to stay there; he managed to get them away and over to where his own Ko-Ko and Cinderella and the van Riebeeks’ Syndrome and Superego were giving vocal lessons.

  It had been the Navy people, temporarily sheltering his own family on Xerxes before the Fuzzy trial, who had found out about their ultrasonic voices and made special hearing aids. After the trial, when Victor Grego, once the Fuzzies’ archenemy, acquired a Fuzzy of his own and became one of their best friends, he and Henry Stenson, the instrument maker, designed a small self-powered hand-phone Fuzzies could use to transform their voices to audible frequencies. Then Grego discovered that his own Fuzzy, Diamond, was speaking audibly with the power-unit of his Fuzzyphone dead; he had learned to imitate the sounds he had heard himself making. Diamond was able to teach the trick; now his pupils were teaching others.

  This class had several of the Stenson-Grego Fuzzy-phones, things with Fuzzy-size pistol grips and grip switches. They were speaking with them, and then releasing the switches and trying to make the same sounds themselves. Ko-Ko seemed to be in charge of the instruction.

  “No, no!’* he was saying. “Not like that. Make talk away back in mouth, like this.”

  “Yeek?”

  “No. Do again with hold-in-hand thing. Hold tight, now; make talk.”

  The van Riebeeks’ Syndrome didn’t seem to be doing anything in particular; Holloway spoke to her:

  “You make talk to these. Tell about how learn to make talk like Big Ones.” He turned to the Fuzzies who had come in with him. “You stay here. Do what these tell you. Soon you make talk like Big Ones too. Then you come to Pappy Jack, make talk; Pappy Jack give something nice.”