She was receptive to the idea as it fitted her own experience and concepts. The groups of natives near the polar colonies were in the habit of handling their foreign affairs by exchanging 'mothers'-actually judges-who ruled on matters arising out of differences in custom; Oscar had! presented the matter in the same terms. ^
He had thus laid the groundwork for a consulate, extraterritorial courts, and an Earthman police force; the mission, as he saw it, was complete- provided he could get back to base and report before other prospectors, mining engineers, and boomers of all sorts started showing up.
Only then had he spoken to her of getting back-to have her suggest that he remain permanently as 'mother' for his people. (The root word translated as 'mother' is used for every position of authority in the Venerian speech; the modifiers and the context give the word its current meaning-)
The proposal left Oscar temporarily speechless. 'I didn't know what to say next,' he confessed later. 'From her point of view she was honoring me. If I turned it down, it might offend her and crab the whole deal.' ';
'Well, how did you talk your way out of it?' Tex wanted j to know. 'Or did you?' |
'I think so. I explained as diplomatically as possible that I was too young for the honor and that I was acting as 'mother only because Thurlow was laid up and that, in any case, my 'great mother of many had other work which I was obliged, by custom, to carry out.'
'I guess that held her.'
'I think she just filed it away as a point to negotiate. The Little People are great negotiators; you'll have to come to New Auckland some time and listen to the proceedings of a mixed court.'
'Keep to the point,' suggested Matt
'That is to the point-they don't fight; they just argue until somebody gives in. Anyhow, I told her that we had to get Thurlow back where he could get surgical attention. She understood that all right and expressed regret for the tenth time that her own little girls couldn't do the trick. But she had a suggestion for curing the boss.'
'Yes?' demanded Matt. 'What was it?' Matt had appointed himself Thurlow's caretaker, working with the amphibian healers who now had him as a professional responsibility. He had taught them to take his pulse and to watch his respiration; now there was always one of the gentle creatures x squatting on the end of Thurlow's couch, watching him with grave eyes. They seemed genuinely distressed at not being able to help him; the lieutenant had remained in a semi-coma, coming out of it enough occasionally that it had been possible to feed him and give him water, but never saying anything that the cadets could understand. Matt found that the little nurses were quite unsqueamish about feeding a helpless person; they accepted offensive necessities with the same gallantry as a human nurse.
But Thurlow, while he did not die, did not get any better.
'The old girl's suggestion was sort of radical, but logical. She suggested that her healers take Burke's head apart first, to see how it was made. Then they could operate on the boss and fix him.'
'What?' said Matt.
Tex was having trouble controlling himself. He laughed so hard he strangled, then got hiccoughs and had to be pounded on the back. 'Oh, boy!' he finally exploded, tears streaming down his cheeks, 'this is wonderful. I can't wait to see Stinky's face. You haven't told him, have you?'
'No.'
'Then let me. Dibs on the job.'
'I don't think we ought to tell him,' objected Oscar. 'Why kick him when he's down?'
'Oh, don't be so noble! It won't hurt any to let him know that his social rating is 'guinea pig.' '
'She really hates him, doesn't she?' Matt commented.
'Why shouldn't she?' Tex answered. 'A dozen or more of her people dead-do you expect her to regard it as a schoolboy prank?'
'You've both got her wrong,' Oscar objected. 'She doesn't hate him.'
'Huh?'
'Could you hate a dog? Or a cat-'
'Sure could,' said Tex. 'There was an old tomcat we had once-'
'Pipe down and let me finish. Conceding your, point, you can hate, a cat only by placing it on your own social level. She doesn't regard Burke as ... well, as people at all, because he doesn't follow the customs. We're 'people* to her, because we do, even though we look like him. But Burke in her mind is just a dangerous animal, like a wolf or a shark, to be penned up or destroyed-but not hated or punished.
'Anyhow,' he went on, 'I told her it wouldn't do, because we had an esoteric and unexplainable but unbreakable religious tabu that interfered-that blocked her off from pressing the point. But I told her we'd like to use Burke's ship to get the lieutenant back. She gave it to me. We go out tomorrow to look at it.'
'Well, for crying out loud-why didn't you say so, instead of giving all this build-up?'
They had made much the same underwater trip as on entering the city, to be followed by a longish swim and a short trip overland. The city mother herself honored them with her company.
The Gary was everything Burke had claimed for her, modern, atomic- powered, expensively outfitted and beautiful, with sharp wings as graceful as a swallow's.
She was also a hopeless wreck.
Her hull was intact except the ruined door, which appeared to have been subjected to great heat, or an incredible corrosive, or both. Matt wondered how it had been done and noted it as still another indication that the Venerians were not the frog-seal-beaver creatures his Earth-side prejudices had led him to think.,
The inside of the ship had looked fairly well, too, until they started checking over the controls. In searching the ship the amphibians, to whom even a common door latch was a puzzle, had simply burned their way through impediments-including the access hatch to the ship's autopilot and gyro compartment. The circuits of the ship's nervous system were a mass of fused and melted junk.
Nevertheless they spent three hours convincing themselves that it would take the resources of a dockyard to make the ship fly again.. They gave up reluctantly at last and started back, their spirits drooping.
Oscar had at once taken up with the city mother the project of recovering the jeep. He had not mentioned it before as the Gary seemed the better bet. Language difficulties would have hampered him considerably-their hostesses had no word for 'vehicle,' much less a word for 'rocket ship'-but the Gary gave him something to point to wherewith to explain.
When she understood what he was driving at she gave orders which caused the party to swim to the point where the cadets had first been picked up. The cadets made sure of the spot by locating the abandoned litter and from there Oscar had led them back to the sinkhole that was the grave of the jeep. There he acted out what had happened, showing her the scar in the bank where the jeep had balanced and pacing off on the bank the dimensions of the ship.
The mother-of-many discussed the problem with her immediate staff while the cadets waited, ignored rather than excluded. Then she abruptly gave the order to leave; it was getting on in the late afternoon and even the Venerians do not voluntarily remain out in the jungle overnight.
That had ended the matter for several days. Oscar's attempts to find out what, if anything, was being done about the jeep were brushed off as one might snub a persistent brat. It left them with nothing to do. Tex played his harmonica until threatened with a ducking in the room's center pool. Oscar sat around, nursing his arm and brooding. Matt spent much of his time watching over Thurlow and became well acquainted with the nurses who never left him, especially one bright-eyed cheerful little thing who called herself Th'wing.'
Th'wing changed his viewpoint about Venerians. At first he regarded her much as he might a good and faithful, and unusually intelligent dog. By degrees he began to think of her as a friend, an interesting companion-and as 'people.' He had tried to tell her about himself and his own kind and his own world. She had listened with alert interest, but without ever taking her eyes off Thurlow.
Matt was forced willy-nilly into the concepts of astronomy-and came up against a complete block. To Th'wing there was the world of water and swamp and occasional dry land; above that was the endless cloud. She knew the Sun, for her eyes, perceptive to infrared, could see it, even though Matt could not, but she thought of it as a disc , of light and warmth, not as a star.
As for other stars, none of her people had ever seen them and the idea did not exist. The notion of another planet was not ridiculous; it was simply incomprehensible- Matt got nowhere.
He told Oscar about it. 'Well, what did you expect?' Oscar had wanted to know. 'All the natives are like that. They're polite but they think you are talking about your religion.'
