Part 8 (1/2)
”The deuce; I'd never have guessed that, as small and dark as you are.”
”Well, another of my great-grandmothers was j.a.panese,” she replied.
”The family name's French. I'm also part Spanish, part Russian, part Italian, part English ... the usual modern Argentine mixture.”
”I'm an Argentino, too. From La Rioja, over along the Sierra de Velasco. My family lived there for the past five centuries. They came to the Argentine in the Year Three, Atomic Era.”
”On account of the Hitler bust-up?”
”Yes. I believe the first one, also a General von Schlichten, was what was then known as a war-criminal.”
”That makes us partners in crime, then,” she laughed. ”The Quintons had to leave France about the same time; they were what was known as collaborationists.”
”That's probably why the Southern Hemisphere managed to stay out of the Third and Fourth World Wars,” he considered. ”It was full of the descendants of people who'd gotten the short end of the Second.”
”Do you speak the Kragan language, general?” she asked. ”I understand it's entirely different from the other Equatorial Ulleran languages.”
”Yes. That's what gives the Kragans an entirely different semantic orientation. For instance, they have nothing like a subject-predicate sentence structure. That's why, Stanley-Browne to the contrary notwithstanding, they are entirely non-religious. Their language hasn't instilled in them a predisposition to think of everything as the result of an action performed by an agent. And they have no definite parts of speech; any word can be used as any part of speech, depending on context. Tense is applied to words used as nouns, not words used as verbs; there are four tenses--spatial-temporal present, things here-and-now; spatial present and temporal remote, things which were here at some other time; spatial remote and temporal present, things existing now somewhere else, and spatial-temporal remote, things somewhere else some other time.”
”Why, it's a wonder they haven't developed a Theory of Relativity!”
”They have. It resembles ours about the way the Wright Brothers'
airplane resembles this aircar, but I was explaining the Keene-Gonzales-Dillingham Theory and the older Einstein Theory to King Kankad once, and it was beautiful to watch how he picked it up. Half the time, he was a jump ahead of me.”
The aircar began losing alt.i.tude and speed as they came in over Kraggork Swamp; the treetops below blended into a level plain of yellow-green, pierced by glints of stagnant water underneath and broken by an occasional low hillock, sometimes topped by a stockaded village.
”Those are the swamp-savages' homes,” he told her. ”Most of what you find in Stanley-Browne about them is fairly accurate. He spent a lot of time among them. He never seems to have realized, though, that they are living now as they have ever since the first appearance of intelligent life on this planet.”
”You mean, they're the real aboriginal people of Uller?”
”They and the Jeel cannibals, whom we are doing our best to exterminate,” he replied. ”You see, at one time, the dominant type of mobile land-life was the thing we call a sh.e.l.losaur, a big thing, running from five to fifteen tons, plated all over with silicate sh.e.l.l, till it looked like a six-legged pine-cone. Some were herbivores and some were carnivores. There are a few left, in remote places--quite a few in the Southern Hemisphere, which we haven't explored very much. They were a satisfied life-form. Outside of a volcano or an earthquake or an avalanche, nothing could hurt a sh.e.l.losaur but a bigger sh.e.l.losaur.
”Finally, of course, they grew beyond their sustenance-limit, but in the meantime, some of them began specializing on mobility instead of armor and began excreting waste-matter instead of turning it to sh.e.l.l.
Some of these new species got rid of their sh.e.l.l entirely. _Parah.o.m.o sapiens Ulleris_ is descended from one of these.
”The sh.e.l.losaurs were still a serious menace, though. The ancestors of the present Ulleran, the proto-geeks, when they were at about the Java Ape-Man stage of development, took two divergent courses to escape the sh.e.l.losaurs. Some of them took to the swamps, where the sh.e.l.losaurs would sink if they tried to follow. Those savages, down there, are still living in the same manner; they never progressed. Others encountered problems of survival which had to be overcome by invention. They progressed to barbarism, like the people of the fis.h.i.+ng-villages, and some of them progressed to civilization, like the Konkrookans and the Keegarkans.
”Then, there were others who took to the high rocks, where the sh.e.l.losaurs couldn't climb. The Jeels are the primitive, original example of that. Most of the North Uller civilizations developed from mountaineer-savages, and so did the Zirks and the other northern plains nomads.”
”Well, how about the Kragans?” Paula asked. ”Which were they?”
Von Schlichten was scanning the horizon ahead. He pulled over a pair of fifty-power binoculars on a swinging arm and put them where she could use them.
”Right ahead, there; just a little to the left. See that brown-gray spot on the landward edge of the swamp? That's King Kankad's Town.
It's been there for thousands of years, and it's always been Kankad's Town. You might say, even the same Kankad. The Kragan kings have always provided their own heirs, by self-fertilization. That's a complicated process, involving simultaneous male and female masturbation, but the offspring is an exact duplicate of the single parent. The present Kankad speaks of his heir as 'Little Me,' which is a fairly accurate way of putting it.”
He knew what she was seeing through the gla.s.ses--a ma.s.sive b.u.t.te of flint, jutting out into the swamp on the end of a sharp ridge, with a city on top of it. All the buildings were multi-storied, some piling upward from the top and some clinging to the sides. The high watchtower at the front now carried a telecast-director, aimed at an automatic relay-station on an unmanned orbiter two thousand miles off-planet.
”They're either swamp-people who moved up onto that rock, or they're mountaineers who came out that far along the ridge and stopped,” she said. ”Which?”
”n.o.body's ever tried to find out. Maybe if you stay on Uller long enough, you can. That ought to be good for about eight to ten honorary doctorates. And maybe a hundred sols a year in book royalties.”