Lower than Angels Read online

  Finally, he picked an area on the eastern shore of the principal continent and drifted down toward it, slipping in over the swelling expanse of an island-speckled ocean. Following the curve of a chain of atolls extending almost completely across the sea, he lost altitude steadily, finding it possible now, with some of the tension draining out of him, to enjoy the almost effortless drift through the quiet sky and the quick responsiveness of his ship. It wasn’t quite as he’d dreamed it, but it was good. The mother ship was far away, and here on this world he was alone, coming down just above the tops of the breakers, now, settling gently on a broad and gleaming beach.

  The anchoring field switched on, and bored down until it found bedrock. The sand around the ship pressed down in a shallow depression. Imbry turned away from the beach and began to walk into the jungle, his detectors and pressor fields tingling out to all sides of him. He walked slowly in the direction of a village, wearing his suit with its built-in equipment, with his helmet slung back between his shoulder blades.

  The jungle was typical rain forest. There were trees which met the climatic conditions, and therefore much resembled ordinary palms. The same was true of the thick undergrowth, and, from the sound of them, of the avian fauna. The chatter in the trees was not quite as harsh as the Terrestrial version, nor as shrill. From the little he’d seen, that seemed typical—a slightly more leisurely, slightly gentler world than the Pacific belt of Earth. He walked slowly, as much from quiet enjoyment as from caution. Overhead, the sky was a warm blue, with soft clouds hanging over the atolls at the horizon. The jungle ran with bright color and deep, cool green. Imbry’s face lost its drawn-up tension, and his walk became relaxed.

  He found a trail in a very short time, and began following it, trusting to his detectors and not looking around except in sun-pie curiosity. And quite soon after that, his detector field pinged, and the pressor pushed back against the right side of his chest. He turned it down, stopped, and looked in that direction. The field was set for sentient life only, and he knew he was about to meet his first native. He switched on his linguistic computer and waited.

  The native, when he stepped out on the trail, was almost humanoid enough to pass for a Terrestrial. His ears were set a bit differently, and his musculature was not quite the same. It was also impossible to estimate his age, for none of the usual Terrestrial clues” were applicable. But those were the only differences Imbry could see. His skin was dark enough so there was no mistaking him for a Caucasian—if you applied human standards—but a great deal of that might be simple suntan. His hair was light brown, grew out of his scalp in an ordinary fashion, and had been cut. He was wearing a short, skirtlike garment, with a perfectly ordinary navel showing above it in a flat stomach. The pattern of his wrap-around was of the blocky type to which woven patterns are limited, and it was bright, in imitation of the forms and colors available in the jungle.

  He looked at Imbry silently out of intelligent black eyes, with a tentative smile on his mouth. He was carrying nothing in his open hands, and he seemed neither upset nor timid.

  Imbry had to wait until he spoke first. The computer had to have something to work with. Meanwhile, he smiled back. His TSN training had prepared him for situations exactly like this. In exercises, he’d duplicated this situation a dozen times, usually with ET’s much more fearsome and much less human. So he merely smiled back, and there was no tension or misgiving in the atmosphere at all. There was only an odd, childlike shyness which, once broken, could only lead to an invitation to come over to the other fellow’s house.

  The native’s smile broadened, and he raised one hand in greeting, breaking into soft, liquid speech that seemed to run on and on without stopping, for many syllables at a time.

  The native finished, and Imbry had to wait for his translator to make up its mind. Finally, it whispered in his ear.

  “This is necessarily a rough computation. The communication is probably: Hello. Are you a god? (That’s an approximation. He means something between ancestor and deity.) I’m very glad to meet you.”

  Imbry shook his head at the native, hoping this culture didn’t take that to mean “yes.”

  “No,” he said to the computer, “I’m an explorer. And I’m glad to meet you.” He continued to smile.

  The computer hummed softly. “Explorer is inapplicable as yet,” it told Imbry. It didn’t have the vocabulary built up.

  The native was looking curiously at the little box of the computer sitting on Imbry’s shoulder.’ His jungle-trained ears were sharp, and he could obviously hear at least the sibilants as it whispered. His curiosity was friendly and intelligent; he seemed intrigued.

  “All right, try: I’m like you. Hello,” Imbry told the computer.

  The translator spoke to the native. He looked at Imbry in gentle unbelief and answered.

  This time, it was easier. The translator sank its teeth into this new material, and after a much shorter lag, without qualification, gave Imbry the native’s communication, in its colloquial English, somewhat flavored:

  “Obviously, you’re not like me very much. But we’ll straighten that out later. Will you stay in my village for a while?”

  Imbry nodded, to register the significance of the gesture. “I’d be glad to. My name’s Imbry. What’s yours?”

  “Good. I’m Tylus. Will you walk with me? And who’s the little ancestor on your shoulder?”

  Imbry walked forward, and the native waited until they were a few feet apart and then began leading the way down the trail.

  “That’s not an ancestor,” Imbry tried to explain. “It’s a machine that changes your speech into mine and mine into yours.” But the translator broke down completely at that. The best it could offer to do was to tell Tylus that it was a lever that talked. And your speech and my speech were concepts Tylus simply did not have.

  In all conscience, Imbry had to cancel that, so he contented himself with saying it was not an ancestor. Tylus immediately asked which of Imbry’s respected ancestors it would be if it were an ancestor, and it was obvious that the native regarded Imbry as being, in many respects, a charming liar. But it was also plain that charming liars were accorded due respect in Tylus’s culture, so the two were fairly well acquainted by the time they reached the outskirts of the village, and there was no longer any lag in translation at all.

  The village was built to suit the environment. The roofs and walls of the light, one-room houses were made of woven frond mats tied down to a boxy frame. Every house had a porch for socializing with passersby and a cookfire out front. Most of the houses faced in on a circular village square, with a big, communal cooking pit for special events, and the entire village was set in under the trees just a little away from the shoreline. There were several canoes on the sand above high water, and at some time this culture had developed the outrigger.

  There was a large amount of shouting back and forth going on among the villagers, and a good-sized crowd had collected at the point where the trail opened out into the village clearing. But Tylus urged Imbry forward, passing proudly through the crowd, and Imbry went with him, feeling somewhat awkward about it, but not wanting to leave Tylus marching on alone. The villagers moved aside to let him through, smiling, some of them grinning at Tylus’s straight back and proudly carried head, none of them, obviously, wanting to deprive their compatriot of his moment.

  Tylus stopped when he and Imbry reached the big central cooking pit, turned around, and struck a pose with one arm around Imbry’s shoulders.

  “Hey! Look! I’ve brought a big visitor!” Tylus shouted, grinning with pleasure.

  The villagers let out a whoop of feigned surprise, laughing and shouting congratulations to Tylus, and cordial welcomes to Imbry.

  “He says he’s not a god!” Tylus climaxed, giving Imbry a broad, sidelong look of grinning appreciation for his ability to be ridiculous. “He came out of a big Ihoni egg on the beach, and he’s got a father-ghost who sits on his shoulder in a little black pot and gives
him advice!”

  “Oh, that’s ingenious!” someone in the crowd commented in admiration.

  “Look how fair he is!” one of the women exclaimed. “Look how much handsomer than us he is!”

  “Look how richly he’s dressed! Look at the jewels shining in his silver belt!”

  Imbry’s translator raced to give him representative crowd comments, and he grinned back at the crowd. His rescue training had always presupposed grim, hostile or at best noncommittal ETs that would have to be persuaded into helping him locate the crashed personnel of the stricken ship. Now, the first time he’d put it to actual use, he found reality giving theory a bland smile, and he sighed and relaxed completely. Once he’d disabused this village of its god-notions in connection with him, he’d be able to not only work but be friendly with these people. Not that they weren’t already cordial.

  He looked around at the crowd, both to observe it and to give everybody a look at his smile.

  The crowd was composed, in nearly equal parts, of men and women very much like Tylus, with no significant variation except for age and sex characteristics that ranged from the appreciable to the only anthropologically interesting. In lesser part, there were children, most of them a little timid, some of them awestruck, all of them naked.

  An older man, wearing a necklace of carved wood in addition to his wraparound, came forward through the crowd. Imbry had to guess at his age, but he thought he had it fairly accurately. The native had white hair, for one thing, and a slight thickness to his waist. For another, he was rather obviously the village head man, and that indicated age and the experience it brought with it.

  The head man raised his arm in greeting, and Imbry replied.

  “I am Iano. Will you stay with us in our village?” Imbry nodded. “My name’s Imbry. I’d like to stay here for a while.” Iano broke into a smile. “Fine! We’re all very glad to meet you. I hope your journey can be interrupted for a long tune.” He smiled. “Well, if you say you’re not a god, who do you say you are?” There was a ripple of chuckling through the crowd.

  “I’m a man,” Imbry answered. The translator had meanwhile worked out the proper wording for what he wanted to say next. “I’m an explorer from another country.” The local word, of course, was not quite “explorer”—it was traveler-from-other-places-for-the-enjoyment-of-it-and-to-see-what-I-can-find. Iano chuckled. Then, gravely, he asked: “Do you always travel in an Ihoni egg, Imbry-who-says-he-is-Imbry?”

  Imbry chuckled back in appreciation of Iano’s shrewdness. He was enjoying this, even if it was becoming more and more difficult to approach the truth.

  “That’s no Ihoni egg,” he deprecated with a broad gesture to match. “That’s only my…” And here the translator had to give up and render the word as canoe.

  Iano nodded with a gravity so grave it was obviously no gravity at all. Tylus, standing to one side, gave Imbry a look of total admiration at this effort which overmatched all his others.

  “Ah. Your canoe. And how does one balance a canoe shaped like an Ihoni egg?”

  Imbry realized what the translator had had to do. He’d been afraid of as much. He searched for the best answer, and the best answer seemed to be to tell the truth and stick to it. These people were intelligent. If he presented them with a consistent story and backed it up with as much proof as he could muster, they’d eventually see that nothing so scrupulously self-consistent could possibly be anything but the truth. “Well,” he said slowly, wondering what the effect would be at first, “it’s a canoe that doesn’t sail on water. It sails in the sky.”

  There was a chorus of admiration through the crowd. As much of it seemed to be meant for Iano as for Imbry. They appeared to think Imbry had made a damaging admission in this contest.

  Iano smiled. “Is your country in the sky?” Imbry struggled for some way of making it understandable. “Yes and no,” he said carefully. “It’s necessary to travel through the sky to get to my country, but when you get there you’re in a place that’s very much like here, in some ways.” Iano smiled again. “Well, of course. How else would you be happy if there weren’t places like this to live, in the sky?”

  He turned toward the other villagers. “He said he wasn’t a god,” he declared quietly, his eyes twinkling.

  There was a burst of chuckling, and now all the admiring glances were for Iano.

  The head man turned back to Imbry. “Will you stay in my house for a while? We will produce a feast later in the day.”

  Imbry nodded gravely. “I’d be honored.” The villagers were smiling at him gently as they drifted away, and Imbry got the feeling that they were being polite and telling him that his discomfiture didn’t really matter.

  “Don’t be sad,” Tylus whispered. “lano’s a remarkably shrewd man. He could make anybody admit the truth. I’m quite sure that when he dies, he’ll be some kind of god himself.”

  Then he waved a hand in temporary farewell and moved away, leaving Imbry alone with the gravely smiling Iano.

  Imbry sat on the porch with Iano. Both of them looked out over the village square, sitting side by side. It seemed to be the expected posture for conversation between a god and someone who was himself a likely candidate for a similar position, and it certainly made for ease of quiet contemplation before each new sentence was brought out into words.

  Imbry was still wearing his suit. Iano had politely suggested that he might be warm in it, but Imbry had explained.

  “It cools me. That’s only one of the things it does. For one thing, if I took it off I wouldn’t be able to talk to you. In my country we have different words.” Iano had thought about it for a moment. Then he said: “Your wraparound must have powerful ancestors living in it.” He thought a moment more. “Am I right in supposing that this is a new attribute you’re trying out, and it hasn’t grown up enough to go about without advice?”

  Imbry’d been glad of several minutes in which to think. Then he’d tried to explain.

  “No,” he said, “the suit” (perforce, the word was wrap-around-for-the-whole-body) “was made—was built—by other men in my country. It was built to protect me and to make me able to travel anywhere without being in any danger.” But that was only just as much as repeating lano’s theory back to him in different form, and he realized it after lano’s polite silence had extended too long to be anything but an answer in itself.

  He tried to explain the concept “machine.”

  “I’ll teach you a new word for a new thing,” he said. Iano nodded attentively.

  Imbry switched off the translator, making sure Iano saw the motion and understood the result. Then he repeated “machine” several times, and, once Iano had accustomed himself to Imbry’s new voice, which up to now he’d only heard as an indistinct background murmur to the translator’s speaker, the head man picked it up quickly.

  “Mahschin,” he said at last, and Imbry switched his translator back on. “Go on, Imbry.”

  “A machine is a number of levers, working together. It is built by perfectly ordinary artisans—not gods, Iano, but men like yourself and myself—who have a good deal of knowledge and skill. With one lever, you can raise a tree trunk. With many levers, shaped into paddles, men can push the tree trunk through the water, after they have shaped it into a canoe.

  “So a machine is like the many levers that move the canoe. But usually it doesn’t need men to push it. It goes on by itself, because it—”

  Here he had to stop for a minute. These people had no concept of storing energy and then releasing it to provide motive power. Iano waited, patient and polite.

  “It has a little bit of fire in it,” Imbry was forced to say lamely. “Fire can be put in a box—in something like two pots fastened tightly on top of each other—so that it can’t get out. But it wants to get out-—it pushes against the inside of the two pots—so if you make a hole in the pots and put a lever in the way, the fire rushing out pushes the lever.”

  He looked at Iano, but couldn’t make out
whether he was being believed or not. Half the time, he had no idea what kind of almost-but-sadly-not-quite concepts the translator might be substituting for the things he was saying.

  “A machine can be built to do almost anything that would otherwise require a lot of men. For instance, I could have brought another man with me who was skilled at learning words that weren’t his. Then I wouldn’t need the little black pot, which is a machine that learns words that aren’t the same as mine. But the machine does it faster and in some ways better.”

  He stopped, hoping Iano had understood at least part of it.

  After a time, Iano nodded gravely. “That’s very ingenious. It saves your ancestors the inconvenience of coming with you and fatiguing themselves. I had no idea such a thing could be done. But of course, in your country there are different kinds of fires than we have here.”

  Which was a perfectly sound description, Imbry had to admit, granting lano’s viewpoint.

  So now they’d been sitting quietly for a number of minutes, and Imbry had begun to realize that he might have to work for a long time before he extricated himself from this embarrassment. Finally he said, “Well, if you think I’m a god, what kind of a god do you think I am?” Iano answered slowly. “Well, to tell you the truth, I don’t know. You might be an ancestor. Or you might be only a man who has made friends with a lot of his ancestors.” Imbry felt a flash of hope, but Iano went on: “Which, of course, would make you a god. Or—” He paused, and Imbry, taking a sideward look, caught Iano looking at him cautiously. “Or you might be no ancestor and no man-god. You might be one of the very-real-gods. You might be the cloud god, or the jungle god, taking the attribute of a man. Or… you might be the god. You might be the-father-of-all-Ihoni.”

  Imbry took a deep breath. “Would you describe the Ihoni to me, please,” he said.