Read Ebook: The Worshippers by Knight Damon Emshwiller Ed Illustrator

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Ebook has 191 lines and 12852 words, and 4 pages

As far as he could, he made himself master of the ship and its contents. He discovered, by arduous trial and error, which of the supposed foods in the storerooms he could eat safely, which would make him sick, and which were not foods at all. He found out which of the control board's knobs and levers controlled the engines, and he shut them off. He studied the universe around him, hoping to see some change.

After nearly a month, it happened. One star grew from a brilliant pinpoint to a tiny disk, and each time he awoke it was larger.

Weaver took counsel with himself, and pasted a small piece of transparent red tape over the place on the telescreen where the star appeared. He scratched a mark to show where the star was on each of three succeeding "days." The trail crawled diagonally down toward the bottom of the screen.

He knew nothing about astrogation; but he knew that if he were heading directly toward the star, it ought to stay in the same place on his screen. He turned on the engines and swung the steering arm downward. The star crawled toward the center of the screen, then went past. Weaver painstakingly brought it back; and so, in parsec-long zigzags, he held his course.

The star was now increasing alarmingly in brightness. It occurred to Weaver that he must be traveling with enormous speed, although he had no sensation of movement at all. There was a position on the scale around the steering arm that he thought would put the engines into reverse. He tried it, and now he scratched the apparent size of the star into the red tape. First it grew by leaps and bounds, then more slowly, then hardly at all. Weaver shut off the engines again, and waited.

The star had planets. He noted their passage in the telescreen, marked their apparent courses, and blithely set himself to land on the one that seemed to be nearest. He was totally ignorant of orbits; he simply centered his planet on the screen as he had done with the star, found that it was receding from him, and began to run it down.

He came in too fast the first time--tore through the atmosphere like a lost soul and frantically out again, sweating in the control room's sudden heat. He turned, out in space, and carefully adjusted his speed so that ship and planet drifted softly together. Gently, as if he had been doing this all his life. Weaver took the ship down upon a continent of rolling greens and browns, landed it without a jar--saw the landscape begin to tilt as he stepped into the airlock, and barely got outside before the ship rolled ten thousand feet down a gorge he had not noticed and smashed itself into a powdering of fragments.

Two days later, he began turning into a god.

They had put him into a kind of enclosed seat at the end of a long rotating arm, counter-weighted at the opposite side of the aircar proper, and the whole affair swung gently in an eccentric path, around and around, and up and down as the aircar moved very slowly forward through the village.

All the houses were faced with broad wooden balconies stained blood-red and turquoise, umber and yellow, gold and pale green; and all of these were crowded to bursting with the blue and white horny chests and the big-eyed faces of the bug things. Weaver swung in his revolving seat past first one level and another, and the twittering voices burst around him like the stars of a Fourth-of-July rocket.

This was the fifth village they had visited since the bug things had found him wandering in the mountains. At the first one, he had been probed, examined and twittered over interminably; then the aircar had arrived, they had strapped him into this ridiculous seat and begun what looked very much like a triumphal tour. Other aircars, without the revolving arm, preceded and followed him. The slowly floating cars and their riders were gay with varicolored streamers. Every now and then one of the bug things in the cars would raise a pistol-like object to fire a pinkish streak that spread out, high in the air, and became a gently descending, diffusing cloud of rosy dust. And always the twittering rose and fell, rose and fell as Weaver revolved at the end of the swinging arm.

One had to remember, he reminded himself, that Earthly parallels did not necessarily apply. It was undignified, certainly, to be revolving like a child on a merry-go-round, while these crowds glared with bright alien eyes; but the important thing was that they had not once offered him any violence. They had not even put him into the absurd revolving seat by force; they had led him to it gently, with a great deal of gesturing and twittered explanation. And if their faces were almost nauseatingly unpleasant--with the constantly-moving complexity of parts that he had seen in live lobsters--well, that proved nothing except that they were not human. Later, perhaps, he could persuade them to wear masks....

It was a holiday; a great occasion--everything testified to that. The colored streamers, the clouds of rosy dust like sky-rockets, the crowds of people lined up to await him. And why not? Clearly, they had never before seen a man. He was unique, a personage to be honored: a visitor descended from the heavens, clothed in fire and glory. Like the Spaniards among the Aztecs, he thought.

Weaver began to feel gratified, his ego expanding. Experimentally, he waved to the massed ranks of bug things as he passed them. A new explosion of twittering broke out, and a forest of twiglike arms waved back at him. They seemed to regard him with happy awe.

"Thank you," said Weaver graciously. "Thank you...."

In the morning, there were crowds massed outside the building where he had slept; but they did not put him into the aircar with the revolving arm again. Instead, four new ones came into his room after he had eaten the strange red and orange fruits that were all of the bug diet he could stomach, and began to twitter very seriously at him, while pointing to various objects, parts of their bodies, the walls around them, and Weaver himself.

In the afternoon, they brought a machine with staring lenses and bright lights. Weaver guessed that he was being televised; he put a hand on the nearest bug thing's shoulder, and smiled for his audience.

Later, after he had eaten again, they went on with the language lesson. Now it was Weaver who taught, and they who learned. This, Weaver felt, was as it should be. These creatures were not men, he told himself; he would give himself no illusions on that score; but they might still be capable of learning many things that he had to teach. He could do a great deal of good, even if it turned out that he could never return to Earth.

He rather suspected that they had no spaceships. There was something about their life--the small villages, the slowly drifting aircars, the absence of noise and smell and dirt, that somehow did not fit with the idea of space travel. As soon as he was able, he asked them about it. No they had never traveled beyond their own planet. It was a great marvel; perhaps he could teach them how, sometime.

As their command of written English improved, he catechized them about themselves and their planet. The world, as he knew already, was much like Earth as to atmosphere, gravity and mean temperature. It occurred to him briefly that he had been lucky to hit upon such a world, but the thought did not stick; he had no way of knowing just how improbable his luck had been.

They themselves were, as he had thought, simple beings. They had a written history of some twelve thousand of their years, which he estimated to be about nine thousand of his. Their technical accomplishments, he had to grant, equalled Earth's and in some cases surpassed them. Their social organization was either so complex that it escaped him altogether, or unbelievably simple. They did not, so far as he could discover, have any political divisions. They did not make war.

They were egg-layers, and they controlled their population simply by means of hatching only as many eggs as were needed to replace their natural losses.

Just when it first struck Weaver that he was their appointed ruler it would be hard to say. It began, perhaps, that afternoon in the aircar; or a few days later when he made his first timid request--for a house of his own. The request was eagerly granted, and he was asked how he would like the house constructed. Half timidly, he drew sketches of his own suburban home in Schenectady; and they built it, swarms of them working together, down to the hardwood floors and the pneumatic furniture and the picture mouldings and the lampshades.

Or perhaps the idea crystallized when he asked to see some of their native dances, and within an hour the dancers assembled on his lawn--five hundred of them--and performed until sundown.

At, any rate, nothing could have been more clearly correct once he had grasped the idea. He was a Man, alone in a world of outlandish creatures. It was natural that he should lead; indeed, it was his duty. They were poor things, but they were malleable in his hands. It was a great adventure. Who knew how far he might not bring them?

Weaver embarked on a tour of the planet, taking with him two of the bug things as guides and a third as pilot and personal servant. Their names in their own tongue he had not bothered to ask; he had christened them Mark, Luke and John. All three now wrote and read English with fair proficiency; thus Weaver was well served.

All that was for the distant future. Now he was chiefly concerned with the Terranovans themselves--how they lived, what they thought, what sort of primitive religion they had, and so on. He asked endless questions of his guides, and through them, of the villagers they met; and the more he learned, the more agitated he became.

"But this is monstrous," he wrote indignantly to Mark and Luke. They had just visited a house inhabited by seventeen males and twelve females--Weaver was now beginning to be able to distinguish the sexes--and he had inquired what their relations were. Mark had informed him calmly that they were husbands and wives; and when Weaver pointed out that the balance was uneven, had written, "No, not one to one. All to all. All husband and wife of each other."

Mark held Weaver's indignant message up to his eyes with one many-jointed claw, while his other three forelimbs gestured uncertainly. Finally he seized the note-pad and wrote, "Do not understand monstrous, please forgive. They do for more change, so not to make each other have tiredness."

Weaver frowned and wrote, "Does not your religion forbid this?"

Mark consulted in his own piping tongue with the other two. Finally he surrendered the note-pad to Luke, who wrote: "Do not understand religion to forbid, please excuse. With us many religion, some say spirits in flower, some say in wind and sun, some say in ground. Not say to do this, not to do that. With us all people the same, no one tell other what to do."

Weaver added another mental note to his already lengthy list: "Build churches."

He wrote: "Tell them this must stop."

Mark turned without hesitation to the silently attentive group, and translated. He turned back to Weaver and wrote, "They ask please, what to do now instead of the way they do?"

Weaver told him, "They must mate only one to one, and for life."

To his surprise, the translation of this was greeted by unmistakable twitterings of gladness. The members of the adulterous group turned to each other with excited gestures, and Weaver saw a pairing-off process begin, with much discussion.

He asked Mark about it later, as they were leaving the village. "How is it that they did this thing before--for more variety, as you say--and yet seem so glad to stop?"

Mark's answer was: "They very glad to do whatever thing you say. You bring them new thing, they very happy."

Weaver mused on this, contentedly on the whole, but with a small undigested kernel of uneasiness, until they reached the next village. Here he found a crowd of Terranovans of both sexes and all ages at a feast of something with a fearful stench. He asked what it was; Mark's answer had better not be revealed. Feeling genuinely sick with revulsion, Weaver demanded, "Why do they do such an awful thing? This is ten times worse than the other."

This time Mark answered without hesitation. "They do this like the other, for more change. Is not easy to learn to like, but they do, so not to make themselves have tiredness."

There were three more such incidents before they reached the village where they were to sleep that night; and Weaver lay awake in his downy bed, staring at the faint shimmer of reflected starlight on the carved roof-beams, and meditating soberly on the unexpected, the appalling magnitude of the task he had set himself.

From this, he came to consider that small dark kernel of doubt. It was of course dreadful to find that his people were so wholly corrupt, but that at least was understandable. What he did not understand was the reason they could be so easily weaned from their wickedness. It left him feeling a little off-balance, like a man who has hurled himself at his enemy and found him suddenly not there. This reminded him of ju-jitsu, and this in turn of the ancient Japanese--to whom, indeed, his Terranovans seemed to have many resemblances. Weaver's uneasiness increased. Savage peoples were notoriously devious--they smiled and then thrust knives between your ribs.

He felt a sudden prickling coldness at the thought. It was improbable, it was fantastic that they would go to such lengths to gratify his every wish if they meant to kill him, he told himself; and then he remembered the Dionysian rites, and a host of other, too-similar parallels. The king for a day or a year, who ruled as an absolute monarch, and then was sacrificed--

And, Weaver remembered with a stab of panic, usually eaten.

He had been on Terranova for a little over a month by the local calendar. What was his term of office to be--two months? Six? A year, ten years?

He slept little that night, woke late in the morning with dry, irritated eyes and a furred mouth, and spent a silent day, inspecting each new batch of natives without comment, and shivering inwardly at each motion of the clawed arms of Mark, Luke or John. Toward evening he came out of his funk at last, when it occurred to him to ask about weapons.

He put the query slyly, wording it as if it were a matter of general interest only, and of no great importance. Were they familiar with machines that killed, and if so, what varieties did they have?

At first Mark did not understand the question. He replied that their machines did not kill, that very long ago they had done so but that the machines were much better now, very safe and not harmful to anyone. "Then," wrote Weaver carefully, "you have no machines which are made for the purpose of killing?"

Mark, Luke and John discussed this with every evidence of excitement. At last Mark wrote, "This very new idea to us."

"But do you have in this world no large, dangerous animals which must be killed? How do you kill those things which you eat?"

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