Rork! (2 page)

And Edran Lomar, having seen his baggage deposited in the musty, dusty old U-frame building which was to be his, all his, for the next five years (unless he chose to move in with someone or have someone move in with him), found himself in some perplexity as to what to do next.

Second Aide Arlan, who had been “helping” him (“Is that the new regulation compact-unit? Surely you want to change to shore uniform. Your rating is only three but I wouldn’t worry, there are going to be vacancies, there always are, and no one coming in to fill them from Outside.”), suddenly stopped, blinked, became a good deal more human.

“I was new here once, too,” he said. “Forget about reporting in; wait till tomorrow. I can take all this in stride because I know that in five years I’ll just step aboard the Q and our house in the retirement colony on Coulter
kappa
is only two trips away. But lots of the others…. Never mind. Come home with me, eh? Meet the family. I don’t know what the Tockies have got fixed for supper, but it’ll be good and ample. Q Day doesn’t shake
them
up. Because they’re never going anyplace. Eh?”

This grey little fidget of a man, Arlan … appearance, manner, everything about him reeked of the conventional, cubed types of which Lomar had had overmuch back home. But at least the man made a kind of sense, provided a sort of raft to cling to for the little while before he would strike out and swim for himself. He accepted the invitation.

“May I ask, Ran,” the Second Aide, at home, smiled with the formal informality of his class, “if you are familiar with the Coulter System by any chance?”

“Heigh-ho,” sighed his wife, with a studiedly patient shrug of her comfortable shoulders. “Here comes the Tocky with the tray — goody. Take something, cute. You, too, Arlan. Let us eat, drink, and be regulation, for in five years we retire….” She and her husband began to talk to him, more or less at once, and he paid little attention to either and so caught only snatches of talk.

Husband: “… retirement colony … Coulter
kappa
… wonderful climate … our kind of people … Academy classmates … like old times….”

Wife: “… Old Earth … you’ll just die here … terrible and colonial and remote … terrible long days … some Station girl, and before long you won’t be able to stand her … young enough to interest you means that she grew up here and won’t know anything … fly the fence … Tocky girl … tear the shirt off your back….”

Husband: “… cheap … special prices for pensioned Guildsmen … hunting preserves … get-togethers … lots of fun … old times….”

Wife: “… read every book on the place … want to build a raft and go explore North Cold … won’t … drinking and playing … wonder what you did to wind up here … women wearing Outside these days? …”

The drinks weren’t bad. (“Dead rorks,” said the Arlan wife, cheerfully, lifting hers.) The food wasn’t bad. In his mind Ran was making plans. Get out on a look-see trip as fast as he could. Locate the source of the salt-smelling air…. Wasn’t Guild Station situated not far from the Northern Sea? Get far,
far
away from all these niddering voices, crowding bodies…. There was an Arlan child present, too — a plain, quiet girl who said nothing. The house was a copy of something thirty years old. He stopped looking, listening awhile. When his mind began registering once again the conversation had shifted to something somewhat more interesting.

The wife: “Of course, our Tocks have been well-trained, but the others … well, you’ll be visiting Tockytown, of course. You’ll see for yourself. Dirty, filthy, im-
mor
-al, and, oh! bone-lazy.”

The husband (comfortably noncensorious): “Well, Linny, they’re happy the way they are. I don’t blame them. No responsibilities. Umm … you don’t mind if I tell Ran the old joke?” A titter. “You know what a well-bred Tock is? One who pisses only in the corner of his housey. ‘Housey,’ that’s what they call their huts, you know.”

Lomar nodded. There were other groups like that elsewhere in the Hundred Worlds. There were the Two Tribes on Burnside
beta.
And, off in the Semi-Circle, the Redhaired People of Hercules, the Chickers of New Australia (an ostentatious command of Chicker Cant was a mark of the well-traveled spacer), and the Poor Greens of Humboldt Six.

“The Tocks,” he said. “Tockies. Natives of here? Refugees from somewhere else? The old books don’t mention them. And there are hardly any new books about here … unless you count Captain Conybear.” He laughed, Linny Arlan laughing with him. Captain Conybear, the Munchausen of the Third Age of Space.

“Oh, yes, Captain Conybear,” she said, appreciatively. “How I Fought Off The Wild Tocks. How I Slew The Man-Eating Rork Single-Hand. How I Met The Hermit Of Hollow Rock.”

The SA, evidently not approving of the very nonregulation Captain Conybear, made a noise which might have been agreement, disagreement, a chuckle, or a grunt. “Might call them natives, although they didn’t start out that way. Refugees, hmm, sort of. Oh, you haven’t had the chance to see any General Orders yet, have you?
Officers, Men, and Autochthonous Persons.
That’s them. Autochthonous, Tocks, Tockies. Well, they’re the descendants of the original settlers before, oh, way before the First War. You don’t know what happened then? The war lasted sixty years. You do know that. And for forty years no ship put down here. Not one ship. They were on their own. And they didn’t make it. No … they didn’t make it….

“Because even after that first ship did come, it was a long time, damned long, before any other one came. And after that, even, it was a long time before the ships started coming regularly and Guild Station was reestablished.”

They were on their own. And they didn’t make it.

Ships had come often in the days of the original settlement. No one then had thought in terms of self-sufficiency. And then, suddenly, they stopped coming — not just often, but at all. There had been two more wars since then, interrupting communications. The settlers (who hadn’t originally thought of themselves as settlers, any more than the present off-planet personnel of Guild Station did) had had to scrabble. It had been root, hog, or die. Many had died. Education, culture, social ways, science, and marriage, had crumbled and vanished. The local Tocks no longer had husbands, wives, or family names.

Or much of anything else, it seemed.

Lomar said, “No wonder they’re wild. I thought that Captain Conybear had made that part up.”

“What? No, no, these are all Tame Tocks up here. The others, the Wild ones, they live down at the South end of the continent. You’ll see them up here, though, when they come to trade. For my part, the less I see of them, the better. Bad numbers. They’re killing themselves off, though, and if it weren’t for the redwing they bring in, I’d say the sooner the better,” he tittered. He began to ramble. “It’ll be soon enough, after my time, though, that’s all I care about. Less and less redwing comes in every year. Medical fixitive, you know, that’s what they use it for; so, do people need less medicine Outside or have they developed a synthetic or found something else? It’ll last my time, though, I’ll be safe and happy on the games course there on Coulter
kappa
and then let the Wild Tocks kill themselves all off with their homemade popguns….”

Titter.

The decline in redwing production was fairly recent. Until the last decade the amount had scarcely varied from year to year. It was the fault of the Tocks. They were the ones who went out and gathered it. The Wild Tocks trading it for scrap metal and sulphur, made crude guns and cruder gunpowder. The Tame Tocks weren’t interested in that, never had been (no, Arlan didn’t know when or why the original stock had split into two groups) — food and booze was all they cared for. And, of course, titter, sex. But they didn’t have to trade redwing for that. Regulations didn’t allow the Station to give them booze. But they could trade for the makings.
Tockyrot,
the stuff was called. Vile stuff….

But that’s the way they were. Give them a gut full and a skin full and a (heh heh hee) something else full, and they were happy. Lazy? It was just incredible how lazy they were. Wouldn’t work unless they absolutely had to, rather just lie in the sun. Or run around feuding … the Wild ones, that is. How many Tocks were there? No one counted. There did seem to be fewer than there used to be.

Presently talk slowed down, ran out. The Arlan girl had excused herself and left, the Arlan wife had fallen into frank slumber. The SA cleared his throat. “It’s still early,” he said. “I suppose it might be just as well to make a courtesy call at the Residence.” The Second Station Aide had obviously made a mental flip through of the Regulations and come to a conclusion.

Lomar felt not the slightest degree of anticipation at the thought. “Ah … you don’t think … tomorrow?”

“Oh, no. Come along. Not a formal reporting in, just a visit. These quintennials take a lot out of the Old Man. He feels the letdown, he’ll be glad to see us. Come along.”

• • •

Servants snapped-to, bowed, saluted, rang gongs, trotted on ahead. The Residency was cool, spic-and-spotless, though crammed with furniture and pictures and cabinets of bric-a-brac. They came at last into a room with hidden lights. A servant was holding a uniform and the man who had just removed it stood beside him. For a moment more the man’s figure retained the molded outlines of formality. Then it seemed to sag and melt, found refuge in the quickly offered, quickly donned brocaded wraparound, and sank into an easy chair.

“Aquilas! And a new person!” The voice was rich and mellow, eager, but with overtones of petulance and self-pity. “Oh, these ghastly Q Days! The strain, the strain …” The man squinted, slightly frowned. Then a smile distended his rather full, rather loose mouth. “Who is this you’ve brought along with you to divert my aching nerves? A drinky — we must all have a drinky. Boy, bring drink, quick-quick.” The wraparound drooped a bit, revealing his heavy, hairy breasts. Three Tock house-boys, well-fed and coarsely handsome, glanced at Lomar out of the corners of their eyes, hastily glanced away, set to work at the lavish bar.

The Second Station Aide was once again all stiff and starchy. “Sir. I have the honor to present Edran Lomar, newly come aboard, with a rating of three, and not yet reported in. Three Lomar, this is His Respect, the Station Officer, Tan Carlo Harb.”

Tan Carlo Harb jiggled in his chair with pleasure. “Not yet reported in! Then we can dispense with formality for the present; good. My dear boy! Let me take your hands. A fresh face — you can have no idea — Hark! Did I hear the sunset gun?” He giggled, helped himself from the tray of glasses, waggled his fingers at his guests to do the same. “Pardon the classical allusion. I know the classics are not popular nowadays…. ‘Nowadays’ — what do we here know of ‘Nowadays,’ isolated as we are on the very edge of empire, the staff about to fall from our nerveless, bloodless hands? Metaphorically speaking.

“I hope you like the drinky, new face. My boys make good ones. Feckless, swinish lot, these Tocks, one has to observe them every little minute; although as to my own boys, their loyalty is beyond question, as it damned well ought to be, all that I have done for them.”

His large, olive-colored eyes traveled Lomar up and down, taking in the whole slender figure from the unfashionably short brown hair and heavy eyebrows, the critical mouth and dissatisfied set of the chin, the rangy limbs to the almost defiantly non-regulation footgear. “Since you are not here, yet, officially,” the Station Officer said, “let us — if you will excuse my language while you still have to — cut the crap. What is a decent, alert-looking boy like you doing out here in the absolute ass-end of bloody nowhere?”

Lomar smiled an unprompted, ungrudged smile. No one had asked him to, but nonetheless he felt that he rather liked Tan Carlo Harb. Out with it, then. And then perhaps smile no more. “You will find, sir,” he said, “in the official documents I hand over tomorrow when I report in, that although my regular rating is three, I am commanded by Their Serenities the Guild Directorate to function here under an assimilated rating of seven. My assigned duty is to investigate the decline in redwing production, and use all permissible means to increase that production.”

He felt, did not see, the Station Aide stiffen with absolute astonishment beside him. He saw the full, full face of the SO lengthen with what was certainly surprise and might have been dismay as well. The olive eyes were large and blank. Plump, hairy fingers crept around the glass, lifted it. Automatically or otherwise, Tan Carlo Harb announced the traditional toast.

“Dead rorks,” he whispered. “Dead rorks …”

Lomar tossed aside the worn copy of Harrel’s
Commercial Pharmacopeia of the Outer Worlds.
Thirty-fifth revision of the 20th edition, it had already been theoretically superseded, but the up-to-date versions for this entry which he had looked at on Old Earth had been worded just the same. Obviously the Guild of the Second Academy of Science, Commerce, and the Arts had not come up with a substitute or synthetic; obviously the need for the derivative was still urgent — as urgent as anything ever was in these tired times of Don’t Rock The Boat and If You Don’t See It It isn’t There — or they would not have upped him to a temporary rating of seven and saddled him with the job of increasing production.

Not only did the fact that he had five uninterruptible years sap any sense of urgency he might have had; or the fact that Pia 2 took thirty hours in its circuit around Pia Sol make a siesta a physical, rather than merely a social, necessity; but the whole atmosphere of the place was death to speed and efficiency. He kept telling himself that there was a mostly empty continent about the size of New Zealand waiting for him to go and see. But he still hadn’t gone.

He found himself no more able to concentrate here on his own bed than at the old-model desk in his office. All sorts of odd things kept running through his mind.
Officers, Men, and Autochthonous Persons,
for instance. The first, more than mere men, presumably; the latter, less. And how long had it been since there was more than one “officer” here on Pia 2? And what a one he was, too! Not that Ran Lomar liked Tan Carlo Harb much the less for it. It was easy enough to avoid his unspoken invitation. Had the SO been stationed … exiled … here on Pia 2 because of this peculiarity? Or had it been submerged, only rising to the surface here; or the surface wearing away like greasepaint in the isolation which was life out here? Whichever it was, the Old Man had adjusted, was happy, didn’t pull rank to make conquests. Lomar had known of worse SOs by far.

Officers, Men, and Autochthonous Persons.
A stupid phrase, typical officialese gobbledygook, frozen here like so much else.
Tocks. Tockies.
An offensive term, particularly when used as distinct from
Men
— and yet they themselves accepted it. The crone who cleaned his U for him, for instance — “Thace two Tocks and a man to see you,” so she’d said that morning. It had been old “Cap” Conders, come to show him a fresh batch of redwing start its slow way through the curing sheds he supervised. Big Tock and Shorty, they’d said their names were. Inquiries as to their real names had brought only surprised looks and rotten-toothed grins.

Redwing.
The leaf did somewhat resemble a wing. It was as long and as broad as his back, with a long and pulpy stalk which Big Tock had chunked off with his hack then and there. The leaf was still a vivid red somewhere between scarlet and crimson. “I made them get you a nice prime one, still fresh, so you could see, yes,” said the old man. “Leave it to them, they’ll just as soon leave it lie around till it gets shrinky and starts browning, yes. There you are, Brother Ran. That’s what we’re all here for, yes. That and to protect these poor piss-ants from the rorks. If it weren’t for us the rorks would soon overrun the place and scour it clean, yes. Oh, good-morning! Haven’t I shot enough of them in my time — haven’t I, you, Big Tock?”

And Big Tock, looking up from his grey toes wiggling in the dirt: “Oh, yace, Mist Cap. Oh, yace.”

Lomar protested. “What for, Cap? I mean, why shoot them? Aren’t they harmless unless you attack them first?”

There was no make-believe in the bloodshot eyes at all. “You’ll learn different,” the old man said. “You aren’t the first who came here believing everything he read in some book three hundred years old, yes. You ask these boys — they know — they’ll tell you. Tell him about the rorks, Big Tock. Go on.”

Big Tock stopped scratching a naked armpit whose skin showed slightly white against the general grime. He shivered, spat three times, dipped his big toe in the puddly craters. “Oh, yace,” he said, his voice lower. “We s’ll all be dead, all, if the men don’t protex us fro the spiders — ”

“Spiders?”

“That’s their name for the rorks. Go on, Big Tock, tell him about when you were a boy — ”

“Yace, Mist Cap. When I a boy, wece livin in a housey too far fro Tockeytown. Me mumma’s fella go fro brower (“Brower?” “Borrow, he means.”) — goce brower fire, becus why, becus fire goce out in housey. He hafs to go too far. My momma gahst two-three lilla baby. 1st come nigh-time. Inna nigh-time we mussa falla sleep. Becus me mumma’s fella goce back wista fire, one lilla baby we cahn fine im. Becus alla crybaby they crine too. And we cahn tell witsta crybaby an witsta real baby….”

Big Tock told his story so far matter-of-factly enough, but Lomar winced. He could, suddenly, picture the dilemma. How
would
you be able to locate a crying baby, a human child, with the trees and bushes and shrubs and grass full of the little insectivorous woods creatures whose cry for all the world was that of a wailing infant?

“Becus real lilla baby he jus learnin walk. Irma nigh-time when wece sleepin he mussa walkin outa housey. An we loosk and we loosk and we yellin. Nen we
hear — .Ukh — !
”

A rictus of fear convulsed his face. Shorty shivered. Conders looked at Lomar, who asked, “Hear
what?
”

“Hear
spider.
Too near. Goce,
‘Rork! Rork!’
An wece knowin ista spider becus wece hearin him rorkin. Nen wece runnin back to housey anna nex day we loosk again an we seece lilla blood here an lilla blood there. But we never fine lilla baby. Spider take im for eats im. Yace.”

There was a moment’s silence. Lomar felt his flesh prickling. It hardly seemed a fairy tale he’d just heard. Conders said, as casually as if he had been discussing the morning menu, or as if the two of them had been quite alone, “Well, that’s the Tocks for you. Running off just like that and leaving a baby at the mercy of the rorks. Dirty, cowardly, piss-poor worthless people, that’s what they are. Of course, the girls, yes ….”

Conders snickered. “You’ll be changing your luck with one of these Tocky girls, soon, I guess,” he said. “They’re hot stuff, all right. All the young men have them, yes. They’ll tumble for money, marbles, chalk, or just for fun. Oh, I know it — good morning! I must’ve tumbled hundreds of ‘em. And I’m not all worn out yet, either.” His reddish eyes rolled around towards Lomar, as if in challenge; his cracked lips leered.

Lomar was not presently interested in the thought of taking a tumble with a female equivalent of Shorty or Big Tock. Of course, the idea held a certain academic interest, wasn’t to be forever rejected out of hand. Loving — if it was good loving — soaked in. But it didn’t last forever.

• • •

Reluctantly, now, on the bed in his upstairs room in the U (plenty of room here at Guild Station, where the buildings had been set up in more populous times), he turned his thoughts to other, local and immediate thoughts. His mind returned now to the comment of the Station Aide, Arlan, about finding a substitute for or a synthetic form of the redwing derivative … that curious substance which had the power to force more subtle medicinal substances to stay bonded and not go flying off to join the universal ether … it had not been a very realistic comment. Arlan was just making conversation.

When were discoveries in any field made nowadays? Never … or next to never. Nobody did anything new, nobody ever tried. Nobody rocked the boat, went looking for trouble. Everybody just held on because nobody dared let go. Maybe if they did it wouldn’t take them as long as it had the Tame Tocks to become the way they now were.

The Tame Tocks … marooned here forever in their thin strip of territory on the top of the continent. Listlessly going through the outback parts of North Tockland, pulling up redwing, dragging the bundles of it back to their stinking hovels, hacking off the stalks, turning in the leaves for Guild chits which enabled them to buy the cast-off clothes and the coarser foodstuffs at the Station store reserved for them. Scratching about and growing scant patches of crops. Acting as the cheapest kind of cheap labor for Station and its personnel. Mixing their pot-batches of tockyrot and hardly waiting for it to become fully fermented before guzzling it. Big drunks, fights, orgiastic matings. Lying around for days, sleeping it off. Whoring. Dozing in the sun. “Sick. Yace. Sick. Cahn work t’day. Sick.”

His job seemed doomed before he could get it started.

Standing on the flats of yellowgrass behind the curing sheds, the heavy rank musty odor now and then blown away by the tempting salt-sea wind, Lomar had made his first attempt.

“Look here … Why don’t you bring in bigger loads of weed, you Tocks?”

“Cahn carry im, Mist Ran. Too heavy.”

“Yes, but look here. You see a stand of redwing. You tear it up by the roots. You make up your load. You drag it in. Then you hack off the roots, the stalks. Then you sell the leaf. Now — don’t you see? If you hacked off the roots and stalks as soon as you pulled the plant up, you’d be able to make up loads that wouldn’t be any heavier but would be all leaf.”

Blank stares. Scratching of rumps. “You see … half your labor, maybe more, goes into dragging along the roots and stalks, the part of the plant that’s of no use to us. Why bother? If you do it my way, you bring in a load that’s a hundred percent salable. You don’t have to do any more work, but you can get more money…. Don’t you see?”

They did not see. This is the way things were done. Things were done this way. Things weren’t done another way. You did things the way you did things. You didn’t do things the way you didn’t do things. Thus, the Tocks. But —

But did you really
need
the Tocks?

• • •

The Commercial Aide sat in his office looking steadily at a bottle set in the absolute middle of the table. The morning was only half over. He had spent an hour in front of his mirror, putting his red moustaches into their elaborate convolutions with the thick and gummy stuff called “Chicker spit.” He looked up slowly from the bottle as Lomar entered. A wide and rather shyly charming smile began to spread slowly over his long, pale face.

“Reldon! I — ”

“See what the dice-devils have sent me for a present,” Reldon said. “Have a drink.” He pressed his palms flat to the tabletop, but Lomar motioned him not to rise.

“Reldon, I came here to tell you — ”

“Tell me over a drink. It will sound much better, believe me.” A single 3D picture hung askew on the light brown wall. Young men in uniform. Reldon’s class at the Academy. It was covered with dust. Aside from this the room was bare of the usual clutter — family portraits, scenic views, souvenirs, record scans, record spools. Just the bottle on the desk.

“Thanks, thanks, it’s too early for me to drink, and besides something has just occurred to me that may be the answer to — ”

Reldon’s smile faded, trembled. “It’s not too early for
me
to drink. Not if I’ve got a legitimate reason to. It
is
too early for me to be drinking by myself. That, I’ve got to watch. But, oh, no harm surely in a social drink? Hey?
Sure.
Hey?” His pale hands with their prominent blue veins twitched as he talked. Lomar’s face indicated reluctant consent and Reldon jumped up, jerking open a wall file marked
Urgent
so suddenly that the glasses in it clattered together.

“Dead rorks!” said Reldon, cheerfully. He splashed himself another, questioned Lomar with eyes and eyebrows, shrugged at the refusal. Drank again — “Dead rorks …”

“What is this thing that everyone has about rorks?” Lomar sipped cautiously. Whatever was in the glass had not been mixed with anything lighter, was strong.

Reldon grimaced. “You’ve never seen one.”

“Have you?”

Nodding over his glass, Reldon took away his lips. “Yes. Horrible things. Finish your drink. Another.”

But Ran wouldn’t. “No, I want to tell you about my idea….” It came tumbling out of him … Tocks … wasteful labor … wasted time … impossible to get them to make even the simplest changes….

“But look. Do we need the Tocks? Do we really
need
them?”

Reldon squinted, unaccustomed thought coming hard and painful. “Well, who in the Hell else is going to gather that stinking muskweed?”

Eyes bright, lips eager, Lomar put his hands on the other man’s shoulders. “Grow it!” There. It was out. “Plant it and grow it! It’s been done, did you know that? Only experimentally, but it’s been
done.
It’s in the old books. Before the First War broke out, over five square kilometers were planted into redwing. Did you know that?”

“Mmm. No. Didn’t. Finish your — ”

But Lomar wanted him to catch fire, too. Didn’t he see? Didn’t Reldon understand? The Guild wanted redwing production increased, and this was the way to do it. True, there was no agricultural equipment on hand —
but it could be made!

“ ‘Made’?” Reldon had perhaps never heard the verb. “How — ‘made’?”

“Improvised. It can be improvised. The skimmers, for ex — ”

Skimmers. Whatever vague emotion that had passed for interest now ebbed quite out of Reldon’s face. Skimmers. Not his pidgin. The Motor Aide should be the one to see. Starchy Manton, the one who had the crazy notion that he was always in danger of being lured onto the Q and killed or shanghaied or something … See him. Nothing to do with Reldon, skimmers —

“Nothing to
do
with you — ? Hell! You’re the Commercial Aide. Has this place got any other commerce besides redwing? The Directorate’s orders are that redwing production be increased. And — ”

Reldon’s long, pale fingers, trembling only the slightest now that three drinks had restored his equilibrium, caressed the elaborate whorls of his moustaches. He seemed to draw confidence from their stiff contours. “Well, you see, my boy. The Guild. The Directorate. Their orders. Mmm. Well, yes. But you forget. Those orders are addressed to you. They aren’t addressed to me. I don’t care. I don’t have to care. All I have to do is keep the records. Which I do. Oh, I get behind. Lots and lots, I get behind. But I catch up in time for the Q.