The Practice Effect (7 page)

Dennis grabbed his own left foot. Awkwardly, he tried to look at the sole of his own boot. Moving too quickly, he overbalanced and fell on his backside.

He stared at the pattern of his own boot and sighed. It was identical! Either the computers here had come up with the same design as those on Earth had, or …

He looked around. The bootprints were everywhere. No doubt nearly all of them were his own.

There was a peeping that sounded suspiciously like laughter. Dennis turned and glared at the pixolet. It wore its accustomed grin.

“Don’t you dare say
one
word!” Dennis warned the creature.

For once, Pix did as told.

There weren’t many more clues. By the firepit he found a few crumbly sticks of dried meat. Over where the animals had been staked there were scatterings of spilled grain.

By a tall tree Dennis found a red stain in the earth. It felt sticky, like blood.

There were scuffmarks in the ground, and loose tufts of fur. Then he found one long golden strand that glinted in the morning light. He looked at it for a long moment, then carefully stuffed it into a button-down shoulder pocket.

A bit closer to the forest, he found a dead animal.

It looked like a larger cousin of the pixolet’s. It had the snub nose and needle teeth, but it was the size and build of a mastiff.

The head stared at him dully from a spot three feet from the rest of the body. It had been sheared off, along with part of the shoulder, as if by a guillotine—or a high-power laser.

He stared at the carnage until the buzzing of the watch-alarm carried over from the firepit. Dennis looked up anxiously. What was coming?

He turned just as six ragged doglike things suddenly emerged from the line of trees. He did not have time to form a more accurate impression. They snarled—a low, gravelly sound—then charged.

The needier was in his hand before he had time to think. He had practiced drawing and blasting knots in tree trunks
during the past few days of hiking. The exercise probably saved his life.

Balanced, legs apart, Dennis aimed just ahead of the beasts and fired.

The ground in front of the pack exploded, but the crazed things charged straight through the spray of dirt and grass single-mindedly. Dennis had no choice. He lifted his aim and fired again.

The pack tumbled into a howling mass. It divided almost instantly into the fleeing and the dead.

Dennis watched the survivors stumble away, howling in pain, their fellows bloody and still behind them. He looked down at the small weapon in his hand.

Powered by stored sunlight, the needier could peel tiny slivers off of any odd-shaped lump of metal he crammed into its ammo chamber, and fire them at high velocity. Dennis had thought it little better than a toy when he started out from the zievatron but he had begun to gain confidence in it with all the practice on the trail.

Now he stared at it in amazement.

What a killer
, he thought.

Soon he could tell he was drawing near civilization.

The highway perceptibly widened as it dropped from the mountain pass. Some of the hillside meadows now showed signs of cultivation. A thick hedgerow now separated the highway from open fields on both sides. Through the branches he could see herds of grazing animals on the slopes.

He would run into traffic soon. A happenstance encounter on the road wasn’t the best kind of first contact. He didn’t want to face the sort of weapon that had severed the head of the beast back at the campsite. Dennis decided it might be best to continue his travels off the road for a while.

He searched for a break in the hedge. Pix awakened from its nap atop his backpack when Dennis drew his machete and started to chop at a thin spot in the windbreak.
The little beast leaped for a high branch, then crouched and looked down at Dennis reproachfully for interrupting its siesta.

Dennis didn’t find the going easy. The heavy blade bounced back from the branches, barely chipping them.

He looked at it in disgust. He had not used the machete much until now. It was covered with rust spots and the edge was dull. Dennis cursed Bernald Brady, taking what consolation he could from the fact that he had not misjudged the fellow after all.

As he sucked at scratches on the back of his right hand, he had an idea. What about the beautiful native knife he had found by the airlock? He shrugged out of his pack and retrieved the cloth-wrapped artifact from one of the bottom pouches. With a wary glance up and down the highway, he laid the cloth on the ground and unfolded it.

His eyes went wide.

A week ago he had put away a beautiful, sharp, resilient knife, an obvious product of high-tech craftsmanship.

What lay before him was still impressive, but it looked a lot more like a finely chipped piece of obsidian tied to a wooden handle by tightly wound leather strips. It was sharp and well made, but a far cry from the advanced tool he remembered first picking up.

His head felt light.
A phenomenon
, he remarked internally, touching the object lightly.

He was brought back to the present by a peeping cry from above. The pixolet chirped at him twice, shaking its head vigorously. Then it soared off into the thicket.

Dennis reached into his thigh pocket and pulled out the camp-watch. The little screen showed red lights on the road, coming this way.

He rewrapped the artifact. The mystery would keep. He hefted the pack once more and set to hacking in earnest with the machete. He
had
to get off the road!

Brambles caught at his pack and at the arm he kept up to protect his face as he bulled his way through the thicket. Finally, like a pip squeezed from a melon, he flew into the meadow and sprawled onto the grass.

Dennis rolled over, breathing heavily.

At least
this
time I’ll get a good look at them
, he thought as
he crawled away from the break in the hedge.
At last I’ll find out what the natives
look
like!

He drew out the camp-watch again. The display showed a great many yellow lights, apparently depicting the herds of grazing animals Dennis had seen on the hillsides. To one side of the screen he saw two red dots and two yellow, coming this way down the road.

A pair of riders
.

Pix’s green marker was nowhere to be seen. The fickle creature must have left him again.

He was concentrating so hard on the red dots on the road that it took him a moment to notice that two small pink lights had detached themselves from a nearby herd of yellows to the south. They were moving rapidly toward the center of the screen.

Toward the center
, Dennis realized … 
that’s me
.

“Haaaa-aayy-oooaaoo!!
”

It came from behind him, a high, shrill cry that sent a shiver down his back. With the ululation came the sound of running footsteps. Someone was charging down on him from the rear!

Dennis clawed at his holster, holding little hope he could scramble about in time. At any instant he expected the sudden flash of some alien death ray to cut him down.

“Haaayyoo-oh!
”

Encumbered by the pack, he rolled over onto his stomach, trying to bring his weapon up. He held the needier out in two shaky hands ready to fire at … the dog.

He blinked, poised to shoot … the small dog that growled at him, then hopped back to take cover behind a pair of small legs … the stubby, scuff-kneed legs of a small boy.

Dennis looked up and stared. The most ominous weapon in sight was a shepherd’s crook held by a four-foot-tall towhead with a dirty face.

The first sapient extraterrestrial with whom Dennis had made contact wiped a lock of untidy brown hair out of his eyes and panted. “… 
Ayoo-missuh
.…” The boy breathed excitedly.
“Ooowan’ seem’pop
?”

A bit numb from surprise, Dennis realized he probably looked silly laying there. Slowly, so as not to frighten the child, he picked himself up.

He decided not even to think about the incongruity of finding a human boy—apparently about eight years old—here on an alien world. There was no profit in it. He made himself concentrate on the language problem. Something about the sounds spoken by the boy had sounded strangely familiar, as if he had heard them somewhere before.

He tried to remember a few facts from the linguistics course he had taken in college in order to get out of the infamous Professor LaBelle’s English 7. There were a few sounds, he had learned, that were nearly universal in meaning among human beings. Anthropologists used to use them at the beginning of contact with newly discovered tribes.

He swallowed, then ventured one of them.

“Huh
?” he said.

By now the boy had caught his breath. With a sigh of exaggerated patience he repeated himself.

“You wanna see my pop, misser
?”

Dennis gulped. He did manage, at last, to make his head go up and down in a nod.

The pup ran around them, yapping about their feet. The boy—who said his name was Tomosh—walked earnestly beside Dennis, leading him over the hilly meadow toward his home.

As they walked, Dennis saw a pair of riders pass by on the highway. Seen through breaks in the hedge, the sources of the threatening red dots that had sent him plunging into hiding minutes before turned out to be a couple of farmers cantering past on shaggy ponies.

He was just starting to adjust to all this. Of all possible first contacts, this one had to be the most benign and the most confusing. Dennis couldn’t even begin to imagine how there had come to be humans here.

“Tomosh,” he began.

“Yessirrr?” The boy rolled his “r’s” in an accent that Dennis was only just getting used to. He looked up expectantly.

Dennis paused. Where could he even begin? There was so much to ask. “Er, will your flock be all right while you escort me to meet your folks?”

“Oh, the rickels will be fine. The dogs watch ’em. I just gotta go out an’ count ’em twice a day an’ give an alarrm if one’s missin’.”

They walked on in silence for a few more steps. Dennis didn’t have much time to prepare for his first meeting with adults. Suddenly he felt very nervous about it.

Before running into the boy he had resigned himself to standing out as an alien and taking his chances. To be slain on sight by mammal-hating antmen, for instance, would have merely been unavoidable bad luck. Nothing he could have done about that.

But small details of his own behavior could affect the way local
humans
reacted to him. A simple mistake in courtesy—a careless slip—might cost him everything. And in that case the foult would be his.

Perhaps he could ask a child questions that would only cause an adult to become suspicious.

“Tomosh, are there many other farms around here?”

“Nossirr, only a few.” The boy sounded proud. “We’re almost the farthest! The King only wants miners an’ traders to go into the mountains where the L’Toff live.

“Baron Kremer feels different, o’ course. M’pop says th’ Baron’s got no right to send in lumbermen an’ soldiers.…”

Tomosh rambled on about how tough and mean the local overlord was and how the King, who lived far away to the east, would put the Baron in his place someday. The story broke down into gossip that sounded a bit sophisticated for a small boy … how “Lord Hern” was slowly taking over all the mines in the Baron’s name and how no circuses had come to the region in more than two years because of the troubles with the King. Although it was hard to follow all the details, Dennis gathered that the local setup was a feudal aristocracy, and apparently war was not uncommon.

Unfortunately, the story didn’t tell him anything about the crucial question of the world’s technology. The boy’s clothes, though dusty, looked well made. There were no pockets, but the belt of button-down pouches looked like it came straight
out of a Kelty catalogue. Tomosh’s shoes looked a lot like the tough old sneakers Dennis had worn as a child.

A rambling farmstead came into view as they crested a low hill. A house, barn, and storehouse lay about a hundred meters back from the windbreak along the road. The yard was surrounded by a high stockade. To Dennis the place looked prosperous enough. Tomosh grew excited and pulled on Dennis’s hand. Dennis uneasily followed the boy down the hill.

The farmhouse was a low, rambling earth-sheltered structure with a shallow, sloping roof that gleamed in the afternoon sunlight. At first Dennis thought the reflection came from aluminum siding. But as they came closer he saw that the walls were actually laminated wooden panels, beautifully joined and vanished.

The barn was similarly constructed. Both buildings looked like pictures out of a magazine.

Dennis stopped just outside the gate. It was his last chance to ask stupid questions.

“Uh, Tomosh,” he said, “I’m a stranger hereabouts.…”

“Oh, I could tell
that
. You talk funny!”

“Umm, yes. Well, in fact, I’m from a land far away to the … to the northwest.” Dennis had gathered from the boy’s ramblings that it was a direction about which the locals knew little.

“Naturally, I’m a bit curious about your country,” he went on. “Uh, could you tell me, for instance, the name of your land here?”

Without hesitation the boy answered, “It’s Coylia!”

“So your King is the King of Coylia?”

Tomosh nodded with an expression of exaggerated patience. “Right!”

“Good. You know, it’s a funny thing about names, Tomosh. People in different lands call the world by different names. What do your people call it?” Dennis was determined to put “Flasteria” to rest.

“The world?” The boy looked puzzled.

“The whole world.” He motioned at the earth, the sky, the hills. “All the oceans and kingdoms. What do you call it?”

“Oh. Tatir,” he replied earnestly. “That’s the name of the world.”

“Tatir,” Dennis repeated. He tried not to smile. It wasn’t much of an improvement on “Flasteria.”

“Tomosh!”

The shrill cry came from the farmhouse. A rather husky young woman stepped out onto the front porch and shouted again, “Tomosh! Come here!”