The Ugly Little Boy Read online

  She reached out, so quickly that she couldn’t be stopped, and snatched up Blazing Eye’s spear. He grunted in rage and jumped up to take it from her, but she deftly slid her hands along it to the hunting-grasp, and prodded the flint tip of its point against Blazing Eye’s belly. He looked at her, goggle-eyed. It wasn’t just the sacrilege of having a woman handle his spear that seemed to be bothering him; he appeared actually to think she was going to stick it into him.

  “Give me that,” he said in a thick voice.

  “Look, she knows how to hold it, Blazing Eye,” Tree Of Wolves said.

  “Yes, and I know how to use it, too.”

  “Give me that.”

  She prodded him with it again. She thought Blazing Eye was going to have a fit. His face was bright red and sweat poured down his cheeks. Everyone was laughing. He made a swipe at the spear and she pulled it back out of his reach. Furious, he spat at her and made a demon-sign with his clasped hands. She Who Knows grinned.

  “Make that sign again and I’ll wash it away with your blood,” she told him.

  “Come on, She Who Knows,” Blazing Eye said sourly. He was visibly struggling to control himself. “It isn’t right for you to be touching that spear, and you know it. We’re in enough danger as it is, without your committing evil acts.”

  “You invited me to go out and fight with the men,” she said. “Well, if I do I’ll need a spear, won’t I? Yours is a perfectly good one. It will suit me very well. Make yourself another one, if you like,”

  The other men laughed again. But there was an odd edge on their laughter now.

  She feinted with the spear and Blazing Eye, cursing, dodged it. He came forward stolidly as if to take it from her by sheer force. She warned him off with a serious thrust. Blazing Eye jumped back, looking angry and a little afraid.

  It was hard for her to remember when she had last enjoyed herself so much. Blazing Eye was the strongest warrior of the tribe, and the most handsome man as well, with shoulders as wide as a mammoth’s and wonderful dark eyes smoldering like coals under a splendid brow that jutted forth like a cliff. When they were young she had slept with him many times and she had hoped he would take her as his mate when Dark Wind died. But he had been the first to refuse her. Milky Fountain was the only mate he wanted, he had said. He liked the sort of woman who knew how to bear children, is what he had told her. And that had been the end of it between Blazing Eye and her.

  “Here,” She Who Knows said, relenting at last. She leaned forward and jammed the point of Blazing Eye’s spear into the ground. Under the midday warmth, the last of the night’s snowfall had disappeared and the earth was soft.

  Blazing Eye snatched the spear up with a growl.

  “I ought to kill you,” he muttered, brandishing it in her face.

  “Go ahead.” She spread her arms wide and pushed her breasts outward. “Strike right here. Kill a woman, Blazing Eye. It’ll be a fine achievement.”

  “It might bring us a little good luck,” he said. But he lowered the weapon. “You ever touch my spear again, She Who Knows, and I’ll tie you up on a hillside somewhere and leave you for a bear to eat. Do you understand that? Do you?”

  “Save your threats for the Other Ones,” she replied evenly. “They’ll be harder to frighten than I am. And I’m not frightened at all.”

  “You saw an Other One right up close once, didn’t you?” Broken Mountain asked her.

  “Once, yes,” She Who Knows said, frowning at the troubling memory of it.

  “What did he smell like, when you were that close?” said Young Antelope. “He really stank, I’ll bet.”

  She Who Knows nodded. “Like a dead hyena,” she said. “Like something that had been rotting for a month and a half. And he was ugly. You can’t imagine how ugly. His face was flat, like this, as if somebody had pushed it in.” She gestured emphatically with her hands. “And his teeth were as small as a child’s. He had ridiculous little ears and a tiny nose. And his arms, his legs—” She shuddered. “They were absurd and hideous. Like a spider’s, they were. So long, so thin.”

  They were all looking at her in awe, even Blazing Spear. No one else in the tribe, not Silver Cloud himself, had ever come face-to-face with an Other One, so close that she could have reached out and touched him, the way she had. Some of them had seen Other Ones now and then at a great distance, just fleeting glimpses, back in the days when the tribe had lived in the western lands. But She Who Knows had stumbled right into one in the forest.

  That had been years ago, when she was nineteen, still a wild girl then, who went her own way in all things. The men of the Hunting Society had forbidden her, at last, to accompany them on their patrols any more, and she had gone off by herself early one morning in a dark, scowling mood, wandering far from the tribe’s encampment. At midday in a little glade of white-barked birch trees she had found a pretty rock-bound pool, and she had stripped off her robe of fur to bathe in its chilly blue water, and when she came out she was astounded to see an Other One, an unmistakable Other One, staring at her from a distance of no more than twenty paces.

  He was tall—incredibly tall, as tall as a tree—and very thin, with narrow shoulders and a shallow chest, so that he looked more fragile than any woman, tall though he was. His face was the strangest face she had ever seen, with oddly delicate features like a child’s, and extremely pale skin. His jaws looked so weak that she wondered how he could manage to bite all the way through his meat from one side of a piece to another, but his chin was unpleasantly heavy and deep, thrusting out below his flat, pushed-in face. His eyes were large and of a weird, washed-out watery-looking color, and his forehead went straight up, no brow ridges whatsoever.

  All in all, she thought, he was astonishingly ugly, as ugly as a demon. But he didn’t seem dangerous. He carried no weapon that she could see, and he appeared to be smiling at her. At least, she thought that was a smile, that way he had of baring those tiny teeth of his.

  She was stark naked and in the full ripeness of her youthful beauty. She stood before him unashamed and the unexpected thought came to her that she wanted this man to beckon to her and call her to his side, and take her in his arms, and make love to her in whatever way it was that the Other Ones made love to their women. Ugly as he was, strange-looking as he was, she wanted him. Why was that? she wondered. And she answered herself that it was because he was different; he was new; he was other. She would give herself to him, yes. And then she would go home with him and live with him and become an Other One herself, because she was weary of the men of her own tribe and ready for something new. Yes. Yes.

  What was there to be afraid of? The Other Ones were supposed to be terrifying demons, but this man didn’t seem demonic at all, only strange of face and much too tall and thin. And he didn’t appear menacing, particularly. Only different.

  “My name is Falling River,” she said—that was what she called herself in those days. “Who are you?”

  The Other One man didn’t reply. He made a sound deep in his throat that might have been laughter.

  Laughter?

  “Do you like me?” she said. “Everyone in the tribe thinks I’m beautiful. Do you?”

  She ran her hands through her long thick hair, wet from her swim. She preened and stretched, letting him see the fullness of her breasts, the strength and solidity of her arms and thighs, the sturdiness of her neck. She took two or three steps toward him, smiling, crooning a little song of desire.

  His eyes widened and he shook his head. He held his arm straight out at her with the palm facing her, and began making signs with his fingers, sorcery-signs, no doubt, demon-signs. He backed away from her.

  “You aren’t afraid of me, are you? I just want to play. Come here, Other One.” She grinned at him.—“Listen, stop backing away like that! I won’t hurt you. Can’t you understand what I’m saying?” She was speaking very loudly, very clearly, putting plenty of space between one word and the next. He was still backing away. She put her hands b
eneath her breasts and pushed them outward in the universal gesture of offering.

  He understood that, at least.

  He made a low rumbling sound, like that of an animal at bay. His eyes had the bright sheen of fear in them. His lips drew back in an expression of what—dismay? Disgust?

  Yes, disgust, she realized.

  I must look as ugly to him as he does to me.

  He was turning now, running from her, lurching helter-skelter through the birches.

  “Wait!” she called. “Other One! Other One, come back! Don’t run away like that, Other One!”

  But he was gone. It was the first time in her life that a man had refused her, and she found the experience astonishing, unbelievable, almost shattering. Even though he was an Other One, even though she must have seemed alien and perhaps unattractive to him, had he really found her so repellent that he would growl and grimace and run?

  Yes. Yes. He must have been only a boy, she told herself. Tall as he was, only a boy.

  That night she returned to the tribe, resolved to take one of her own kind as a mate at last, and when Dark Wind asked her soon afterward to share his sleeping-rug she accepted without hesitation.

  “Yes,” she said to the men of the Hunting Society. “Yes, I know all too well what the Other Ones are like. And when we catch up with them I mean to be right there beside you, killing the loathsome beasts like the foul demons that they are.”

  “Look,” Tree Of Wolves said, pointing. “The old men are coming down from the hill.”

  Indeed, there they came now, Silver Cloud leading the way, limping painfully and all too obviously trying to pretend that he wasn’t, and the other three elders creaking along behind him. She Who Knows watched as they paraded into the camp, going straight to the place of the Goddess-shrine. For a long while Silver Cloud conferred with the three priestesses. There was much shaking of heads, then much nodding. And eventually Silver Cloud stepped forward, with the oldest of the priestesses at his side, to make an announcement.

  The Summer Festival, he said, would be canceled this year—or postponed, at least. The Goddess had shown her displeasure by bringing a party of Other Ones uncomfortably close to their encampment, even in these eastern lands where no Other Ones were supposed to live. Plainly the People had done something improper; plainly this was not a good place for them to be. Therefore the People would leave here this day and would undertake a pilgrimage to the Place of Three Rivers, far behind them, where on their way east last year they had erected an elaborate shrine in honor of the Goddess. And at the Place of Three Rivers they would beseech the Goddess to explain their errors to them.

  She Who Knows groaned. “But it’ll take us weeks to get there! And it’s in the wrong direction entirely! We’ll be walking right back into the territory we’ve just left, where Other Ones are swarming everywhere!”

  Silver Cloud gave her an icy glare. “The Goddess promised us this land, free of Other Ones. Now we have come into it and we find Other Ones already here. This is not as it should be. We need to ask Her guidance.”

  “Let’s ask for it down south, then. At least it’ll be warmer there, and we may find a decent place to camp, with no Other Ones around to bother us.”

  “You have our permission to go south, She Who Knows. But the rest of us will set out this afternoon toward the Place of Three Rivers.”

  “And the Other Ones?” she cried.

  “The Other Ones will not dare to approach the shrine of the Goddess,” said Silver Cloud. “But if you fear that they will, She Who Knows, why, then—go south! Go south, She Who Knows!”

  She heard someone laughing. Blazing Eye, it was. Then the other men of the Hunting Society began to laugh, too, and a few of the Mothers joined in. Within moments they were all laughing and pointing at her.

  She wished she still had Blazing Eye’s spear in her hands. She would smite them all if she did, and nothing would stop the slaughter.

  “Go south, She Who Knows!” they called to her. “Go south, go south, go south.”

  A curse came to her lips, but she forced it back. They meant it, she realized. If she spoke out angrily now, they might well drive her from the tribe. Ten years ago she would have welcomed that. But she was an old woman, now, past thirty. To go off by herself would be certain death.

  She murmured a few angry words to herself, and turned away from Silver Cloud’s steady stare.

  Silver Cloud clapped his hands. “All right,” he called. “Start packing up, everybody! We’re breaking camp! We’re getting out of here before it turns dark!”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Arriving

  [5]

  FOR EDITH FELLOWES it was a tremendously busy few weeks.

  The hardest part was the winding up of her work at the hospital. Giving only two weeks’ notice was not only irregular, it was downright improper; but the administration was reasonably sympathetic once Miss Fellowes let it be known that she was leaving with the greatest reluctance, and only because she had been offered an opportunity to take part in an incredibly exciting new research project.

  She mentioned the name of Stasis Technologies, Ltd.

  “You’re going to be taking care of the baby dinosaur?” they asked her, and everybody chuckled.

  “No, not the dinosaur,” she said. “Something much closer to what I know.”

  She didn’t give any further details. Dr. Hoskins had forbidden her to go into specifics with anyone. But it wasn’t hard for those who knew and worked with Edith Fellowes to guess that the project must have something to do with children; and if her employers were the people who had brought that famous baby dinosaur out of the Mesozoic, then surely they must be planning to do something along the same lines now—such as bringing some prehistoric child out of a remote period of time. Miss Fellowes neither confirmed nor denied it. But they knew. They all knew. Her leave of absence from the hospital was granted, of course.

  Still, she had to work virtually round the clock for a few days, tying off loose ends, filing her final reports, preparing lists of things for her successors, separating her own equipment and research materials from the hospital’s. That part was strenuous but not otherwise burdensome. The really difficult part was saying goodbye to the children. They couldn’t believe that she was leaving.

  “You’ll be back in a week or two, won’t you, Miss Fellowes?” they asked her, crowding around. “You’ll just be going on vacation, isn’t that so? A little holiday?—Where are you going, Miss Fellowes?”

  She had known some of these children since the day they were born. Now they were five, six, seven years old: outpatients, most of them, but some were permanent residents and she had worked with them year in, year out.

  That was hard, breaking the news to them, very hard.

  But she steeled herself to the task. Another child needed her now, an extraordinarily special child, a child whose predicament would be unique in the history of the universe. She knew that she had to go where she would be most needed.

  She closed up her small apartment on the south side of town, selecting the few things she would want to take with her to her new home, storing away the rest. That was done quickly enough. She had no houseplants to worry about, no cats, no pets of any kind. Her work had been the only thing that really mattered: the children, always the children, no need for plants or pets.

  But in her prudent way she arranged to maintain her lease for an indefinite period of time. She was taking very seriously Gerald Hoskins’ warning that she might be let go at any moment. Or might want to resign, for that matter: Miss Fellowes knew she should allow for the possibility that the operation at Stasis Technologies would be uncongenial to her, that her role in the project would be unsatisfying, that she might discover very swiftly that it had been a gigantic mistake to have taken the job. She hadn’t burned her bridges, not at all: the hospital would be waiting for her return, the children, her apartment.

  During those final two weeks, busy as she was, she made several trips across
town to the headquarters of Stasis Technologies to help prepare for the arrival of the child from the past. They had given her a procurement staff of three, two young men and a woman, and she provided them with an extensive list of things she would need—medicines, nutritional supplements, even an incubator.

  “An incubator?” Hoskins asked.

  “An incubator,” she said.

  “We’re not planning to bring back a premature child, Miss Fellowes.”

  “You don’t know what you’re bringing back, Dr. Hoskins. You told me so yourself, in just about that many words. You may be bringing a sick child; you may be bringing a weak one; you may be bringing a child who’ll fall ill the moment it starts to get modern-day microbes into its system. I want an incubator, at least on a standby basis.”

  “An incubator. All right.”

  “And a sterile chamber big enough to contain an active and healthy child, if it turns out that it’s too big to live in an incubator.”

  “Miss Fellowes, be reasonable, please. Our budget is—”

  “A sterile chamber. Until we know that it’s safe to let that child be contaminated by our air.”

  “Contamination is unavoidable, I’m afraid. It’ll be breathing our microbe-ridden air from the moment it arrives. There’s no way we can conduct the Stasis under the germ-free conditions you seem to want. No way, Miss Fellowes.”

  “I want there to be a way.”

  Hoskins gave her what she had already come to think of as his patented no-nonsense glare. “This is one that I’m going to win, Miss Fellowes. I appreciate your desire to protect the child from all imaginable risks. But you have no understanding of the physical layout of our equipment, and you’ve simply got to accept the fact that we can’t deliver the child instantly into a perfectly pure isolation chamber. We can’t.”

  “And if the child sickens and dies?”

  “Our dinosaur is still in fine health.”

  “There’s no reason to believe that reptiles, prehistoric or otherwise, would be subject to infection by the microorganisms that carry the diseases humans contract. But this is a human being you’ll be bringing here, Dr. Hoskins, not a little dinosaur. A member of our own species.”