Lloyd Biggle Jr. - Monument

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Monument

By Lloyd Biggle Jr.

The short story ‘Monument’ was first published in Analog Magazine, June of 1961, and was included

and Smith Publications Inc. This novel is an expanded version of that story.

e-book version 4.0

It came to Obrien quite suddenly that he was dying.

He was lying in a gently swaying gourd hammock, almost within reach of the

flying spray where the waves broke in on the point. The caressing warmth of

the sun filtered through ragged, scarlet-leaved sao trees. Shouts of the children

spearing marnl off the point reached him on fitful gusts of fragrant wind. A full

drinking gourd hung at his elbow. The sweet, clear tones of a girl's voice

uplifted in an old, old song, and the tremulous twanging of the nabuls stroked

in accompaniment, had embroi-dered his reverie with bittersweet nostalgia. His

first wife had sung that song at a moment in time that now seemed remote

almost beyond the reach of memory.

Then the realization snapped coldly across his thoughts and roused him

from half-dozing, drowsy contentment to icy wakefulness.

He was dying.

The sudden surge of panic he experienced brought pain in its wake, and

while the spasm lasted he lay quietly, hands clutching his abdomen, eyes

closed, perspiration oozing from his fore-head and soaking the hammock's

brightly patterned robes. It passed, and he jerked erect and shook his fist at

the mocking emptiness of the cloudless blue-green sky. "What are you wait-ing

for, damn it! What are you waiting for?"

The song stopped abruptly. A nabul struck the ground with a soft thud and

a dissonant rattle of strings as Dalla, the singer, leaped to her feet and hurried

to his side. He sat on the edge of the hammock wearily looking about him. The

multicolored vege-tation encircled him with a curtain of riotous beauty, and its

glistening, drooping blossoms wafted a soporific invitation to rest, to meditate.

Obrien leaned back. Then he felt the first stabbing thrust of the pain's

return, and he slid determinedly to his feet and brushed the blossoms aside.

Dalla fluttered about him concernedly, her face tense with un-spoken

questions. Obrien's great-great-grandson, Fornri, hurried toward him. Fornri

and Dalla: Obrien regarded the two of them benignly, suddenly comprehending

why Dalla had sung that old love song. In a year or two they would be partners

at a be-trothal dance. He wondered whether he would be alive to offer his

blessing.

The other young people were on their feet and looking on with grave

concern. They came frequently to ease the burden of an old man's boredom

with music, and they would not understand if he told them he no longer

needed to be entertained because he was dying. The pain's thrust continued,

but Obrien resisted the impulse to futilely clutch his stomach.

"To the Elder," he said curtly.

Consternation touched their faces. Fornri said slowly, "It is a long and tiring

journey. Perhaps in the morning—"

"To the Elder," Obrien said again and turned his back on them.

Their words drifted after him; they spoke unaware that an old man's hearing

could be as sharp as their own. Dalla said tremulously, "If you go only a short

distance and then return, he may fall asleep and forget."

There was a pause, and then Fornri answered, his voice deeply troubled.

"No. He is the Langri. If he wishes to visit the Elder we must take him."

Obrien left them to their dilemma and stumbled down the slope to the

beach. The moment he appeared, the children came splashing toward him.

"Langri!" they shouted. "Langri!"

They crowded about him excitedly, holding up marnl for his approval, waving

their spears, laughing and shouting. The marnl was a fiat, broad,

reptilian-looking creature with a multitude of legs and a small head on a

ridiculously long neck. It was unlovely and inedible, but as a bait it was

priceless. On this world children learned to swim before they could walk, for

there was nothing in the sea that could harm them, and as soon as they could

wield a spear they took to this game of catching marnl and made their play an

indispensable economic asset.

Obrien paused to admire the more choice specimens before he gestured

toward a dugout hunting boat drawn up on the beach. "To the Elder," he said.

"Ai! To the Elder! Ai! To the Elder!"

They dashed to the boat, hauled it into the water, and began a furious

struggle for places. Then Fornri arrived, and he waded into the melee, restored

order, and told off seven boys for pad-dlers. They brought the boat back to the

beach for Obrien to board. His pain had diminished, so he shrugged off Fornri's

prof-fered assistance, waded to the other end of the boat, and hopped aboard

native fashion. As the boat moved away, the crowd of children splashed after it,

swimming around and under it until the paddlers got up speed. Behind them,

Dalla stood on a rise of ground with her arm uplifted in farewell.

The boys shouted a song as they dipped their paddles—a se-rious song, for

this was a serious undertaking. The Langri wished to see the Elder, and it was

their solemn duty to make haste.

And Obrien leaned back and wearily watched the foam dance under the

outrigger, for he was dying.

It was not the imminence of death that disturbed him, but the realization

that he should have thought of it sooner. Death was inevitable from the instant

of birth, and Cerne Obrien was a long lifetime from babyhood. He wondered,

sometimes, just how old he might be, for in this dreamy land, where the nights

were moist and the days warm and sunny, where there were no sea-sons,

where men measured age by wisdom, it was difficult to keep an alert finger on

the pulse of time.

But Obrien did not need a calendar to tell him he was an old man. The

solitary hut he had built on the lovely rise of ground above the point had

become the center of a community as his sons, and grandsons, and

great-grandsons brought home their wives. It was the village of Langru, the

village of fire-topped men, already celebrated in legend and song; and though

few of his descendants inherited his red hair, all were considered people of fire.

Maidens were eager to mate with them, and the sturdiest youths came to court

the daughters of fire. Many of them defied tradition and settled in the village of

their wives.

A man who lived to watch his family thrive into the fifth gen-eration had to

expect a time of reckoning. Obrien's limbs were stiff and swollen each morning

from the night's dampness. He moved slowly and tired easily, and the flaming

red hair of his youth had faded to rusty gray. He had been ill for several years

as a twitch of discomfort in his stomach became a throbbing irritation and then

a sharp, prolonged pain and finally a searing agony. It was the corrosive touch

of death, and so slowly did it come upon him that he had not recognized it.

He had received more happiness than he'd expected from life and far more

than he deserved, and he should have been able to face death without fear or

regret; but the dream that had grown until it shaped his life among these

people was unful-filled, and he knew, with an absolute and terrifying certitude,

that if he died now this lovely world was doomed to utter ruin and this

beautiful, generous, loving people to extinction. He knew.

He had known it almost from the moment of his crash landing. In his

younger days the knowledge had made him frantic with worry, and he had

pondered and debated with himself on long nocturnal walks along the beaches,

and paced his hut through innumerable hours of misty darkness while he

devised stratagems, and with inspiration and luck and stubbornness he finally

fash-ioned the answers he had to have. He was the one man in the far-flung

cosmos who could save this world that he loved and these people that he loved,

and he would do it. He painstakingly rehearsed in his mind every step that had

to be taken, and every opposing move that would have to be countered, and he

was ready to act the moment the world was officially discovered.

The discovery did not happen, and he, Cerne Obrien, had played the fool.

He had been content to wait. It was pleasant lounging in his hammock with a

gourd of fermented juice at his elbow, acting the part of a veritable oracle,

respected, even wor-shiped. When he was younger he had roamed the length

and breadth of this world's lone continent. He had taken long sea voyages. He

was first in every adventure and courted danger with a grin on his face,

scorning the world's hazards and revering its beauties wherever and whenever

he found them; but his zest for hazards diminished with age, and he became

aware that the view from his own village encompassed as much breath-taking

beauty as a man could comprehend in a lifetime.

He was a simple man, an uneducated man. The natives' awe of his supposed

wisdom alarmed and embarrassed him. He found himself called upon to settle

complex sociological and economic problems, and because he had seen many

civilizations and remembered much of what he had seen, he achieved a

spec-tacular success and enjoyed it not at all.

And now the long pageant of unnumbered, wonderful years had come to this

bitter ending: he was the one man in the cosmos who knew how to save this

world and this people, and he could not do it because he was dying.

Kilometers of coast drifted past, and scores of villages, where people

recognized the Langri and crowded the shore to wave. The afternoon waned and

evening came on. Fatigue touched the boys' faces and their singing became

strained and breathless, but they worked tirelessly and kept their rhythm.

Dusk was hazing the sea about them and purpling the land when they

entered a shallow bay and rode the surf up onto a wide, sloping beach studded

with boats. The boys leaped out and heaved their own boat far up onto the

sand. Then they slumped to the beach in exhaustion and bounced up a

moment later, beam-ing with pride. There would be feasting tonight, and they

would be honored guests. Had they not brought the Langri?

All native villages lay on hillsides overlooking the sea, with their dwellings

arranged in concentric circles about a central oval where, at dusk, cooking fires

sent fragrant plumes of smoke skyward. Obrien's march up the village's central

avenue was a triumphal procession. Respectful adults and awed children

sol-emnly trailed after him. He skirted the enormous signal gourd that stood in

the center of the oval and continued on to the top of the slope where the Elder's

dwelling stood. The Elder stood waiting for him, a smile on his wrinkled face,

his arms forming the native salute: one arm uplifted; the other held across his

breast with hand resting lightly on his shoulder. Ten paces from him Obrien

halted and returned the salute. The villagers watched silently.

"I greet you," Obrien said.

"Your greetings are as welcome as yourself," the Elder replied.

Obrien stepped forward, and they touched hands. This was not a native

greeting, but he used it with some of the older men who were almost lifelong

friends to him.

"I ordered a feast in the hope that you would come," the Elder said.

"I came in the hope there would be a feast," Obrien returned.

The formalities thus satisfied, the villagers drifted away mur-muring

approval. The Elder took Obrien's arm and led him to the grove at the top of the

hill, where hammocks were hung. They stood facing each other.

"Many days have passed," the Elder said.

"Too many days," Obrien agreed.

The Elder's tall, gaunt frame seemed as sturdy as ever, but his hair was

silvery white. The years had etched lines in his face, and more years had

deepened them and dimmed the brightness in his eyes. Like Obrien, he was

old. He was dying.

"The way is long," the Elder said, "but at the end is a soft ham-mock, a full

gourd, and a village of friends. Rest!"

They settled into two hammocks hung in a V, where they could lie with their

heads close together, and a girl brought drinking gourds. They sipped in

silence as darkness slowly settled on the village.

"The Langri is no longer a traveler," the Elder observed finally.

"The Langri travels when the need arises."

"Let us then talk of that need."

"Later. After we have eaten. Or tomorrow. Tomorrow would be better."

"Tomorrow, then," the Elder agreed. He pushed Obrien's gourd toward him.

Below them, the village was girding itself for the feast. New fires had been

kindled—the oval blazed with them—and each of the village's most skilled chefs

had brought out the piece of koluf meat that he or she had long been curing, or

aging, or marinat-ing, or smoking, or drying for just such an auspicious

occasion as a visit from the Langri. The koluf was an authentic sea

mon-ster—one of them filled a hunting boat—and Obrien often won-dered how

many of the natives' ancestors had died before they found a way to capture this

virulently poisonous creature and render it edible. Once found, the meat

proved delectable beyond human powers of description. Obrien had tasted

thousands of koluf dishes, because each chef had his own technique of

season-ing and preparation, and each one tasted more delicious than any of

the others.

Fires also leaped high on the distant beach, and soon Obrien heard the

thum . . . thum . . . thum of the nabs. Like the smaller nabuls, they were

stringed instruments fashioned of gourds, but the enormous nabs towered over

the musicians who played them.

The thumming continued. Soon a raln, a type of gourd used as a drum,

added its resonant thuds, and then the twanging na-buls were heard. Already

the dancing had begun, for the young natives needed no persuasion to perform

a festive dance. They were circling the musicians with torches, and soon they

would peel off in a sinuous dance line that would weave through the village and

summon the guests of honor. The rippling night breeze blended savory odors of

the coming feast with the crisp tartness of the sea that heaved tirelessly just

beyond the mouth of the bay. Blended words of chant and song were flung up

to them as the dance line gained momentum and began its progress through

the village.

Obrien felt exhausted—had there been time, he gladly would have

slept—but when the Elder touched his arm he dutifully swung to his feet.

Escorted by the jubilantly singing dancers, the two walked to their places of

honor on the beach.

Except for the chefs and the escorting dancers, the entire vil-lage had

assembled there. Around the fires, enormous, elongated gourds had been

placed in circles, and these served as platforms for the dancing. In the position

of honor amidst the waiting vil-lagers was a triple throne with a high seat in the

center and lower seats on either side.

Obrien and the Elder took the two lower places, and the danc-ers returned

to the village oval and began to escort the chefs to the beach. They came a few

at a time, each carefully carrying his culinary masterpiece on a gourd platter

that was lined with colorful leaves and encircled with flowers. The natives'

existence depended absolutely on the whims of the koluf. When they caught

enough, they ate well; when they didn't, they went hun-gry. But no matter how

much or how little food they had, they lavished on it all of the care and skill at

their command.

The chefs formed a line at the edge of the beach, and the dancers took the

dishes, one at a time, and with great ceremony they moved to the place of

honor and presented them to Obrien. The thumming, twanging music and

rhythm continued; dancing about the beach fires was now a contortion of

violent movement; now a sedate gliding; now a vigorous leaping from gourd to

gourd.

Obrien inspected each dish in turn, broke off a crumb of meat, tasted

solemnly, meditated, shook his head. The dish was passed to the waiting

villagers, and its hopeful author retired in disap-pointment. Another took his

place at the head of the line, and the dancers brought the next dish for

Obrien's approval. Obrien tasted, rejected, and turned his attention to the

dancing until another dish arrived.

The villagers watched avidly as Obrien tasted dish after dish. The Langri was

no novice, and the chef who prepared the por-tion he found out of the ordinary

would be honored indeed.

Suddenly Obrien, having tasted a crumb of koluf, tilted his head

thoughtfully and broke off a larger morsel. He tasted again, smiled, nodded,

and offered some to the Elder, who tasted it and smiled his own approval.

Obrien accepted the platter of meat from the dancers, who returned to the line

of waiting chefs to proclaim the winner. They escorted her to the throne, a

plump, middle-aged woman delirious with delight. Obrien and the Elder arose

and handed her up to the highest seat while around them the villagers slapped

bare legs in enthusiastic approval. For with the natives, as with any people

revering good food, the ultimate place of honor at any feast belonged to the

cook.

In the morning, Obrien and the Elder walked together along the shore and

seated themselves on a knoll overlooking the sea. Sweet-scented blossoms

crowded up about them, nodding in the breeze. The morning light sparkled on

the leaping water. Brightly colored sails of the hunting fleet were pinned

flower-like to the horizon. To their left, the village rested sleepily on its hillside,

with a single thin plume of smoke wafting skyward. Children of both sexes

romped in the surf or walked timidly along the shore to stare up at the Elder

and the Langri.

"I am an old man," Obrien observed wearily.

"The oldest of old men," the Elder agreed promptly.

Obrien smiled wanly. To a native, "old" meant "wise." The Elder had paid him

the highest of compliments, and he felt only bitterness and frustration. "I am

an old man," he said, "and I am dying."

The Elder turned quickly and looked at him with concern.

"No man lives forever, my friend," Obrien said, "and you and I have been

cheating the fire of death for a long time."

"The fire of death never lacks for fuel. Let those cheat it who can. You spoke

of a need."

"Your need. The need of all of your people and of my people."

The Elder nodded thoughtfully. "As always, we listen well when the Langri

speaks."

Obrien got to his feet, walked forward a few paces, and stood looking at the

sea. "You remember that I came from afar and stayed because the skyship that

brought me could fly no longer. I came to this land by chance and because I

had lost my way and my skyship had a serious sickness."

"I remember."

"Others will come," Obrien said, "and then more others. There will be good

men and bad, but all will have strange weapons."

"I remember. I was there when you slew the maf."

"Strange weapons," Obrien repeated. "Our people will be help-less. The men

from the sky will take this land—whatever they want of it. They will take the

hills and the forests and the beaches and even the sea, the mother of life. There

will be boats that sail above and below the waters and poison them, and the

koluf, the staple of life, will be driven into deep waters where the hunters can't

find it. Our people will be pushed back into the mountains where there is no

food. The strangers will bring strange sicknesses, and entire villages will lie in

the fire of death. They will lay waste to the shores, they will hunt the waters

and swim, and their dwellings will be taller than the tallest trees and their

numbers on the beaches thicker than the marnl at hatching. Our own people

will be no more."

The Elder was silent for a time. Then he said, "You know this to be true?"

"It will not happen this day or the next, but it will happen."

"It is indeed a terrible need," the Elder said quietly.

Obrien looked at the awesome beauty of the curving shore and thought,

"This beautiful, unspoiled land, this wonderful, generous, beautiful people—" A

man was so damned helpless when he was dying.

The Elder got to his feet, and for a time they stood side by side in silence,

two old men in bright sunlight waiting for dark-ness. The Elder placed his hand

gently on Obrien's shoulder. "Cannot the Langri prevent this thing?"

Obrien walked a short distance down the slope and knelt in the lush

vegetation. He plucked the flowers, one at a time, and as each glistening,

multicolored blossom turned dark in his hand he crushed it, tossed it aside,

and plucked another.

The Elder followed and knelt beside him. "Cannot the Langri—"

"The Langri can prevent it—I think—if the men from the sky come this day

or the next. If they delay longer the Langri cannot prevent it because the Langri

is dying."

"Now I understand. The Langri must show us the way."

"The way is strange and difficult."

"What we must do shall be done. The Langri's wisdom will light the way."

"Strange and difficult," Obrien repeated. "Our people may not be able to

follow it, or the path the Langri chooses may be the wrong one."

"What does the Langri require?"

Obrien got to his feet. "Send the young people to me, two hands at a time. I

will make my choices. There must be a village for them, in a place apart. They

must eat, though they neither hunt nor gather, and the burden of their food

and its prepara-tion must be fairly divided among all the villages."

"The first will come to you this day, and your wishes will be my wishes."

They touched hands. Obrien turned and walked away quickly. Fornri and

the young paddlers were waiting for him on the beach, and they pushed off at

once and hoisted a sail, because the wind was at their back for the return

voyage. They moved swiftly out of the bay, and Obrien, looking backward, saw

the Elder still standing motionless on the knoll with arm uplifted.

Cerne Obrien had been knocking about in space since he was twelve, and

when he got sufficiently tired of being the top name on everyone's duty list, he

saved a little money and acquired a battered government surplus survey ship.

The sale—at discounted salvage value—was contingent on his junking the ship,

but he scraped together some supplies and paid a dispatcher to be looking the

other way when he took off.

He was only a dumb mechanic—though a good one—and he had no license

to be touching anything at all on a spaceship for-ward of the retron cells; but

he'd seen one piloted often enough to think he knew the fundamentals. The

ship had a perverse streak that matched his own, but after he exercised his rich

vo-cabulary of profanity and kicked the control panel a few times it would settle

down and behave itself. Pointing it in the right direction was another matter.

Probably any bright school kid knew more about celestial navigation than he

did, and his only support came from an obsolete Simplified Astrogation for the

Layman. He was lost ninety per cent of the time and only vaguely aware of his

whereabouts for the other ten, but it didn't matter.

He wanted to see some places that were off the usual space lanes and maybe

do a little illegal prospecting, but especially he wanted to be his own boss and

make his own decisions. When supplies got low he looked for a small, privately

owned port where there would be no authorities asking to see his non-existent

license. Good mechanics were always in demand, and he could slip in for a

night landing, work until he'd earned enough to re-plenish his fuel and

supplies, and slip back into space without exciting anyone.

He went through the motions of prospecting, too, nosing about on dozens of

asteroids and moons and small planets that either were undiscovered or

forgotten. He would have been reluctant to admit even to himself that the

prospecting was in reality an excuse that enabled him to enjoy the contorted

strangeness of a stark lunar landscape or experience the awesome thrill of

riding a barren, spinning asteroid through an unending procession of glowing

dawns and precipitant sunsets.

No one could have been more amazed than Obrien when he actually struck

it rich. An asteroid of solid platinum he would have overlooked, but a rich

deposit of retron crystals made his ship's instrumentation misbehave so

radically that eventually he got the message. He started back to civilization with

a wealth so enormous and so unexpected that he had no notion of what he

would do with it.

He had nothing with which to blanket the massive retron emis-sions from

his cargo hold. He was lost when he started, and his erratically functioning

instrumentation quickly lost him much more thoroughly while he fought a

losing battle to conserve fuel and keep his worn engines operating. Finally he

selected the world that seemed to offer his best chance for survival and pointed

his ship at it. It was in fact his last chance, because his misbehaving fuel gauge

had misled him. He ran out of fuel and crashed while attempting to land.

The natives made him welcome. He became a hero by turning his las pistol

on an obnoxious, leathery-skinned flying creature that dove into the sea to tear

its food from the living koluf. The maf had become so numerous that the

natives' principal source of food was threatened. Obrien used up all of his

magazines, shooting the creatures in flight and destroying chrysalides and

young in the high, inaccessible lairs, and he rendered the maf virtually extinct.

Obrien then explored the lone continent end to end and found nothing

more significant than scant deposits of coal and a few metals. Any serious

prospector would have scorned them, but they sufficed to lead the natives

immediately into a bronze age and give them the metal points they so

desperately needed for their hunting spears. He next turned his attention to

the sea and added an outrigger to the hunting boats for stability in the furi-ous

battles waged with the koluf.

He had lost interest in being rescued. He was the Langri; he had his family

and his own growing village and a position of tre-mendous prestige. He could

have been the Elder at a relatively young age, but the idea of him, an alien,

ruling these people seemed repugnant to him. His refusal enhanced the

natives' re-spect for him. He was happy.

He also was worried. The planet had such meager natural re-sources that no

one would be attracted to it by prospective plun-der. It was so inhospitable to

humans that the natives could not have survived without the koluf and the

many species of gourds. There were few material things that they needed that

could not be made in whole or in part from gourds, but the koluf crop barely

sufficed to feed them. Fortunately for the natives, there was no galactic market

for gourds. Unfortunately, the world had another potential resource that

rendered it priceless.

It was a beautiful world. Its beaches were smooth and sandy, its waters

warm, its climate admirable. It would make a magnifi-cent vacation resort, a

world-wide vacation resort, and those paradoxical features that made life so

difficult for the natives would become assets where tourists were concerned.

Man was the alien on this world, and these natives had to be descended

from a space expedition or colonization party that had gone astray hundreds of

years before. Except for the koluf— after a lavish purification process—and a

few roots and berries, the world's flora and fauna were virulently poisonous to

man. Fortunately, man was equally poisonous to the native animals. He could

swim in the sea with perfect safety as long as he avoided drowning, for not even

the most voracious monster would dare to molest him. A drop of his blood, a

scrap of his flesh, meant sickness or death, and in that violent arena the first

was rapidly followed by the second.

Man paid dearly for his safety, because there was so little that he could eat.

The edible roots could be pounded into a barely palatable flour. A few

specimens of bitter fruit and leaves were excellent for seasoning koluf meat,

and there was a small, pulpy berry that was tasteless but contained juices that

could be blended into an excellent fermented drink. That was all.

But if man brought his own food, avoided poisonous thorns and nettles, and

guarded against those forms of the world's dis-tressingly potent bacteria to

which man was susceptible—and a well-ordered resort would take the

necessary precautions—this world would become his playground. To the people

of the myri-ads of harsh environments whose natural resources attracted large

populations—dry worlds, barren worlds, airless worlds—it would be paradise.

Those who could leave their bleak atmosphere domes, or underground caverns,

or sand-blown villages for a few days in this sweet-smelling, oxygen-rich

atmosphere could re-turn to their rigorous environments with renewed

courage.

Luxury hotels would crowd the beaches. Lesser hotels, board-inghouses,

rental cottages would press back into the hills where magnificent forests now

flaunted their lavishly colored leaves. Millionaires would indulge in spirited

bidding for choice stretches of beach on which to locate their mansions. The

shores would be clotted with vacationers. Ships would offer relaxing sea cruises,

undersea craft would introduce their passengers to the world's fantastically rich

and incredibly strange marine life, and crowded wharves would harbor fishing

boats for hire—for though the sea creatures were inedible, catching such

repulsive monsters would constitute rare sport. It would be a year-round

business because the climate was delightful the year around: a multibil-lion

credit business.

The natives, of course, would be crowded out. Exterminated. There were

laws to protect them, and an impressive Colonial Bureau to enforce the laws,

but Obrien knew only too well how such governmental bureaucracies

functioned. The little freeboot-ers such as himself, who tried to pick up a few

quick credits, received stiff fines and prison terms. The big-money operators

incorporated, applied for charters, and if charters weren't avail-able they found

the required legal loophole or paid the necessary bribe. Then they went after

their spoils under the protec-tion of the laws that were supposed to protect the

natives.

The tourists' water recreations would drive the koluf to new feeding grounds,

and unless the natives were able to follow it—continuously—or effect radical

changes in their diet, their social structure, and their manner of living, they

would starve. Obrien doubted that they could do any of those. And a century or

two later, scholars, always worrying deeply about yesterday's trag-edies while

blithely ignoring today's, would bemoan the loss. "They'd achieved a splendid

civilization. Some of its facets were highly original and even unique. It's a pity,

really it is. One would think there'd be a law about that kind of thing."

The young people came from all of the villages. They swung lightly down the

coast with flashing paddles and rollicking songs—ten at a time they came,

handsome boys and lovely girls bronzed from their days in the sun, all of them

equally experienced at the koluf hunt and the loom, for in this society either

sex did the work it preferred.

Theirs was the age of carefree happiness, the age the natives called the Time

of Joy, for they were granted the leisure for sing-ing and dancing, for courtship,

for—if they chose—doing nothing at all, before assuming their adult

responsibilities. And though they solemnly beached their boats along the point

and came into the august presence of the Langri with appropriate reverence, he

knew that no talk about tomorrow's doom would easily divert their thoughts

from today's delights.

His questions startled them. They grappled awkwardly with strange

concepts. They struggled to repeat unutterable sounds. They underwent

bewildering tests of strength and endurance, of memory, of comprehension.

Obrien tested and rejected, and others took their places, and finally he had

chosen fifty.

In the forest, remote from the attractions of sea and shore and village,

Obrien had a small village constructed. He moved in with his fifty students, and

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摘要：

MonumentByLloydBiggleJr.Copyright1974byLloydBiggleJr.Theshortstory‘Monument’wasfirstpublishedinAnalogMagazine,Juneof1961,andwasincludedintheanthologyAnalog1,editedbyJohnW.Campbell(Doubleday,1963).Copyright1961,StreetandSmithPublicationsInc.Thisnovelisanexpandedversionofthatstory.e-bookversion4.01Itc...

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Lloyd Biggle Jr. - Monument

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