Sporting with the Chid

“But look at him, he’s such a mess,” Brand protested. “There wouldn’t be any point in it.”

Ruiger grunted, looking down at what remained of their comrade. It was a mess, all right, a sickening, bloody mess. The scythe-cat they had been hunting had practically sliced Wessel to ribbons. The ruined body still retained a lot of blood, however, due to the heart having stopped at the outset, when the cat had ripped open the ribcage. For that reason, Ruiger had supposed there was still hope.

“We can’t just stand here doing nothing,” he said. He glanced up the trail along which the cat had fled under the hail of their gunfire. Wessel’s own gun lay nearby, wrecked by the first blow of the animal’s terrible bladed claw. It infuriated Ruiger to think that the beast had bested them. He wondered why the toxic darts they had fired had failed to take effect. Possibly they had lodged in its very thick dermis and the poisons were spreading slowly. In that case, the cat’s corpse should be found within not too great a distance.

“The brain isn’t damaged,” he observed stubbornly. “Come on, do what I say: freeze him quick, before it starts to degenerate.” He was a broad-set man with a rugged face; he spoke with traces of a clipped, hard-toned accent Brand had never yet been able to identify.

Brand hesitated, then submitted to the other’s more positive personality. He moved closer to the dead Wessel, nerving himself against the raw, nauseating smell of blood and flesh. Kneeling, he opened the medical kit and took out a blue cylinder. From the cylinder there flowed a lavender mist which settled over the body and then seemed to fly into it, to be absorbed by it like water into a sponge.

“You can’t freeze somebody without special equipment,” he told Ruiger. “Frozen water crystallises and ruptures all the body cells. This stuff will keep him fresh, but it’s only good for about twelve hours. It holds the tissues in a gelid suspension so chemical processes don’t take place.”

“He’s not frozen?”

“No.” Brand straightened. “You realise what this means? The nearest fully equipped hospital is six weeks away. Even then, I don’t suppose the surgeons could do much. He’d be crippled for life, probably paralysed if he lived at all. Maybe he wouldn’t like that.”

Before replying Ruiger glanced at the sky, as if summing up interstellar distances. “What about the Chid camp on the other side of the continent? You know their reputation.”

Brand snapped shut the medical case with an angry gesture. “Are you crazy? You know damned well we can’t go messing with the Chid.”

“Shut up and help me get him on the sled.”

They tackled the unpleasant job in silence. It should have been the scythe-cat the sled was carrying, Ruiger thought, but he fought down an urge to go after the animal and make sure it was dead. A more compelling urge had come over him, for he was a man who hated to admit defeat if there remained even the possibility of action, and Wessel had been a good comrade.

The sled floated a foot or two above the coarse broad-bladed grass that covered most of the planet’s dry surface. As they trudged back to the ship Ruiger looked at the sky again. The sun lay well below the horizon, but there was no such thing as real night—this was the N4 star cluster, where suns were packed so thick as to turn even midnight into what would have been a mellow autumn evening on Earth. The multicoloured blaze never faded; it filled the sky not only at night but throughout the day, augmenting the light of the somewhat pale sun.

The cluster teemed, if such a vast region could be said to teem, with freelance prospectors looking for anything that, by reason of rarity or novelty, would command a high price back in civilisation. Exotic furs and hides, unknown gems, outlandish chemicals and minerals, drugs with unexpected properties—these days, rarity was the name of the game. If it was new, preferably unique, and had a use, then it was valuable. The fur of the scythe-cat, for example, would grace the wardrobes of no more than a dozen exorbitantly wealthy women.

Not all the prospectors were human. The cluster had few sentient races of its own, but it had attracted the attentions of scores of others, lured by its wealth or else engaged on less identifiable business. As a rule the various species prudently ignored one another, a practice with which Ruiger would normally have concurred wholeheartedly. With some of the alien races known to mankind—so numerous that only the most cursory examination had been made of most of them—one could communicate with ease. But with others one had to be cautious.

And there were yet others with habits and attitudes so inexplicable by human standards that the central government had placed a strict prohibition on any kind of intercourse with them whatsoever.

Such a species was the Chid.

Back at the ship, Ruiger took out the official government handbook on aliens. Like many others, the entry on the Chid was subheaded: Absolutely No Contact In Any Circumstances. The information offered supplied very little by way of explanation, but he carefully read such as there was. Following the location of the Chid star, and a description of the extent of Chid influence, the sociological information was scant, apparently depending on the word of some lone-wolf explorer who had visited the home planet and later had volunteered an account of his experiences to the Department of Alien Affairs. Ruiger knew, however, that subsequent encounters between Chid and humans had reinforced the impression of them as a wayward and difficult people.

“An extraordinary feature of the Chid,” he read, “is their aptitude for the medical sciences. Among them advanced surgery is a household skill; even the most highly trained Earth surgeon would find himself outclassed by the average Chid, who traditionally prides himself on his surgical ability, much as a human will pride himself on being able to repair his own auto. That Chid surgical skill is so universal is probably because it was the first technique to be developed on the Chid world, predating even the discovery of fire.

“Surgery’s prominent place in Chid lore, even from primitive times, is attested by the following incident from the saga of the ancient champion Gathor. On finding himself trapped in a country surrounded by enemies, he ordered his followers to dissect him, and to smuggle him out in pieces ‘none of them larger than a single finger-joint’. After being reassembled, Gathor went on to free his people from slavery.

“The Chid have a love of sports and games, and are addicted to gambling. Otherwise there is little in the Chid mind that renders it suitable for human company. On the contrary, Chid mental processes are so foreign to human mentality as to present considerable danger. Anyone finding himself in the presence of a Chid should on no account attempt to have dealings with it, since if he does he will almost certainly misunderstand its intentions. Instead, he should at once remove himself from the vicinity of the Chid.”

Slowly, Ruiger put away the handbook.

Outside, he found Brand sitting gazing into the night sky. “We’ll go to the Chid,” he said with finality.

Brand stirred. “You realise the risks we’ll be taking?”

Ruiger nodded. “Intercourse with prohibited aliens. A twenty thousand labour credit fine, or five years in a work prison. Or both.” The government took such matters seriously.

“I was thinking less of that,” Brand said, “than of the Chid themselves. Those laws are for our own protection. Maybe we’d be getting into something we can’t get out of.”

Ruiger’s voice was blunt and obstinate. “My ancestors were Boers,” he said. “They were people who learned to hang on to life, no matter what it costs. That’s my outlook, too. Chances are worth taking where it’s a matter of living or not living.”

He took a last look round the clearing, feeling a lingering regret that he had not found time to go after the scythe-cat. “No sense hanging about here. Let’s get moving.”

“The way I see it,” Ruiger said as they flew over the tawny-coloured continent, “creatures with such a knowledge of surgery can’t be all that bad. They can mend the sick and injured—that’s not something I find incomprehensible. Maybe the government’s too quick to write the no-go sign.”

Brand didn’t answer. Soon the Chid camp came in sight. It was on the edge of a level plain, perched near a two-hundred foot cliff that fell away to sharp rocks and a boiling sea. It had only three features: a pentagonal hut that seemed to be roofed with local ferns, the Chid ship, which resembled nothing so much as an Earth street tram, and a small, dark wood which occupied an oval-shaped depression in the ground. Ruiger did not think the wood was indigenous. Probably, he thought, the Chid had set it up as a garden or a park, using plants and trees from their own world.

They set down on what could roughly be interpreted as the perimeter of the camp. For some time they sat together in the control cabin, saying nothing, watching the site through the view-screens. At first there was no sign of life. After about half an hour, two tall Chid emerged from the hut and strolled to the wood, with not a single glance at the Earth ship nearby.

Anxiously Ruiger and Brand watched. At length the Chid reappeared, brushing aside foliage and coming into the light of day from the dank depths of the wood. Unconcernedly they ambled back to the fern-covered hut.

“It seems they spend their time in the hut, not in the ship,” Brand observed.

“Unless there are more of them in the ship.”

“It’s not very big. It couldn’t carry many.”

“Yes, that’s right.” Ruiger gnawed his knuckles. “They’re ignoring us.”

“Wise of them. We’d do the same if they landed near us. We might even move away. They haven’t done that.”

“Well, the first move’s up to us.” Ruiger rose, and looked at Brand. Both men felt nervousness make a sick ache in their stomachs. “Let’s go out there and see what they’ll do for us.”

They holstered their side-arms inside their shirts so that to outward appearances they were unarmed. Wessel’s jellified body still lay on the sled. They eased it out of the port, and set off across the short stretch of savannah-like grass to the Chid hut.

From outside the hut looked primitive and could as well have been erected by savages. They stopped a few feet from the door, which like the walls was made of a frame of branches from a local tree interwoven with ferns.

He decided it was probably an advantage that they would have to converse by means of gestures. When only the simplest and most obvious wants could be made known there was less room for misunderstanding.

He hooked his thumbs in his belt and called out. “Hello! Hello!”

Again: “Hello! We are Earthmen!”

The door opened, swinging inwards. The interior was dim. Ruiger hesitated. Then, his throat dry, he stepped inside, followed by Brand who guided the sled before him. “We are Earthmen,” he repeated, feeling slightly ridiculous. “We have trouble. We need your help.”

Anything else he might have said was cut off as he absorbed the scene within. The two Chid he had seen earlier swivelled their eyes to look at him. One lolled on a couch, but in such a manner as to seem like a corpse that had been carelessly thrown there, limbs flung apart in disarray, head hanging down and almost touching the beaten earth floor. The other was leaning forward half upright, dangling limply from a double sling into which his arms were thrust, and which was suspended from the roof rafters. His head lolled forward, his legs trailed behind.

Both postures looked bizarrely uncomfortable. Ruiger supposed, however, that the Chid were simply relaxing.

Somewhat larger of frame than a human, they had a lank, loose appearance about them. Their skin was grey, with undertones of green and buff orange. For clothing they wore a simple garment consisting of short trousers combined with a bib held in place by straps going over the shoulders. As with many androform species, their nonhuman faces were apt to seem caricatures of a particular human expression—in the Chid instance, an idiotic, chuckling gormlessness. It was important, Ruiger knew, not to be influenced by this doubtlessly totally wrong impression.

Unrecognisable utensils lay scattered and jumbled about the floor, and Ruiger’s gaze went to the rest of the hut. He shuddered. The walls resembled the racks of some prehistoric butcher’s shop, hung with pieces of raw flesh—limbs, entrails, various internal organs, and other organic components and substances he could not identify, from a variety of creatures unknown to him. The Chid clearly had botanic interests, too. Items of vegetable origin accompanied the purely animal ones, plants, tree branches, cuttings, fruit, strips of fibre and so forth. A moist, slightly rotten smell hung on the air, though whether from the grisly array or from the Chid themselves he could not say.

Unable to find a clear space on the floor, Brand left the sled floating. Ruiger pointed to the body. He hoped the purpose of their visit was self-evident.

“This is our comrade. He has been badly injured. We came to ask if you can heal him.”

The Chid in the sling swayed slightly from side to side. “Werry-werry-werry-werry…” he said, or that was what it sounded like to Ruiger. But then he broke off, and to the Earthmen’s great surprise spoke in almost perfect English.

“Visitors come to us from off the vast plain! You are here to sport with us, perhaps?”

“We came to ask for your help,” Ruiger replied. Again he pointed to the sled. “Our friend was attacked by a scythe-cat—a dangerous animal that’s found on this continent.”

“For the time being I’ve suspended his organic processes with a gelid solution,” Brand interrupted. “But when it wears off he’ll be dead, unless the damage can be made good first.”

“Chids are famed for their surgical skill,” Ruiger added.

The Chid withdrew his arms from the sling and approached the sled with an ambling gait, kicking aside metal artifacts that lay on the floor. Automatically Ruiger drew back. The strangeness of the scene made him fearful. It was hard to believe that these people were as advanced as they were supposed to be.

Bending over the sled, the Chid prodded Wessel’s inert form with a long finger. He chortled: a brassy sound like the braying of a cornet.

“Can you help him?” Ruiger enquired.

“Oh yes. Quite easy. Simple slicing. Nerves, muscles, blood vessels, lymph channels, skin—you won’t even know where the joins are.”

A feeling of relief flooded through the two men. “Then you’ll operate?” Ruiger pressed.

Straightening, the Chid stared directly at him. His eyes, now that Ruiger saw them close up, were horrible, like boiled eggs. “I have heard it said that Earthmen can leave their bodies and move about without them. Is it true?”

“No,” said Ruiger. It took him a moment to realise what the Chid was talking about. “You mean their souls can leave their bodies. It’s not true, though. It’s only religious belief. You know what religion is? Just a story.”

“How wonderful, to be able to leave one’s body and move about without it!” The Chid seemed to reflect. “Are you here for sport?” he asked suddenly. “Do you like races?”

“We are only interested in helping our friend get better.”

“Oh, but you should game with us.”

“After our friend is better,” Ruiger said slowly, “we’ll do anything you like.”

“Excellent, excellent!” The Chid chortled again, much louder than before, a shrill, unnerving sound.

“Can we rely on you?” Ruiger pressed. “How long will it take?”

“Not long, not long. Leave him with us.”

“May we stay to watch?”

“No, no!” The Chid seemed indignant. “It is not seemly. You are our guests. Depart!”

“All right,” Ruiger said. “When shall we come back?”

“We will send him out when he is ready. Tomorrow morning, perhaps.”

“Good.” Ruiger stood uncertainly. He was eager to get out of the hut, but somehow reluctant to leave.

The Chid on the couch had completely ignored them, apart from one glance when they first entered. He still lay motionless, as if dead.

“Until tomorrow, then.”

“Until tomorrow.”

They withdrew, stiffly and awkwardly. To human sensibilities the Chid seemed to lack stability, Ruiger decided. They gave a neurotic, erratic, disconcerting impression. But it was probably a false impression, like that given by their idiot faces.

Back in the ship, Ruiger said: “Well, so far it went all right. If that Chid keeps his promise we’ve got nothing to worry about.”

“But this talk about sports and games,” Brand said anxiously. “What do they expect of us?”

“Never mind about that. As soon as we get Wessel back, and he’s all right, we simply take off.”

“We’ll owe them. They might try to stop us.”

“We’ve got guns.”

“Yeah… you know, I guess we’re all right, but what about Wessel? That hut doesn’t look a lot like an operating theatre to me. Somehow I find it hard to believe they can do anything.”

“They don’t work the way we do. But everybody knows they can accomplish miracles, almost. You’ll see. Anyway, it gives Wessel a chance. He didn’t have one before.”

They fell silent.

After a while Ruiger became restless. In crossing the continent they had backtracked on the sun; now it was evening again, and there were about eight hours to wait until dawn. Ruiger didn’t feel like sleeping. He suggested they take a walk.

After some hesitation Brand agreed. Once outside, they strolled towards the Chid’s wood, both of them curious to see what lay inside it. They skirted the depression where it grew, aware that the Chid could be watching and might not like strangers entering their private garden, if such it was.

There was little doubt that the wood was alien to the planet. It was quite unlike the open bush that covered most of the continent. Local flora and fauna were characterised by a quality of brashness, and their colours were light, all tawny, orange and yellow, but this seemed dark and oppressive, huddled in on itself, and unnaturally silent and still. The bark of the trees was slick, olive-green in colour, and glistened, while the foliage was almost black.

Out of sight of the Chid hut, Ruiger parted some shoulder-high vegetation that screened the interior of the wood from view and stepped between the slender tree trunks.

Quietly and cautiously, they sauntered a few yards into the wood. The light was suffuse and dim, filtering through the tree cover that seemed to press in overhead to create a totally enclosed little environment. Though fairly close-packed, the interior was less dense than the perimeter, which Ruiger began to think of as a barrier or skin. There was the same moist, rotting odour he had noticed in the Chid hut. The air was humid and surprisingly hot; presumably the wood trapped heat in some way, or else was warmed artificially.

The ground, sloping down towards the centre, was carpeted with a kind of moss, or slime, which felt unpleasant underfoot. Ruiger was struck by the dead hush of the place. Not a leaf moved; there was not the merest breath of a breeze. They crept on, descending the slope into the depths of the wood, and before long began to notice a change in the nature of the vegetation. Besides the slender trees other, less familiar plants flourished. Luxurious growths with broad, drooping leaves that dripped a yellow syrup. Python-like creepers that intertwined with the upper tree branches and pulsed slightly. Bilious parasites, like clusters of giant grapes or cancerous excrescences, that clung and tumbled down the squamous trunks, sometimes engulfing entire trees.

The wood was coming more to resemble a lush, miniature, alien jungle. Also, it was no longer still. There were sounds in it—not the rustle of leaves or the sigh of branches, but obscene little slurping and lapping sounds. Ruiger stopped, startled, as the scum carpet suddenly surged into motion just ahead of him. From it there emerged what looked like a pinkish-grey tangle of entrails, which swarmed quickly up a nearby tree and began to wrestle with the parasitic growth hanging there. The parasite apparently had a gelid consistency; the two shook and shivered like horrid jelly.

“Look,” Brand whispered.

Ruiger followed his gaze. A small creature was creeping through some undergrowth that sprouted near the base of a tree. It looked for all the world like the uncovered brain of a medium-sized mammal such as a dog or a tiger, complete with trailing spinal stem.

They watched it until it disappeared from sight. A few yards further on, they came to a clearing. It was occupied by a single tree—not one of the trees that made up the bulk of the wood, but a fat, pear-shaped trunk that contracted rhythmically like a beating heart. It was surmounted by a crown from which spread a mesh of fine twigs. As they entered the clearing this mesh suddenly released a spray of red droplets onto them.

Quickly they moved away. Ruiger examined the drops that had fallen on his tunic, head and hands. The liquid was sticky, like blood, or bile.

Distastefully they wiped the stuff off their exposed skin.

“I’ve seen enough,” said Brand. “Let’s get out.”

“Wait,” Ruiger insisted. “We might as well go all the way.”

They were approaching the bottom of the wood now, and Ruiger guessed there might be something special there. The rich, foetid smell was becoming so strong that both men nearly gagged, but a few yards further on they broke through a thicket of clammy-feeling tendrils, and there it was.

The surrounding trees leaned over it protectively, spreading their branches to form a complete canopy above it: a little lake of blood. Ruiger was sure the stuff was blood: it looked like it and smelled like it, though with not quite the same smell as human blood. Dozens of small creatures were gathered on the shores of the pool to drink: segmented creatures the size of lobsters, creatures like the brain-animal they had seen already, creatures that consisted of clusters of tubes, resembling assemblies of veins and arteries. The forest, too, put out hoses of its own into the pool, snaking them down from the trees and across the bushes.

Ruiger and Brand stared in fascination. Was this, Ruiger wondered, a pleasant little paradise to the Chid mind? He took his eyes from the gleaming crimson surface of the lake. The wood, with its covering of slime, its slick trees, its gibbous growths and pulsing python pipes that seemed neither animal nor vegetable, no longer looked to him like a wood in the Earthly sense. Its totally enclosed, self-absorbed nature put him in mind of what it might be like inside his own body.

He grunted, and nudged Brand. “Let’s go.”

Slowly they made their way up the bowl-shaped slope, towards the open starlight.

Minutes after they returned to the ship, the first of the Chid gifts arrived.

They did not know, at the time, that it was meant to be a gift, and if they had known, they still wouldn’t have known what they were supposed to do with it. It was an animal that came bounding from the Chid hut to prance about in front of the Earthmen’s ship. It was vaguely dog-like and about the size of a Great Dane, with hairless yellow skin.

Ruiger focused the external scanner on it, magnifying the image. There were slits in the animal’s body; as it moved, these opened, revealing its internal organs.

Brand was nauseated. He turned away.

For a while the creature snuffled about the ship’s port, and leaped this way and that. “I didn’t see this beast in the Chid hut,” Brand remarked.

“Perhaps they made it.” Ruiger watched until the animal apparently wearied of what it was doing and loped back the way it had come, disappearing inside the hut.

“I’m tired,” Ruiger said. “I’d like to get some sleep.”

“O.K.”

But Brand himself could not sleep. He felt restless and uneasy. Nervously he settled down with a full percolator of coffee and kept his eye on the external viewer.

From time to time other animals left the hut and approached the ship. None were particularly alien-looking, except, that was, that they were all apt to expose their innards to view as they moved. One vaguely resembled a pig, another a hairless llama, another a kangaroo. Were they all, perhaps, one animal, made over and over from the same bits and pieces?

The Chid had better not fix Wessel up that way, Brand thought aggressively. He wondered if he and Ruiger were expected to respond to these sorties. But when one didn’t know, it was safer to do nothing.

Steadily the stars, illuminating the landscape with shadowless light, moved across the sky. A short time after the pale sun had risen, Ruiger came stumbling back into the room.

“Anything happen?”

Brand gave him some coffee and told him about the animals. Ruiger sat down, staring at the viewscreen and sipping from his cup.

By now Brand felt tired himself, but his nervousness had not decreased. “You think it will be all right?” he asked Brand anxiously.

“Sure it will be all right,” Ruiger said gruffly. “Don’t be put off by that wood. Probably the whole Chid planet is like that.”

It was the first time either of them had mentioned the wood. “Listen,” Brand said, “I’ve been thinking about those animals they keep sending—”

Ruiger gave a shout. On the screen, Wessel had appeared in the open door of the Chid hut. He stood there uncertainly, and then took a step forward.

“There he is!” Ruiger crowed. “They’ve delivered the goods!”

He jumped to his feet and swept from the room. Brand followed him down to the port and out onto the coarse grass. Wessel was walking towards them. But it was not his usual walk. He plodded rather than strode, moving leadenly and awkwardly, his arms hanging loose, his face slack.

Nevertheless they both loped out to meet him. And then, as they came closer, the grin on Ruiger’s face froze. Wessel’s eye-sockets were empty. The eyelids framed nothing; even the orbital bones had been removed. And Brand now realised that this eyeless Wessel wasn’t even walking towards the ship. He was making for the cliff a short distance away.

“Wessel,” he called softly. And then something else caught his attention. Crawling some yards behind Wessel there came a rounded greyish object no larger than his boot. The thing had a wrinkled, convoluted surface, with a deep crevice running down its back, and glistened as if encased in a transparent jelly.

The creature moved after the manner of a snail, on a single splayed podium. It followed after Wessel with every appearance of effort, just managing to keep up with his erratic pace. Brand and Ruiger watched the procession dumbly. The crawling creature’s front end supported a pair of white balls, their whiteness broken by neat circles of colour. These white balls were obviously human eyes, the same eyes that were missing from Wessel’s eye-sockets. The grey mass, however improbable it seemed logically, was without doubt Wessel’s own brain, alive but without a body, given its own means of locomotion.

Suddenly the decerebrated body stumbled and fell. The brain seemed avid for the body. Before the body could rise it had caught up with it and clambered on to a leg. When the body started to walk again the brain clung to it like a leech, and began to climb.

The body lurched towards the cliff; the brain ascended painfully. Its rate of progress was impressive. It negotiated the hips, climbed up the back and reached a shoulder, momentarily perching there. Then, as if hinged somehow, the back of Wessel’s head opened, the two halves coming apart and revealing an empty cavern. Into this empty skull the brain nosed its way, like a hermit crab edging into a discarded shell or a fat grey rat disappearing down a hole, and the head closed up behind it.

The Wessel body abruptly stopped walking. A shudder passed through it. Then it stood motionless, facing the sea.

Brand and Ruiger glanced at one another.

“Christ!” Ruiger said hoarsely.

“What shall we do?”

Gingerly, continuing to glance at one another for support, they approached Wessel. Wessel’s eyes were now in place and peered from their sockets, somewhat bloodshot. He might have been taken for normal, except that he seemed very, very dazed.

Angrily Ruiger unholstered his pistol and glared towards the Chid hut. “Those alien bastards aren’t getting away with this,” he said. “They’re going to put this right.”

“Wait a minute,” said Brand, holding up his hand. He turned to Wessel. “Wessel,” he said quietly, “can you hear me?”

Wessel blinked. “...