And that was the sadness that made me cry. I was frightened, too.
In two days I was up in the shack trying my legs, and in two more days Jerry helped me outside. The shack was located at the top of a long gentle rise in a scrub forest; none of the trees was any taller than five or six meters. At the bottom of the slope, better than eight kilometers from the shack, was the still-rolling sea. The Drac had carried me all that way.
Our trusty nasesay had filled with water and had been dragged back into the sea soon after Jerry pulled me to dry land. With it went the remainder of the ration bars. Dracs are very fussy about what they eat, but hunger finally drove Jerry to sample some of the local flora and fauna—hunger and the human lump that was rapidly drifting away from lack of nourishment. The Drac had settled on a bland, starchy type of root, a green bushberry that when dried made an acceptable tea, and snakemeat. When I was well enough, Jerry taught me where to find the snakes and how to catch them.
The snakes stick their heads out of holes near mudpools and you have to grab them before they can pull themselves back in, and it’s a serious tug-of-war to get one of them out. Then there is the rather unpleasant task of driving off the critter’s spirit. Using our skills acquired on the sandbar, you take one rock and smack it down on top of another, with the snake’s head in between. The real trick is trying to wrestle one of those things down long enough for the scalp treatment. The things were like greased fire hoses on steroids.
Exploring, Jerry had found a partly eroded salt dome. In the days that followed, I grew stronger and added to our diet with several types of sea mollusk and a fruit resembling a cross between a pear and a plum. The one fish I caught from the ocean was so scary looking neither of us wanted to risk eating it. Besides the teeth, claws, and spines, it had long trailing purple appendages that secreted some sort of green pus. The smell was enough to gag a sewer rat. The next morning, on the sand where I had left the fish from hell, I saw the tracks of something else that had come from the sea, grabbed the dead fish, and dragged that tasty morsel back into the water. The Drac and I decided that seafood was not going to be one of the planet’s big export items.
At night, as we chewed on the rubbery mollusks, I said to the Drac, "It’s getting colder, Jerry."
"Warm some tomorrow morning."
I shook my head. "I mean colder, day-by-day. Every night now it freezes and it takes longer every morning to melt off."
Those yellow eyes stared at me for a long time, then it said, "Ice season?"
"I think we have to face it. This planet has a winter."
"How long? How cold?"
I held out my hands. "Unknown." I pointed with my thumb toward the door. "Some of those trees out there are losing their leaves now, though. The protection they give us from the winds is going with them. If it snows, we’re going to have to have food and firewood stored up."
The Drac looked around at the interior of the shack it had built. "Another place, we find. Need ." The Drac bent forward and scooped a handful of dirt from the ground and pointed at the hole its scraping had left. "Cudall, ne?"
"Cave," I answered. "You’re right. We need a cave."
Food was first. When dried next to the fire, the berrybush and roots kept well, and we tried both salting and smoking snakemeat. With strips of fiber from the berrybush for thread, Jerry and I pieced together the snake skins for winter clothing. The design we settled on involved two layers of skins with the down from berrybush seed pods stuffed between and then held in place by quilting the layers.
It took three days of searching to find our first cave, and another three days before we found one that suited us. The mouth opened onto a view of the eternally tormented sea, but was set in the face of a low cliff well above sea level. Around the cave’s entrance we found great quantities of dead wood and loose stone. The wood we gathered for heat; and the stone we used to wall up the entrance, leaving only space enough for a hinged door. The hinges were made of snake leather and the door of wooden poles tied together with berrybush fiber. The first night after completing the door, the sea winds blew it to pieces; and we decided to go back to the original door design we had used on the sandbar.
Deep inside the cave, we made our living quarters in a chamber with a wide, sandy floor. Still deeper, the cave had natural pools of water, which were fine for drinking but too cold for bathing. We used the pool chamber for our supply room. We lined the walls of our living quarters with piles of wood and made new beds out of snakeskins and seed pod down. In the center of the chamber we built a respectable fireplace with a large, flat stone over the coals for a griddle. The first night we spent in our new home, I discovered that, for the first time since ditching on that damned planet, I couldn’t hear the wind.
During the long nights, we would sit at the fireplace making things—gloves, hats, packbags— out of snake leather, and we would talk. To break the monotony, we alternated days between speaking Drac and English, and by the time the winter hit with its first ice storm, each of us was comfortable in the other’s language.
We talked of Jerry’s coming child.
"What are you going to name it, Jerry?"
"It already has a name. See, the Jeriba line has five names. My name is Shigan; before me came my parent, Gothig; before Gothig was Haesni; before Haesni was Ty, and before Ty was Zammis. The child is named Jeriba Zammis."
"Why only the five names? A human child can have just about any name its parents pick for it. In fact, once a human becomes an adult, he or she can pick any name he or she wants."
The Drac looked at me, its eyes filled with pity. "Davidge, how lost you must feel. You humans—how lost you must feel."
"Lost?"
Jerry nodded. "Where do you come from, Davidge?"
"You mean my parents?"
"Yes."
I shrugged. "I remember my parents."
"And their parents?"
"Sure, I remember my mother’s father. When I was young we used to visit him."
"Davidge, what do you know about this grandparent?"
I rubbed my chin. "It’s kind of vague… I think he was in some kind of agriculture. I don’t know."
"And his parents?"
I shook my head. "The only thing I remember is that somewhere along the line, English and Germans figured. Gavey Germans and English?"
Jerry nodded. "Davidge, I can recite the history of my line back to the founding of my planet by Jeriba Ty, one of the original settlers, one hundred and twenty-nine generations ago. At our line’s archives on Draco, there are the records that trace the line across space to the racehome planet, Sindie, and there back seventy generations to Jeriba Ty, the founder of the Jeriba line."
"How does one become a founder?"
"Only the firstborn carries the line. Products of second, third, or fourth births must found their own lines."
I nodded, impressed. "Why only the five names? Just to make it easier to remember them?"
Jerry shook its head. "No. The names are things to which we add distinction; they are the same, commonplace five so that they do not overshadow the events that distinguish their bearers. The name I carry, Shigan, has been served by great soldiers, scholars, students of philosophy, and several priests. The name my child will carry has been served by scientists, teachers, and explorers."
"You remember all of your ancestors' occupations?"
Jerry nodded. "Yes, and what they each did and where they did it. You must recite your line before the line’s archives to be admitted into adulthood as I was twenty-two of my years ago. Zammis will do the same, except the child must begin its recitation," Jerry smiled, "with my name, Jeriba Shigan."