by Mike Resnick & Lezli Robyn
* * * *
Some things are so obvious it would never occur to anyone to question them....
Far out on the rim of the galaxy there is a pastoral world, golden-hued, with lush green fields, crystal clear rivers and streams, colorful avians, gorgeous blossoms.
It used to be a colony world. Fairview, they called it. There’s still a town there, though no one’s lived in it for ... well, for a long time now. There’s a church, with a steeple you can see from just about anywhere, and a general store that’s stood empty for close to sixty years. Same with the saloon, and the restaurant, and the bank, and the bubble-domed boarding houses.
There’s really only one thing of note to see on Fairview. It’s right in the center of the small town square, and you don’t know it’s there until you’re almost upon it.
It’s an old-fashion gallows, complete with a rope noose. And hanging from the noose, its body swaying and gently spinning with every breeze, is something dead, something that looks like a man from a distance, but the closer you get, the more you realize that you’re looking at something very strange and very alien.
It’s been dead a long time, this something that hangs in the town square. I don’t know what its skin looked like in life, but it’s all leathery now, and any color it might have had has been burned away.
Oh—and there’s the sign. That gets your attention even more than what’s hanging from the gallows. It’s propped up against the base of it—well, bonded or nailed there, or it would long since have blown away. It’s almost as high as a man’s waist, and maybe twice as long as it is high.
And on it, in bold letters more than two feet high, all capitals, is a single word:
SHAME.
You see it, and you know there has to be a story behind it. So I looked around the empty town, and sure enough, I found one old man, toothless, bent over with the weight of his years, almost as leathered as the body on the gallows, and he told me the tale of what happened on Fairview.
He had a name (said the old man), but no one could pronounce it. Most folks just called him Boy, or sometimes Satan because of the reddish tint to his skin and those hooves that passed for feet. He wasn’t native to Fairview—hell, Fairview didn’t have no natives. As I hear tell, he got here right after the first wave of colonists, and spent his time digging for something in the rocky outcrops just beyond where they built the town. The geological surveys said there wasn’t nothing out there worth the effort he was going to, but who knows what’s valuable to an alien?
He wasn’t what you’d call eloquent or articulate, but he spoke a kind of Terran, enough to make himself understood. We figured he’d been dropped off on Fairview, since there wasn’t any sign of his ship, and that meant someday he’d be picked up, but truth to tell nobody gave it much thought since he didn’t hang around the human centers much. Never entered a bar or a restaurant, and the general store sure didn’t have anything he could use. We never did learn what he ate, but whatever it was, he must have found it out there where he was digging.
I’m not aware that anyone ever had a grudge against him. No one tried to befriend him neither. He was just too different, if you know what I mean. He lived alone, kept to himself, didn’t bother anyone, didn’t talk much to anyone, didn’t pay us any more attention than we paid him.
Not until Charlie Drumm came along, anyway.
He showed up one day, put his robots to work building him a house on the outskirts of town, made friends nice and quick with anyone who gave him half a chance, spent his first few weeks buying drinks for anyone who was thirsty, even took to attending our little church. That church probably wasn’t pulling a dozen people on a Sunday morning, but then Charlie started going and people decided that if a man they all admired could go humble himself before God, maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea after all.
He did one thing that caused more than a few eyebrows to raise, because no one could figure out why he did it. He actually went out of his way to make friends with the alien, and spent a lot of time visiting him out in the foothills. He even invited him into his own home. Might have been some trouble if he’d been anyone but Charlie Drumm. You know the rules: you just don’t invite an alien into your house, no matter what.
Before long they’d become fast friends. You didn’t see the one in town without the other. Charlie would vanish for three or four days at a time, then come back and tell us about the trip he’d taken with Satan, off to some new mountain looking for whatever the hell it was Satan looked for. Or Satan would be in town every day, and sleep in at Charlie’s place.
I still remember the night Charlie walked into the tavern with his arm around Satan’s shoulders, waved hello to everyone, and sidled right up to the bar. Now, we didn’t have no rules forbidding aliens to join us in the bars. We just figured that nine out of ten couldn’t handle our drinkin’ stuff, and the tenth would have sense enough to know when he wasn’t wanted.
“I’ll have Barillian whiskey and a chaser,” Charlie announced.
The barkeep headed off to get it.
“Hang on a second,” said Charlie. “You haven’t asked my friend what he wants.”
The barkeep walked over, with an expression on his face like you might see if his shorts were too tight, and said, “What’ll it be, Boy?”
“Just a minute,” said Charlie. “He’s got a name. Probably you can’t pronounce it, so you can call him Satan, which is what I hear a lot of folks calling him. But he’s not a boy, yours or anyone else’s, and I don’t want to hear anyone calling my friend Boy again.”
I don’t think anyone but Charlie could have said that without starting a fight that would involve everyone in the bar. The barkeep looked around to see if anyone was about to throw a punch, or maybe a chair, and when they didn’t, his face got even more pained, and he said, “What can I fix you, sir?”
“Water,” said Satan in that gravelly, mush-mouthed voice of his.
“Water’s pretty expensive on Fairview,” said the barkeep.
“The hell it is,” said Charlie. “And I want you to put it on my bill.”
And that was that. They waited for their drinks, then wandered over to a table in a corner, probably so no one could sneak up behind them. Pretty soon conversations started up again, and by the end of the evening hardly anyone paid them any attention.
They came back the next night, and the night after that, and by week’s end it was like Satan had always been a customer. A couple of men even started up conversations with him when Charlie was off in the john, but he didn’t have much to say. In fact, the major topic of conversation when him and Charlie weren’t around was what the hell they could find to spend all those hours talking about.
I guess Charlie had been here maybe four months when news of the Skeletons started coming through. No one knew what they looked like or why they were called Skeletons—no one in town, anyway—but word had it that they’d been attacking mining colonies for the better part of a year, plundering any kind of fissionable materials they could find.
We didn’t worry overmuch about it. We were an agricultural and trading world. The only mining anyone did, and I don’t know if mining is even the right word, was Satan digging out there in the hills, and he didn’t glow when he’d walk through town at night, so we figured there was nothing radioactive out there. We knew that sooner or later the navy would dope out where the Skeletons were going to strike next and be waiting for them, and we’d hear about it on the subspace radio when they’d sent the last of ‘em off to hell.
Still, we did a lot of talking about it at the tavern, wondering what a critter called a Skeleton looked like. Jake Mundy thought they were probably just real skinny things, maybe like a six-foot man who weighs seventy-five pounds, but Christian Duran argued that maybe they had eyes set so deep in their heads that they looking like skulls with gaping eyeholes. I remember that Roz Waterson even suggested that they were big, fat, blimplike creatures, and someone with a sense of humor had dubbed ‘em Skeletons.
Finally Charlie spoke up from where he was sitting with Satan.
“You’re all wrong,” he said. “They’re bipeds like us, but they’ve got exoskeletons.”
“You ever seen one?” asked Jake Mundy.
“Once or twice,” answered Charlie.
“And you’re sure they were Skeletons?”
“You get one look at one, you’ll know there’s nothing else you could call them,” said Charlie.
Well, as you can imagine, the whole tavern wanted to know more, but Charlie just finished his beer, announced it was getting late, and he and Satan got up to leave.
“Hey, Satan,” said Roz Waterson. “Have you ever seen a Skeleton?”
He turned to her. “It is possible,” he answered her.
“If they’re that distinctive, how could you not know?” she said.
“I saw many races before I came here,” he replied.
Before she could ask any more questions, the two of them—him and Charlie—had left the place, and we spent the next couple of hours trying to figure out how a two-legged alien with an exoskeleton would appear. We even used the tavern’s computer—it was more complex than anything we were carrying around with us—to try to create a holo of one, but no one could decide who was right, and we figured we’d better pack it in for the night before we got into a fight over it. So we all went to bed still wondering what a Skeleton looked like.
Turned out we didn’t have that long to wait before we found out.
It was the crack of dawn not a fortnight later when them Skeletons landed on Fairview and rousted us out of our beds. They rounded us up like animals and put us in the church—the only place big enough to hold us all—and demanded we take them to Charlie Drumm. That’s when we realized how little we knew about Charlie, including why the Skeletons were searching for him.
They looked mighty scary if I say so myself, and given how well armed they were, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that they meant business. But we protected our own, and Charlie was one of us by then, so we told them that there was no one named Charlie in our town. And it wasn’t really a lie, either; he’d left three days earlier with Satan on one of their jaunts.
Of course, they didn’t take our word for it. They ransacked our homes looking for him, and then used them bone-covered hands of theirs to rough some of us up a little, but not one of us squealed on Charlie. The interrogation went on for most of the day and finally, when we thought that they were ready to give up and go looking for him on some other world, Satan happened to walk through the door.
He may have looked like the devil entering our church, but he was our alien, and he was Charlie’s friend to boot, so when the Skeletons surrounded him and asked about Charlie, we were sure that he would follow our example and keep his trap shut—and he did.
Even when they leaned on him, all he told was that he was just a down-on-his-luck prospector who had come to the church to pray for a better yield in his mines. Now, since they specialized in raiding mining worlds, he had to have known that the Skeletons’ ears would prick up at that. They demanded to see his yield, threatening that if it wasn’t good enough to compensate them for a wasted trip, they’d kill him. So off they went, Satan leading the parade, and suddenly the rest of us were forgotten.
I might not have liked him, but I had to grudgingly admit that he’d led the Skeletons away from us, and I was a little worried about him. Satan might have looked demonic, but he didn’t have a patch on these raiders with their spiky exoskeletons and glowing reptilian eyes.
We waited in the church until nightfall, not knowing if they’d gone yet, and not wanting to provoke any of them if they hadn’t. I mean, hell, what could a handful of farmers do against a shipload of armed raiders? It was best to just let them take what they wanted, and bide our time until they left.
So when three of our five moons had risen for the night, we used the moonlight to guide us quietly back to our homes, and we discovered how destructive the Skeletons had been. There wasn’t a piece of furniture left unturned, and all of our root cellars had been looted of anything of value. I figured it would take us the next two seasons worth of crops just to get our stores back up, but at least they’d believed us about not knowing Charlie. It looked to us like they’d gone.
We were wrong.
We decided that a few of us would hike out to Charlie’s house to see if he was all right—and I have to admit we were mighty curious to find out why they were looking for him in the first place.
The one thing we never expected to see as we came over the rise was Satan leading an armed group of Skeletons right up to Charlie’s front door. We also didn’t expect to see him stand there motionless as they dragged Charlie out of the house, but that’s what happened. They half-dragged and half-carried him to their scout ship. We couldn’t do anything but watch; hell, we were outnumbered and outgunned. But no sooner had the ship taken off than we were running down the hill to Charlie’s house.
I still remember the look in Satan’s eyes as he saw us close in on him: it was like a deer caught in a vehicle’s headlights back on Old Earth. But he didn’t make any attempt to run away: he looked like all the fight had gone out of him—if he ever had any in the first place.
We questioned him all night, trying to get a straight answer out of him with words, with fists, with other things—but never once did he explain to us why he’d led the Skeletons right up to Charlie’s house when he knew Charlie was inside it, or what they’d given him to betray the one man who’d befriended him.
Jake Mundy and a couple of others wanted to kill him on the spot, but we were civilized men and we decided we had to have a trial. There was no way we were going let him set foot in our church again, so we held the trial in the only other place big enough for all the townsfolk to gather under one roof: the bar. We trussed him up to keep him from running away, and sat him at the very same corner table he and Charlie had shared a drink at. He looked uncomfortable as hell, beaten and bruised as he was, but that didn’t bother any of us, not after what he’d done.
The trial took less than five minutes. A bunch of us had seen him lead the Skeletons to Charlie, so all we really had to do was vote him guilty and work out his sentence. We didn’t have the facility or the resources to confine him for the rest of his life (which could have been a few hundred years for all anyone knew), and we sure as hell weren’t going to slap him on the wrist and turn him loose. I think even before the trial began everyone knew what the sentence would be.
We gave him a chance before we passed sentence to speak in his own defense, and he wouldn’t say a word. We gave him another chance when we put the noose around his neck right in the middle of the town square, and again he didn’t say anything, but just stared silently at us.
I wanted him to say something. Maybe just that he was sorry, or even that he hated all Men and he was glad of what he’d done. I just wanted to know why he did it, but he stayed stoic and silent to the end.
Took him a long time to die, twitching and dangling at the end of the rope, but nobody looked away, not even the womenfolk or the kids. I suppose we could have shot up or poisoned him, but somehow hanging seemed right for what he’d done.
And after he’d finished kicking and was just hanging there, limp and dead, Roz Waterson and a couple of other women brought out a sign with “shame” written on it in big black letters, and propped it up against the gallows.
They were both still there—the alien and the sign—when I went outside the next morning, and by mutual consent the townspeople let them stay there permanently, to remind everyone what happens when you betray a friend.
Over the next few months avians pecked his eyes out, and his skin dried out and turned leathery, and he didn’t smell any more, and when a newcomer would land on the planet, or a friend would visit, we always made sure they saw Satan hanging there, and told them the story of how one colony, at least, had dispensed justice when it was called for.
And then, four months later, came a visitor no one expected—Charlie Drumm. Most of us figured he wouldn’t last the night aboard the Skeletons’ ship, and even the most optimistic figured he’d be dead within a week—either he’d be killed after giving them whatever they wanted from him, or he’d die keeping it from them—but there he was, staring at Satan’s body twisting in the wind.
Then he stormed into the bar and demanded to know what had happened. After we’d told him, not without a certain amount of pride in our actions, he just stood there silently for a couple of minutes, and when we thought he might maybe have gone catatonic, he uttered a single word:
“Fools!”
We looked at him like whatever he’d suffered at the hands of the Skeletons had unhinged him.
“Fools!” he repeated. “He was worth any twenty of you!”
“What the hell are you talking about?” demanded Christian Duran. “Did he turn you over to the Skeletons or didn’t he?”
“On my orders,” responded Drumm, trying to control his temper.
“On your orders?” repeated Jake Mundy. “Just who the hell are you?”
“I’m an officer who’s been fighting the goddamned Skeletons for five years!” he snapped. “They’ve been after me for almost two of them. We found a way to let them know that I was here.”
“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You wanted to be captured?”
“I had a subspace transmitter sealed inside a false wisdom tooth. When they delivered me to their flagship, they led our navy right to it.”
“Are you saying Satan worked for our navy too?” demanded Jake Mundy. “Because if he did, he’s the first alien I ever heard of to do so.”
“No,” said Charlie. “He worked for his own government, but we had a common cause: they’re at war with the Skeletons too. I told him to let them bribe or threaten him into giving me up.”
“Why didn’t he tell us when he had the chance?”
“There could have been a fifth columnist here,” said Charlie. “This wouldn’t be the first world.”
“You should have confided in one of us,” said Christian Duran bitterly. “After all, we’re men—and he was just an alien.”
“I know,” said Charlie with no attempt to hide his contempt. “His race doesn’t hold kangaroo courts and lynchings.”
He walked outside, strode over to where Satan was hanging, stared at the “shame”sign, and spat on it. Then he was gone, and that’s the last any of us ever saw of Charlie Drumm.
By nightfall every colonist on Fairview knew the story, knew what we had done. And suddenly it seemed like that sign was there to remind us of ourselves, not of Satan, and no one had the guts to take it down.
One by one people started leaving the planet; they just didn’t want to live with what we’d done. Within a year only sixteen people were left, in two years only seven, and in three years there was just me. I stuck around because I thought someone ought to be here to tell the true story of what happened, because when you see that body still hanging there and the sign beneath it, you can misinterpret it as easily as we misinterpreted what we saw all those years ago.
* * * *
“That’s the story,” said the old man. “I’ve been telling it to anyone who’d listen, maybe two or three visitors a year, for close to forty years now, but my time’s just about up, and I’m going back to my home world to spend my last few months or years there and be buried in my family plot.” He paused. “It’s a pity the truth’s going to be forgotten again, but I did what I could, probably not enough to rub all the grime off my soul, but maybe some of it anyway.”
After he left I pulled out my pocket computer and ran a check on Charlie Drumm. Turns out he was Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Charles Drumm, twice decorated for bravery in the Skeleton War, died in action in the Lammix Campaign. I couldn’t find anything about Satan, but I did learn one interesting thing: Charlie Drumm left his estate to a charitable institution on the planet Malakawn II, which was inhabited by a red-skinned race that, though hooved, was bipedal.
That night I moved my gear into Charlie’s deserted house. Sooner or later visitors will touch down on Fairview and see what was still on display in the town square, and somebody has to be here to tell them the true story. nCopyright © 2010 Mike Resnick & Lezli Robyn