It was a holiday; a great occasion--everything testified to that. The
colored streamers, the clouds of rosy dust like sky-rockets, the crowds
of people lined up to await him. And why not? Clearly, they had never
before seen a man. He was unique, a personage to be honored: a visitor
descended from the heavens, clothed in fire and glory. Like the
Spaniards among the Aztecs, he thought.
Weaver began to feel gratified, his ego expanding. Experimentally, he
waved to the massed ranks of bug things as he passed them. A new
explosion of twittering broke out, and a forest of twiglike arms waved
back at him. They seemed to regard him with happy awe.
"Thank you," said Weaver graciously. "Thank you...."
In the morning, there were crowds massed outside the building where he
had slept; but they did not put him into the aircar with the revolving
arm again. Instead, four new ones came into his room after he had eaten
the strange red and orange fruits that were all of the bug diet he could
stomach, and began to twitter very seriously at him, while pointing to
various objects, parts of their bodies, the walls around them, and
Weaver himself.
* * * * *
After awhile, Weaver grasped the idea that he was being instructed. He
was willing to co-operate, but he did not suppose for a moment that he
could master the bird-like sounds they made. Instead, he took an old
envelope and a stub of pencil from his pocket and wrote the English word
for each thing they pointed out. "ORANGE," he wrote--it was not an
orange, but the color was the same, at any rate--"THORAX. WALL. MAN.
MANDIBLES."
In the afternoon, they brought a machine with staring lenses and bright
lights. Weaver guessed that he was being televised; he put a hand on the
nearest bug thing's shoulder, and smiled for his audience.
Later, after he had eaten again, they went on with the language lesson.
Now it was Weaver who taught, and they who learned. This, Weaver felt,
was as it should be. These creatures were not men, he told himself; he
would give himself no illusions on that score; but they might still be
capable of learning many things that he had to teach. He could do a
great deal of good, even if it turned out that he could never return to
Earth.
He rather suspected that they had no spaceships. There was something
about their life--the small villages, the slowly drifting aircars, the
absence of noise and smell and dirt, that somehow did not fit with the
idea of space travel. As soon as he was able, he asked them about it. No
they had never traveled beyond their own planet. It was a great marvel;
perhaps he could teach them how, sometime.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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