Have you ever thought about what fiction is? Probably, such a question may seem surprising: and so everything is clear. Every person throughout his life has to repeatedly create the works he needs for specific purposes - statements, autobiographies, dictations - using not gypsum or clay, not musical notes, not paints, but just a word. At the same time, almost every person will be very surprised if he is told that he thereby created a work of fiction, which is very different from visual art, music and sculpture making. However, everyone understands that a student's essay or dictation is fundamentally different from novels, short stories, news that are created by professional writers. In the works of professionals there is the most important difference - excogitation. But, oddly enough, in a school literature course, you don’t realize the full power of fiction. So using our website in your free time discover fiction for yourself. Blueblood by Jim Harmon (short books to read txt) 📖
- Author: Jim Harmon
Book online «Blueblood by Jim Harmon (short books to read txt) 📖». Author Jim Harmon
"We haven't gone that far, Mike. The bigots, the hatemongers, the pettiness and xenophobia lurking in everybody haven't been asleep that long. Just look at it from my side, Mike. What will the white people of Earth think about the Orientals, Negroes and Indians of Earth when they find out the dark-skinned humanoids of another planet are—measurably, unquestionably, vastly—inferior to the light-skinned race of the same world? I ask you, Mike!"
Mike Ellik said, "It's an inept analogy, Lee, and you know it."
"But most people reason by analogy," said Lee Chon. "No, Mike. I have to leave you and Johnny to prevent a recurrence of racial hatred, intolerance and all the ugly consequences on both sides. This is the last time I'll answer you, Mike. I'm getting lonesome. In a few years, I'll get hungry for human companionship. I don't want to be tempted down. Good-by, Johnny. So long, Mike."
Ellik screamed. "Wait! Answer one more call, Lee. It's the least you can do for me. I don't know when I'll make it. It may be in a few weeks or a few years. It won't be just argument, Lee. I'll have something you'll want to tell Earth about this place and these people."
"I'm still here. Tell it to me now," Chon's voice said.
"No. I want to get proof. Let me rig up some kind of video circuit for you. I can use parts out of our tape camera and the translators. I want to get it all across to you."
I could hear Chon breathing. "Very well. I'll answer your next call."
"Lee," I called out, "Mike and me will be expecting you to answer."
Chon laughed. "I'm not going anywhere, Johnny. Only around this world every couple of hours."
"You couldn't make the jump through hyperspace without us, Lee," Ellik said.
"That's right, Mike. I'm—I'm sorry to quarantine you two down there."
"Quarantine!" Ellik stormed. "We're not sick, Lee. You are the sick one!"
There wasn't any sound, not even of breathing.
"You have an idea to change Lee's mind, Mike?" I asked.
He cupped his hand on the back of my neck. "Affirmative, Jonathan. A pretty damned good one, too."
Ellik stood staring out the door, gnawing on one of his knuckles, letting the sun turn the front of him into gold, so he looked like half a statue, and half a man.
"I suppose it had to come out in him sooner or later," he said.
"What, Mike?"
"What could we expect? It's the basic quality of treachery in the Oriental mind."
When the shadows were at their longest and the alien sun was down the closest to the horizon without actually going under, Ellik marched up the path shoving a new Indigo. The Azures supplied Mike with all the flunkies he wanted to gather food and the like for him, as his natural right. But I thought we had enough of them hanging around our quarters. I couldn't imagine what he would want with another one.
The alien hovered at the door. Ellik kicked him in the calf to make him understand he was to go inside.
"Look at him, Johnny," Ellik said, pushing the fellow forward. "Not a mongoloid, would you say?"
"No."
The alien looked stupid—blue and stupid. His face was hanging there, but it wasn't pushed out of shape any more than the faces of the Azures. The Indigo blinked back at me. What he also looked was not friendly.
Ellik took the Indigo's cheeks in his hand and angled the face toward the light. "He's a half-breed, Johnny, or otherwise the gene was recessive. He wasn't damaged before birth, only after—when he started to breathe."
"What do you mean, Mike?"
"You ever hear of cyanosis, Johnny?"
"No."
"Well, these creatures have something like it. The Indigos don't get enough oxygen in their blood cells. It makes them sluggish; it turns them blue like the pictures of 'blue babies' in the old books."
"I never saw a picture like that in an old book," I said.
"Did you ever see a book? Sorry, Johnny. Just kidding." Ellik rubbed his hands together. "Well! I theorized that there is no basic difference in the Azures and the Indigos except improper aeration of their blood. So, you see, an Indigo is only a sick Azure, and I am going to make this Indigo well."
"How can you do that?"
"It's simple," Mike said irritably. "The Indigos must have a malformation of the heart causing an abnormal communication between the venous and arterial side of the circulation system. A little surgery and I adjust a valve in the heart. No more communication. Proper aeration. Enough oxygen. The deep blue color goes, leaving only the lighter blue of the natural pigmentation. The patient feels better, acts better, thinks better, looks better. In short, he is no longer an Indigo but an Azure."
"Is—is this what you're going to show Lee?" I ventured.
"Of course! It proves the Indigos aren't an inferior race. They are the same as the Azures except that they are sick. Their being sick can't reflect unfavourably on any terrestrial colored race. There is no analogy. But I have to prove it to Chon. We're going to tape the whole process and feed it to him."
"I think," I said, "that that might get to him."
"Sure it will." Ellik's jaw muscles flexed. "I should ruin Lee with this thing, but I won't. I'm not a vindictive man. Lee and I will probably be working together for years. But whenever he gets out of line—has some stubborn idea about doing something his way—don't think I won't remind him of this!"
Suddenly, he was smiling again. He turned to the gawking Indigo. He pointed two fingers at him.
"Mmr?" Ellik asked.
The alien tapped himself on his chest cavity twice. "Mhaw," he gave his name.
"Mhaw M'i uh M'i m M'm'-uh?" Ellik asked him, without even using the translators.
"M-m-M-m-M," the alien went, slapping himself on the chest with his opened palms.
Ellik turned to me, grinning. "I asked him if he wanted to stop being an Indigo and become an Azure. He thinks I can do anything and he's all for it."
After we fed Mhaw a dose of null-shock from our packs, Doc Ellik started to slice him open with a ceramic knife he had borrowed from the Azures.
But Ellik had forgotten that the alien might get frightened seeing himself cut open, even if he couldn't feel any pain. It had never happened to him before.
The alien lumbered to his feet, his chest hanging open, showing his heart beating like some animal caught inside a blueberry pudding.
I drove a right cross into his jaw, and felt the jar all the way up to my shoulder.
He melted back down onto the pallet.
"Good work, Johnny," Ellik said, stooping and starting his work.
Right away, Mhaw started to lose that Indigo color and get real light—lighter than the Azures, in fact. None of the blue of the race was actually in the pigmentation, Mike found out. Even the Azures suffered some degree of improper aeration of the blood.
"You going to call Lee Chon now?" I asked Mike. "You going to show him the tape we had running during the operation and all?"
"Not quite yet, Johnny," he said. "First I want to educate Mhaw a bit, up to the Azure level or better. That should convince Lee."
Mhaw learned fast, probably faster than the Azures, even. Almost the first thing he wanted was for us to stop calling him Mhaw and start using an Azure name, Aedo.
Once a day, Ellik left our hut to take some exercise—a walk along the alien esplanade, he called it. I used to stay with the doctored alien, now Aedo, but we finally learned we could trust him to follow our orders—which were to stay inside, away from the others, since we didn't know how they would take him. So I got to walking along with Ellik.
As dusk lengthened, we could see the spark that was our ship in its orbit along the retreating horizon.
Ellik twisted back his head and the side of his mouth. "Look at him up there—look!"
The spark burned brighter and danced in another direction.
"He's gone! He left us!" Ellik said.
"It's okay. He's still there. Just corrected the orbit a little, I guess."
"No, no, no," Ellik said. "He started to make another try. But he got afraid to try to go into hyperspace alone."
"He was just correcting for orbital decay."
"You don't understand, Johnny. He's a coward. That makes him dangerous. He's getting desperate. That desperation will burst the dam of his own weakness and wash away our hope, our lives."
His voice hushed. He stood staring starkly ahead, his palms outstretched at his sides.
"Maybe he isn't that cowardly," I said hopefully.
"Finished," Ellik announced. He meant he had finished editing the tape showing the operation on the alien and his recovery from his blue disease, from being an Indigo to better than an Azure.
"The transmitter is finished too," I said.
Ellik had suggested a way of switching the tape camera to a video converter for one of the audio communicators, and I had been able to do it easy. It took parts from both our communicators and translators too.
Ellik fitted the coiled snake of tape into place. "This will be a great day for your people, Aedo. After our friend from heaven lands, we will be able to teach you a way to cure all of your sick, to make all the Indigos like you."
"Like me? Make like me?" Aedo said in the pidgin terrestrial that Mike Ellik had taught him.
"Yes. We'll show them how we cured you and how all can be cured."
"You make show fellow like me? Make tell make that fellow like fellow like me?"
"Everything's ready, Mike," I called.
"That's right, Aedo," Mike said. "You'll show your people the way to equality."
"Make all fellow like this fellow?" Aedo asked.
"Shall I call in Lee?" I asked Mike.
"Yes, that's right, Aedo. Just right."
"No," Aedo said.
The alien stomped the tape camera and the communicator to bits before I could get a hammerlock on him.
Ellik just stared at the complete wreck of our only means of communication with the spaceship.
"I be much man now. I much smart. Much smart than Azure hicks and Indigo slobs. I much smart all. I much man! Not to be all same now. No." The snarl hung on in Aedo's throat.
Ellik lifted his head and sort of smiled. But not quite.
"Well," he said slowly and sadly, "what could you expect in the way of gratitude from a dirty alien?"
The Azures did accept Aedo all right. They seem to think he must have come from some other tribe. They don't associate him with the Indigo that disappeared. No Indigo ever became an Azure before.
Of course, Azures sometimes become Indigos, we found out.
It seems there's a virus of what Ellik called pseudo-cyanosis in the air. The Azures have become a pretty resistant breed to it, while the Indigos are all easy victims. But once in a while an Azure will come down with it and turn Indigo.
Mike Ellik caught it too.
It happened pretty fast. By the time we realized what it was, he was already too stupid to finish the operation he started on himself. I had to sew him up, not very neatly.
Ellik is treated pretty much like the rest of the Indigos. So am I. He takes it all pretty calm. He can still talk a little Earth. Whenever anybody kicks him, Ellik just mutters something about, "What can fellow expect bunch lousy creeps like those fellow?"
I guess I'll get it too. I think I am getting it.
It won't be so bad for me. Just like maybe going around drunk all the time, not being able to think or coordinate very well.
It will be kind of bad being a member of an inferior race, but the thing I'll hate about it the most isn't that, or even leaving old Lee up there, circling around and waiting for our call forever.
No, the thing I hate is having it happen now, just when I'm beginning to learn something.
I'm not dead sure I know just exactly what I learned, but I think maybe I do:
You get just what you damned well expected all along from a bunch of blue-blooded mongrels!
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Blueblood, by Jim Harmon
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