Dance Band on the Titanic and Other Stories by Jack Chalker

Author:Jack Chalker
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2013-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

His parents called him Little Wolf because he was born with so much hair on his head, and he grew up a curious and intelligent child in the world of the People. Unlike the subhumans who roamed the plains, the People lived in semipermanence beside the shore of a great lake on the edge of a beautiful forest. The men hunted and fished, while the women bore and reared the children, maintained the village, and in season, when the priest said all the signs were right, planted and tended some crops, mostly maize but occasionally nice vegetables as well.

In his thirteenth year manhood came upon him, quite unlike what Little Wolf expected it to be but that which he'd anticipated and prayed for all the same, and thus, the following spring, he entered the teaching circles of the warriors and learned the basics of survival-the use of the bow, the science of the spear, the patience needed to capture deer and birds and other creatures, and also some of the arts of war. Of the codes of war he needed no instruction: Those were a part of the culture of the People from the time of his birth and were as much taken for granted as the air, trees, and water.

By late spring he was accompanying the men into the forests on hunts, and out on the lake in canoes to use the coarse skin and bark nets made by the women to catch the silvery fish. He was neither the best nor the worst of the candidates for manhood, and, finally, he brought down a young doe with his bow and handmade flint arrows, and passed the final preliminary. The ceremonies of manhood were solemn and took several days, but in the end he was anointed, his head was shaved, and he was branded painfully on the face and chest and hands by the priest with the signs of manhood of his people and did not flinch or hold back and was, therefore, proclaimed a man.

He enjoyed his new status and took particularly well to the hunt, showing an ability to go for days without food far from home in search of community meat. Because of this he chose his man's name as approved by the elders of his tribe, that of Runs-Far-Needs-Nothing, a name he was very proud of.

In the fall the elders met with all the new men and brought forth the new women, those whom the gods had shown by the sign of blood were now women. Runs-Far-Needs-Nothing took then one whom he'd known from childhood, a small, lithe, attractive woman who accepted him as well and whom he gave the woman's name Shines-Like-the-Sun, a name approved by her parents and the elders and by she herself.

His early years had been remarkably peaceful, with little commerce and no major conflicts with the subhumans, although an occasional one of these strange ones would come to bargain for food or passage rights, and there would be occasional contests

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