Free The Very Best of F & SF v1 by Gordon Van Gelder (ed) Page A

shoulders back and forth and flexed his arm muscles. “All
this talk,” he growled. “Paleface talk. Makes me tired.”
    “Mr. Thomas is
not a paleface,” his father told him sharply. “Show respect! He’s our guest and
an accredited ambassador—you’re not to use a word like paleface in his
presence!”
    One of the
other, older warriors near the chief spoke up. “In the old days, in the days of
the heroes, a boy of Makes Much Radiation’s age would not dare raise his voice
in council before his father. Certainly not to say the things he just has. I
cite as reference, for those interested, Robert Lowie’s definitive volume, The Crow Indians , and
Lesser’s fine piece of anthropological insight, Three Types of Siouan Kinship. Now, whereas we have not yet been able to reconstruct a Siouan
kinship pattern on the classic model described by Lesser, we have developed a
working arrangement that—”
    “The trouble
with you, Bright Book Jacket,” the warrior on his left broke in, “is that you’re
too much of a classicist. You’re always trying to live in the Golden Age
instead of the present, and a Golden Age that really has little to do with the
Sioux. Oh, I’ll admit that we’re as much Dakotan as the Crow, from the linguist’s
point of view at any rate, and that, superficially, what applies to the Crow
should apply to us. But what happens when we quote Lowie in so many words and
try to bring his precepts into daily life?”
    “Enough,” the
chief announced. “Enough, Hangs A Tale. And you, too, Bright Book
Jacket—enough, enough! These are private tribal matters. Though they do serve
to remind us that the paleface was once great before he became sick and corrupt
and frightened. These men whose holy books teach us the lost art of living like
Sioux, men like Lesser, men like Robert H. Lowie, were not these men palefaces?
And in memory of them should we not show tolerance?”
    “A-ah!” said
Makes Much Radiation impatiently. “As far as I’m concerned, the only good
palefaces are dead. And that’s that.” He thought a bit. “Except their women.
Paleface women are fun when you’re a long way from home and feel like raising a
little hell.”
    Chief Three
Hydrogen Bombs glared his son into silence. Then he turned to Jerry Franklin. “Your
message and your gifts. First your message.”
    “No, Chief,” Bright
Book Jacket told him respectfully but definitely. “First the gifts. Then the message. That’s
the way it was done.”
    “I’ll have to
get them. Be right back.” Jerry walked out of the tent backwards and ran to
where Sam Rutherford had tethered the horses. “The presents,” he said urgently.
“The presents for the chief.”
    The two of them
tore at the pack straps. With his arms loaded, Jerry returned through the
warriors who had assembled to watch their activity with quiet arrogance. He
entered the tent, set the gifts on the ground and bowed low again.
    “Bright beads
for the chief,” he said, handing over two star sapphires and a large white
diamond, the best that the engineers had evacuated from the ruins of New York
in the past ten years.
    “Cloth for the
chief,” he said, handing over a bolt of linen and a bolt of wool, spun and
loomed in New Hampshire especially for this occasion and painfully, expensively
carted to New York.
    “Pretty toys for
the chief,” he said, handing over a large, only slightly rusty alarm clock and
a precious typewriter, both of them put in operating order by batteries of
engineers and artisans working in tandem (the engineers interpreting the
brittle old documents to the artisans) for two and a half months.
    “Weapons for the
chief,” he said, handing over a beautifully decorated cavalry saber, the prized
hereditary possession of the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force, who
had protested its requisitioning most bitterly. (“Damn it all, Mr. President,
do you expect me to fight these Indians with my bare hands?”
    “No, I