All My Sins Remembered by Joe Haldeman Page A

more interesting variety of fauna than this small veldt—but he’d feel safer with a thick tree at his back. He checked his direction bump against the small rangefinder and set off north by northwest.
    Twice in ten steps Otto fired at nothing. He cursed himself for nervousness, for wasting power, and then on the twelfth step a red snake with a head the size of a man’s and eyes that actually did glow lunged for Otto’s belt buckle. After the laser severed its head, the body coiled and writhed through eight long meters of grass.
    For all the years of training and conditioning and experience, Otto suddenly had no control over the toroidal muscle that makes elimination a polite and private function. His anal sphincter bucked and spasmed in that final reflex that tries to make a trapped creature an unpleasant meal. There was no room in his mind for thankfulness that he had taken the elementary precaution that kept him from fouling himself—there was nothing in his head but primitive panic from ear to ear and he screamed and ran blindly for two seconds, hit dirt in a flat dive, rolled, and came up firing. The laser’s beam made a brilliant arc swinging back and forth in front of him, then behind, saving his life as it killed the bat-creature’s mate. When he took his finger off the trigger the glade was in crackling flames that dimmed and smoldered out in the dampness. At the edge of the woods something gave a bad imitation of a human laugh and Otto’s self-preserving panic reached so high a level that it flipped the final mental switch the conditioners had put into his brain and he was suddenly ice:
    McGavin, you are going to die
.
    I know that, McGavin
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    What do you do before you die?
    Kill as many as I can
.
    There is a theory, not provable, that no creature in the Galaxy is more dangerous than man. At any rate, few men could be as dangerous as one who has given up all hope for his own survival—add to that half a lifetime of experience in bloody murder and you may have the only kind of man who could survive three hours alone at night in a Selvan jungle.
    The fact that nighttime is so hostile on Selva was the single most important influence on the strange evolution of Selvan politics. The planet was originally colonized by five hundred idealistic volunteers from the Terran country of Uruguay, members of the Programa Politico de Mao, who had bought the planet cheaply from a mining corporation that couldn’t find anybody willing to run their machines.
    El Programa arrived with a nice efficient setup, a division of duties and rewards that might have worked very well in a more hospitable environment.
    The mining company had not totally misled them about the danger of Selva—they came with guns and electric fences and grim determination and absolutely no desire to go near the jungle at night. But to the planet they were just so many relatively accessible pieces of protein dropped in the middle of about the most competitive land ecology ever discovered—twenty-five thousand kilograms of monster meat.
    They lost nearly a hundred members the first day and the same number in the week that followed. The next week forty vanished, then seventeen, and then eight.
    It might be naive to infer that a primitive kind of natural selection was going on, that only the toughest survived. There may have been some element of that, but far more important was the factor of simple luck and practice. They had all been farmers by profession—and temperament—and nor farmer, however tough, could know enough about knee-jerk killing to stay alive long on Selva—except by luck. If he lived and learned he eventually needed less luck—although he became a less pleasant neighbor.
    Inexorably, in less than one generation, what had been intended as a gentle experiment in communal living degenerated into a bizarre association of mutually suspicious clans, a system more appropriate to the fourteenth century ‘than the twenty-third.
    It started with