CONTINUUM
1
continuum
Solid
science fiction, eight outstanding authors, an unusual format - this is the
tapestry of Continuum,
a revolutionary concept in sf
anthologies where each book
in the series, of which this is the first, stands as an entity on its own, at
the same time forming an integral part of a continuing cycle.
philip josé farmer
poul anderson chad oliver thomas scortia Anne McCaffrey gene wolfe edgar
pangborn
These
are the authors who create their own strange and fascinating worlds to which
they return in each successive volume, thus contributing to a unique experiment
in sf. Also included is the totally original revolving authorship series conceived
by dean r. koontz and continued by three eminent authors in the
field.
Volumes
2, 3 and 4 of This stunning
series are to be published in Star.
CONTINUUM
1
Edited
by Roger Elwood
A
STAR BOOK
published by WYNDHAM PUBLICATIONS
A
Star Book Published in 1977 by Wyndham Publications Ltd. A. Howard &
Wyndham Company 123, King Street, London W6 9JG
First published in Great Britain by W. H.
Allen & Co. Ltd. 1975
Copyright © 1974 Roger Elwood
Printed in Great Britain by Richard Clay (The
Chaucer Press), Ltd., Bungay, Suffolk
•
ISBN 0 352 39664 4
This book is sold subject to the condition
that it shall
not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or
otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of
binding or cover other than that in which it is published
and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
CONTINUUM
1
INTRODUCTION
Roger Elwood
STATIONS OF THE NIGHTMARE - PART ONE
Philip José
Farmer
MY OWN, MY NATIVE LAND Poul Anderson
SHAKA!
Chad Oliver
THE
ARMAGEDDON TAPES - TAPE I
Thomas Scortia
PRELUDE
TO A CRYSTAL SONG
Anne McCaffrey
THE DARK OF THE JUNE Gene Wolfe
THE CHILDREN'S CRUSADE Edgar Pangborn
THE NIGHT OF THE STORM Dean R. Koontz
INTRODUCTION
There
are several excellent anthology series available today: Damon Knight edits one,
Bob Silverberg has another, and so does Terry Carr. Each is based upon a single
premise, fashioned by the editor's individual tastes: namely, the best science
fiction written in an atmosphere of creative freedom.
But
- and it's not a shortcoming, just a fact - there is no other connection between, say, New Dimensions 1 and New Dimensions 2; or Universe 1 and Universe 2. All present solid, top-notch science fiction
by well-known and beginning authors ... period. Considering the quality of
these books, that's a strong raison d'etre.
But
the Continuum anthologies are, frankly, based upon an additional premise: a tightly woven series of threads
will ultimately tie all four books closely together.
What does this premise mean?
That each story in each anthology is part of
a series written by the author in question. There are eight stories in Continuum 1; eight in Continuum 2; and so on. That means, also, eight series. Thus, with all four books, there will be a
total of thirty-two episodes - four episodes per series.
Now, each story is, in theory and actuality,
a separate entity. We're not fostering Flash Gordon cliff-hangers here. You
don't have to buy the second book to enjoy the first;
and vice versa.
Yet, with the four Continuum anthologies, the series format reaches its
full potential, with each series a minimum of 25,000 words all told; there is
only one exception: Gene Wolfe's delightful short-shorts.
Since each story was written by the author as
a separate entity, able to stand on its own, there was no sacrifice of artistic
quality; no subsequent story was written simply to
fulfil the series format. Thus, in several instances, authors
discarded initial creations because after one or two stories, to add the
remaining number would have meant sheer padding, and by the time the fourth
story was written, well, it would have been just
an assembly-line job. Only stories that naturally fit the series guidelines, and are valid separately, have been accepted for Continuum.
It is awkward for an editor to praise stories
in books that he puts together because these comments usually seem
self-serving. I run that risk here but to be able to note how much I think of
these stories, well, it's worth the risk, in my opinion.
I doubt very much that any of the authors
herein have done material that is significantly better than that which is represented
in this Continuum
or in the others comprising
this series. A number are breathtaking tours de force which
I have re-read several times since accepting them for publication.
I would very much like to extend thanks to
George Erns-berger, Editor-in-Chief of Berkley Books, for his patience and his
help in a variety of ways. George is one of those rare editors who possess
boundless degrees of creative insight yet who permit their authors /
anthologists to express themselves
in the best way possible.
Deep thanks also to Virginia Kidd, someone else whose relationship I value
highly and who has been both a friend and a strong impetus in the aim to settle
for nothing less than the very best.
Continuum
is a new concept in
anthologies. We sincerely hope that, as far as you, the reader, are concerned,
it is also a satisfying one.
Roger Elwood
Margate, NJ.
Philip José Farmer
STATIONS
OF THE NIGHTMARE
Part
1: The Two-edged Gift
1
Paul
Eyre shot a flying saucer.
On
this bright morning, he was walking through a farmer's field. Ahead of him was
the edge of a wood bisected by a small creek. Riley, the setter, had just
stiffened. Nose down, crouched low, seeming to vibrate, he pointed toward the
magnet, the invisible quail. Paul Eyre's heart pumped a little faster. Ahead
of Riley, a few yards away, was a bush. Behind it should be the covey.
They broke loose with that racket that had
made him jump so when he was a novice. It was as if the earth had given violent
birth to several tiny planets. But there was not the dozen or so he had
expected. Only two. The lead one was much larger than
the other, so much larger that he did jump then. He knew as the shotgun roared
and kicked that it was not a bird.
The
concentrated pattern of his modified choke must have hit the thing squarely. It
fell away at a forty-five degree angle instead of dropping as a dead bird
drops, and it crashed through I lie lower branches of
a tree on the outskirts of the wood.
Automatically,
he had fired the second barrel at the trailing bird. And he had missed it.
The thing had rocketed up like a quail. But
it had been dark and about two feet long. Or two feet wide.
His finger had squeezed on the trigger even as his mind had squeezed on the
revelation that it was not a winged creature.
It wasn't a creature, he thought, but a made
thing. More like a huge clay pigeon than anything else.
lie looked around. Riley was a white and black
streak, running as if a cougar were after him. He made no noise. He seemed to
be conserving his breath as if he knew he'd need every atom of oxygen he could
get. Behind him was a trail of excrement. Ahead of him, over half a mile up
the slope, was a white farmhouse and two dark-red
barns.
Roger, Paul's son, had spoken of mines which
flew up into the air before exploding. This thing had not been attached to a
chain nor had it blown up. It could be a dud. But there had been no blast as it
soared up. Perhaps the noise of his shotgun had covered it.
He shook his head. It could not have been
anything like that. Unless ... Had.some vicious person put it in the field just
to kilt hunters? Senseless violence was on the increase in this God-forsaking
country.
The situation was much like that of a car
that refused to run. You could think about it all you wanted to and make mental
images of what was wrong. But until you opened the hood and looked at the
engine, you would not be able to make a definite analysis. So he would open the
hood.
He walked forward. The only sound was the
northwest wind, gentle here because the woods broke it. The bluejay and the
crows that had been so noisy before he had fired were quiet. There was the
bluejay, sitting on a tree branch. It seemed frozen with shock.
He
was cautious but not afraid, he told himself. He had been afraid only three
times in his life. When his father had deserted him, when his mother had died,
and when Mavice had said she was leaving him. And these three events had taught
him that nothing was as bad as he'd thought it at the time and that it was
stupid, illogical to fear. He and his brothers and sisters and mother had
gotten along without his father. His mother's death had actually made his life
easier. And Mavice had not left him.
'Only
the unimaginative, of whom you are the king, have no
fear,' Tincrowdor had told him. But what did that effete egg-head know of real
life or real men?
Nevertheless,
he hesitated. He could just walk away, round up the dog, and hunt elsewhere. Or, better, tell Smith that someone had planted a strange
mechanical device in his field.
Perhaps, though he did not like to admit it,
his sight had betrayed him. Behind his glasses were fifty-four-year-old eyes.
He was in good shape, better than most men twenty years younger. Much better
than that Tincrowdor, who sat on his locus all day while he typed away on his
crazy stories.
Still,
he had been informed by the optometrist that he needed a new prescription. He
had not told anyone about this. He hated to admit to anyone that he had a weakness,
and that anyone included himself. When he had a chance to get fitted with new
lenses, with no one except the doctor the wiser, he'd go. Perhaps he should not
have put it off so long.
He
resumed walking slowly across the field. Once, he looked toward the farmhouse.
Riley, his pace undiminished, was still headed toward it. When he caught Riley,
he'd rap him a few on the nose and shame him. If he were ruined by this, he'd
get rid of him. He couldn't see feeding something that was useless. The hound ate
more than he was worth as it was.
He
could imagine what Mavice would say about that. 'You're going to retire in
eleven years. Would you want us to give you away or send you to the gas chamber
because you're useless?'
And
he'd say, 'But I won't be. I'll be working as hard as ever on my own. business after I've retired.'
He was ten feet from the wood when the yellow
haze drifted out from it.
2
lie
stopped. It couldn't be pollen at this time of the year. And no pollen ever
glowed.
Moreover, it was coming with too much force
to be driven by the wind. For the second time, he hesitated. The thick yellow
luminance looked so much like gas. He thought about I ho sheep that had been killed in Nevada or Utah when the army nerve gas
had escaped. Could - But no ... that was ridiculous.
The shimmering haze spread out, and he was in
it. For a few seconds, he held his breath. Then he released it and laughed. The
stuff blew away from his face and closed in again. Here and there, some bits
sparkled. Before he reached the trees, he saw tiny blobs form on the grass, on
his hands, and on the gun barrels. They looked like gold-colored mercury. When
he ran his hand over the barrels, the stuff accumulated at the ends into two
large drops. They ran like mercury into the cup formed by bis
palm.
Its odor made him wrinkle his nose and snap
it to the ground. It smelled like spermatic fluid.
It
was then that he noticed that he had not reloaded. He was mildly shocked. He
had never missed reloading immediately after firing. In fact, he did it so
automatically that he never even thought about it. He was more upset than he
had realized.
Abruptly,
the haze or fog, or whatever it was, disappeared. He looked around. The grass
for about twenty feet behind him was faintly yellow.
He
went on. A branch, broken off by the thing, lay before him. Ahead was the dense
and silent wood. He pushed through the tangles of thorn bushes, from which he
had flushed out so many rabbits. And there was one now, a big buck behind the
thorns. It saw him, saw that it was seen, but it did not move. He crouched down
to look at it. Its black eyes looked glazed, and its brown fur scintillated
here and there with yellowness. It was in the shade, so the sun could not be
responsible for the glints.
He poked
at it, but it did not move. And now he could see that it was trembling
violently.
A
few minutes later, he was at the place where the thing would have landed if it
had continued its angle of descent. The bushes were undisturbed; the grass
unbent.
An hour
passed. He had thoroughly covered the woods on this side of the creek and found
nothing. He waded through the waters, which were nowhere deeper than two feet,
and started his search through the woods on that side. He saw no yellow
mercury, which meant one of two things. Either the thing had not come here or
else it had quit expelling the stuff. That is, if the stuff had been expelled from it. It might just be a coincidence that the stuff
had appeared at the same time the thing had-disappeared. A coincidence,
however, did not seem likely.
Then
he saw a single drop of the mercury, and he knew that it was still... bleeding?
He shook his head. Why would he think of that word? Only living creatures could
be wounded. He had damaged it.
He
whirled. Something had splashed behind him. Through a small break in the
vegetation, he could see something round, flat, and black shooting from the
middle of the creek. He had seen it before at a distance and had thought it was
the top of a slighdy rounded boulder just covered by the creek. His eyes were going bad.
He recrossed the creek and followed a trail of water which dwindled away suddenly. He looked up, and something
- it -dropped down behind a bush. There was a crashing noise, then silence. .
So it was alive. No machine moved like that, unless ...
What would Tincrowdor say if he told him that
he had seen a flying saucer?
Common sense told him to say nothing to
anybody about (his. He'd be laughed at, and people would think he was going
insane. Or suffering from premature senility, like his
father.
The thought seemed to drive him crazy for a
minute. Shouting, he plunged through the bushes and the thorn tangles. When he
was under the tree from which the thing had dropped, he stopped. His heart was
hammering, and he was sweating. There was no impression in the soft
moisture-laden ground; nothing indicated that a large heavy object had fallen
onto it.
Something moved to the right at the corner of
his eye. He turned and shot once, then again. Pieces of bushes flew up, and
hits of bark showered. He reloaded - he wasn't about to forget this time - and
moved slowly toward the base of the bush at which the thing seemed to have
been. But it wasn't there anymore, if it had ever been there.
A
few feet further, he suddenly got dizzy. He leaned against a tree. His blood
was thrumming in his ears, and the trees and bushes were melting. Perhaps the
yellow stuff was some kind of nerve gas.
He decided to get out of the woods. It wasn't
fear but logic that had made him change his mind. And no one had seen him
retreat.
Near the edge of the woods, he stopped. He no
longer felt dizzy, and the world had regained its hardness. It was true that
only he would know he had quit, but he wouldn't ever again be able to think of
himself as a real man. No, by God - and he told himself he wasn't swearing when
he said that - he would sec this out.
He turned and saw through the screen of bushes
something white move out from behind a tree. It looked like the back of a woman's torso. She wore nothing; he could see the soft white skin and
the indentation of the spine. The hips were not visible. Then the back of the
head, black hair down to the white shoulders, appeared.
He shouted at the woman,
but she paid no attention. When he got to the tree where she had first
appeared, he could no longer see her. Some of the grass was still rising, and
some leaves had been distorted.
An hour later, Paul Eyre gave up. Had he just
thought he'd seen a woman? What would a woman be doing naked in these woods?
She couldn't have been with a lover, because she and the man would have gotten
out of the woods the first time he'd fired his shotgun.
On the way back, he thought he saw something
big and tawny at a distance. He crouched down and opened the bush in front of
him. About thirty yards off, going behind an almost solid tangle, was the back
of an animal. It was yellowish brown and had a long tufted tail. And if he
hadn't known it was impossible, he would have said that it was the rear end of
an African lion. No, a lioness.
A moment later, he saw the head of the woman.
She was where the lion would be if it stood
up on its hind legs and presented its head.
The woman was in profile, and she was the
most beautiful he had ever seen.
He must be suffering from some insidious form
of Asiatic flu. That would explain everything. In fact, it was the only
explanation.
He
was sure of it when he got to the edge of the trees. The field was covered with
red flowers and at the other side, which seemed to be miles away, was a
glittering green city.
The vision lasted only three or four seconds.
The flowers and the city disappeared, and the field, as if it were a rubber
band, snapped back to its real dimensions.
He could hear it snap.
Ten minutes later, he was at the farmhouse.
Riley greeted him by biting
him.
3
Eyre parked the car in front of his house.
The driveway was blocked with a car to which was hitched a boat trailer, a
motorcycle lacking a motor, and a Land-Rover on top of which was a half-built
camper. Behind it was a large garage crammed with machines, tools, supplies,
old tires, and outboard motors in the process of being repaired.
Thirteen-thirty-one Wizman Court was in an
area which once had been all residential. Now the huge old mansion across I he street was a nursing home; the houses next to it had been worn down
and buildings for a veterinarian and his kennels were almost completed. Eyre's
own house had looked large enough and smart enough when he and Mavice had moved
into i ( twenty years ago. It looked tiny, mean, and
decaying now and had looked so for ten years.
Paul
Eyre, until this moment, had never noticed that. Though he felt crowded at
times, he attributed this to too many people, not the smallness of the house.
Once he got rid of his son and (.laughter, the house would again become
comfortable. And the house was paid for. Besides taxes, maintenance, and the
utilities, il cost him nothing. If
the neighborhood was run down somewhat, so much the better. His
neighbors did not complain because he was conducting his own repair business
here.
Until now, he had not thought anything about
its appearance. It was just a house. But now he noticed that the grass on the
tiny lawn was uncut, the wooden shutters needed painting, the driveway was a
mess, and the sidewalk was cracked.
He got out of the car and picked up his
shotgun and bag with his left hand. The right hand was heavily bandaged. The
old ladies sitting on the side porch waved and called out to him, and he waved
back at them. They sat like a bunch of ancient crows on a branch. Time was
shooting them down, one by one. There was an empty chair at the end of the row,
but it would be occupied by a newcomer soon enough. Mr Ridgley had sat there
until last week when he had been observed one afternoon urinating over the
railings into the rosebushes below. He was, according to the old ladies, now
locked up in his room on the third floor. Eyre looked up and saw a white face
with tobacco-stained moustaches pressed against the bars over the window.
He waved. Mr Ridgley stared. The mouth below
the moustache drooled. Angry, Paul Eyre turned away. His mother had stared out
of that window for several weeks, and then she had disappeared. But she had
lived to be eighty-six before she had become senile. That was forgivable. What
he could not forgive, nor forget, was that his father had only been sixty when
his brain had hardened and his reason had slid off it.
He went up the wooden unpainted steps off the
side of the front porch. It was no longer just a porch. He had enclosed it and
Roger now used it for a bedroom. Roger, as usual, had neglected to make up the
bed-couch. Four years in the Marines, including a hitch in Viet Nam, had not
made him tidy.
Eyre growled at Roger as he entered the front
room. Roger, a tall thin blond youth, was sitting on the
sofa and reading a college textbook. He said, 'Oh, Mom said she'd do it.' He
stared at his father's hand. 'What happened?'
'Riley went mad, and I had
to shoot him.'
Mavice, coming in from the kitchen, said,
'Oh, my God! You
shot him!'
Tears ran down Roger's cheeks.
'Why would you do that?'
Paul waved his right hand. 'Didn't you hear
me? He bit me! He was trying for my throat!' 'Why would he do that?' Mavice
said.
'You
sound like you don't believe me!' Paul said. 'For God's sake, isn't anyone
going to ask me how badly he bit me? Or worry that I might get rabies?'
Roger
wiped away the tears and looked at the bandages. 'You've been to a doctor,' he
said. 'What'd he say about it?'
'Riley's
head has been shipped to the state lab,' Paul said. 'Do you
have any idea what it's going to be like if I have to have rabies shots?
Anyway, it's fatal! Nobody ever survived rabies!'
Mavice's
hand shot to her mouth and from behind it came
strangled sounds. Her light blue eyes were enormous.
'Yeah,
and horseshoes hung over the door bring good luck,' Roger said. 'Why don't you
come out of the nineteenth century, Dad? Look at something besides outboard
motors and the TV. The rate of recovery from rabies is very high.'
'So
I only had one year of college,' Paul said. 'Is that any reason for my smartass
son to sneer at me? Where would you be if it wasn't for the G.I. Bill?'
'You
go to college to get a degree, not an education,' Roger said. 'You have to
educate yourself, all your life.'
'For
Heaven's sake, you two,' Mavice said. 'Quit this eternal bickering. And sit
down, Paul. Take it easy. You look terrible!'
He jerked his arm away and said, 'I'm all
right.' But he sat down. The mirror behind the sofa had showed him a short,
thin but broad-shouldered man with smooth pale-brown hair, a high forehead, bushy sandy eyebrows, blue eyes behind octagonal rimless
spectacles, a long nose, a thick brown moustache, and a round cleft chin.
His
face did look like a mask. Tincrowdor had said that anyone who wore glasses
should never sport a moustache. Together, these gave a false-face appearance.
That remark had angered him then. Now it reminded him that he was looking
forward to seeing Tincrowdor. Maybe he had some answers.
'What about a beer, Dad?' Roger said. He
looked contrite.
That'd help, thanks,' Paul said. Roger
hurried off to the kitchen while Mavice stood looking down at him. Even when
both were standing up, she was still looking down on him. She was at least four
inches taller.
'You
don't really think Riley had rabies?' she said. 'He seemed all right this
morning.'
'Not really. He wasn't foaming at the mouth
or anything like that. Something scared him in the woods, scared him witless,
and he attacked me. He didn't know what he was doing.'
Mavice
sat down in a chair across the room. Roger brought in the beer. Paul drank it
gratefully, though its amber color reminded him of the yellow stuff. He looked
at Mavice over the glass. He had always thought she was very good-looking, even
if her face was somewhat long. But, remembering the profile of the woman in the
woods, he saw that she was very plain indeed, if not ugly. Any woman's face
would look bad now that he had seen that glory among the trees.
The front door slammed, and Glenda walked in
from the porch. He felt vaguely angry. He always did when he saw her. She had a
beautiful face, a feminization of his, and a body which might have matched the
face but never would. It was thin and nearly breastless, though she was
seventeen. The spine was shaped like a question mark; one shoulder was lower
than the other; the legs looked as thin as piston rods.
She stopped and said, 'What happened?' Her
voice was deep and husky, sexy to those who heard it without seeing her.
Mavice and Roger told her what had taken
place. Paul braced himself for a storm of tears and accusations, since she
loved Riley dearly. But she said nothing about him. She seemed concerned only
about her father. This not only surprised him. It angered him.
Why was he angry? he
thought.
And he understood, then, that it was because
she was a living reproach. If it weren't for him, she would not be twisted;
she'd be a tall straight and beautiful girl. His anger had been his way of
keeping this knowledge from himself.
He was amazed that he had not known this
before. How could he have been so blind?
He began sweating. He shifted on the sofa as
if he could move his body away from the revelation. He felt the beginning of a
panic. What had opened his eyes so suddenly? Why had he only now, today,
noticed how ugly and mean the house was, how frightened and repulsed he was by
the old people across the street, and why Glenda had angered him when he should
have shown her nothing but tenderness?
He
knew why. Something had happened to him in the woods, and it was probably the
stuff which had fallen on him, the stuff expelled by the thing. But how could
it have given him this insight? It scared him. It made him feel as if he were
losing something very dear.
He
almost yielded to the desire to tell them everything. No, they would not
believe him. Oh, they'd believe that he had seen those things. But they would
think that he was going crazy, and they would be frightened. If he would shoot
Riley while in a fit, he might shoot them.
He
became even more frightened. Many times, he had imagined doing just this. What
if he lost control and the image shifted gears into reality?
He
stood up. 'I think I'll wash up and then go to bed for a while. I don't feel so
good.'
This seemed to astonish
everybody.
'What's so strange about that?' he said
loudly.
'Why,
Dad, you've always had to be forced to bed when you've been sick,' Glenda said.
'You just won't admit that you can get ill, like other people. You act as if
you were made of stone, as if microbes bounced off of you.'
'That's
because I'm not a hyper— a hyper— a what-you-call-it, a goldbricker, like some
people,' he said.
'A hypochondriac,' Glenda and Roger said at
the same time.
'Don't look at me when you say that,' Mavice
said, glaring at him. 'You know I have a chronic bladder infection. I'm not
faking it. Dr Wells told you that himself when you called him to find out if I
was lying. I was never so embarrassed in all my fife.'
The shrill voice was coming from a long way
off. Glenda was becoming even more crooked, and Roger was getting thinner and
taller.
The doorway to the bedroom moved to one side
as he tried to
yet through it. He
couldn't make it on two legs, so he got down on all fours. If he was a dog,
he'd have a more solid footing, and maybe the doorway would be so confused by
the sudden change of identities it would hold still long enough for him lo get through it.
I Ic heard Mavice's
scream and barked an assurance that he was all right. Then he was protesting to
Mavice and Roger that lie didn't want to stand up, but they had hoisted him up
and were guiding him toward the bed. It didn't matter then, since he had gotten
through. Let the doorway move around all it wanted now; he had fooled it. You
could teach an old dog new tricks.
Later, he heard Mavice's voice drilling
through the closed door. Here he was, trying to sleep off whatever was ailing
him, and she was screaming like a parrot. Nothing would ever get her to lower that voice. Too many decibels from a unibelle, he thought. Which was a strange thought, even if he was an engineer. But
he wished she would tone down or, even better, shut up. Forever.
He knew that it wasn't her fault, since both her parents had been somewhat deaf
during her childhood. But (hey were dead now, and she had no logical reason to
keep on screaming as if she were trying to wake the dead.
Why hadn't he ever said anything about it? Because he nourished the resentment, fed it with other resentments.
And then, when the anger became too great, he in turn screamed at her. But it was always about other things. He had never told her how
grating her voice was.
He
sat up suddenly and then got out of bed. He was stronger now, and the doorway
was no longer alive. He walked out into the little hall and said, 'What are you
saying to Morna?'
Mavice
looked at him in surprise and put her hand over the receiver. 'I'm calling off
tonight. You're too sick to have company.'
'No, I'm not,' he said. 'I'm all right. You
tell her to come on over as planned.'
Mavice's
penciled eyebrows rose. 'All right, but if I'd insisted they come, you would
have gotten mad at me.'
T got work to do,' he said, and headed toward
the rear exit.
'With that bandage on your
hand?'
Mavice said.
He threw both hands up into the air and went
into the living room. Roger was sitting in a chair and holding a textbook while
watching TV.
'How can you study freshman calculus while
Matt Dillon is shooting up the place?' Paul Eyre said.
'Every time a gun goes off and a redskin
bites the dust, another equation becomes clear,' Roger said.
'What the hell does that
mean?'
T don't know what it
means,' Roger said calmly. 'I just know it works.'
'I don't understand you,' Paul said. 'When I
was studying I had to have absolute quiet.'
'Didn't you listen to the radio while you
were hitting the books?'
Paul seemed surprised.
'No.'
'Well, I was raised this way,' Roger said.
'AH my friends were. Maybe we learned how to handle two or more things
simultaneously. Maybe that's where the generation gap is. We take in many
different things at once and see the connections among them. But you only saw
one thing at a time.'
'So that makes you better than us?'
'Different, anyway,' Roger said. 'Dad, you
ought to read MacLuhan. But then ...' 'But then what?'
'But you never read anything but the local
newspaper, sports magazines, and stuff connected with your work.'
T don't have time,' Paul said. 'I'm holding down a job at
Trackless and working eight hours a day on my own business. You know that.'
'Leo Tincrowdor used to do that, and he read
three books a week. But then he wants to know.'
'Yeah,
be knows so much, but if his car breaks down, can he fix it himself? No, he has
to call in an expensive mechanic. Or get me to do it for him for nothing.'
'Nobody's perfect,' Roger said. 'Anyway, he's
more interested in finding out how the universe works and why our society is
breaking down and what can be done to repair it.'
'It
wouldn't be breaking down if people like him weren't trying to break it down!'
'You
would have said the same thing a hundred years ago,' Roger said. 'You think
things are in a mess now; you should read about the world in 1874. The good old days. My history professor -'
Paul
strode from the room and into the kitchen. He never drank more than two beers a
day, but today was different. And how it was different. The top of
the can popped open, reminding him of the sound when the field had snapped back
to normalcy. Now there
was a connection which
Roger, anybody else in the world, in fact, would not have made. He wished he
had stayed home to catch up on his work instead of indulging himself in a quail
hunt.
4
At
seven, the Tincrowdors walked in. Usually Paul kept them waiting, since hs
always had to finish up on a motor in the garage. By the time he had washed up,
Leo had had several drinks and Morna and Mavice were engaged in one of their
fast-moving female conversations. Leo was happy enough talking to Roger or
Glenda or, if neither were there, happy to be silent. He did not seem to resent
Paul's always showing up late. Paul suspected that he would have been content
if he never showed up. Yet, he always greeted him with a smile. If he had been
drinking much, he also had some comment which sounded funny but which concealed
a joke at Paul's expense.
Tonight,
however, Paul was in the living room when they arrived. He jumped up and kissed
Morna enthusiastically. He always kissed good-looking women if they would let
him; it gave him a sense of innocent infidelity, outside of the sheer pleasure of
kissing. Morna had to bend down a little, like Mavice, but she put more warmth
into it than Mavice. Yet she was always, well, often, chewing him out in defense
of her friend, Mavice.
Leo Queequeg Tincrowdor enclosed Paul's hand
with his over-sized one and squeezed. He was a six-footer with heavy bones and
a body that had once been muscular but now was turning to fat. His once auburn
hair was white and thinning. Below protruding bars of bone, his strange
leaf-green eyes, the balls bloodshot, looked at and through Paul. His cheeks
were high and red. His beard was a mixture of gray, black, and red. He had a
deep voice the effect of which was lessened by a tendency to slur when
drinking. And Paul had only seen him twice when he hadn't been drinking. He
pushed ahead of him a balloon of bourbon. When he had money, it was Waller's
Special Reserve. When he was broke, it was cheap whiskey cut with lemon juice.
Evidently he had recently received a story check. The balloon had an expensive
odor.
'Sit
down, Leo.' Ritualistically, Eyre asked, 'What'll it be? Beer
or whiskey?'
Ritualistically, Tincrowdor answered,
'Bourbon. I only drink beer when I can't get anything better.'
When Paul returned with six ounces of Old
Kentucky Delight on ice, he found Tincrowdor handing out two of his latest
soft-covers to Roger and Glenda. He felt a thrust of jealousy as they exclaimed
over the gifts. How could the kids enjoy that trash?
'What's this?' he said, handing Leo his drink
and then taking the book from Glenda. The cover showed a white man in a cage
surrounded by some green-skinned women, all naked, reaching through the bars
for the man. In the background was a mountain vaguely
resembling a lion with a woman's head. On top of the head was a white
Grecian temple with small figures holding knives around another figure
stretched out on an altar.
'Sphinxes Without
Secrets,' Leo
said. 'It's about a spaceman who lands on a planet inhabited by women. The
males died off centuries before, mostly from heartbreak. A chemist, a women's
lib type, had put a substance in the central food plant which made the men
unable to have erections.'
'What?' Mavice said. She laughed, but her
face was red.
'It's an old idea,' Leo said. He sipped the
bourbon and shuddered. 'But I extrapolate to a degree nobody else has ever
done before. Or is capable of doing. It's very
realistic. Too much so for the Busiris Journal-Star. Their reviewer not only refused to write a review, he sent me a nasty
letter. Nothing libelous. Old Potts doesn't have the
guts for that.'
'If
there weren't any men, how could they have babies?' Paul said.
'Chemically induced parthenogenesis. Virgin birth caused by chemicals. It's been
done with rabbits and theoretically could be done with humans. I don't doubt
that the Swedes have done it, but they're keeping quiet about it. They have no
desire to be martyrs.'
'That's
blasphemy!' Paul said. His face felt hot, and he had a momentary image of
himself throwing Tincrowdor out on his rear. 'There's only been one virgin
birth, and that was divinely inspired.'
'Inspired? That sounds like a blow job,'
Tincrowdor said. 'No, I apologize for that remark. When among the aborigines,
respect their religion. However, I will point out that if Jesus was the result
of parthenogenesis, he should have been a woman. All parthenogenetically
stimulated offspring are females, females only carry the X chromosome, you
know. Or do you? It's the male's Y chromosome
that determines that the baby be a male.'
'But God is, by the definition of God,
all-powerful,' Glenda said. 'So why couldn't He have, uh, inserted a sort of
spiritual Y chromosome?'
Tincrowdor laughed and said, 'Very good,
Glenda. You'd make an excellent science-fiction author, God help you.
'Anyway,
every culture has its deviates, and this lesbian society was no exception. So a few perverts were not repulsed by the spaceman.
Instead, he was to them a most desirable sex object.'
'How could a woman who wanted a man instead
of a woman be a deviate?' Paul said.
'Deviation is determined by what the culture
considers normal. When we were kids, going down was considered by almost
everybody to be a perversion, and you could get put in jail for twenty years or
more if caught doing it. But in our lifetime, we've seen this attitude change.
By 2010, anything between consenting adults will be acceptable. But there are
still millions in this country who think the only God-favored way is for the
woman to lie on her back with the man on top. And would you believe it, there
are millions who won't undress in front of each other or keep a light on during
intercourse. The sexual dinosaurs, for that's what they are, will be extinct
in another fifty years. Could I have another drink?'
Paul
Eyre glared at his wife. She must have been confiding in Morna. Tincrowdor had
made it obvious that he was talking about the Eyres. Was nothing sacred
anymore?
Nor did he like this
kind of talk before Glenda.
He said, 'Roger, will you
get him another whiskey?'
Roger left reluctantly. Mavice said, 'So what
happened to the spaceman?'
'He was a homosexual and wanted nothing to do
with the woman who let him out of his cage. Scorned, she turned him in to the
priestess, and they sacrificed him. However, he was stuffed and put in a museum
alongside a gorilla-type ape. Due to complaints from the Decency League, he was
eventually fitted with a skirt to hide his nauseating genitals.'
'What does the title mean?' Mavice said.
'That's
from Oscar Wilde, who said that women were sphinxes without secrets.'
‘I like that’ Mavice said.
'Oscar Wilde was a queer,' Morna said. 'What
would he know about women?'
'Being
half-female, he knew more about them than most men,' Tincrowdor said.
Paul wanted to get away from that subject. He
leaned over and took the other book from Glenda. 'Osiris On Crutches.
What does that mean? Or
maybe I'm better off if I don't ask.'
'Osiris was an ancient Egyptian god. His evil
brother, Set, tore him apart and scattered the pieces all over earth. But
Osiris' wife, Isis, and his son, Horus, collected the pieces and put them back
together again and revivified him. My book tells the story in detail. For a
long time, Osiris was missing a leg, so he hopped around earth on crutches
looking for it. That wasn't the only thing he was missing. His nose couldn't be
found, either, so Isis stuck his penis over the nasal cavity. This explains why
Osiris is sometimes depicted as being ibis-headed. The ibis was a bird with a
long beak. An early Pharaoh thought this was obscene and so ordered all artists
to change the penis into a beak.
'Anyway,
after many adventures, Osiris found his leg but wished he hadn't. He got a lot
more sympathy as a cripple. He found his nose, too, but the tribe that had it
refused to give it up. Since it was a piece of a divine being, they'd made a
god of it. It was giving them good crops, both of wheat and babies, and it was
dispensing excellent, if somewhat nasal, oracles.
'Osiris
blasted them with floods and lightning bolts, and so scared them into returning
his nose. But he would have been better off if he hadn't interfered with their
religious customs. His nose elongated and swelled when he was sexually excited,
which was most of the time, since he was a god. And he breathed through his
penis.'
'For heaven's sake!' Paul said. 'That's pornography? No wonder Potts won't
review your books!'
'They
said the same thing about Aristophanes, Rabelais, and Joyce,' Tincrowdor said.
'I'm just as glad that the paper won't review
his books,'
Morna
said. It would be so embarrassing. I'm on good terms with our neighbors, but if
they found out what he wrote, we'd he ostracized. Fortunately, they don't read
science-fiction.'
Leo was silent for a moment, and then he
looked at Paul's bandaged hand. '"Morna said your dog bit you today. You
had (o shoot him.'
He made it sound like an accusation.
'It was terrible,' Mavice said. 'Roger
cried.'
'Tears over a dog from a man who's
booby-trapped cans of food to blow up infants?' Tincrowdor said.
Roger
handed him his drink and said, 'Those same little kids were the ones tossing
grenades in our trucks!'
'Yeah,
I know,' Tincrowdor said. 'Don't criticize a man unless you've walked a mile in
his G.I. boots. I shot some twelve-year-old kids in World War II. But they were
shooting at me. I suppose the principle's the same. It's the practice I don't
like. Did you ever see your victims, Roger? After the explosions, I mean.'
'No, I'm not morbid,' Roger said.
'I saw mine. I'll never forget them.'
'You
better lay off the booze,' Morna said. 'You've been insulting and now you're
going to get sloppy sentimental.'
'Advice from the world's champion insulter,'
Tincrowdor said. 'She calls it being frank. Does it hurt, Paul? The bite, I
mean.'
'You're the first person who's asked me
that,' Paul said. 'My family's more concerned about the dog than me.'
'That's not true!' Mavice said. 'I'm terribly
worried about rabies!'
'If he starts foaming at the mouth, shoot
him,' Tincrowdor said.
'That's not funny!' Morna said. T saw a kid
that'd been bit by a dog when I was working in the hospital. He didn't get
rabies, but the vaccination made him suffer terribly. Don't you worry, Paul. There's not much chance Riley had hydrophobia. He
hadn't had any contact with other animals. Maybe the post-mortem will show he
had a tumor on his brain. Or something.'
'Maybe he just didn't like Paul,' Tincrowdor
said. Paul understood that Tincrowdor was speaking not only lor the dog but for
himself. 'I once wrote a short story called The Vaccinators from
Vega.
The Vegans appeared one day
in a great fleet with weapons against which Earth was powerless. The Vegans
were bipedal but hairy and had bad breaths because they ate only meat. They
were, in fact, descended from dogs, not apes. They had big black eyes soft with
love, and they were delighted because we had so many telephone poles. And they
had come to save the universe, not to conquer our planet. They said a terrible
disease would soon spread throughout the galaxy, but they would be able to
immunize everybody. The Earthlings objected against
forcible vaccination, but the Vegans pointed out that the Earthlings themselves
had provided the precedent.
'After
they had given everybody a shot, they departed, taking with them some of the terrestrial
artifacts they thought valuable. These weren't our great works or art or sports
cars or atom bombs. They took fire hydrants and flea powder. Ten weeks later
all members of homo sapiens dropped dead. The Vegans
hadn't told us that we were the dreaded disease. Mankind was too
close to interstellar travel.'
'Don't
you ever write anything good about people?' Paul said.
'The people get the kind of science-fiction
writer they deserve.'
At least, that's what Paul thought he said.
Tincrowdor was getting more unintelligible with every sip.
'Sure,
I've written a number of stories about good people. They always get killed.
Look at what happened to Jesus. Anyway, one of my stories is a glorification
of mankind. It's entitled The Hole in the Coolth. God is walking around in the Garden in the
coolth of the evening. He's just driven Adam and Eve out of Eden, and He's
wondering if He shouldn't have killed them instead. You see, there are no
animals in the world outside. They're all in the Garden, very contented. The
Garden is a small place, but there's no worry about the beasts getting too
numerous. God's ecosystem is perfect; the births just balance the deaths.
'But
now there's nothing except accident, disease, and murder to check the growth of
human population. No saber-tooth cats or poisonous snakes. No sheep, pigs, or
cattle, either. That means that mankind will be vegetarians, and if they want
protein they'll have to eat nuts. In a short time they'll have spread out over
the earth, and since they won't discover agriculture for another two thousand
years, they'll eat all the nuts.
Then
they'll look over the fence around the Garden and see all those four-footed
edibles there. There goes the neighborhood. The Garden will be ruined; the
flowers all tromped flat; (he animals exterminated in an orgy of
carnivorousness. Maybe I le should change His mind and burn them with a couple
of lightning strokes. He needs the practice anyway.
'Another thing that bothers God is that He
can't stop thinking about Eve. God receives the emotions of all his creatures,
as if he's a sort of spiritual radio set. When an elephant is constipated, He
feels its agony. When a baboon has been rejected by its pack, He feels its
loneliness and sadness. When a wolf kills a fawn, he feels the horror of the
little deer and the gladness of the wolf. He also tastes the deliciousness of
the meat as it goes down the wolf's mouth. And he appreciates the animals'
feelings for sex.
'But human beings have a higher form of sex.
It involves psychology, too, and this is so much better. On the other hand, due
to psychology, it's often much inferior. But Adam and Eve haven't existed long
enough to get their psyches too messed up. So
God, as a sort of mental peeping torn, enjoys Adam's and Eve's coupling. Qualitatively,
Adam and Eve are so far ahead of the other creations, there's no comparison.
'When Adam takes Eve in his arms, God does
too. But in this eternal triangle, no cuckolding is involved. Besides, God had
made Eve first.
'But when Adam and Eve were run out of Eden,
God decided to dampen the power of His reception from them. I le'll stay tuned
in, but He'll be getting only faint signals. That means He won't be getting
full ecstasy of their mating. On the other hand, He won't be suffering so much
because of their yrief and loneliness. The two are deep in Africa and heading
south, and the signals are getting weaker. About the only thing I le can pick
up is a feeling of sadness. Still, He sees Eve in His mind's eye, and He knows
He's missing a lot. But He refuses to apply more of the divine juice. Better He
should forget them for a while.
'He's walking along the fence, thinking these
thoughts, when He feels a draft. The cold air of the world outside is blowing
into the pleasant warm air of the Garden. This should not be, so God
investigates. And he finds a hole dug under the golden, jewel-studded fence
that rings Eden. He's astounded, because the hole has been dug from the Garden
side. Somebocly has gotten out of
the Garden, and He doesn't understand this at all. He'd understand if somebody
tried to get in. But out!
'A
few minutes later, or maybe it was a thousand
years later, since God, when deep in thought, isn't aware of the passage of
time, he receives a change of feeling from Adam and Eve. They're joyous, and
the grief at being kicked out of Eden is definitely less.
'God
walks out of Eden and down into Africa to find out what's made the change. He
could be there in a nanosecond, but He prefers to walk. He finds Adam and Eve
in a cave and two dogs and their pups standing
guard at the entrance. The dogs snarl and bark at Him before they recognize
Him. God pets them, looks inside the cave, and sees Adam and Eve with their
children, Cain, Abel and a couple of baby girls. It was their sisters who would
become Cain and Abel's wives, you know. But that's another story.
'God
was touched. If human beings could gain the affections of dogs so much that
they would leave the delights of Eden, literally dig their way out just to be
with humans, then humans must have something worthwhile. So He returned to the
Garden and told the angel with the flaming sword to drive the other animals
out.
'
"It'll
be a mess," the angel said.
' "Yes,
I know," God said. "But if there aren't other animals around, those
poor dogs will starve to death. They've got nothing but nuts to eat." '
Paul
and Mavice were shocked by such blasphemy. Roger and Glenda laughed. There was
a tinge of embarrassment in their laughter, but it was caused by their parents'
reaction.
Morna had laughed, but she said, 'That's the
man I have to live with! And when he's telling you about Osiris and God, he's
telling you about himself!'
There was silence for a moment. Paul decided
that now was his chance. 'Listen, Leo, I had a dream this afternoon. It may be
a great idea for you.'
'O.K.,' Tincrowdor said. He looked weary.
'You
didn't sleep this afternoon,' Mavice said. 'You weren't in bed for more than a
few minutes.'
T know if I slept or
if I didn't. The dream must've been caused by what happened this morning. But
it's wild. I dreamt I was hunting quail, just like I did this morning. I was on
the same field, and Riley had just taken a point,
like he did this morning. But from then on ...'
Leo said nothing until Paul was finished. He
asked Roger to fill his glass again. For a moment he twiddled his thumbs, and
then he said, 'The most amazing thing about your dream is that you dreamed it.
It is too rich in imaginative details for you.'
Paul opened his mouth to protest, but
Tincrowdor held up his hand for silence.
'Morna has related to me dreams which you
told Mavice about. You don't have many - rather, you don't remember many, and
those few you do seem to you remarkable. But they're not. They're very poor
stuff. You see, the more creative and imaginative a person, the richer and more
original his dreams. Yes, I know that you do have a flair for engineering
creativity. You're always tinkering around on gadgets you've invented. In fact,
you could have become fairly wealthy from some of them. But you either delayed
too long applying for a patent, and so someone else beat you to it,
or you never got around to building a model of your gadget or never finished
it. Someone always got there ahead of you. Which is
significant. You should look into why you dillydally and so fail. But
then you don't believe in psychoanalysis, do you?'
'What's that got to do with this dream?' Paul
said.
'Everything
is connected, way down under, where the roots grope
and the worms blind about and the gnomes tunnel through crap for gold. Even the
silly chatter of Mavice and Morna about dress sizes and recipes and gossip
about their friends is meaningful. You listen to them a while, if you can stand
it, and you'll see they're not talking about what they seem to be talking
about. Behind the mundane messages is a secret message,
in a code which can be broken down if you work hard at it, and have the talent
to understand it. Mostly they're S.O.S.'s, cryptic maydays.'
T like that]' Mavice said.
'Up your cryptic!' Morna said.
'What about the dream?' Paul said.
'As a lay analyst, I'm more of a layer - of
eggs, unfortunately - than an analyzer. I don't know what your dream means. You'd have to go to a psychoanalyst for that, and of course you'd never
do that because, one, it costs a lot of money, and, two, you'd think people
would think you were crazy.
'Well,
you are, though suffering from that kind of insanity which is called normalcy. What I am interested in are the elements of
your dream. The flying saucer, the gaseous golden blood from
its wound, the sphinx, and the glittering green city.'
'The sphinx?' Paul asked. 'You mean the big statue by the
pyramids? The lion with a woman's head?'
'Now,
that's the Egyptian sphinx, and it's a he, not a she, by the way. I'm talking
of the ancient Greek sphinx with a lion's body and lovely woman's breasts and
face. Though the one you described seemed more like a leocentaur. It had a
woman's trunk which joined the lion's body, lioness',
to be exact, where the animal's neck should be.'
T didn't see anything like that!'
'You
didn't see the entirety. But it's obvious that she was a leocentaur. Nor did
you give her a chance to ask you the question. What is it that in the morning goes on four
legs, in the afternoon on two, and in the evening on three? Oedipus answered the question and then killed
her. You wanted to shoot her before she could open her mouth.'
'What was the answer?' Mavice said.
'Man,'
Glenda said. 'Typically anthropocentric and male chauvinistic'
'But these are not ancient times, and I'm
sure she had a question relevant to this contemporary age. But you must have
read about her sometime, maybe in school. Otherwise, why the
image? And about the green city? Have you ever
read the Oz books?'
'No, but I had to take Glenda and Roger to
see the movie when they were young. Mavice was sick.'
'He wouldn't let me see it on TV last month,'
Glenda said. 'He said Judy Garland was an animal.'
'She used drugs I' Paul said. 'Besides, that picture is a lot of
nonsense 1'
'How
like you to equate that poor suffering soul with vermin,' Tincrowdor said. 'And
I suppose your favourite TV series, Bonanza, isn't
fantasy? Or The
Music Man, which
you love so much? Or most of the stuff you read as the gospel truth in our
right-wing rag, the Busiris
Journal-Star’
'You're not so smart,' Paul said. 'You
haven't got the slightest idea what my dream means!'
'You're
stung,' Tincrowdor said. 'No, if I was so smart, I'd be charging you
twenty-five dollars an hour. However, I wonder if that was a dream. You didn't actually see all
this out in that field? By the way, just where is it? I'd like to go out and
investigate.'
'You are crazy!'
Paul said.
T think we'd better
go,' Morna said. 'Paul has such an awful yellow color.'
Paul detested Tincrowdor at that moment and
yet he did not want him to leave.
'Just a minute. Don't you think it'd make a great story?'
Tincrowdor sat back down. 'Maybe.
Let's say the saucer isn't a mechanical vehicle but a living thing. It's from
some planet of some far-off star, of course. Martians aren't de rigeur anymore. Let's say the saucerperson lands
here because it's going to seed this planet. The yellow stuff wasn't its blood
but its spores or its eggs. When it's ready to spawn, or lay, it's in a
vulnerable position, like a mother sea-turtle when it lays its eggs in the sand
of a beach. It's not as mobile as it should be. A hunter comes across it at the
critical moment, and he shoots it. The wound opens its womb or whatever, and it
prematurely releases the eggs. Then, unable to take off in full flight, it
hides. The hunter is a brave man or lacking imagination or both. So he goes into
the woods after the saucerperson. It's still capable of projecting false images
of itself; its electromagnetic field or whatever it is that enables it to fly
through space, stimulates the brain of the alien biped that's hunting it.
Images deep in the hunter's unconscious are evoked. The hunter thinks he sees a
sphinx and a glittering green city.
'And the hunter has breathed in some of the
spore-eggs. This is what the saucerperson desires, since the reproductive cycle
is dependent on living hosts. Like sheep liver flukes. The eggs develop into
larvae which feed on the host. Or perhaps they're not parasitic but symbiotic.
They give the host something beneficial in return for his temporarily housing
them. Maybe the incubating stage is a long and complicated one. The host can
transmit the eggs or the larvae to other hosts.
'Have you been sneezing yellow, Paul?
'In
time, the larvae will mutate into something, maybe little saucers. Or another
intermediate stage, something horrible and inimical. Maybe these take different
forms, depending upon the chemistry of the hosts. In any event, in human beings
the reaction is not just physical. It's psychosomatic. But the host is doomed,
and he is highly infectious. Anybody who comes into contact with him is going
to be filled with, become rotten with, the larvae. There's no chance of
quarantining the hosts. Not in this age of great mobility. Mankind has invented
the locomotive, the automobile, the airplane solely to make the transmission
of the deadly larvae easier. At least, that's the viewpoint of the
saucerperson.
'Doom,
doom, doom!'
'Dumb,
dumb, dumb,' Morna said. 'Come on, Leo, let's go. You'll be snoring like a pig,
and I won't be able to get a wink of sleep. He snores terribly when he's been
drinking. I could kill him.'
'Wait for time to do its work,' Tincrowdor
said. 'I'm slowly killing myself with whiskey. It's the curse of the Celtic
race. Booze, not the British, beat us. With which alliteration, I bid you bon
voyage. Or von voyage. I'm part German, too.'
'What are your Teutonic ancestors responsible
for?' Morna said. 'Your arrogance?'
5
After
the Tincrowdors had left, Mavice said, 'You really should get to bed, Paul. You
do look peaked. And we have to get up early tomorrow for church.'
He didn't reply. His bowels felt as if an
octopus had squeezed them in its death agony. He got to the bathroom just in
time, but the pain almost yanked a scream from him. Then it was over. He became
faint when he saw what was floating in the water. It was small, far too small
to have caused such trouble. It was an ovoid about an inch long, and it was a
dull yellow. For some reason, he thought of the story of the goose which laid
golden eggs.
He
began trembling. It was ten minutes or more before he could flush it down,
wash, and leave the bathroom. He had a vision of the egg dissolving in the
pipes, being treated in the sewage plant, spreading its evil parts throughout
the sludge, being transported to farms for fertilizer, being sucked up by the
roots of corn, wheat, soy beans, being eaten, being carried around in the
bodies of men and animals, being ...
In the bedroom, Mavice tried to kiss him
goodnight. He turned away. Was he infectious? Had that madman accidentally hit
on the truth?
'Don't
kiss me then,' Mavice shrilled. 'You never want to kiss me unless you want to
go to bed with me. That's the only time I get any tenderness from you, if you
can call it tenderness. But I'm just as glad. I have a bladder infection and
you'd hurt me. After all, it's my wifely duty, no matter how sick I am. According to you, anyway.'
'Shut
up, Mavice,' he said. 'I'm sick. I don't want you to catch anything.'
'Catch
what? You said you felt all right. You don't have the flu, do you?'
T don't know what I got,' he said, and he groaned. 'Oh, Lord,
I pray it's not the rabies,' she said. 'It couldn't be. Morna said rabies
doesn't act that fast.' 'Then what is it?'
'I
don't know,' he said, and groaned again. 'What is it Leo is so fond of quoting?
Whom the gods wish to
destroy, they first make mad.’
'What's
that supposed to mean?' she said, but she softened. She kissed him on the cheek
before he could object, and turned over away from him.
He lay awake a long time, and when he did
sleep he had fitful dreams. They awoke him often, though he remembered few of
them. But there was one of a glittering green city and a thing with a body
which was part lioness and part woman advancing toward him over a field of
scarlet flowers.
6
Roger Eyre stood up and looked at Leo
Tincrowdor. They were standing near the edge of a cornfield just off the Litde
Rome Road.
'They're
the tracks of a big cat all right,' he said. 'A very big cat.
If I didn't know better, I'd say they were a lion's or a tiger's. One that could fly.'
'Your major is zoology, so you should know,'
Tincrowdor said. He looked up at the sky. 'It's going to rain. I wish we had
time to get casts. Do you think that if we went back to your house and got some
plaster ... ?'
'It's going to be a heavy rain storm. No.'
'Damn it, I should have at least brought a
camera. But I never dreamed of this. It's objective evidence. Your father isn't
crazy, and that dream ... I thought
he was telling more than a dream.'
'You can't be serious,' Roger said.
Tincrowdor
pointed at the prints in the mud. 'Your father was driving to work when he
suddenly pulled the car over just opposite here. Three men in a car a quarter
of a mile behind him saw him do it. They knew him, since they work at Trackless,
too. They stopped and asked him if his car had broken down. He mumbled a few
unintelligible words and then became completely catatonic. Do you think that
that and these tracks are just coincidence?'
Ten minutes later, they were in the Adler
Sanitorium. As they walked down the hall, Tincrowdor said, T went to Shomi
University with Doctor Croker, so I should be able to get more out of him than
the average doctor would tell. He thinks my books are a lot of crap, but we're
both members of The Baker Street Irregulars and he likes me, and we play poker
twice a month. Let me do the talking. Don't say anything about any of this. He
might want to lock us up, too.'
Mavice,
Morna, and Glenda were just coming out of the doctor's office. Tincrowdor told
them he would see them in a minute; he wanted a few words with the doctor. He
entered and said, 'Hi, Jack. Anything cooking on the grange?'
Croker was six-feet
three-inches tall, almost too handsome, and looked like a Tarzan who had lately
been eating too many bananas. He shook hands with Tincrowdor and said, in a
slight English accent, 'We can dispense with the private jokes.'
'Sorry.
Laughter is my defense,' Tincrowdor said. 'You must really be worried about
Paul.'
The door opened, and Morna entered. She said,
'You gave me the high sign to come back alone, Jack. What's wrong?'
'Promise
me you won't say anything to the family. Or to anybody,' he said. He gestured
at a microscope under which was a slide. 'Take a look at that. You first,
Morna, since you're a lab tech. Leo wouldn't know what he was seeing.'
Morna bent over, made the necessary
adjustments, looked for about ten seconds, and then said, 'Lord!'
'What is it?' Leo said.
Morna straightened. 'I don't know.'
'Neither do I,'
Croker said. 'I've been ransacking my books, and it's just as I suspected.
There ain't no such thing.'
'Like the giraffe,' Leo said. 'Let me look.
I'm not as ignorant as you think.'
A
few minutes later, he straightened up. I don't know what those other things
are, the orange, red, lilac, deep blue, and purple-blue cells. But I do know
that there aren't any organisms shaped like a brick with rounded ends and
colored a bright yellow.'
'They're
not only in his blood; they're in other tissues, too,' Croker said. 'My tech
found them while making a routine test. The things seem to be coated with a
waxy substance which doesn't take a stain. i put some specimens in a blood agar culture,
and they're thriving, though they're not multiplying. I stayed up all night
running other tests. Eyre is a very healthy man, aside from a mental
withdrawal. I don't know what to make of it, and to tell you the truth, I'm
scared!
'That is why I had him put in isolation, and
yet I don't want to alarm anybody. I've got no evidence that he's a danger to
anybody. But he's swarming with something completely unknown. It's a hell of a
situation, because there's no precedent to follow.'
Morna
burst into tears. Leo Tincrowdor said, 'And if he recovers from his catatonia,
there's nothing you can do to keep him here.'
'Nothing legal,' Croker said.
Morna snuffled, wiped her tears, blew her
nose, and said, 'Maybe it'll just pass away. Those things will disappear, and
it'll be just another of the medical mysteries.'
T doubt it,
Pollyanna,' Tincrowdor said. T think this is just the
beginning.'
"There's
more,' Croker said. 'Epples, the nurse assigned to
him, has a face deeply scarred with acne. Had, I should say. She went into his
room to check on him, and when she came out, her face was a smooth and as soft
as a baby's.'
There was a long silence before Tincrowdor
said, 'You mean, you actually mean, that Paul Eyre performed a miracle? But he
wasn't conscious! And -'
T
was staggered, but I am a scientist,' Croker said. 'Shorfly after Epples, near
hysteria, told me what happened, I noticed that a wart on my finger had
disappeared. I remember that I'd had it just before i examined Eyre ...'
'Oh, come on’ Morna said.
'Yes, I know. But there's more. I've had to
reprimand a male nurse, a sadistic apish-looking man named Backers, for
unnecessary roughness a number of times. And I've suspected him, though I've
had no proof, of outright cruelty in his treatment of some of the more
obstreperous patients. I've been watching him for some time, and I would have
fired him long ago if it weren't so hard to get help.
'Shortly
after Epples had left Eyre and not knowing yet that her scars were gone, she
returned to the room, She caught Backers sticking a
needle in Eyre's thigh. He said later that he suspected Eyre of faking it, but
he had no business being in the room or testing Eyre. Epples started to chew
Backers out, but she didn't get a chance to say more than two words. Backers grabbed
his heart and keeled over. Epples called me and then gave him mouth-to-mouth
treatment until I arrived. I got his heart started with adrenalin. A half hour
later, he was able to tell me what happened.
'Now Backers has no history of heart trouble,
and the EKG I gave him indicated that his heart is normal. I -'
'Listen,'
Tincrowdor said, 'are you telling me you think Eyre can both cure and kill? With thought projection?'
T don't know how he
does it or why. I'd have thought that Backer's attack was just a coincidence if
it hadn't been for Epple's acne and my wart. I put two and two together and
decided to try a little experiment. I felt foolish doing it, but a scientist
rushes in where fools fear to tread. Or maybe it's the other way around.
'Anyway, I released some of my lab mosquitoes
into Eyre's room. And behold, the six which settled on him expecting a free
meal fell dead. Just keeled over, like Backers.'
There was another long silence. Finally,
Morna said, 'But if he can cure people ... ?'
'Not he,' Croker
said. T think those mysterious yellow microorganisms in his tissues are
somehow responsible. I know it seems fantastic, but -'
'But if he can cure,' Morna said, 'how
wonderful!'
'Yes,'
Leo said, 'but if he can also kill, and I say if, since he'll have to be tested further before such a power can be
admitted as possible, if, I say, he can kill anybody that threatens him, then ...'
'Yes?' Croker said.
'Imagine what would happen if he were
released. You can't let a man like that loose. Why, when I think of how often
I've angered him! It'd be worse than uncaging a hungry tiger on Main Street.'
'Exactly,' Croker said. 'And as long as he's
in catatonia, he can't be released. Meanwhile, he is to be in a strict
quarantine. After all, he may have a deadly disease. And if you repeat any of
this to anybody else, including his family, I'll deny everything. Epples won't
say anything, and Backers won't either. I've had to keep him on so I can
control him, but he'll keep silent. Do you understand?'
T understand that he might be here the rest of his life,' Tincrowdor
said. 'For the good of humanity.'
Poul Anderson
MY OWN, MY NATIVE LAND
The
boy stood at sunrise on the edge of his world. Clouds
tor-rented up along the gap which clove it. They burned in the light.
Wind sang, cold and wholly pure.
A
spearfowl broke from those mists to soar further aloft, magnificence upon wings
the hue of steel. For an instant the boy did not move. He could not. Then he
screamed, once, before he fled.
He took shelter in a thicket until he had
mastered both tears and trembling. Boys do not tell anyone, least of all those
who love them, that they are haunted.
'Coming in, now,' said Jack O'Malley over the
radiophone, and got to work at a difficult approach.
On
its northeastern corner, that great tableland named High America did not slope
in mountains and valleys, to reach at last the sea level which lay eight
kilometers straight beneath. Here the rim fell in cliffs and talus until vapors
drowned vision. Only at one place were the heights climbable: where a fault had
driven them apart to make the Cleft. And the drafts which it channeled were
treacherous.
As his aircar slanted toward ground, O'Malley
had a clear view across the dropoff and its immense gash. At evening, the
almost perpetual clouds that lapped around the plateau were sinking. Rock
heaved dark and wet above the ocean, which billowed to the horizon. Their
whiteness bore a fire-gold tinge and shadows were long upon them; for the
Eridani sun was low in the west, barely above the sierra of the Centaurs. The
illusion of its hugeness could well-nigh overwhelm a man who remembered Earth
- since in fact its disc showed more than half again the width of Terrestrial
Sol. Likewise the ruddier hue of its less ardent G5 surface was more plain to see than at high noon.
Further up, O'Malley's gaze had savored a
sweep of country from Centaurs to Cleft, from Hercules Mountains to Lake
Olympus, and all the grasslands, woodlands, farmlands in between, nourished by
the streams out of yonder snowpeaks. Where the Swift and Smoky Rivers joined to
form the Emperor, he should have been able to make out Anchortown. But the rays
blazed too molten off their waters.
Instead,
he had enjoyed infinite subtleties of color, the emerald of man's plantings
mingled in patchwork with the softer blue-greens of native growth. Spring was
coming as explosively as always on Rustum.
Raksh,
the larger moon, stood at half phase in a sky turning royal purple. About
midway between the farthest and nearest points of its eccentric orbit, it
showed a Lunar size, but coppery rather than silver.
O'Malley scowled at the beautiful sight. It was headed in closer, to raise
tides in the dense lowland air which could make for even heavier equinoctial
storms than usual. And that was just when he wanted to go down there.
His pilot board beeped a warning and he gave
his whole attention back to flight. It was tricky at best, in this changeable
atmosphere, under a fourth more weight than Earth gives to things. Earth, where this vehicle was designed and made. He wondered
if he'd ever see the day when the colony manufactured craft of its own,
incorporating the results of experience. Three thousand people, isolated on a
world for which nature had never intended them, couldn't produce much
industrial plant very soon.
Nearing
ground, he saw Joshua Coffin's farmstead outlined black against sky and some
upsurgings from the cloud deck. The buildings stood low, but they looked as
massive as they must be to withstand hurricanes. Gim trees and plume oak, left
uncut for both shade and windbreak, were likewise silhouetted, save where the
nest of bower phoenix phosphoresced in one of them.
O'Malley landed, set his brakes, and sprang
out: a big, freckle-faced man, athletic in spite of middle age grizzling his red hair and thickening his waist. He wore a
rather gaudy coverall which contrasted with the plainness of Coffin's. The
latter was already, courteously, securing the aircar's safety cable to a
bollard. He was himself tall, as well as gaunt and crag-featured, sun-leathered
and iron-gray. 'Welcome,' he said. They gripped hands. 'What brings you here
that you didn't want to discuss on the phone?'
T need help,'
O'Malley answered. 'The matter may or may not be confidential.' He sighed.
'Lord, when'll we get proper laser beams, not these damn 'casts that every
neighborhood gossip can listen in on?'.
'I don't believe our household needs to keep
secrets,' said Coffin a bit sharply. Though he'd mellowed over the years,
O'Malley was reminded that his host stayed a puritanical sort. Circumstance had
forced this space captain to settle on Rustum - not any strong need to escape
crowding, corruption, poverty, pollution, and tyranny on Earth. He'd never been
part of the Constitutionalist movement. In fact, its rationalism,
libertarian-ism, tendency toward hedonism, to this day doubtless jarred on his own austere religiousness.
'No, I didn't mean that,' O'Malley said in
haste. 'The thing is - Well, could you and I talk alone for a few minutes?'
Coffin peered at him through the gathering
dusk before he nodded. They walked from the parking strip, down a graveled path
between ornamental bushes. The Stellas were
starting to flower, breathing a scent like mingled cinnamon and - something
else, perhaps new hay - into coolness. O'Malley saw
that Teresa Coffin had finally gotten her roses to flourish, too. How long had
she worked on that, in what time she could spare from survival and raising
their children and laying the groundwork of a future less stark than what she
had known of Rustum? Besides science and ingenuity, you needed patience to make
Terrestrial things grow. Life here might be basically the same kind as yours,
but that didn't mean it, or its ecology, or the soil that that ecology had
formed, were identical.
The small stones scrunched underfoot. 'This
is new, this graveling,' O'Malley remarked.
'We laid it two years ago,' Coffin said.
O'Malley felt embarrassed. Was it that long
since he'd had any contact with these people? But what had he in common with
farmers like them, he, the professional adventurer? It struck him that the last
time he'd trodden such a path was on an estate on Earth, in Ireland, an enclave
of lawns and blossoms amidst rural bondage and megalopolitan misery. Memory
spiraled backward. The sound of pebbles hadn't been so loud, had it? Of course not. His feet had come down upon them with only
four-fifths the weight they did here. And even on High America, the air was
thicker than it was along the seashores of Earth, carried sound better, made
as simple an act as brewing a pot of tea into a different art -
A
volant swooped across Raksh, warm-blooded, feathered, egg-laying, yet with too
many strangenesses to be a bird in anything other than name. Somewhere a
singing 'lizard' trilled.
'Well,' said Coffin, 'what
is this business of yours?'
O'Malley reflected on how rude it would be to
make Teresa wait, or the youngsters for that matter. He drew breath and
plunged:
'Phil
Herskowitz and I were running scientific survey in the deep lowlands, around
the Gulf of Ardashir. Besides mapping and such, we were collecting instrument
packages that'd completed their programs, laying down fresh ones elsewhere -
oh, you know the routine. Except this trip didn't stay
routine. A cyclops wind caught us at the intermediate altitude where
that kind of thing can happen. Our car spun out of control. I was piloting, and
tried for a pontoon landing on the sea but couldn't manage it. The best I could
do was crash us in coastal jungle. At least that gave us some treetops to
soften the impact. Even so, Phil has a couple of broken ribs where the fuselage
got stove in against his chair.
'We
didn't shear off much growth. It closed in again above the wreck. Nobody can
land nearby. We put through a distress call, then had to struggle a good fifty
kilometers on foot before we reached a meadow where a rescue car could safely
settle.
'That was five days ago. In spite of not
being hurt myself, I didn't recover from the shock and exhaustion overnight.'
'Hm.' Coffin tugged his chin and glanced
sideways. 'Why hasn't the accident been on the news?'
'My request. You see, it occurred to me - what I mean to
ask of you.'
'Which is?'
T don't think a lot of the wreckage can be
salvaged, damn it, but I'd like to try. You know what it'd be. worth to the colony, just to recover a motor or something.
Salvagers can't feasibly clear a landing area; they'd have no way of removing
the felled trees, which'd pose too much of a hazard. But they can construct a
wagon and slash a path for it. That'd at least enable them to bring out the
instruments and tapes more readily - I think - than by trudging back and forth
that long distance carrying them in packs.'
'Instruments and tapes,'
Coffin said thoughtfully. 'You consider that, whether or not repairable parts
of the car can be recovered, the instruments and tapes must be?'
'Oh,
heavens, yes,' O'Malley replied. 'Think how much skilled time was spent in the
manufacture, then in planting and gathering the packages - in this
labor-short, machine-poor economy of ours. The information's tremendously
valuable in its own right, too. Stuff on soil bacteria,
essential to further improvement of agriculture. Meteorology,
seismology - Well, I needn't sell you on it, Josh. You know how little we know,
how much we need to know, about Rustum. An entire world.1,
'True. How can I help?'
'You can let your stepson
Danny come along with me.'
Coffin halted. O'Malley did the same. They
stared at each other. The slow dusking proceeded.
'Why him?' Coffin asked at last, most low. 'He's only a
boy. We celebrated his nineteenth ...
anniversary ... two tendays ago. If
he were on Earth, that'd have been barely a couple of months past his
fifteenth.'
'You
know why, Josh. He's young, sure, but he's the oldest of the exogenes -'
Coffin stiffened. 'I don't like that word.'
'I'm sorry. I didn't mean -'
'Just
because he was grown artificially instead of in a uterus, from donated cells
instead of his parents coming here in person, he's not inferior.'
'Sure! Understood! How would three thousand
people be a big enough gene pool for the future, cut off in an environment like
this, if they didn't bring along-'
'- a potential million extra parents. When you marry, you'll also be required to
have one of them brought to term for you to adopt.'
O'Malley
winced. His Norah had died in the Year of Sickness. Somehow he'd never since
had more than fleeting liaisons. Probably that was because he'd never stayed
put long at a time. There was too much discovery to be made, by too few persons
who were capable of it, if man on Rustum was to endure.
Yet
he was still, in one way, shirking a duty to wed. Man in his billions was a blight on Earth, but on Rustum a very lonely creature
whose hold on existence was precarious at best. His numbers must be expanded as
fast as possible - and not merely to provide hands or even brains. There is a
more subtle kind of underpopulation, that can be
deadly to a species. Given too few parents, too much of their biological
heredity will be lost, as it fails to find embodiment in the children they can
beget during their lifetimes. In the course of generations, individuals will
become more and more like each other. And variability is the key to adaptability,
which is the key to survival.
A partial, though vital solution to the
problem lay in adoption. Spaceships had been overburdened with colonists; they
would certainly not add a load of plants and animals. It sufficed to carry
seeds - of both. Cold-stored, sperm and ovum could be kept indefinitely, until
at last it was convenient to unite them and grow a new organism in an
exogenetic tank. As easily as for dogs or catde, it could be done for humans.
Grown up, marrying and reproducing in normal fashion - for they would be
perfecdy normal people - they would contribute their own diverse chromosomes to
the race.
This
was, however, only a partial measure. The original settiers and their
descendants must also do their part.
Coffin
saw O'Malley's distress, and said more gently: 'Never mind. I get your point.
You remembered how Danny can tolerate lowland conditions.'
The other man braced himself. 'Yes,' he
replied. T realize the original cell donors were
chosen with that in mind. Still, the way we lucked out with him, this early in
the game - Look. The trip does involve a certain hazard. It always does, when
you go down where everything's so unearthly and most of it unknown. That's why
I've kept my idea secret, that Danny would be the best possible partner on this
expedition. I don't think the risk is unduly great. Nevertheless, a lot of
busybodies would object to exposing a boy to it, if they heard in advance. I
thought, rather than create a public uproar ...
I thought I'd leave the decision to you. And Teresa,
naturally.'
Again Coffin bridled. 'Why not Danny?'
'Huh?' O'Malley was startied. 'Why, I, well,
I took for granted he'd want to go. The adventure - a real springtime vacation from school ...
After all, when he was a tyke, he wandered down the Cleft by himself -'
'And got lost,' Coffin said bleakly. 'Almost died. Was barely saved, found hanging onto the
talons of a giant spearfowl that aimed to tear him apart.'
'But
he was saved. And that was when proved he was, is,
the first real Rustumite, a human who can five anywhere on the planet. I've not
forgotten what a celebrity it made him.'
'We've
gone back to a decent obscurity, him and the rest of us,' Coffin said. 'I've
seen no reason to publicize the fact that he's never since cared to go below
the clouds. He's a good boy, no coward or sluggard, but whenever he's been
offered a chance to join some excursion down, even a little ways, he's found an
excuse to stay home. Teresa and I haven't pushed him. That was a terrible
experience for a small child. In spite of being a ninety days' wonder, he had nightmares for a year afterward. I wouldn't
be surprised if he does yet, now and then.'
'I see.' O'Malley bit his lip. They stood a while beneath a Raksh whose mottled brightness seemed to wax
as heaven darkened. The evening star trembled forth. A breeze, the least bit
chilly, made leaves sough. It was not bedtime; this close to equinox, better
than thirty-one hours of night stretched before High America. But the men stood
as if long-trained muscles, guts, blood vessels, bones felt anew the drag upon
them.
'Well,
he's got to outgrow his fears,' burst from O'Malley. 'He has a career ahead of him in the lowlands.'
'Why should he?' Coffin retorted. 'We'll take
generations to fully settle this one plateau. Danny can find plenty of work. We
could even argue that he ought to protect those valuable chromosomes of his,
stay safe at home and found a large family. His descendants can move downward.'
O'Malley
shook his head. 'You know that isn't true, Josh. We won't ever be safe up here
on our little bit of lofty real estate - not till we understand a hell of a lot
more about the continent, the entire planet that it's part of. Remember? We
could've stopped the Sickness at its beginning, if we'd known the virus is
carried from below by one kind of nebulo-plankton. We'll never get proper storm
or quake warnings till we have adequate information about the general
environment. And what other surprises is Rustum waiting to spring on us?'
'Yes-'
'Then there's the social importance of the
lowlands. We came because it was our last hope of establishing a free society.
In those several generations you speak of, High America can get as crowded as
Earth. Freedom needs elbow room. We've got to start expanding our frontiers
right away.'
'I'm
not convinced that a political theory is worth a single human life,' Coffin
said. His tone softened. 'However, the practical necessities you mention,
you're right about those. Why do you need Danny?'
'Isn't
it obvious? Well, maybe it isn't unless you've seen the territory. Take my word
for it, men who have to wear reduction helmets are
too handicapped to accomplish much in that wilderness. I told you, Phil and I
barely made it to rendezvous with our rescue craft, and we had nothing more to
do than hike. Salvagers will have to work harder.'
'Who'll accompany him?'
'Me. We haven't got anybody else who can be
spared before weather ruins the stuff. I figure my experience and Danny's capabilities
will mesh together pretty well.
'I've
arranged about the wage, plus a nice payment for whatever we bring back. The
College will be delighted to fill his pockets with gold. That equipment, that
information represent too many manhours invested, maybe so many lives saved in
future, that anybody would want to write it off.'
Coffin was quiet for another space, until he
said, 'Let's go inside,' squared his shoulders and trudged toward the house.
Within lay firelit cheeriness, books and
pictures, more room than any but the mightiest enjoyed on Earth. Teresa had tea
and snacks ready; this household did not use alcohol or tobacco. (The latter
was no loss, O'Malley reflected wryly. Grown in local soil, it got fierce!) Seven well-mannered youngsters greeted
the visitor and settled back to listen to adult talk. (On Earth, they'd
probably have been out in street gangs - or enslaved, under the name of
'contract,' to a Lowlevel robber baron - or barracked on some commune.) Six of
them were slender, brown-haired, and fair-skinned where the sun had not
scorched.
Danny differed in more than being the oldest.
He was stocky, of medium height. Though his features were essentially
cau-casoid - straight nose, wide narrow mouth, rust-colored eyes -still, the
high cheekbones, blue-black hair, and dark complexion bespoke more than a touch
of Oriental. O'Malley wondered briefly, uselessly, what his gene-parents had
been like, and what induced them to give cells for storage on a spaceship they
would never board, and whether or not they had ever met. By now they were
almost certainly dead.
Small
talk bounced around the room. There was no lack of material. Three thousand
pioneers didn't constitute a hamlet where everybody knew day by day what
everybody else was doing, especially when they were scattered across an area
the size of Mindanao. To be sure, some were concentrated in Anchor; but on the
whole, High American agriculture could not yet support a denser settlement.
Nonetheless,
an underlying tension was undisguisable. O'Malley felt grateful when Teresa
suddenly asked him why he had come. He told them. Their eyes swung about and
locked upon Danny.
The
boy did not cringe, he grew rigid, in the manner of
his stepfather. But his answer could scarcely be heard: 'I'd rather not.'
'I admit we'll face a bit of risk,' O'Malley
said. 'However' -he grinned - 'you tell me what isn't risky. I'm mighty fond of
this battered hide of mine, son, and I'll be right beside you.'
Teresa strained her fingers together.
Danny's voice lifted and
cracked. T don't like it down there!'
Coffin hardened his lips. 'Is that all?' he
demanded. 'When you can carry out a duty?'
The
boy stared at him, and away, and hunched in his chair. Finally he whispered,
'If you insist, Father.'
Hours passed before O'Malley left the house,
to go home and prepare himself. Meanwhile full night had come upon the highland.
The air was cold, silent, and altogether clear. Raksh, visibly grown in both
size and phase, stood low above the cloud-sea, while tiny Sohrab hastened in
pursuit; both moons crossed the sky widdershins. Elsewhere, darkness was
thronged with stars. Their constellations weren't much changed by a score of
light-years' remove. And though it was a trifle more tilted, Rustum's axis did not
point far from Earth's. He could know the Bears, the Dragon - and near Bootes,
a dim spark which was Sol -
More than forty years away by spaceship, he
thought -human cargo cold-sleeping like the cells of their animals and plants
and foster children, for four decades till they arrived and were wakened back
to life. But did the spaceships still fare? It had been a nearly last-gasp
effort which assembled the fleet that carried the pioneers here: an effort by
which the government, with their own consent, rid itself of Constitutionalist
troublemakers who kept muttering about foolishnesses like freedom. Had any of
those vessels ever gone anywhere else again? Radio had not had time to bring an
answer to questions beamed at Earth. Nor would man on Rustum be prepared to
build ships which could leave it for a much longer time to come. Quite possibly
never ... O'Malley shivered and
hastened to his car.
Roxana was a large continent, and this trip
was from its middle to the southern edge. Time dragged for Danny. They were
flying high, for the most part very little below the normal cloud deck. Hence
transient nimbuses, further down, often cut them off from sight of land. But
then they would pass over the patch of weather and come back into clear vision
- as clear as vision ever got, here.
O'Malley made several attempts at cheerful
conversation. Danny tried to respond, but words wouldn't come. At last talk
died altogether. Only the hum of jets filled the cabin, or a hoot of wind and
cannonade of thunder, borne by the thick atmosphere across enormous distances.
O'Malley
puffed his pipe, whistled an occasional tune, sat alertly by to take over from
the autopilot if there were any trouble. Danny squirmed in the seat beside him.
Why didn't I at least bring
a book? the boy
thought, over and over. Then
I wouldn't have to just sit here and stare out at that.
'Grand,
isn't it?' O'Malley had said once. Danny barely kept from yelling back, 'No,
it's horrible, can't you see how awful it is?'
Above,
it was pearl-gray, except in the east where a blur of light marked the morning
sun. Mountains reared beneath: so tall, as they climbed toward the homes of
men, that their heads were lost in the skyroof. They tumbled sharply downward,
though, in cliffs and crags and canyons, vast misty valleys, gorges where
rivers gleamed dagger-bright, steeps whose black rock
was slashed by waterfalls. Ahead were their foothills, and off to the west
began a prairie which sprawled around the curve of the world. A storm raged
there, swart bulks of cloud where lightning flared and glared, remorseless
rains driven by the great slow winds of the lowlands. Hues were infinite, for
vegetation crowded all but the stoniest heights. Yet those shades of
blue-green, tawny, russet were as somber in Danny's eyes as the endless
overcast above them; and the wings which passed by in million-membered flocks
only drove into him how alien was the life that overswarmed these lands.
O'Malley's glance lingered upon him. 'What a
shame you don't like it here,' he murmured. 'It's your kind of country, you
know. You're fitted for it in a way I'll never be.'
'I don't, that's all,' Danny forced out. 'Let's not talk about
it. Please, sir.'
If
we talk, I won't be able to hide the truth from him, I'll start shaking, I'll
stammer, the sweat that's already cold in my hands and armpits, already sharp
in my nose, it'll break out so he can see, and he'll know I'm afraid. Oh, God,
how afraid! Maybe I'll cry. And Father will be ashamed of me.
Father, who followed me down into yonder
horror and plucked me free of death.
Fear didn't make sense, Danny told himself.
His mind had stated the same thing year after year, whenever a dream- or a
telepicture or a word in someone's mouth brought him back to the jungle. That
was what had branded him. Not heat and wet and gloom. Not hunger and thirst
(once his belly had lashed him into trying fruits which were unlike those he
had been warned were poisonous). Not rustlings, croakings, chatterings, roar
and howl and maniacal cackle, his sole changes from a monstrous silence. Not
the tusked beast which pursued him, nor even - entirely - the gigantic bird of
prey whose beak had gaped at him. It was the endlessness, Danny thought, the
faceless friendless endlessness of jungle, through which he stumbled lost for
hours that stretched into days and nights, nights.
Sometimes he thought a part of him had never
come back again, would always grope weeping among the trees.
No, I'm being morbid,
his mind scolded him before
it sought shelter at home on High America.
Skies unutterably blue and clear by day,
brilliant after dark with stars or aurora, the quick clean rains which washed
them or the heart-shaking, somehow heart-uplifting might of a storm, the white
peace which descended in winter. Grainfields rippling gold in
the wind; flowers ablaze amidst birdsong. Wild hills to climb, and woods which were open to the sun. Rivers to swim in - a thousand cool caresses - or to row a boat on before
drifting downstream in delicious laziness. The reach of Lake Olympus,
two hours' airbus ride whenever he could get some free time from school or farm
work, but worth it because of the sloop he and Toshiro Hirayama had built; and
the dangers, when a couple of gales nearly brought them to grief, those were
good too, a challenge, afterward a proof of being a skilled sailor and well on the way to manhood, though naturally it
wouldn't be wise to let parents know how close the shave had been...
This I've had to leave. Because I've never
had the courage to admit I'm haunted.
Am I
really, anymore? That wasn't too bad
a nightmare last sleep-time, and my first in years.
The
eon ahead of him needn't be unbearable, he told himself. Honestly, it needn't.
This trip, he had a strong, experienced boss, radio links to the human world,
proper food and clothing and gear, a quick flit home as soon as the job was
done, the promise of good pay and the chance of an even better bonus. All I've got to do is get through some
strenuous, uncomfortable days. No more than that. No more. Why, the experience
ought to help me shake off what's left of my old terrors.
Not that I'll ever return!
He setded into his chair and harness, and
fought to relax.
The vehicle, a bulky cargo bus, almost filled
the open space on which it had set down. Tall, finely fronded blue-green stalks
- plants of that varied and ubiquitous family which the colonists misnamed
'grass' - hid the wheels and much of the pontoons. Trees made a wall around.
They were mostly ruddy-barked goldwood, but among them stood slim feathery
soartop, murky fakepine, crouched and thorny gnome. Between the trunks, brush
and vines crowded like a mob waiting to attack. A few meters inward, the
lightiessness amidst all those leaves seemed total, as if to make up for the
lack of any noticeable shadows elsewhere. Insectoids glittered across that
dusk. Wings beat overhead, some huge in this upbearing pressure. None of the
life closely resembled what dwelt on High America, and much was altogether
unlike it. Those environments were too foreign to each other.
The air hung windless, hot and heavy. It was
full of odors, pungent, sweet, rank, bitter, none recalling home. Sounds came
loud - a background of trills, whispers, buzzes, rustles, purling water;
footfalls, above everything else, the first incautious words of human speech.
Danny took a breath, and another. His neck
felt stiff, but he made himself stare around. No matter how horrible a bush looks it won't
jump out and bite me. I've got to remember that. It helped a little, that
they'd let their craft pressurize gradually before venturing forth. Danny had
had a chance to get used to the feel of it in lungs and bloodstream.
Jack
O'Malley had not. He could
endure the gas concentration for a while if he must, with no consequences
afterward worse than a bad headache. But let him breathe the stuff too long and
carbon dioxide acidosis would make him ill, nitrogen narcosis blur his brain,
over-much oxygen begin slowly searing his tissues. Above his coverall, sealed
at the neck, rose a glasite helmet with a reduction pump, an awkward water tube
and chowlock for his nourishment, a heavy dessicator unit to prevent fogging
from the sweat which already studded his face.
And yet he's spent his years on Rustum
exploring the lowlands, Danny thought. What
could make a man waste that much life?
'Okay, let's unload our stuff and saddle up.'
O'Malley's voice boomed from a speaker, across the mutterings. 'At best, we
won't get where we're bound before dark.'
'Won't we?' Danny asked, surprised. 'But you
said it was about fifty kilometers, along a hard-packed game trail. And we must
have, uh, twenty hours of daylight left. Even stopping to sleep, there
shouldn't be any problem.'
O'Malley's smile flickered wistful. 'Not for you maybe. I'm not young anymore. Worse, I've got
this thing on my head and torso. The pump's powered by my chest expansion when
I breathe, you know. You'd be surprised how the work in that adds up, if you
weren't so lucky you'll never need the gadget yourself.'
Lucky!
'However,' O'Malley continued, 'we can hike
on after nightfall, and I guess we'll arrive with plenty of time for
preliminary jobs before daybreak.'
Danny nodded. Sometimes he wondered if men
wouldn't do best to adapt to the slow turning of Rustum. Whatever the medics
said, he felt it should be possible to learn to stay active for forty hours, then sleep for twenty. Could it be that efficient electric
lanterns were the single reason the effort had never been made?
'Come dawn, then, we can start constructing
what we need to haul the salvage back here,' O'Malley said. 'If we can,' Danny
mumbled.
He hadn't intended to be heard, but was.
Blast the dense atmosphere! O'Malley frowned
disapproval. After a moment the man shrugged. 'Maybe we will have to give up on
the heaviest suff, like the engine,' he conceded. 'Maybe even on the biggest,
bulkiest instruments, if my idea about the wagon doesn't work out. At a
minimum, though, we are going to bring back those tapes - Huh? What's wrong?'
Danny hugged the metal of a pontoon to
himself. 'N-n-noth-ing,' he pushed forth, around the shriek that still
struggled to escape him. He couldn't halt the shudders of his body.
Above
the meadow soared a spearfowl, not the big raptor of the highlands but its
truly immense cousin, eight meters from wingtip to wingtip, with power to carry
a little boy off and devour him.
Yet boughs overarched the trail. Nothing flew
beneath that high, high ceiling of bronze, amber, and turquoise except multitudinous
small volants like living rainbows. And when a flock of tarzans went by,
leaping from branch to branch, chattering and posturing, Danny found himself
joining O'Malley in laughter.
Astonishing, too, was the airiness of the
forest. 'Jungle' was a false word. Roxana wasn't in the tropics, and no matter
how much energy Rustum got from its nearby sun, the Ardashir coast was cooled
by sea breezes. The weather was not so much hot as warm, actually: a dry warmth, at that. Brush grew riotously only where
openings in the woods provided ample light. Elsewhere, between the boles were
simply occasional shrubs. The ground was soft with humus; it smelled rich.
Nor was the forest gloomy. That appearance
had merely been due to contrast. Pupils expanded, the human eye saw a kind of gende brightness which brought out infinite tones and shadings
of foliage, then faded away into mysterious cathedral distances.
Cathedral? Danny had seen pictures and read
descriptions from Earth. He'd always thought of a big church as hushed. If so,
that didn't qualify this wilderness, which hummed and sang and gurgled -
breezes in the leaves, wings and paws, eager streams, a call, a carol. Where
was the brooding cruelty he remembered?
Maybe the difference was that he wasn't lost;
he had both a friend and a gun at his side. Or maybe his
dread had not been so deep-rooted after all; maybe, even, what he had feared
was not the thing in itself, but only memories and bad dreams which for some
years had plagued a child who no longer existed.
The trail was easy, broad, beaten almost into
a pavement. He scarcely felt the considerable load on his back. His feet moved themselves, they carried him afloat, until he must stop to
let a panting O'Malley catch up.
Higher oxygen intake, of course. What an appetite he was building, and
wouldn't dinner taste good? What separated him from his chief, besides age, was
that for him this atmosphere was natural. Not that he was some kind of mutant: no such nonsense. If that had been the case, he couldn't
have stood the highlands. But his genes did put him at the far end of a distribution
curve with respect to certain biochemical details.
/ don't have to like this country, he told himself. It's just that, well, Mother used to say we
should always listen to the other fellow twice.
When
they camped, he had no need to follow O'Malley into sleep immediately after
eating. He lay in his bag, watched, listened, breathed.
They had established themselves off the trail, though in sight of it. The man's
decision proved right, because a herd of the pathmaking animals came by.
Danny
grabbed for his rifle. The plan was to do pothunting, wild meat being abundant.
Rustumite life didn't have all the nutrients that humans required, but
supplemental pills weighed a lot less than even freeze-dried rations -
He
let the weapon sink, unused. It wouldn't be possible to carry off more than a
fraction of one of those bodies; and it would be a mortal sin to waste so
towering-horned a splendor.
After a while he slept. He fell back into a
tomb silence of trees and trees, where the spearfowl hovered on high. He woke
strangling a scream. Although he soon mastered the terror, for the rest of his
journey to the wreck he walked amidst ghastli-ness.
The last several kilometers went slowly. Not
only did compass, metal detector, and blaze marks guide the travelers off the
game path, while a starless night had fallen, but many patches were less thickly
wooded than elsewhere, thus more heavily brush-covered. None were sufficiently
big or clear for a safe landing. O'Malley showed Danny how to wield the
machetes they carried, and the boy got a savage pleasure from it. Take that, you devil! Take that! When they reached the goal, he too could
barely stay on his feet long enough to make camp, and this time his rest was
not broken.
Later they studied the situation. The slender
shape of the car lay crumpled and canted between massive trees. Flashbeams
picked out a torn-off wing still caught among the limbs above. There went a
deep, changeable pulsing through the odorous warmth. It came from the south,
where the ground sloped evenly, almost like a ramp, four or five kilometers to
the sea.
Danny
had studied aerial photographs taken from the rescue car. In his troubled
state, he had not until now given them much thought. Now he asked, 'Sir, uh,
why'd you head inland, you and Mr Herskowitz? Why not just out onto the beach
to get picked up?'
'Haven't got a beach here,' O'Malley
explained. 'I know; went and looked. The bush continues
right to the edge of a whacking great salt marsh, flooded at high tide and
otherwise mucky. Wheels or pontoons would too damn likely stick fast in that
gumbo. If you waited for flood, you'd find the water churned, mean and tricky,
way out to the reefs at the bay mouth—nothing that a pilot would want to risk
his car on, let alone his carcass.'
'I
see.' Danny pondered a while. 'And with Mr Herskowitz injured, you couldn't
swim out to where it'd be safe to meet you ...
But can't we raft this stuff to calm water, you and me?*
'Go see for yourself, come morning, and tell
me.'
Danny had to force himself to do so. Alone
again in the wilderness! But O'Malley still slept, and would want to start work
immediately upon awakening. This might be Danny's one chance to scout a quicker
way of getting the cursed job done. He set teeth and fists, and loped through
the thin fog of sunrise.
At
the coast he found what O'Malley had described. Of the two moons, Raksh alone
raised significent tides; but those could rise to several times the deep-sea
height of Earth's. (Earth, pictures, stories, legends,
unattainable, one tiny star at night and otherwise never real.) Nor was
the pull of the sun negligible.
From
a treetop he squinted across a sheet of glistening mud. Beyond it, the incoming
waters brawled gunmetal, white-streaked, furious. Rocks reared amidst spume and
thunder. The low light picked out traces of cross-currents, rips, sinister
eddies where sharpness lurked already submerged. Afar, the bay widened out in a
chop of waves and finally reached a line of skerries whereon breakers exploded in
steady rage. Past these, the Gulf of Ardashir glimmered more peaceful.
No
doubt at slack water and ebb the passage would be less dangerous than now. But
nothing would be guaranteed. Certainly two men couldn't row a sizeable,
heavily laden raft or hull through such chaos. And who'd want to spend the fuel
and cargo space to bring a motorboat here, or even an outboard motor? the potential gain in salvage wasn't worth the risk of
losing still another of Rustum's scarce machines.
Nor
was there any use reconnoitering elsewhere. The photographs had shown that
eastward and westward, kilometer after kilometer, the coastline was worse yet:
cliffs, bluffs, and banks where the savage erosive forces of this atmosphere
had crumbled land away.
Above,
the sky arched colorless, except where the sun made it brilliant or patches
where the upper clouds had drifted apart for a while. Those showed so blue that
homesickness grabbed Danny by the throat.
He made his way back. Since he'd gotten a
proper rest, again the country did not seem out-and-out demonic. But Lord, how
he wanted to leave!
O'Malley was up, had the teaketde on a fire
and was climbing about the wreck making more detailed investigations.
'Satisfied?' he called. 'Okay, you can rustie us some breakfast. Did you enjoy
the view?'
'Terrible,' Danny grumbled.
'Oh?
I thought it was kind of impressive, even beautiful in its way. But
frustrating, I admit. As frustrating as wanting to scratch my head in my helmet
... I'm afraid we'll accomplish less
than I hoped.'
Danny's
heart leaped to think they might simply make a few trips between here and the
bus, backpacking data tapes and small instruments. The voice dashed him:
'It's
bound to be such slow going at best, you see, especially when I'm as
handicapped as I am. We won't finish our wagon in a hurry. Look how much work
space we'll have to clear before we can start carpentering.' They had toted in
lightweight wheels and brackets, as well as tools for building the rest of the
vehicle from local timber and cannibalized metal. 'Then it'll be harder cutting
a road back to our game trail than I guessed from what I remembered. And the
uphill gradient is stiffer, too. We'll spend some days pushing and hauling our
loot along.'
'Wh-what do you
expect we'll be able to carry on the wagon?'
'Probably no more than the scientific stuff. Damn! I really did hope we could at least
cut the jets and powerplant free, and block-and-tackle
them onto the cart. They're in perfecfiy good shape.'
Danny felt puzzled. 'Why didn't we bring more
men? Or a small tractor, or a team of mules?'
'The College couldn't afford that, especially
now in planting season. Besides, a big enough bus would cost more to rent than
the salvage is worth, there's such a shortage of that kind and such a demand
elsewhere. What we have here is valuable, all right, but not that valuable.'
O'Malley paused. 'Anyway, I doubt the owner of a really big vehicle would agree
to risk it down here for any price.'
'It's
only okay to risk us,' Danny muttered. I'm not afraid, he
told himself. I'm
not! However ...all the reward I could win doesn't counterbalance the chance of
my dying this young in hell.
O'Malley
heard and, unexpectedly, laughed. 'That's right. You and I are the most society
can afford to gamble for these stakes. God never promised man a free ride.'
And
Father always says, 'The laborer is worthy of his
hire,' came to Danny. In his mind, it meant the laborer must be.
Day
crept onward. The work was harsh - with machete, ax, cutting and welding
torches, drill, wrench, hammer, saw, and tools less familiar to the boy. Nevertheless
he found himself quite fascinated. O'Malley was a good instructor. More: the
fact that they were moving ahead, that they were on their way to winning even a
partial victory over the low country, was heart-lifting, healing.
Danny
did object to being stuck with trail clearance while the other went off to bag
them some meat. He kept quiet, but O'Malley read it on his face and said,
'Hunting hereabouts isn't like on High America. Different
species; whole different ecology, in fact. You'd learn the basic tricks
fast, I suppose. But we don't want to spend any extra time, do we?'
'No,' Danny replied, though it cost him an
effort.
And
yet the man was right. Wasn't he? The more efficiendy they organized, the
sooner they'd be home. It was just that -well, a hunt would have been more fun
than this toil. Anything
would be.
Slash, chop, hew, haul the cut brush aside
and attack what stood beyond, in a rain and mist of sweat, till knees grew
shaky and every muscle yelled forth its separate aches. It was hard to believe
that this involved less total effort than simply clearing a landing space for
the cargo bus. That was true, however. A field safe to descend on, in so thick
a forest, would have been impossible to make without a lot of heavy equipment,
from a bulldozer onward. A roadway need not be more than passable. It could
snake about to avoid trees, logs, boulders, any important obstacle. When it
meant a major saving of labor, Danny allowed himself to set off a small charge
of fulgurite.
Returning, O'Malley was gratified at the
progress. T couldn't have gotten this far,' he said. 'You couldn't yourself, up
in thinner air.' He estimated that in two days and nights they would link their
path to the game trail. Then remained the slogging, brutal
forcing of the loaded wagon upward to the bus.
At midday dinner, O'Malley called his
superiors in Anchor. The communicator in that distant cargo carrier had been
set to amplify and relay signals from his littie transceiver. Atmospherics
were bad; you couldn't very well use FM across those reaches. But what words
straggled through squeals, buzzes, and wines were like the touch of a friendly
hand. Wherever we go on
Rustum, Danny
thought, we'll
belong, and
was wearily surprised that he should think this.
Rain
fell shortiy after he and his companion awoke at mid-afternoon, one of the
cataracting lowland rains which left them no choice but to relax in their tent,
listen to the roar outside, snack off cold rations, and talk. O'Malley had
endless yarns to spin about his years of exploration, not simply deeds and
escapes but comedies and sudden, startling loveliness. Danny realized for the
first time how he had avoided, practially deliberately, learning more than he
must about this planet which was his.
The downpour ended toward evening and they
crawled out of the shelter. Danny drew a breath of amazement. It was likewise
a breath of coolness, and an overwhelming fragrance of
flowers abruptly come to bloom. Everywhere the forest glistened with
raindrops, which chimed as they fell onto wet grass and eastward splintered the
light into diamond shards. For heaven had opened, lay clear and dizzyingly high
save where a few cloudbreaks like snowpeaks flung back the rays of the great
golden sun. Under that radiance, leaf colors were no longer sober, they flamed
and glowed. In treetops a million creatures jubilated.
O'Malley
regarded the boy, started to say something but decided on a prosaic: 'I'd
better check the instruments.' They were still in the wreck and, though boxed,
might have been soaked through rents in the fuselage.
He climbed up a sort of ladder he had made, a
section of young treetrunk with lopped off branches leaned against a door which
gaped among the lower boughs. Foliage hid just what happened. Danny thought
later that besides making things slippery, the torrent had by sheer force
loosened them in their places. He heard a yell, saw the ladder twist and topple,
saw O'Malley crash to the ground under the full power of weight upon Rustum.
Night deepened. The upper clouds had not yet
returned; stars and small hurtling Sohrab glimmered yonder, less sharply than
on High America but all the more remote-looking and incomprehensible. The tent
was hot, and O'Malley wanted breezes on his sweating skin. So he lay outside in
his bag, half propped against a backpack. Light from a pair of lanterns glared
upon him, picked out leaves, boles, glimmer of metal, and vanished down the
throat of croaking darkness.
'Yes.'
Though his voice came hoarse, it had regained a measure of strength. 'Let me
rest till dawn, and I can hike to the bus.' He glanced
down at his left arm, splinted, swathed, and slung. Fortune had guarded him.
The facture was a clean one, and his only serious injury; the rest were bruises
and shock. Danny had done well in the paramedical training which was part of
every education on Rustum, and surgical supplies went in every traveling kit.
'Are you sure?' the boy fretted. 'If we
called for help - a couple of stretcher-bearers -'
'No, I tell you! Their work is needed
elsewhere. It was harder for Phil Herskowitz to walk with those ribs of his,
than it'll be for me.' Pride as well as conscience stiffened O'Malley's tone.
Bitterness followed: 'Bad enough that we've failed here.'
'Have we, sir? I can come back with somebody
else and finish the job.'
'Sorry.' The man set his teeth against more
than pain. T didn't mean you, son. I've failed.'
He turned his face away.
'Lower
me, will you? I'd like to try to sleep some more.'
'Sure.' Suddenly awkward, Danny hunkered down
to help his chief. 'Uh, please, what should I do? I can push our roadway
further.'
'If you want. Do what you like.' O'Malley closed his eyes.
Danny rose. For a long while he gazed down at
the stubbled, pale, exhausted countenance. Before, O'Malley could take off his
helmet temporarily to wash, shave, comb his hair.
Danny hadn't dared allow that extra stress on the body. Dried perspiration
made runnels across furrows which agony had plowed. It was terrible to see this
big,,genial, powerful man so beaten.
Was he asleep already, or hiding from his
shame under a pretense of it?
What was disgraceful, anyway, about a run of
bad luck?
Danny
scuffed boot in dirt and groped after understanding. Jack O'Malley, admired
surveyor-explorer, had finally miscalculated and crashed an aircar. He could
make up for that - it could have happened to anybody, after all - by arranging
to recover the most important things. But first it turned out that there was
no way to haul back the motor, the heart of the vehicle. And then, maybe
because he had actually continued to
be a
little careless, he fell and got disabled____ All right. His
pride,. or vanity or whatever, is suffering. Why should it - this
much? He's not a petty man. Think how patient and sympathetic he's been with
me. What's wrong with another person completing his project? Certainly
not a mere chunk of salvage money. He's well off.
It must be pretty crucial
to him, this. But why?
Danny
looked around, to the stars which were relentlessly blinking out as vapors rose
from sea and soil, to the shadowiness which hemmed him in. Trees stood
half-seen like trolls. They mumbled in the slow, booming wind, and clawed the
air. Across the years, his fear and aloneness rushed toward him.
But I can beat that! he cried, almost aloud. I'm doing it!
O'Malley
groaned. His eyelids fluttered, then squeezed shut
again. He threw hale arm across helmet as if to shield off the night.
Realization came like a blow: He's been afraid too. It's that alien down
here, that threatening. More than it ever can be to me ... He won his victory over himself, long ago. But a single bad
defeat can undo it inside him.
Jack O'Malley, alone and
mortal as any small boy?
Danny shook his fist at the forest. You won't beat him! 1 won't let you!
A
minute later he thought how melodramatic that had been. His ears smoldered. Yet
blast, blast, blast, there had to be a way! The wagon was built. The few
remaining kilometers of brush could be cleared in some hours. True, no one
person could manhandle the thing, loaded, the whole way to the bus; and
O'Malley lacked strength to help on that uphill drag ...
'Do
what you like,' the man had whispered in his crushed state, his breaking more
of soul than bones.
Uphill?
Danny yelled.
O'Malley started, opened his eyes, fumbled
after his pistol. 'What is it?'
'Nothing,' Danny chattered. 'Nothing, sir. Go back to sleep.'
Nothing - or everything!
Roadmaking was a good deal easier between
camp and sea than in the opposite direction. Besides the ground sloping
downward, salt intrusions made it less fertile. Still, there was ample brush to
lay on muddy spots where wheels might otherwise get
stuck. By the brilliance of a lantern harnessed on his shoulders, Danny got the
path done before he must likewise sleep.
'You're
the busy bee, aren't you?' O'Malley said drowsily on one of his companion's
returns to see to him. 'What're you up to?'
'Working,
sir,' Danny answered, correctly if evasively. O'Malley didn't pursue the
question. He soon dropped again into the slumber, half natural, half drugged,
whereby his body was starting to heal itself.
Later
Danny took the wagon to the shore. It went easily, aside from his occasional
need for the brake. Unladen, it was light enough for him to bring back alone.
But it would require more freeboard - he grinned - especially if it was to bear
a heavier burden than planned. With power tools he quickly made ribs, to which
he secured sheet metal torched out of the wreck. Rigging would be difficult.
Well - tent and bags could be slashed for their fabric.
He
labored on the far side of the site, beyond view of the hurt man. Toward
morning, O'Malley regained the alertness to insist on knowing what was afoot.
When Danny told him, he exclaimed, 'No! Have you gone kilters?'
'We can try, sir,' the boy pleaded. 'Look,
I'll make several practice runs, empty, get the feel of it, learn the way, make
what changes I feel we need before I stow her full. And you, you can pilot the
bus one-handed, can't you? I mean, what can we lose?'
'Your
fool life, if nothing else.'
'Sir, I'm an expert swimmer, and -'
Shamelessly, Danny used his
vigor to wear O'Malley down.
Preparation took another pair of days. This
included interruptions when Danny had to go hunting. He found O'Malley's
advice about that easy to follow, game being plentiful and unafraid. Though he
didn't acutally enjoy the shooting, it didn't weigh on his conscience; and the
ranging around became relaxation and finally a joy.
Once a giant spearfowl passed within reach of his rifle. He got the creature in his sights and
followed it till it was gone. Only then did he understand that he had not
killed it because he no longer needed to. How majestic it was!
O'Malley
managed camp, in spite of the clumsiness and the occasional need for
pain-killer forced on him by his broken arm. With renewed cockiness, he refused
to return to High America for medical attention, or even talk to a doctor on
the radio. 'I'm coming along okay. You did a first-class job on me. If it turns
out my flipper isn't set quite right, why, they can soon repair that at the
hospital. Meanwhile, if I did call in, some officious idiot would be sure to
come bustling out. If he didn't order us home, he'd cram his alleged help onto
us, so he could claim a share in the salvage money - your money.'
'You really will go through
with it, then, sir?'
'Yes.
I'm doubtiess as crazy as you are. No. Crazier, because at my
age I should know better. But if the two of us can lick this country -
Say, my name is Jack.'
Filled
with aircraft motor and all, the wagon moved more sluggishly than on its trial
trips ... at first. Then the downgrade
steepened, the brake began to smoke, and for a time Danny was terrified that
his load would run out of control and smash to ruin. But he tethered it safely
above high-water mark. Thereafter he had to keep watch while O'Malley walked
back to the bus carrying the data tapes which must not be risked. Danny could
have done this faster, but the man said it was best if he spent the time
studying the waters and how they behaved.
He
also found chances to get to know the plants better, and the beasts, odors and
winds and well-springs, the whole forest wonderland.
Wavelets lapped further and still further
above the place to which he had let the wheels roll. He felt a rocking and knew they were upborne. Into the portable transceiver he
said: 'I'm afloat.'
'Let's go, then.' O'Malley's was the voice
drawn more taut.
Not that excitement didn't leap within Danny. He recalled a remark of his comrade's - 'You're too young to
know you can fail, you can die' - but the words felt distant, unreal. Reality
was raising the sail, securing the lift, taking sheet and tiller in hand,
catching the breeze and standing out into the bay.
No matter how many modifications and
rehearsals had gone in advance, the cart-turned-boat was cranky. It could not
be otherwise. Danny knew sailing craft too well to imagine he would ever have
taken something as jerry-built as this out upon Lake Olympus. The cat rig was
an aerodynamic farce; the hull was fragile, ill-balanced, and overloaded;
instead of a proper keel were merely leeboards and what
lateral resistance the wheels provided.
Yet
this was not High America. The set of mind which had decided, automatically,
that here was water too hazardous for aircar or motorboat, had failed to see
that a windjammer -built on the spot, involving no investment of machinery
-possessed capabilities which would not exist in the uplands.
Here air masses thrust powerfully but slowly,
too ponderous for high speed or sudden flaws, gusts, squalls. Here tide at its
peak raised a hull above every rock and shoal except the highest-reaching; and,
the period of Raksh being what it was, that tide would not change fast. An
enormous steadiness surrounded the boat, enfolded it and bore it outward.
Not that there were no dangers! Regardless of
how firm a control he had, it took a sailor who was
better than good to work his way past reefs, fight clear of eddies and
riptides, beat around regions against which the hovering man warned him.
Heaven was not leaden, it was silver. Lively
litde weather clouds caught the light of a half-hidden sun in flashes which
gleamed off steel and violet hues beneath. The land that fell away aft was a
many-colored lavishness of life; over the forest passed uncountable wings and a
wander-song to answer the drumbeat of breakers ahead. The air blew full of salt
and strength, it lulled, it whistied, it frolicked and kissed. To sail was to
dance with the world.
Now came the barrier. Surf spouted blinding white. Its roar
shook the bones. 'Bear right!' O'Malley's voice screamed from the transceiver.
'You'll miss the channel - bear right!' Starboard, Danny
grinned, and put his helm down. He could see the passage, clear and inviting
ahead. It was good to have counsel from above, but not really needed, in this
place that was his.
He passed through, out onto the Gulf of
Ardashir, which gives on the Uranian Ocean and thence on a world. Waves ran
easily. The boat swayed in the long swell of them. So did the airbus, after
O'Malley settled it down on to its pontoons. Still, this could be the trickiest
part of the whole business, laying alongside and transferring freight. Danny
gave himself the challenge.
When both vessels were linked, the man leaned
out of his open cargo hatch and cried in glory, 'We've done it!' After a
moment, with no less joy: 'I'm sorry. You have.'
'We have, Jack,' Danny said. 'Now let me give
you the instruments first. The motor's going to be the very devil to shift
across. We could lose it.'
T think not. Once the chains are made fast, this winch can
snatch along three times that load. But sure, let's start with the
lesser-weight items.'
Danny braced feet against the rolling and
began to pass boxes over. O'Malley received them with some difficulty.
Nevertheless, he received them. Once he remarked, through wind and wave-noise : 'What a shame we can't also take that remarkable
boat back.'
Danny gazed at this work of his hands, then
landward, and answered softiy, 'That's all right. We'll be back - here.'
Chad Oliver SHAKA!
Out of the
deeps of space she came,
a great
metallic fish falling through the sky.
She was not
built for primitive landings, that
tremendous ship with the
incongruous symbol of a laden
camel on her gleaming bow; she
was a
creature of the vast night
between the stars, and her normal
port of call was the
high sky. She was unused to winds and rain
and the
feel of grass and soil
and rock
against her taut hide.
She carried
landing shutdes, of course -graceful
little spheroids that could drift
down to a planet's surface
and come
to rest
as lightly
as a
feather. But she was not
using them this time.
She wanted
to be
seen. She wanted to make
a commotion.
She wanted to call
attention to herself.
She came down
through the sky roaring and
hollering with fire spurting from her
tail. Femalelike, she made herself
a dramatic entrance.
She touched down
gendy for all her bulk,
setding with a grinding hiss into
the yielding
ground. She hit her target
area right on the button, within
inches of the spot the
computers had calculated months ago.
She did
no damage,
but she
was observed
clearly enough. A volcano does not
fall from the heavens without
causing a stir.
A strange
sweet-smelling breeze soothed
her skin.
A swollen
yellow-blue sun beamed down
and took
the long
chill out of her bones. She
was soundless
now, at rest, relaxed.
She waited
for what
had to
come.
The people
had no
name for their world, and
no concept
of what a planet was. Their
land - their territory -
was Ernake,
and they were the
Anake. They knew there were
other lands, and other peoples; some
of them,
in other
times, had journeyed for many days,
and they
knew the land went on
forever.
The Anake
gather around the silent towering
ship. They were filled with wonder,
but they
were not afraid. They had
never seen anything like the ship
before. They were aware that
the thing had great power. Still,
they were not stupid. They
knew this place. This was where
the round
skyboats came. This was where they
met the
traders that flew out of
the blazing
sun. This was where they got
good things. They made the
connection.
The Anake
were troubled. They did not
fear the alien ship as
long as it was
quiet and motionless; in point
of fact,
they were not easily intimidated by anything. But they
had enemies,
the Kikusai, and the Kikusai were
pressing them hard. It was
difficult for the woodcarvers to find peace in
which to work. It was
dangerous to seek the
firestones that the carvers blended
with the dense, dark-grained woods.
They needed
the carvings
now, needed them more than
in the olden days. They needed
them to trade, and it
was trade
that made the Anake
strong.
For many
seasons, the traders had helped
them. Useful things and new ideas
had come
to them
from the skyboats. This time -
although there had been no
meeting arranged in advance, as was the custom -
there might be a gift.
Something big, something
that was scaled to the
size of this mighty visitor.
Perhaps ...
They could
not know.
They could not even try
to guess.
They could only
wait for the magic to
happen. If it happened. The
traders were funny sometimes. They had strange ways. They were not always
like real people.
The Anake
waited. All through the long
afternoon of heat and stillness the
ship did nothing. It was
inert, but alive. It was
aware, watching, but it
took no action. The shadows
lengthened and night winds
whispered through the grasses. The
great sun disappeared in a riot
of color
and there
was only
the little
white sun that sometimes held back
the darkness.
The Anake
built fires; the little sun burned
with an uncertain heat.
They waited,
not sleeping.
In a
lifeway that was not easy,
the Anake had learned the value
of patience.
The long
silent hours passed and the
stars moved and grew dim. The
fires of the people died
and the
great fire in the sky
returned, painting hot colors
across the land.
There was
... change
... on
the ship.
The Anake
stared, expectantly.
The ship
was ready.
* * *
A blurring
on her
smooth metal hide. Color:
a perfect
circle of heavy yellow. A thick pulsing beam, emerging
from the circle and probing toward
the ground.
Figures - dark, indistinct
- floating
down inside the beam.
Emerging.
The Anake
stayed back, observing, giving them
room.
One by
one, men stepped out of
the beam
and stood
in the
brilliant sunlight. There were
ten, then twenty. Thirty. Forty. Fifty. They looked
like no traders the Anake
had ever
seen. Some of them were dressed
like Anake, right down to
the wooden crestcombs in their hair.
Some of them were dressed
like Kikusai.
All of
them carried shields and long
iron-pointed spears.
The men
from the ship formed two
facing lines in the clearing,
those made up like Anake
on one
side and those arrayed like Kikusai on the other.
The lines
were about thirty-five yards apart.
They yelled
abuse at each other and
made threatening - and occasionally obscene - gestures. They began to fight.
There was
no plan
of attack,
no coordination.
An Anake
would rear back, run
a step
or two,
and heave
his long,
heavy spear at the Kikusai. The
Kikusai would deflect the incoming
spear with his tough
oblong hide and then throw
his spear.
There was
a lot
of sweat,
a lot
of profanity,
and very
litde damage.
The men
played out their charade for
nearly an hour, then called the whole thing off.
They retired to the shade
cast by the towering ship and
flopped down to rest. Flasks
and sandwiches
came down the beam.
The men
ate and
drank.
The Anake -
the real
ones - were dismayed. They
had seen
nothing of interest, nothing
new. This was the way
they had always fought. Was this
some kind of trader joke?
They were not amused. They were
tired and hungry and thirsty.
They muttered together and fingered their
spears. They spoke critically of the poor throwing
technique of the men from
the ship.
They were restless. Still,
they waited. The traders were
hard to figure sometimes. It was
well to be patient.
In the
early afternoon, when the winds
were weak and the brown dust-haze
hung in the warm air,
the men
from the ship went into action
again.
This time
it was
different.
This time
they acted as though they
meant business.
The Kikusai arranged
themselves as they had done
before, forming a long
single line with their shields
up and
their great spears poised for throwing.
The Anake came
out in
a totally
different formation. First, they knelt and
took their long spears apart.
The spears
were made in three sections. There
was a
fairly heavy tapered butt, a
socketed center shaft, and
a foreshaft
that ended in a six-inch
iron point. By elminating
the center
shaft and socketing the foreshaft directiy into the butt,
they created a different, shorter spead. You could not
throw it accurately for any
distance, but it had other uses.
While the
Kikusai waited in their single
line, the Anake turned their attention
to their
shields. Those shields, it was
apparent, were not the
simple devices they had seemed.
By opening hidden latches, a portion
of the
shield was detached. The shield that
remained was a new design:
lighter, narrower, coming to a hooked
point on the upper end,
not quite
as long
as before.
With their
equipment ready, the Anake moved
into formation. They didn't really
have the manpower for the
job -
they needed a regiment - but
they sketched it in.
First, a rectangle
of fighting
men, three deep.
On either
side, separated from the rectangle
and a
little behind it, curved hornlike
columns of men, situated to
form a pincers.
In the
rear, a square of reserves.
It was
very hot and still. Sweat
glistened in the sun.
The Anake
shouted and advanced. As they
moved, they kept up the noise.
They did not run. They
simply walked forward at a steady
pace.
Some of
the Kikusai
loosed their spears with random
throws. The advancing Anake deflected them
easily with their man-euverable shields. The Anake threw
no spears.
They just
kept coming.
As the
Anake warriors closed the distance,
the Kikusai
line wavered but held.
The solid
rectangle of fighting men hit
the center
of the
Kikusai line. The long
spears of the Kikusai were
useless in close combat. The Anake
warriors hooked the Kikusai shields
with their slender pointed
shields, forcing them to one
side.
The Anake
went in with their short
jabbing spears. The
Kikusai had
no defense.
They were decimated.
The Kikusai who
were still on their feet
broke and fell back. The horns
of the
Anake formation closed around them,
sealing them in.
The reserves
came up.
Short, merciless spears
thrust and ripped and tore.
The brown
dust was terrible. The
heat hammered the clearing like
a fist
from hell.
When the dust
finally lifted, the Kikusai lay
in crumpled
heaps where they had
fallen. The tired, sweating Anake
were bruised and exhausted and streaked
with dirt, but they had
not lost a man.
For a long
moment suspended in time the
tableau held. Then the Kikusai actors
struggled to their feet, brushed
themselves off, and
mingled profanely with those who
had played
the victorious Anake.
The traders trooped
wearily back to the pulsing
yellow beam. They were ... absorbed
... into
the ship.
The beam
vanished.
There was
only the immense silent ship
poised beneath a strange yellow-blue
sun. There was only the
cloudless vault of the sky and
the first
stirrings of wind.
And the
real Anake, who had seen
it all.
The real Anake,
who could
not leave.
The real
Anake, who played no games
but fought
for survival
against an enemy that was
stronger than they knew.
The tremendous
ship changed position. It did
this almost without sound, almost without
visible motion. It was rooted
into the land and
then it was free. There
was space
beneath it. There was a ...
blurring ... around it.
There was
no need
now for
fire and thunder and drama.
There was no need
and it
would have been impossible. To start those engines would
have seared the Anake to
cinders.
The ship
lifted. It was high in
the sky
before its thrusters flamed. Its roar
was muted.
The ship
was gone.
Its task
was finished.
Not a word had been
spoken between the traders and
the Anake. Nothing had been exchanged.
Technically, there had been no instruction.
But communication
can take
many forms, and not all
of them can be foreseen by
distant laws.
The Anake
had seen.
One in
particular, a small tense man
with bright and piercing eyes
and a
questing mind. He knew. He
saw the
possibilities.
While those
around him babbled of food
and drink
and joked
about small incidents of
the mock
battle, he stood alone.
He looked thoughtfully
at the
long spear he carried in
his hand.
He stared
at the
deserted clearing, and he remembered.
The great
lightship of Caravans, Unlimited, had left the system
of Procyon
far behind.
Even in the coruscating gray abyss of not-space, it would take a
long time before it could
return. In any event, the ship
had other
ports of call to make;
deep space travel was too complicated
and too
expensive to permit one-shot voyages. Like
the laden
camel that was its corporate
symbol, the ship moved
from oasis to oasis through
a universe
of desert. Like the
caravans that once plied the
Sahara sands of a long-ago Earth,
it did
what business it could along
the way.
Alex Porvenir fiddled
with his glass, not really
wanting a drink. That wasn't like
him; he was no lush,
but he
enjoyed his Scotch and it usually
relaxed him. He took out
his pipe,
cleaned the foul thing with elaborate
and pointless
care, and stuffed it with tobacco.
He fired
up a
long wooden match - he
had no
luck with lighters -
and lit
the pipe.
It tasted
like burned grease, which was normal.
About one pipe in twenty
turned out to be worth the
effort.
'You don't
have the look of a
man consumed
with joy,' Tucker Olton said, sipping
his drink with
gusto. 'What's the matter? I thought
it all
went off like a breeze.'
Alex Porvenir stared
at his
glass, watching the ice melt.
He hated these moods of his,
and they
had been
getting more frequent the last
few years.
When he had been Tucker
Olton's age, he had the galaxy
by the
tail. Oh, he had known
just about everything.
It was
surprising what a man unlearned
as he
grew older. Alex was only forty,
and physically
he was
sound enough. He could take Tucker,
for instance,
and Tucker
was ten
years younger. Alex was
a tall,
lean man and he was
hard. He worked at it; he
was one
of those
men who
needed physical outlets to keep his
mind from going stale. He
had a
theory about that: man had been
a hunting
animal for a million years
before he had been anything else,
and that
was the
kind of animal he was. He
wasn't designed to sit at
a desk
and push
paper, not all the time. He
needed a release, and the
release came from the body rather
than the brain. There was
some gray in his hair,
but his brown eyes
were clear and sharp. Alex
had a
jaw on
him; he
could be stubborn. Right now, he
was troubled.
His thoughts were on
Procyn V, and the Anake.
And the Kikusai.
'I'm worried,
Tuck,' he said. T don't like the responsibility
of playing God.'
Tucker Olton
smiled. He knew Alex's moods;
they had been together for six
years now, and they had
gotten beyond the master-student
relationship. 'You're taking yourself a trifle
seriously, aren't you? We're just
doing our job.'
'I've heard
that one before, I think.'
'But what's wrong?
It was
your plan, remember,
and a
damned good one. The
boys acted out their litde
play perfecdy. We must have communicated, unless the Anake have
wood blocks between their ears. We
broke no laws. The Caravans
lawyers could go before
the U.N.
ET Council
and win
this one hands down.'
Alex puffed on
his pipe.
'I'm not worried about the
technical end of it; I know
my business.
It'll work. I'm not worried
about the legal angle. That not
my department.
I regret
using an old-fashioned word, but
I'm worried
about the morality
of the
thing.'
Tucker looked
surprised. 'But there's no question
there. We had to do
it, no
matter whose standards you apply.'
T learned
you better
than that, old son.'
'Hell, this
isn't a fog-brained seminar in
Advanced Ethics. That's a real world
we're dealing with, and real
people. We couldn't just juggle our
philosophies and do nothing. We
did the best we could. The
Anake are a good bunch,
if you
will excuse the value judgement.
Forget about the profit motive
if it
makes you feel better.
The Kikusai
are bigger
trouble than they know - those
birds are on the verge
of a
conquest state that could take over
a very
big chunk
of that
planet, including the Anake. If we
don't act, the
Anake will be slaves. It's
just that simple. It happens to
be in
our interest
to preserve
the Anake,
but so what? That doesn't make
it wrong.'
Alex shook
his head.
'Right, wrong. I don't profess
to know.
But try this one
on for
size. Suppose our little plan
not only
works, but works too well? Try the argument you just
made on that one.'
T don't follow you.'
'Come on,
Tuck. Dredge up a smattering
of history,
or reflect
a bit on our distinguished predecessor, Dr. Frankenstein. What exactly did we do?'
Tucker Olton felt
that his knowledge was being
challenged, and he didn't
like it. He spoke with
cool precision, masking his annoyance. 'We need the Anake
because they are producing for
us. They were being
threatened by the Kikusai to
the point
where it was interfering
with their artisans. Tactically, as we both noticed, the
situation was similar to the
one in
southern Africa about eighteen
hundred. You had a series
of tribally-organized
peoples with economies based on
mixed farming and herding. They raided
back and forth, with no
vast amount of harm done. The
warriors just lined up and
heaved their long spears at each
other. But then the Kikusai
began to get organized, and their population increased. They began to
expand their territory -'
'Get back
to Africa.
You're on Procyon V. What
happened in Africa?'
Tucker smiled.
'Shaka happened.'
Alex fiddled
with his pipe. He couldn't
resist digging at Tucker a trifle.
'Actually, Dingiswayo happened, then Shaka.'
T know that, dammit. But
the new
formation and the new weapons were Shaka's. If it
hadn't been for Shaka, the
Zulus would have been just a
minor historical footnote.'
'Maybe. But
tell me about Shaka.'
Tucker sighed.
Alex had a habit of
asking questions when he already knew the answers. 'Shaka
made himself an army. He
drilled the old age-set
regiments until they would march
off a
cliff at his command.
He taught
them his new encircling tactics and he trained them
to fight
to the
death. He created a fighting
machine that was good
enough - later - to
handle British regular troops. The
other tribes didn't have a
prayer. Shaka knocked some of them
all the
way to
Lake Victoria, and that was
a fair
distance.'
'And what
happened to Shaka?'
Tucker shrugged.
'He was
a military
genius. He was also a
very peculiar gent. He
became a dictator, in effect.
He was
something of a political mastermind;
he destroyed
the old
tribal organization and converted it
into a state system. When
he wasn't
performing cute little tricks
like executing thousands of citizens
so the people would remember his
mother's funeral, he ruled fairly efficienüy. He controlled over eighty thousand square
miles before he was
through. He terrorized southern Africa
-'
'What happened to
Shaka?' Alex repeated. T don't know,' Tucker
admitted. 'Fire me.' Alex poured himself
another drink. 'Look it up
sometime. You might need to know.'
'I'm beginning to get
the drift.'
'Two cheers for
our side.
Maybe there's hope for you
yet. Look, Tuck. We probably saved
the Anake
by sneaking
in some
new ideas - violating,
of course,
the spirit
if not
the letter
of the
law. And you're right
- if
we hadn't
done it, the Anake would
have gone under. But
now what?
Suppose a Shaka comes along
among the Anake and
puts it all together? Then
the Kikusai are up
the old
creek. They are people too,
remember. We have no right to
exterminate them. That's the trouble
with tinkering with cultural
systems - you always get
more problems than you started with. And if I
may return
briefly to the old profit
motive - since Caravans doesn't pay
me just
to conduct
social experiments and brood about
them - how much carving
do you
think the Anake will do once
they get caught up in
the glories
of military conquest?'
'They'll do plenty
of carving.
But they'll
be carving
Kikusai.'
Alex smiled. 'Still
think it's simple?'
'It could be. We can't spend our time
worrying about every conceivable
development.'
T figure that's
one reason
why we're
here. Machines can calculate possibilities and probabilities. It takes a man
to worry
about the long shots.'
'Maybe there will
be no
Shaka.'
'Maybe not. But
I'll tell you this, old
son. You'd better bone up on
what happened to our friend
Shaka. If his counterpart does show up, the two of us
will have to stop him.
And that
might take some doing.'
There was an
uncomfortable silence between the two
men.
The lightship
flashed on through the grayness
of not-space,
and across a universe
that was as uncaring as
the sands
of the
desert.
His name
was Nthenge.
A small, nervous
man. Energy radiated from him;
he was
tense even when he slept,
which was seldom. His eyes were
his most
notable feature: deep eyes, direct, glowing, hypnotic. He
was thin;
he had
no time
to put
meat on his bones.
His voice
was high
but compelling.
When Nthenge spoke, others listened.
There had
been a time when Nthenge was nothing special.
He was just one of the
Anake. A good warrior, a
man of
experience, a man to consult in
village crises - that was
all. If he was unusual
in any
way, it was because he
had never
married.
His name was
not widely
known, then. Those
Anake who knew him generally perferred
his brother,
Kioko. Kioko was a family man and had a gentler
spirit. Kioko was a woodcarver,
and his long, fine
hands were skilled in making
the dark-grained
woods come alive.
That was
before the great ship had
landed.
That was
before Nthenge had seen, and
understood.
They knew the
name of Nthenge now. The
Anake knew him, and the Kikusai.
Nthenge!
He was a
scourge, a destroyer, a flame
across the land. The Kikusai feared and hated him.
The Anake
feared and needed him.
The Anake
followed him.
Had he not
shown them the way? Had
he not
taken the ideas of the traders
and turned
them into an army against
which nothing could stand? Had he
not saved
them from their enemies?
Nthenge!
He was
fearless in battle, but he
was more
than that. He was a thinker, a planner,
a man
who did
not move
until he was sure. And he
was -
hard.
There were
those who disagreed with Nthenge,
at first.
They were no longer among the
living; they had a way
of taking
mortal wounds in battle.
There were those who plotted
against Nthenge. They had
a way
of disappearing.
Nthenge!
He gave his
people power. It was a
heady brew. It made people forget, for awhile.
Forget under
the yellow-blue
sun ...
Forget in
the haze
of brown
dust that obscured a slaughter... Forget
when the sweet nights winds
rustled through the grasses ...
Forget what
had been,
and what
might still be.
The people
of the
land of Ernake owed much
to Nthenge.
He had
shown them the way.
* * *
'Gentlemen^ said
Carlos Coyanosa, 'we have a
problem.'
Alex Porvenir
smiled and stoked up his
pipe, which was as rancid as
ever. 'Which one did you
have in mind?'
It was
a familiar
opening to a dialogue. Carlos
Coyanosa, who was the senior Caravans
representative aboard the
lightship, always had a
problem. It was his responsibility
to oversee
company policies - in some
respects he outranked the captain
- and
that meant that problems
were as much a part
of him
as his
proverbial headache. Moreover, he
had a
habit of assuming that others knew
precisely which problem he was dealing with at any
given moment. In actuality, because of the mechanics
of space travel and the nature
of the
enterprise, there were many situations unfolding concurrendy. Just as
a doctor
has more
than one patient -
unless he is a very
bad doctor
indeed - a trading ship in
space must interact with many
clients on any given voyage. If
cultural adjustments had to be
made, that took time. A company
could not afford to sit
back and twiddle its corporate thumbs while waiting for
a desired
effect to take place. It was
only on the tri-di that
the traders
dropped everything and concentrated on one situation to
the exclusion
of all
others.
'It's Procyon
V,' Carlos
said, smoothing his long black
hair with the palm of his
hand. 'The Anake
thing.' 'What about it?'
'Same old
stuff, gentiemen. Our people filed
the usual
bare-bones report with the U.N.
Trade Commission. They shot it
over to the ET
Council. The Nigerian representative smelled a rat. He went
into a huddle with the
man from
Uganda, and they issued a formal
protest. Our lawyers have tied
the thing
up, but they
need more ammunition.'
Tucker Olton
sighed. 'The protest
being?'
'Their argument
is that
what we did is a
clear case of cultural manipulation. They are
raising the old bugaboo of
colonialism in space. It's good politics back home,
of course.
They say that the Anake did
not give
their consent to a basic
change in their way of life.
They say that we are
out for
a fast
buck. They say we have trampled
on the
rights of the people.'
Alex nodded.
'As an
anthropologist, I agree
with them. It is a clear case of cultural manipulation.'
T didn't
hear that,' Carlos said.
'Hear no
evil, see no
evil, evil go away. Right?'
'Wrong. Damn,
you know
as well
as I
do that
Caravans' policy expressly forbids
any action
detrimental to the welfare of
the people
we're dealing with -' 'Sure, but
who decides?'
'You
do, among
others. Don't wear your holy
hat with
me, Alex. You bank
your pay just like I
do.'
'Let's not
get into
that again,' Tucker
said.
Alex puffed on
his pipe.
T concur. We'll proceed on
the assumption - mistaken,
of course
- that
we're all rational men. At any
rate, we're trying to do
the best
we can.
I even
happen to believe, for
what it's worth, that Caravans
does more good than harm. Hell,
for that
matter colonialism wasn't always
the monster
it was
made out to be.'
T didn't
hear that, either.'
'Right. We
must be fashionable. There were
some rotten things about colonialism. One of them was
paternalism, which is what we're guilty
of right
now. But there were a
few small
forgotten items - schools,
roads, hospitals, political ideas, even
some notion of human
rights.'
'This isn't
helping me at all,' Carlos observed.
'Okay, try
this one on then. It
doesn't matter whether we did or
did not
manipulate the Anake culture. We
did, but that's another story. In
any event,
the Kikusai
are the
ones who are in trouble at the moment -'
'Please. Don't
tangle it up more than
it is
already.'
'Check. We'll stay
with the Anake; the ET
Council is always worried about
the wrong
problem. Maybe there's a lesson
in that somewhere. Never mind. Look, Carlos,
what you've got is a legal problem - legal
and political.
I can't
help you with public relations. The fact is that
the exploration
and utilization
of interstellar
space will be done by
private outfits like Caravans or it
won't be done at all.
Governments can't risk tax revenues on space gambles; the
sums involved are too immense, and the worthy citizens
have enough troubles to cope
with at home. Either
we do
it or
Earth forgets it is part
of a
larger universe. If the
PR boys
can't sell that one they should chop up their shingles.'
'I'll pass
on your
accolades. And the
legal aspects?'
'There I can help.
From a strictly legal point
of view,
our hands are clean. We did
not formally
instruct the Anake in anything. We put on a
little game to ease the
tedium of life aboard ship. We
made no threats, we offered
no incentives.
The change that occurred
took place among the Anake
hell, it was
entirely their decision,
with no prodding of any
sort from us. We
did not
even speak to them. We
pulled out right after our fun
charade. As for the welfare
of the
people, they are in better shape
now than
they were then. Survival is a fairly basic right,
you know.
In terms
of money,
Caravans has not yet realized
any added
income from its action. In fact, the supply of
carvings has diminished. Friend, even
I could argue
this case.'
'You may
have to before we're through.'
Carlos ventured a smile. 'But it
does sound pretty good when
you put
it that
way. Thanks, Alex.'
'Don't mention
it. If
the real
problems were as easy as
the fake problems, I'd turn in
my ulcer.'
Carlos excused
himself and returned to his
office to work on his report.
'You're really
worried, aren't you?' Tucker said.
'I thought
you handled that nicely.'
Alex got some
ice and
poured himself a judiciously hefty portion of Scotch. He
was tired
and tense
and needed
to unwind.
He flopped
in a
comfortable chair and took a
long swallow of therapy.
'The legal situation
doesn't alarm me, Tuck. We're
clear on that one, and that's
not my
baby anyway. But you've seen
the monitor reports. We've got to
get back
to the
Procyon system before everything
falls apart.'
'You mean
Nthenge?'
'He's the key
to it.
The Kikusai
are getting
a very
bloody nose, and that's our responsibility.
The Anake
are so
wrapped up in playing soldier that
the production
of carvings
is going
down. Our moral problem
is Nthenge.
Our practical
problem is to keep those carvings
coming. You know, this is
a very
peculiar business we're in.
Caravans has to show a profit.
In order to do that, we
need relatively small products to
transport - small items that
will bring high prices. The modern
equivalents of salt and
gold. Handicrafts are ideal, because
they are no longer
produced on Earth. Those Anake
carvings are one of our gold
mines. It took a long
time to find them and a
long time to set the
thing up. We can't afford
to lose
them.'
And so?'
'And so
we go
back when we can work
it in. We
stop Nthenge.'
Tucker grinned.
'Nothing to it.
We just
introduce the Kikusai to some repeating
rifles.' 'What would I
do without
you?'
'God knows. I
vote we worry about it
tomorrow. You need some sleep.'
'I'll see what
I can
do. Good
night, Tuck.' Tucker Olton waved and
left.
Alex Porvenir collected
the bottle
of Scotch,
two glasses,
and a supply of ice. He
walked through the silent corridor
of the lightship and caught the
tube to his room.
It was
a pleasant
chamber and spacious by crowded
Earth standards. He had
a bed
big enough
to accommodate
his six-foot-plus
frame with room to spare.
He had
three soft chairs and a battered
foot-stool. There were two ancient
priceless Navaho rugs on
the floor.
He had
a computer
terminal, a scanner, and some real
books. He even had a
genuine oversized bathtub in the
John.
'All the
comforts of home,' he muttered.
In fact,
is was home. For fifteen years, Alex had
spent more time in space
and on other worlds than he
had on
Earth.
He stripped
off his
shirt and poured a drink.
He had
tried a great many concoctions from a variety of
different worlds and he had yet
to find
anything better than Scotch.
He picked
up the
communicator and pressed a number.
'Helen? Were
you asleep?'
'A little.' Her
voice was drowsy, but the
sound of it thrilled him as it always did.
'Can you spare
an hour
or two?'
'Do you need me?'
'Two guesses.'
'Then I'll try
to fit
you into
my busy
schedule, love.' 'My room or yours?'
'You've got a bigger
bed.' 'Ten minutes?' 'Make it five.'
Alex disconnected and poured a second
drink for Helen. As Tucker had
said, Nthenge could wait until
tomorrow.
Alex smiled and
felt some of the tension
leave him. He had tried a
great many things on a
variety of different worlds, and
he had yet to find anything
better than a good woman.
Both suns
were still in the sky,
but the
great yellow-blue fire had dipped close
to the
horizon. The air was hot
and choked with brown dust kicked
up by
marching feet. Long shadows striped the
village and brought no relief.
It was
stifling inside the hut and
the light
was bad.
Kioko had moved to his bench
in the
courtyard. One of his children
played quietiy in the
dirt at his feet. Kioko
frowned at the carving he held
in his
hands and tried to concentrate.
The wood was dark and alive,
flowing. But the firestone in
the head of the ancestral figure
was not
right. It should glow softiy with an inner radiance,
shining through the eyes, as
was the way with
ancestral spirits. The firestone was
clumsy, blatant. It had
not become
one with
the wood.
And there
were so few firestones
now, even for Kioko. He
could not afford to make a
mistake.
The noise from
the soldiers
bothered him. They were forever
drilling and shouting commands. There
was no
peace, and today it was worse
than usual. There was a
sense of urgency and excitement in the square.
Reluctandy, Kioko
replaced the carving on the
bench. He picked up his stone-bladed
knife and polished it absentiy.
He sat back to watch.
Nthenge himself was
there. Kioko studied his brother,
remembering. Nthenge was the same
and he
was not
the same.
He had always been small and
thin and consumed with a
terrible restiessness. When they
were children, Nthenge had twisted constandy in his sleep,
and gotten
up to
think his long night thoughts. He
had grown
up hard
and unyielding
and without compassion. He had never
danced with the girls, never laughed. He had always
been strange, but now -
Kioko hardly knew
him. Nthenge had power, and
it had
changed him. It had
made him proud and arrogant
and arbitrary.
Kioko felt no kinship with
his brother.
Nthenge faced
his sweating
troops and silenced them with
a gesture of command.
The painted
wooden crest-comb in his hair was
so big
and elaborate
that it almost dwarfed him.
Kioko stifled a smile.
It was
dangerous to smile at Nthenge.
He took himself very
seriously indeed.
Nthenge harangued
his men,
his high
voice piercing the still brown haze of the air.
Kioko could not catch the
words, but Nthenge sounded angry. That
was standard
these days.
Nthenge spoke
for a
long time, pacing up and
down and shaking his fists at
the sky.
He was
screaming before his
stone blade of his carver's knife.
The firestone in
the head
of his
unfinished ancestor-figure gleamed with
an icy
flame in the gathering darkness.
The bubble
of the
landing shuttle drifted down out
of the
night sky. She showed
no lights
and was
invisible against the backdrop of the
stars.
She touched down
without a sound and Alex
Porvenir stepped out.
He was alone
and his
best friend would not have
recognized him. He was dressed
in Anake
clothing, complete with a wooden crest-comb
in his
hair. His features had been
subtly blurred. There was
a slight
phosphorescent glow to
his body and his
eyes shone in the dark.
'Brother,' he
muttered, 'if I run into
the wrong
guy in
this get-up it could get interesting.'
He slipped through
the night-damp
grasses toward the Anake village, cursing
the glow
that radiated from him. He
knew that Nthenge's security
was not
what it might be, but
nonetheless he felt about
as inconspicuous
as an
illuminated dinosaur.
'Wait until they
hear about this one back
at the
U.N.,' he whispered to himself. 'They'll
have me drawn and quartered.'
Of course,
this trip was strictly off
the record.
They had better not hear about it.
The village
was asleep,
including the sentries. The Anake
were not night fighters,
and neither
were the Kikusai. It was
only civilized peoples who
lacked enough sense to take
time off to sleep.
Alex found Kioko's
hut without
difficulty. It was fortunate that Kioko was a relatively
important man. That meant that
he had a sleeping hut to
himself, with his wives and
children and the cooking quarters in
a second
hut.
Alex took
a deep
breath and walked through the
open doorway of the hut.
He could
see by
his own
glow. Kioko was alone, and
asleep.
Alex stood
over him and extended his
arms. He did his level
best to look like
an ancestral
spirit. He fought an insane
urge to light his pipe that
sat next
to his
ashtray aboard the ship. He could
almost hear Helen laughing at
him.
He composed
himself.
'Kioko' he
said in an urgent, level
voice.
The sleeping
figure stirred. 'Kioko!'
Kioko sat up.
His eyes
widened. Alex could smell the
man's shocked surprise. It was one
thing to believe in ancestral
spirits. It was quite another to
wake up and find one
in the
room with you.
'Kioko, I want you
to listen
carefully to what I say.'
Kioko fumbled under
his bed
and produced
a bowl
that had some food remnants in
it. He
offered it with shaking hands. 'Here is food, my
father. I have no beer.
Take it and go away.'
Alex could
not understand
him. He had memorized his
speech and could not
deviate from it. He did
not speak
the language of the Anake and
of course
translating equipment was not available. He did know that
the people
were con-stantiy making small offerings
of food
to the
ancestors; a tiny portion of each
meal was set aside for
them. He accepted the bowl and
placed it on the floor.
He extended
his arms
again.
'Kioko, I want you
to listen
carefully to what I say.'
Kioko listened. He had
no choice.
'Kioko, the
ancestors have been saddened. We
have watched our people and we
do not
like what we see. Your
ways are no longer our ways.
We have
come to you because you
are the brother of Nthenge. Nthenge
will not listen to us.
You must listen. You must act.
If you
do not,
the ancestors
can no longer protect their people.
The crops
will fail. There will be sickness.
The witches
will destroy us all.'
Kioko tried
to speak.
Alex silenced him with a
gesture and plunged on.
'One man
has brought
our people
close to destruction. That man is
your brother. One man can
stop him. That man is
you. You, Kioko. We will help you.
We will
protect you. Our people must be
free again and you must
lead them. Listen, Kioko. This is
what you must do ...'
Alex finished
his prepared
speech and gave Kioko no
chance to reply. He stalked out
of the
hut in
what he hoped was a
majestic manner.
Once outside,
he ran
through the silent village. The
glow from his body made him
feel as though he were
moving in the beam of a
spotiight.
He did
not feel
good about what he had
done. He did not see what
other choice had been open
to him.
He tried
to put
his misgivings out of
his mind.
He could
live with his guilt. That was all.
He made
it back
to the
landing shuttle undetected.
The spheroid
lifted soundlessly toward the stars.
Within minutes, Alex
Porvenir was back aboard the
lightship.
Five days
later - five anxious and
expensive days while Caravans observers stayed
glued to their monitors -
Kioko acted.
He invited Nthenge
to visit
him in
his home,
stating that he had information that Nthenge should know.
Normally, Nthenge would not
have come. He was beyond
that. If you wished to see
Nthenge, you went to him.
But Kioko
was different.
He was
a brother
of the
same mother.
Nthenge came.
As had
been arranged, he came in
the evening
when the great sun went
down but light still lingered
between the shadows. He
left his guard outside after
they had inspected the hut. Nthenge
did not
lack courage, and he could
not show fear before
his own
brother.
Nthenge entered
the house.
Kioko said
nothing. He embraced Nthenge in
the traditional
greeting between brothers.
Before Nthenge could
speak, Kioko slipped his woodcarver's
knife from his tunic.
He plunged
the polished
stone blade into his brother's chest.
Nthenge grunted with pain and
surprise. Kioko yanked out the
blade and cut his brother's
throat.
There was
a lot
of blood.
Kioko's hands were slippery.
In a daze, hardly
comprehending what he had done,
Kioko followed instructions. He picked Nthenge's body
up in
his arms. The weight was negligible;
Nthenge had no meat on
his bones. Kioko walked out the
door carrying the body of
Nthenge. It was still
warm. It dripped a bright
red trail.
Kioko carried
the body
to his
workbench and put it down.
He stood
up straight.
T have done it,' he said
in a
loud, strong voice. 'I,
Kioko, the brother of Nthenge.
The Anake
are free.'
There were
many people crowded around the
courtyard. They stood in
total silence. There was no
movement. Then - motion.
Ancestral figures
moved among the people. Their
figures were blurred. They glowed as
they walked. They touched the people - soldiers, guards,
old men,
women, children. They whispered the ancient
blessings.
The ancestors gathered
around Kioko. One by one,
they embraced him.
The strange
silence held.
There were old,
old stories
that told of the ancestors
visiting a village of the
people, but no living man
had seen
such a thing with his own
eyes. When the ancestors had
appeared - magically, as though dropped
from the sky - they
had collected
a crowd
in a
hurry.
It was
a night
that would be long remembered.
In time,
it too would become legend.
The ancestors formed
a tight
little group when they had
finished indicating their approval
of Kioko.
They withdrew,
silently.
Their glow
vanished into the night.
Still, the
people did not speak. They
waited to hear what Kioko would say.
Kioko stood
with his dead brother sprawled
on the
bench behind him. He searched for
the words
that would lead the Anake back.
He faced
his people
and began.
Aboard the
lightship, far now from the
world of Procyon V, Alex Porvenir
fired up one of his
smelly pipes and blew an
angry cloud of smoke
in the
general direction of Tucker Olton.
'It's easy
for us,'
he said.
'We commit
a murder
and then
we just pull out.
We're beyond the range of
their concepts, to say nothing of
their technology. We have achieved
at least
one age-old human goal:
the perfect
crime.'
'We didn't
kill anybody,' Tucker said. 'You
didn't kill anybody.'
'Sure,' Alex
snorted. 'The ancestors did it.
Don't play the fool, Tuck. I'm
a big
boy now.
I made
the decision.
I'll take the responsibility.'
'Kioko killed
him,' Tucker said doggedly.
'What choice
did he
have after I bamboozled him? Kioko was just the
instrument I used. That's all.'
Tucker changed
tactics. 'Nthenge was no loss,
Alex.'
'No. I don't think
so either.
But he
was a
human being. We are not gods.
Who are
we to
sit in
judgement?'
Tucker managed a
grim smile. He understood the older man's moods; he
knew he was being used.
He respected
Alex enough to put up with
it. 'Two
questions, Alex. If you see
an evil - never mind its
cause - and take no
action, does that earn you a
gold star in your hymn
book? And how many lives
did you save by the death of Nthenge?'
Alex poured
himself a drink. 'Maybe. Maybe.'
'We've restored a
balance in that situation. The Kikusai have learned a
few tricks
too, you know. Kioko is
a decent
man, and we've backed
him up
with our litde ancestor squad.
We can use the ancestors again
if we
have to. There will be
a kind of a peace down
there for generations.'
'And carvings.
Don't forget our loot.'
'Yes, and carvings. Dammit, Alex, they don't hurt anybody. If you get
really morbid on me, I'm
yelling for the medics. We did
the best
we could.'
'Yes.' Alex
downed his Scotch and felt
a little
better. 'We did the best we
could. I'll give us that.'
Tucker nodded.
'I'm shoving off to get
some sleep. Helen is waiting for
you, in case you've forgotten.'
T haven't forgotten.'
T do have one question.'
'Shoot'
'What in
the hell
did happen to
the historical
Shaka?'
Alex Porvenir
grinned and poured himself another
drink. 'Shaka had two brothers. They
assassinated Shaka in 1828. Then one brother killed the
other and took over. We
simplified it a litde on Procyon
V.'
Tucker Olton
shook his head and left
the room.
The Caravans
lightship plunged on through the
desert of space. Against the stars,
against the scale of the
universe, the ship was nothing and
less than nothing.
It carried
a man
and beside
him a
woman.
There was
life, and purpose.
And there
was a
tiny thought, hurtled against the
immensity of nothingness:
We try. We
learn through our mistakes. We do the
best we can.
Maybe we'll be remembered.
Thomas
N. Scortia
THE ARMAGEDDON TAPES TAPE I
.. .That the
agency of its defeat should
have come into being by the
merest chance. The all-enveloping menace, the anti-life principle that was the Theos
invested the nearest galaxy. It
had destroyed race after race until
the Angae
fled from its implacable advance to the next
galaxy. The hive personality of this race was completely
alien to the humankind they
encountered in the Sol
system. Yet the elements of
racial consciousness and personality
immortality that was the basis
of their
survival were uniquely suited to the
predatory instincts of humans. When the two were mated,
the racial
fusion presented the most formidable challenge that the Theos
had encountered.
That mankind had
been evolving to this group
mind in its political institutions was obvious from the
peculiar em-pathetic growth of the
Holy State after the final
Thermonuclear War. That
this was a completely atheistic political structure
did not
detract from its essential mystical
base. Indeed, the very nature of
the so-called
'Holy State' depended on the almost
fanatic religiosity that the humanism
of the
day invested in these
institutions so that...
Die Anelan de Galactea Vol II, Ca
4300
I am dreaming
now, a deep placid sleep
in which
all sensation
is muted.
It has
been years since I slept
in this
fashion, years since the
calm and the peace of
a small
death (as some poet once called
sleep) is mine.
I have
set out
to change
the world,
to destroy
the world
if need be and
now I
am content.
(Are you
asleep Martin?)
Yes, I am asleep
but I'm
conscious that you are talking
with me ... to me ...
about me ... and it
really doesn't matter.
You think that
in this
fashion with your drugs and
your flashing lights and your
bright instruments, you have captured
my psyche - my
soul - but it isn't
so. I
am aware
of you
and at any moment I may
shake this spell and be
among you, giant and potent beyond
belief.
(Odd! Paranoid. But we know
that he is dangerous. What could have happened during
the period
when the creatures had him? There's
a profound
change in the biochemistry, of course. He takes in
cellulose and excretes a complex
mixture of purines and pentoses. Who
ever heard of a human
body manufacturing pentoses?)
I remember
about pentoses. Yes, I heard
you. I remember from long ago.
We had
a rhyme.
Lyose, xylose, arabinose,
ribose. Something,
something, something.
(Martin, you are
back with Them. Think
back. Go back. You are back
with Them and They are a
part of your life, your being, your every concern.)
Cattle. I was cattle
to Them, but They gave
me something
without knowing that They
did, and for that They
will eventually be destroyed.
I love
Them and I
hate Them. I will give Them peace and I will
give Them sleep and I
will arise and give you peace
- the
peace of a world well
ordered and unafraid.
(That's a recurrent theme.
He wants
to bring
us some
kind of peace. What
peace, Martin?)
The peace
of being,
of unthinking. The
peace that comes from a universe
ordered in a manner that
men could
never order it.
(Another recurrent theme. Were
it not
for the
fact that he has learned some
remarkable things from Them, I
would put it down to so
much fantasy. He may well
be able
to implement
the fantasy.
Does the desire
and the
power to make a fantasy real
make the concept any less
a fantasy?
A disturbing philosophical question.)
I will
make it real. I have
the vision
and it
is clear.
(Martin, listen
to me.
I am
your friend.)
All men
are my
friends.
(Tell me,
how did
it happen?
How did
you come
to be
with Them?)
How did
I come
to be
Their cow? How
did They take me and the others
like me and turn us,
alien and yet brothers, into a herd for Their
sustenance?
(How?)
How old
am I?
(Thirty, twenty-five. It's
hard to tell.)
Perhaps only five or six. I don't remember.
I was
only three or four when it
happened. My mother and father
- those
are strange words for someone who
has had
a thousand
mothers and fathers ... My mother
and father
were one of the last
to die. They might
have lived but they were
too old
and they
could not accept the
change. So They
killed them. Not really. Actually They caused them to die
because Mother and Father could not adapt. The children,
many of them, could not
adapt and they too died.
(What happened
to the
children?)
They died and
they were eaten. Nothing is
lost in the Group. They taught me that. Waste
becomes a great sin. The
waste of flesh and the waste
of spirit
are equally
not to
be tolerated.
(What happened
in Marksville?
Tell us.)
Marksville? That
was home.
The only
home I had ever known. I wasn't born there
but Mother
and Father
joined the colony when I was
only a year old. They
told me once ... I don't think
I understood
at the
time ... but they told
me that
the world they grew
up in
had become
too complicated,
too restrictive with no
privacy and a constant sense
that someone was looking at you
in your
most intimate moments. There weren't many places left in
the world
where a man might have the privacy and the
peace of mind that come
with being his own person.
(That's treason,
I think.
Maybe we should erase this
part of the tape. No? Well,
God knows
what will happen to him
regardless.)
It was in
the north,
you know.
Somewhere in Canada.
I'm not sure exacfly, but the
winters were very cold so
that the tractors and the automobiles
had to
be wrapped
with electrical coils and hooked into
the colony
power supply at night. Otherwise
the blocks
would have frozen and they
could have been permanently damaged. We
lived in a communal hall
and the
heating plant would blast
a surge
of hot
air across
the common
room one minute and then
in the
next minute the deadly cold would seep in until
it seemed
that it would penetrate to
your very marrow.
It was a
terribly isolated area. We had
a helicopter
that flew in supplies and mail.
The mail
came once a week and
there wasn't very much
of that.
After all, the old people
had cut themselves off from the
world and they didn't want
most of their friends knowing where
they were. There was a
constant fear that someone would
come after us and make
us return to the old world
and the
old ways.
Even at that age, I felt
their fear of being returned
to the
cities and of the eyes
that never stopped watching.
(God, what will
happen when our auditor hears
this tape? Do you think we
dare show it? There's the
doctrine of contamination and I
sure as hell don't want
to face
an inquisitor.)
I can
hear what you're saying and
you have
nothing to fear. Let me tell
you how
They came out
of the
sky. In one cold afternoon, Their ship came out of
the sky.
Completely without warning.
They were the last of
Their kind and
They needed Kreels so that They
would have food. It was
a marvelously
sophisticated technique They had for
making Kreels and all They needed
was a
warm blooded organism that used
glycogen or a similar starch.
They came out
of the
sky and
at first
the people
thought that it was some remarkable
new ship
from the place They had left.
The people
were frightened but they did
not expect
to be mistreated, only captured and
if need
be -
what was the word? - reindoctrinated.
The people didn't
flee, at any rate, and
when They came out of the ship,
the horror
was like
a blanket.
They were large, almost seven feet
tall and Their
chitinous exoskeletons gleamed golden
in the
cold north sun. My father
thought They looked like something half way
between ants and praying mantises.
They came
out of
the great
ship (it turned out that
it was
only a subsidiary vehicle and the
real ship was still orbiting
the earth), and They
spread a gas over the
settiement and all the grown people
fell down and lay as
if they
were dead.
They gathered
them up. It was remarkable
how gende
They were, these
huge insectiike creatures. They were
gentle and They carried the human into
the ship
and found
for each
of them a single crystal container
with all the necessary attachments
to support
life.
You must
understand that They
were not predatory or evil.
They think differendy than we. They see
the whole
universe quite differendy and that much I
have learned from Them. They were
the last
of Their race and They had
a right
to survive.
We were
all placed
in our
special containers and there were
bright hoses that attached
themselves to our veins and
shining disks that rested against our
bare chests and there were
probes that insinuated themselves deep into
our vitals.
Warm fluids washed
our bodies
and a
deep sense of identity filled our minds until it
seemed as if we had
always been a part of the
Group. We were Kreels, of
course, but we were a part
of the
Group. I know that seems
starding to humans. What human thinks
of his
cattle as being a part
of human
life? You feed them and milk
them and slaughter them and
eat their flesh. They are a
part of your life stream
but you
never think of them in this
manner. It was not that
way with
Them. The Kreel
were a part of Them, to be nourished
and cherished
and brought into the
totality of the Group and
all the
while ... harvested.
We were aware
of the
life of the ship and
of the
beings in the ship, of our
fellows who had been brought
into the ship and, as time
went on, of the others
who had
been gathered from a hundred distant
worlds. We were aware too
of the
flickering life force of
those who could not adapt
to these
alien conditions and we
mourned them as they slowly
and quiedy expired. I can remember
the regret
when I felt my father cease
to be
and soon
after that my mother. It
was that
way with most of
the adults
and They silendy resolved among themselves that They would not
try again
with adults of our species. We felt Their regret and
at the
time we forgave Them for it,
we were
so completely
immersed in Their group thinking.
Later our hate vied within
us with
the love
we had
learned in being close to Them.
The ship
returned to space and held
communion with the other ships and
with the great craft that
bore the major part of their
race. In my crystal crysalis
I could
look out with my other senses
and see
Them moving through
dimly lighted passages. I could feel
the moist
warmth that They
needed to survive and smell the
mustiness of Their nests and
the acrid
formaldehyde smell of Their
bodies as They touched and
talked and stroked each
other in a peculiar mixture
of communication
and empathy.
More than
this I and those that
survived began to see through Their eyes. We began to
understand the "way the world and
the universe
was put
together, see the discrete fine
points of structure that
human eyes and human minds
can never comprehend. We watched the
use They made of Their own internal
energies to move the ships
through space and we learned Their ways of manipulating
matter and energy. All this while
we were
being groomed for Their cattle.
(That's sickening.
Do you
remember what the boarding party reported? The place stank
like a sewer. I suppose
our smell must be as repellant
to Them but it must have
been pretty horrible. If it had
not been
for Martin,
They might have continued gathering Their
Kreel and multiplied.)
No, that
was not
Their purpose. They
were a static race waiting only for a chance
to find
an unoccupied
home. They were no menace to
us at
the time.
Only Their way of seeing the universe, Their ideas on
community and the individual -
(I tell
you, we'd better edit this
tape. An Inquisitor will have
our hides. No one
dares think this way, not
and come
out with
a whole mind ...
What? ... Well, how do
I know
how to
conceal the editing? I've
never dared conceal anything in
my life. I suppose we take
our chances.
God, how did I get
this assignment?)
There came a
time when my mind saw
that I had changed and that the others about
me had
changed. It was a subtle
physical change in which
certain enzymes had been modified.
1 learned later from a mind I
probed that the enclase in
the citric
acid cycle had been
modified and that the muscle
phosphorylase too had changed
so that
the energy
source was not now dextrose
from the muscle glycogen but
a seven-member
sugar, a glucoheptose. This was necessary
so that
the product
of the
digestive tract should include
excreted pentoses. They needed five carbon sugars for sustenance
of Their bodies and that was
the purpose of the
Kreel.
Long ago, native
Kreel on Their home planet
had provided
these but most of
the native
Kreel had perished in the
great disaster. It was
a savage
thing that destroyed Their world, a
great and consuming menace
beyond belief. They could not
fight it. They could
only flee. Fortunately They had learned
enough of alien biochemistries
during Their space colonization efforts in Their
own system
to modify
warm-blooded creatures. They were assured forever
of a
source of Their
needed food, just so long as
They could find creatures with
the proper
muscle starches and the
proper enzyme systems for modification.
They had
observed the change Themselves. They
came to the deep hold where
we lay
in our
crystal containers and They roused us.
They were gende and considerate
and when
They discovered that some of us
had not
survived, I could sense Their
regret. They seemed not
at all
disturbed at the sight of
corruption in those who had
died and They
went about the simple business of disposing of the
decaying bodies. The decay was
too advanced in some of them
to serve
in food
but in
others the tissues were relatively fresh and they were
returned to the food stores of the ship.
(Disgusting. Yet
he seemed
completely unaffected by such savagery. There's no question about
his complete
withdrawal from reality.)
Reality? What
is reality?
What do you know of
reality? You presume that you cannot
know the world except through
your senses and you admit that
your senses are limited. Even
in the
visible spectrum in which
your eyes work, your perception
is statistical rather than
detailed. Your optic nerves do
not even
report their statistical data direcdy but operate
as a
somatic sensor on a
part of your brain that
generates random visual images. You can
only perceive in terms of
the impulses
your own brain generates. Yet you
fall into the trap of
believing that you perceive
reality.
(Nonsense, of
course. A systematic delusion. I suppose extended contact
with such alien minds would
affect any human that way.)
You even
assume that I am human.
(Again the pattern of systematic delusion. Can we trust any data we
get from
him? How do we separate
fantasy and fact? We have to
know. The other ships still
exist and we have to
know the degree of
menace from them. God, to
have these things descend upon the
earth and turn it into
Their feeding ground.)
It was
not as
horrible as all that. There
was a
kind of oneness in being a
part of the Group, the
sort of thing that humans
have been seeking all of their
lives. Your philosophers talk of
individuality and the
concept of man himself as
the measure
of all things. Yet you spend
all of
your lives trying to find
an identity
in a
great group of men. Your
whole present society is directed to that end. You
preach freedom and submit to
a monolithic state that leaves you
in constant
terror that you may deviate. Didn't I hear you
speak fearfully earlier of an .jnquisi-tor?
What are you afraid of?
That you may stray from
the narrow prescribed paths of thinking?
Yet all
of you
have given your freedom of action
and decision
to this
system. What are you afraid of?
That you may find the
kind of identity that I
found?
(My God, now
we're in for it. They'll
monitor this examination room within
the next
twenty-four hours, perhaps sooner since they know we have
him here.
What will happen? They certainly can't allow him to
live and contaminate others. They'll
have to do something
about us. Contamination of ideas,
that's a sure ticket to the
inquisitor.)
It was
truly easy to fit into
the life
of the
ship. They took me from the
hold and we went through
narrow passages that glowed with a
soft ruby fire in their
depths. Although They were very
tall, They were extremely thin
and the
passages were narrow for my body.
I had
grown in the crysalis so
that my shoulders and my chest
filled the passage and in
several turns I came close to
being wedged tightly. Somehow I
managed, for this was my clear
duty - to follow Them and take my place
in the vast masses of Kreel
that fed in the depths
of the
ship and generated the sustenance for Them.
The quarters were
extensive and complex like the
branching alveoli of a
mammalian lung. There were thousands
of us,
each filling his small compartment. We exercised daily so
that our muscles would not atrophy,
going through complex muscle-flexing motions in place as
the Keepers
directed us. The Keepers were a special part of
Their social organization
and They
made sure of the health of
the herds.
We were
fed a
complex mixture high in partly-hydrolyzed cellulose and containing the nitrogen sources and the
unsaturated sources we need for
our health.
We could manufacture all of the
essential amino acids in our
own body, a vast improvement over basic human biochemistry.
Vitamins too we could
manufacture and the only limitation
was that we needed a source
of unsaturated
carbon chains. Our bodies could, only
under limited circumstances, produce an unsaturated
oil.
There were
seven of us who survived
the colony
and we
now became a part of the
complex food chain of the
group. We ate and we slept,
and more
than this, we thought. We
extended our consciousness and we merged
with Them. During certain regular
period the Keepers came among
us and
tended to us. This was the
most remarkable period of rapport.
The Keepers
were gentle and concerned and when
they stroked us with their
minds and touched us physically we gave up the
exudate that sustained them. There was
no bulk
to our
diet other than the bulk
of the
excreted pentoses and certain
subsidiary material developed by bacteria we harbored in our
bodies. We became for them
superior manufacturers of food
- highly
efficient. The only waste products in
the cycle
were those substances that went
to sustain our own bodies and
the carbon
dioxide and water we expelled from our own metabolism.
(I think I'm
going to be ill. Like
ants milking aphids. Yet he
seems pleased at the
idea. Contented, even exalted at
the concept.)
Exalted? Why
not? You're struggling with an
earlier concept. The substances your body discards are
corrupt, useless -mere waste materials.
Our bodies
had become
ordered to a different existence. Even the wastes of
our bodies
had a
purpose. The water replenished the sores of the
ship. The carbon-dioxide nourished the
complex plants that provided the
cellulose of our fodder. It was
a true
and lasting
symbiosis.
The sybiosis
of self,
the emotional
content of mind-to-mind contact
was deeply
satisfying. It was during this
period that we seven discovered that there was, however,
a difference.
For Them the contact
was one
of emotional
empathy; for us it was
deeper wth a clearer
semantic content. I suppose this
was only
natural when we consider
why our
parents took us from human
society and brought us
to the
colony in the north.
(Now it
comes out. The older records
aren't clear. After all it was
a hundred
years ago that they left
human society. Perhaps his alienness
is not
stricdy the product of the
creatures. Is it possible ...?)
It's possible
that this is why we
left, that we differed so
much in the function of our
minds from our fellow humans.
I remember
that the contact and the
emotional feeling I had for
Mother and Father was
one-sided. I could receive and
send but they could only send.
Still they knew that this
was the
way it
should be and all
the children
that my father had gathered
together knew that this was
the way
it should
be. I
suppose it was this special difference
that allowed us to learn
from Them and eventually to surpass Them.
This idyllic
existence continued for what may
have been months or even years.
All the
while Their ships marshalled outside the
earth for the next great
jump to another system. They
knew that They could acquire more Kreels
on earth
but Their
morality would not let
Them subject an alien race
to Their
domination, benevolent as it
might have been. That was
a remarkable
thing about Them: They
respected the right of the
separate races to work
out their
own destinies
even though They might recruit individual
members of the race. They
had a
concept of racial unity
but no
real understanding of individuality. Anymore than do you
and the
race of men as it
has become.
(More treason. We'll
never survive this session. They'll
take us and remove the contamination
and reintegrate
us. You
know what reintegration can mean?)
Among us evolved
a new
concept. It was my mind
that first verbalized it but it
was a
product of our group thinking.
We recognized that we had derived
a special
insight from Them that They
Themselves were not aware of.
They could see the universe on a pragmatic statistical
level and more deeply They could see the fine
structure of the universe, the
detailed interactions that made up
the statistical
structure of Their senses. In
a limited way this
allowed Them to manipulate discrete sections
of the
universe in a manner that
humans cannot. It's very much like
the difference
between humans who perceive the
coming of the seasons
and try
to manipulate
the phenomena
with crude methods of
cloud seeding and those humans
who have learned to feed heat
into the upper air streams
and modify
the climate of a
whole subcontinent. It was that
way with
us. Through Them we saw the mechanism.
We learned
through our own differences to see
and feel
and move
the factors
that They saw. It came to
me and
the others
that we were superior to
Them.
It became
a logical
consequence of this that we
could not share our existence further
with Them. We would contaminate
Them and
destroy Their perfect society that
had remained
in dynamic stasis for eons. We
had to
leave.
Imagine cows
taking over the farm? We
became just that. In one period
of ten
hours we became the masters
of the
ship.
The effect
was subtle.
We could
not invade
and control
Their minds. Indeed
this would have been against
our sensitivities.
To sense, to participate in Their existence, to feel as
They felt and see as They
saw -
this was permissible. To reach
and control
Them - this
was as
repugnant to us as it
is natural
to you. The difference is that
our control
would have been far more complete
than your puny masters have
ever achieved.
Rather we
altered the operation of the
ship. Here the inductance of an electrical circuit changed as we
reached out and altered the conductivity
of a
coil or deepened the penetration
of a magnetic field. There the
mean-free-path of the
electrons in a beam changed, enlarged
as we
interfered with the statistical randomness of the
particals. Ion exchange rates in
the depths
of the chemical reservoirs speeded, in
some cases even changed chemical order. The ship foundered,
lost power and had to
land.
It left
the others
and directed
itself into the planetary atmosphere.
It came
down in a low sweeping
approach while we perceived the radar beams scanning
it and
altered the information that they sent
back. There must have been
a great
deal of panic since anything unknown
in your
culture is automatically a menace. You
have lived so long in
fear and the repression of the discipline that is
supposed to meet that fear.
Would you be surprised if I
told you that there is
no enemy?
Unless Their survivors now see us as an enemy.
(Damn it. I'd
sooner destroy the tape and
take the punishment for that
than face the Inquisitor after this. Kill him
and destroy the tapes and take
our chances.
Surely you see that's the answer? ... What kind
of nonsense
is this
- this
thing a godsend? An
answer to our problems? What problems? We have a
perfect society, well ordered. We
have no problems. Do we?)
The ship
landed somewhere on the east
coast of your continent. Amid mountains lighdy frosted
with the first snows of
winter. They had once
been beautiful if the memories
of my
father were correct but
the pines
and the
soft scattering of underbrush
had been
stripped, leaving them bare and
cold and the mountain streams diverted
to concrete
reservoirs. The only area that remained
remotely like the natural condition
of the
land was that around
the last
stronghold of the aborigines. It was a place they
called Cherokee and in the
final battie with the intrusive conquerors
they had somehow managed to
stand fast and preserve the integrity
of their
land. Since you could not control
them, you at least respected
their treaty.
The ship
landed in the smoky morning
that crouched over the mountains and
we waited
for the
reaction. Throughout the ship there was
confusion as They
realized that something had happened, that They no longer
controlled the workings of Their
machines. Then we left
our chambers
and moved
painfully through the ship,
passing Them as They stood. It
was only
just that we spare Them the horror
of our
going. We did certain things that freed unbound electrons
in Their nervous systems and gave Them
a pleasant
passive sleep. Nothing was lost
in the
Group and though many
weaker ones died in that
physical existence, They continued to
live in the broader consciousness
of the Group, such is the
unity of Their group mind.
So you
see it did not violate our
morality or Theirs
or even
yours as you pretend it to
be. It
did not
occur to me at the
time that there was a simpler
way.
(I'm getting a
signal. Interrogation! Answer it, answer it
before they check down here.
The tape
will be monitored soon enough. They report an inquiry.
Our methods
are the
ones prescribed. A
deviation? My sanity
is as
complete as any member of the
staff. How can they say
that it is not, how
can my
anointed superiors even think
of sending
me to
the Fields?
They'll come now. Perhaps
we can
complete the task and they'll
be lenient. After all
such complete devotion to duty
to the
sacrifice of self. Isn't that what they
want? Activate the lock. Let them
try to
come in. We'll finish yet.)
It was
only a matter of time
before you found us. We
knew that and we had decided
that this was what we
wanted. We spread among the community
and we
became a part of them,
sharing in their consciousness
and directing
them in their total integration. It became obvious at
that point that we had
a mission and that it had
certain evolutionary stages. This was
the first and I
admit that it was largely
experimental. There was a special in-group empathy
among them. After all, they
had their tribal traditions and, through
years of menace and social
attack, they had integrated
their group personality on a
level that we could perceive and
understand. This is the natural
evolution of men and
truly their one salvation in
the total
hostile universe.
(Of course,
he would
choose the village. We banished
all of
the Indians to that
area long ago. What else
could we do with them when
their racial biochemistry prevents them
from adjusting?)
(We should
have destroyed them. Why should
the Holy
State allow them to exist unconditioned?
They remain always a menace, just
as long
as their
systems reject the Mettler serum
that has brought peace
and prosperity
to our
world.)
(But he
and the
other children did something to
the villagers.
We know that. It
was like
a mass
schizophrenia, almost as
if he
had freed two personalities
in every
villager. What did they do
... and why?)
In the end
we were
one and
we learned.
The ship
lay in
the valley, canted where it had
landed and They
dreamed, at least the ones who
had not
died. We knew that They would not awake until we
decided They would. It became
apparent that we could not allow
this, as much as we
loved Them. We hated Them too but
that was a different emotion,
one derived
from our memory of what They
had done
to our
parents. That we
learned to live with.
The conflict
was not
as great
as you
might suppose.
Where They had changed us,
we now
changed ourselves. Where we now changed
ourselves, we changed the people
of the village. Again it was
an experiment
because we were still learning. There were failures, of
course, and we were sorry
for that. Still we learned in
the weeks
before you finally found us.
We perfected our skills
and when
we perceived
that you had located us and
were coming in all the
primitive vitality of your force, we were ready.
It was
remarkable to see the primitive
joy with
which your people attacked Them. The
ship could have defended itself, of course, but They
were not aware that you
were attacking. We did certain things
to make
it appear
that They were in control. Your weapons blasted whole masses
of the
mountain down on Them.
Your beams traced fiery lines
through the rock that ran
molten. It was a
thrilling and primitive sight. Then
when it appeared to you that
the ship
was inactivated,
your teams blasted a hole in
it and
entered it and found Them and the Kreels. All of
the Kreels
were alien to your sight,
and They filled you with loathing
and disgust
- poor
creatures - and you killed Them.
We hated
to see
that but we had agreed
by this
time that certain sacrifices
were necessary so that we
might easily enter your society. Our
hosts quite unconsciously helped us.
When you came into the village
you found
us, apparentiy
helpless and being cared for by
the people.
They seemed normal and concerned
and they
invoked the treaty so that
you could
not interrogate
them. In the end you
decided to take us away
and care
for us. Only we
knew that you would do
more, that you would try to
find out about Them and how
we had
come to be with Them.
(Open
the door!)
(No, we
haven't finished yet. There's still
much to learn.)
(This is the staff inquisitor. You are in
open violation of the prime security directive. Open the door or suffer the
consequences.)
Open the door.
It makes
no matter.
At this
point I will pass from the
room and you will have
no further
need of me. You have learned
all that
I can
give you at the moment.
(What do
you mean?
We have
a great
deal to learn yet, don't we?)
(Who's in there? Who are you talking to?)
(Shall we open
the door?
Of course,
it's the only sensible thing.)
I'm sorry
but this
was the
next step in learning. I
had to
learn from you while you learned
from me. Out of that
I can
perceive the nature of my
need.
(Need, what
need?)
We all have
a need
and I
have a need now that
I am
whole. I will go now and
begin the work that you
have shown me. Out of this
will come something quite different.
A natural part
of human evolution when you stop
and think
about it.
(Open
the door. I am the Inquisitor Jarvis. What are you doing with the subject,
Citizen Interrogator? There at last. You were wise not to block the door
further.)
(We were
trying to carry out our
assignment. We were interrogating the patient under deep
narcohypnosis.)
It doesn't
matter. We will all leave
now and
go about
our task. Forgive me for deceiving
you. I have left you
with one gift. A unity with
yourself, an ability to commune
with that part of you that
is forever
submerged in human beings, the
very gift we gave the villagers.
(There is no one here, citizen. What have you
been up to?)
(We have
been interrogating the patient, Inquisitor
Jarvis.)
(We? We? What are you
talking about? The door register shows only one occupancy.
What are you trying to conceal from the Holy State? You are the only one here.
You've been the only one here for the past three hours.)
(We're both
here. Can't you see us. Please, can't you see
us? Can't you see us? Can't
you see
us?)
Anne
McCaffrey PRELUDE TO A CRYSTAL SONG
Killashandra listened, the
words like cold bombs dropping
with leaden fatality into her frozen
guts. She stared at the
Maestro's famous profile as
his lips
opened and shut around the
words that meant the death of
all her
hopes and ambitions, and rendered wasted ten years of
hard work and study.
The Maestro finally
turned to face her. The
genuine regret in his expressive eyes made him look
older as the heavy singer's
muscles in his jaw
relaxed sorrowfully into jowls.
One day
Killashandra might remember those details.
Now she was too crushed by
this overwhelming defeat to be
aware of more than her terrible
personal failure.
'But... but... how
could you?'
'How could
I what?'
the Maestro
asked in surprise.
'How could
you lead
me on?'
'Lead you
on? But,
my dear
girl, I didn't'
'You did! You
said ... you said all
I needed
was hard
work and haven't I worked hard?'
'Of course you
have worked hard.' Valdi was
affronted. 'My students must apply themselves.
It takes
years of hard work to develop
the voice,
to learn
a repertoire
of even
a segment
of the outworld music that must
be performed
...'
'I've the repertoire?
I've worked hard and now
... now you tell me I've no voice?'
Maestro Valdi sighed
heavily, a mannerism which had
always irritated Killashandra and was
insupportable in this instance. She opened
her mouth
to protest
but he
raised a restraining hand. The habit
of four
years made her pause.
'You haven't the
voice to be a top-rank singer, my dear
Killashandra, but that does
not preclude
any of
the many
other responsible
and fulfilling
...'
'I won't be
second-rank. I want ... I
wanted1 - and she
had the satisfaction of seeing him
wince at the bitterness in her voice - 'to
be a
top-rank concert singer. You said
I had
-'
He held up
his hand
again. 'You have the gift
of perfect
pitch, your musicality is fauldess, your memory
superb, your dramatic potential can't be
criticized. But there is that
burr in your voice which becomes
intolerable in the higher register.
While I thought it could
be trained
out, modified ...' he shrugged his helplessness. He eyed
her sternly.
'Today's audition with completely impartial judges proved conclusively
that the flaw is
inherent in the voice. This
moment is cruel for you and
not particularly
pleasant for me.' He gave
her another
quelling look for the
rebellion in her manner. 'I
make few errors in judgement as
to voice.
I honestiy
thought I could help you. I
cannot and it would be
doubly cruel of me to
encourage you to go
further as a soloist. No.
You had
best strengthen another facet
of your
potential.'
'And what, in
your judgement,' demanded Killashandra in a voice so tight
that her throat ached, 'would
that be?'
He had the
grace to blink at her
caustic tone but he looked
her squarely in the
eye.
'You don't have
the patience
and temperament
to teach,
but you could do very well
in one
of the
allied theater arts where your sympathy with the problems
of a
singer would stand you in good
stead. No? You are a
trained synthesizer? Hmmm. Too bad, your
musical education would be a
real asset there.' He paused, had
a thought
and dismissed
it. 'Well
then, I'd recommend you leave the
theater arts entirely. With your
sense of pitch you
could be a crystal tuner,
or an
aircraft and shuttie dispatcher.'
'Thank you, Maestro,'
she said,
more from force of habit
than any real gratitude.
She gave
him the
half bow his rank required and withdrew. She did
slam the panel shut behind
her and stalked down
the corridor,
blinded by the tears she'd
been too proud to
shed. She half wanted and
half feared to meet some other
student who would question her
tears, commiserate with her disaster,
but was
inordinately grateful when she reached the
door of her study cubicle
without encountering anyone. There
she gave
herself up to her misery,
bawling into hysteria, past choking, until
she was
too spent
to do
more than breathe.
If her body
protested the emotional excess, her
mind reveled in it. For she'd
been abused, misused, misguided, misdirected. And who knows how
many of her peers had
been secretiy laughing at her for
her dreams
of glorious
triumphs on the concert and opera
stage. Killashandra had a generous
portion of the conceit and ego
required for her chosen profession,
with no leavening dollop of humility:
she'd felt her success and
stellar-dom only a matter
of time.
Now she
cringed against the panoramic memories of
her Self-assertiveness
and arrogance,
hugging her fractured, deflated self
as she
recalled the agony of that audition
this morning. She had approached
it with such confidence, so sure
of receiving
the necessary
commendations to continue
as a
solo-aspirant. She remembered
the faces of the examiners, so pleasantly composed -
one man
nodding absent-mindedly to the
pulse of the test arias
and lieder. She knew she'd been
scrupulous in tempi - they'd
marked her high on
that. How could they have
looked so - so impressed? So encouraging? She wanted
to erase
the morning's
fiasco completely from her
memory!
How could they
record such verdicts against her?
'The voice is unsuited to the
dynamics of opera; unpleasant burr too audible.' 'A good instrument
for singing
with orchestra and chorus where grating
overtone will not be noticeable.'
'Strong choral leader quality:
student should be positively dissuaded from solo work.'
The judgements
burned in her mind, abrading
the tortured
strands of her ego
and shattered
aspirations.
Unfair! Unfair! How
could she be allowed to
come so far, be permitted to
delude herself, only to be
dashed down in the penultimate trial? And to be
offered, as a sop, choral
leadership? How degradingly ignominious!
Wiggling up out
of her
excruciating memories were the faces
of brothers and sisters,
taunting her for 'shrieking at the top of
her lungs.' Teasing her
for the
hours she spent pounding out
finger exercises and attempting
to 'understand'
some of the weird harmonics of
off-world music. Her parents had
surrendered to her choice of
profession because it was, for
starters, financed by the
planetary educational system; secondly, it
might accrue to their
own standing
in the
community; and thirdly, she seemed to
have the encouragement of her
early voice teachers. Them! Was it
to the
ineptitude of one of those
clods that she owed
the flaw
in her
voice? A mishandling
in the fragile early stages of
training? Killashandra rolled in an agony of
self-pitying memories.
Then she realized
that it was self-pity and
sat bolt
upright in the chair, staring at
herself in the mirror on
the far
wall, the mirror which had reflected
all those
long hours of study and
self-perfection ... Self-deception.
What was
it Valdi'd.
had the temerity
to suggest?
An allied art? A synthesizer?
Bah! Spending her life catering
to flawed
minds in mental institutions
because she had a flawed
voice? Or mending flawed crystals to
keep interplanetary travel or someone's power plant flowing smoothly?
All in an
instant, Killashandra shook herself free
of such
wallowing self-indulgence. She looked
around the study, a slice of
a room
with its musical scores neady
filed by the viewer, with the
built-in keyboard and console that
tapped the orchestral banks of the
Music Center for any aria
or song
ever composed. She glanced
over the repros of training
performances - she'd always had
a lead
role - and she knew
that she'd do best to forget
the whole
damned thing! If she couldn't
be top rank, the hell with
the theater
arts! She'd be top in
whatever she did or die
in the
attempt.
She stood up.
There was nothing for her
now in
a room
that three
hours before had been the
focal point of every waking minute and all her
energies. Whatever personal items were in the drawer or
shelves, the prize certificates on the wall, the signed
repros of singers she'd hoped
to emulate
or excel,
no longer concerned nor belonged to
her.
She reached for
her coat,
ripped off the student badge
and threw the cloak across her
shoulders. She remembered, hand on panel,
that she'd better take her
credit plate with her. As
she fumbled in the slip drawer
for it,
she saw
the notation
on her
engagement pad.
'Party at
Rory's to celebrate!'
She snorted. They'd
all know.
Let them
chortle over her downfall. She'd not
play the bravely-smiling-courageous-under-adversity
role tonight. Or
ever.
Exit
Killashandra, quietly, stage center, she said to herself as she ran
down the long shallow flight
of steps
to the
Mall in front of the Culture
Center. Again she experienced both satisfaction and regret
that no one witnessed her
departure.
Actually she
couldn't have asked for a
more dramatic exit. They'd wonder this
evening what had happened. Maybe
someone would know ... someone
always did know even the
most confidential things about
fellow students. She knew that
Valdi would never talk ... not
about his failures, or anyone
else's. They'd not know
from him. And the verdict
of the
examiners would be classified
in the
computer; but someone would 'know'
that Killashandra Ree had
failed her vocal finals, and
what the grounds for the failure
were. In the meantime, she
would have effectively disappeared
and they
could speculate. They'd remember, when
she rose
to prominence
in another
field. Then they'd marvel that nothing
could suppress the excellence in her.
These reflections consoled Killashandra all the
way to
her lodgings. Students rated supported dwellings:
no more
the terrible bohemian semi-filth and overcrowding
of old,
but her
room was hardly palatial.
After she had failed to
re-register at the Music Center, her
landlady would be notified and
the room
locked to her. Subsistence
living was abhorrent to Killashandra : it suggested an
inability to achieve. But she'd
take the initiative on that too.
Therefore leave the room now.
And all
the memories it held.
Also, it
would spoil her mysterious disappearance if she were
to be 'discovered moping in her
digs.' So, with a brief
nod to
the landlady who always
checked comings and goings, Killashandra
ascended to her floor, keyed
open her room and looked
around it. Really nothing
here to take but clothing.
Despite that decision, Killashandra packed the
lute which she had handcrafted to satisfy that requirement
of her
profession. She couldn't bear to play
it but
she also
couldn't abandon it. Clothes in carisak,
lute in case, she left
the key
in the
lock. She nodded to the landlady
just as she always did
and exited.
• Having fulfilled the
dramatic requirement of her assumed
role, she now didn't
have an earthly idea what
to do
with herself. She skipped onto the
fast belt of the pedestrian
way, heading into the center of
the city.
She ought
to register
with a work bureau,
she ought
to apply
for subsistence.
She ought
to do many things but suddenly
Killashandra discovered that 'ought to' no
longer ruled her. No more
tedious commitments to schedule,
to rehearsals,
to lessons,
to study,
to any
of her
so-called friends and associates. She was free, utterly
and completely
free, with a lifetime ahead
of her
that ought to be filled. Ought to? With what?
The walkway was
whipping her rapidly into the
busier commercial stations of the
city. Pedestrian directions flashed at
cross-points: mercantile purple crossed
with social services' orange:
green manufactory and dormitory blue-hatching;
medical green-red stripes and
then airport red and spaceport
star-spangled blue.
Killashandra was
enmeshed by indecision. And while
she toyed with the variety of
things she ought to do,
she was
carried past the crosspoints that would
take her where she ought
to go.
Ought to, again,
she thought.
And stayed on
the speed-way. Half of
Killashandra was amused that she,
once so certain of her goal,
could be so irresolute. It did not, at
that moment, occur to her that
she was
suffering an intense, traumatic shock.
Nor that she was reacting to that shock, first in a somewhat
immature fashion with her abrupt withdrawal from the
abortive sphere of interest; secondly in a mature one, as she divorced herself from the indulgence of self-pity and began
a positive search for an alternative life.
She couldn't know
that Esmond Valdi was concerned
about her, realizing that the girl
would be reacting in some
fashion to the death of her
ambition. She might have thought
more kindly of him had she
known, though he hadn't pursued
her further than her study or
do more
than call to the Personnel
Section to report his
concern for her. He'd taken
the comfortable
conclusion that she was in
some other student's room, having a good cry. Knowing
her dedication
to music,
he'd come to the equally incorrect
assumption that she'd undoubtedly continue in music, accepting
a choral
leadership in due time. That's where
he wanted
her. It simply didn't occur
to him that Killashandra would be
able to discard ten years
of intensive training in
one split
second. He would not have
done so, faced with
her decision.
He'd have been shocked if
he'd known how completely
she was
to reject
all references
to those ten years.
Killashandra was halfway
to the
spaceport before she came to the
decision that that was where
she ought
to go.
'Ought,' this time not
in an
obligatory but in an investigative
sense.
This planet
held nothing but distressing memories for her. She'd leave it and erase
all vestiges
of its
painful associations, domestic and
career. Good thing she had
the lute.
She had
sufficient training credentials to go along as
a casual
entertainer on some liner at
the best,
or as
a crystal
tuner at the worst. She might
as well
travel about a bit to
see what
else she 'ought' to do with
her life
now.
The 'now' both
exacerbated and amused her until
the speedway
slowed to run into the
spaceport terminal. For the first
time since he'd left
Maestro Valdi's studio, Killashandra was aware of externals -
people and things.
Come to
think of it, she'd never
actually been to the starburst-design
spaceport. She'd never been on
any of
the welcoming
committees for off-planet Stellars. A shutde took
off from
its bay, its powerful plasma engines
making the port buildings rumble. There was, however, a
very disconcerting whine that she was
subsonically aware of, feeling it
down the mastoid bone right to
her heel.
She shook
her head.
The whine
intensified - it must have
to do
with the shutde - until
she had
to clamp her hands over her
ears to cut the irritation.
The sonics
abated and she forgot
the incident,
wandering around the immense, bubble-domed reception hall of the
port facility. Consoles were
ranked across the inner wall,
each one labeled with the name
of the
freight or passenger service, each
with its screen plate. Faraway places with strange sounding names: an ancient fragment
of song
obtruded and was suppressed. No more music.
She paused at
a portal
to watch
a shutde
off-loading cargo, the dockmen working with
aircushions to remove odd-sized packages which had traveled by
drone from who-knew-where in the galaxy.
A supercargo
was scurrying
about, checking numbers against
the arm-computer
he wore,
juggling weigh-units and arguing with
the dockees.
He was
a bustiing
portentous man, utterly involved in
his lot
of life.
Killashandra snorted. She'd have
more than such trivia to
occupy her energies. In the process
of inhaling,
she caught
the whiff
of appetising odors not entirely cleansed
from the air.
She was
hungry! Hungry? When her whole life
had been
shattered? How banal! But
the odors
made her salivate. Well, her credit
plate ought to be good
for a
meal. She'd better check the balance
lest she be embarrassed if the plate was
spewed back out in the restaurant
check-desk.
She slapped the
credit plate into one of
the many
public outlets in the reception
hall and was agreeably surprised
to see
that there'd been a credit that
very day. A student credit
she was
forced to notice. Her last
one. The fact that the
total represented a bonus did
not please
her. A bonus
to signalize
the fact
that she could never
be a
soloist?
She walked quickly
to the
nearest restaurant, noticing that it was
not an
economy establishment. The old, dutiful
Killashandra would have backed out
hastily. The new Killashandra entered imperiously.
At this
hour the place was uncrowded
so she
took a booth on the upper
level by the viewplate so
she could
watch the flow of shuttle and
small space craft. She'd never
realized how much traffic passed through
the space
port of her not very
important planet. .She had
heard it was a change-over
point. She ate, with relish and
appetite, of some piscine casserole
purportedly composed of off-world
fish. Exotic but not too
highly spiced for a
student's untutored palate. An off-world
wine included in the
selection pleased her so much
that she ordered a second carafe
just as dusk closed in
on the
planet.
She thought
at first
it was
the unfamiliar
wine that made her nerves jangle so. But the
discomfort increased so rapidly that
it couldn't be the
effect of the alcohol. She
looked around for the source of
irritation, rubbing her neck and
frowning. She shook her head and
then, with the appearance of a descending shutde's retro-blasts, realized that it
must be a sonic disturbance
- though
how it
could penetrate the shielded restaurant
she didn't know. She
had to
cover her ears, pressing as
hard as she could against her
skull, but there seemed to
be no
escape from that piercing ache. When
she thought
she couldn't
bear the agony a second longer,
it ceased.
T tell you, that shutde
drive's about to explode,' a
man's baritone voice cried
in the
ensuing quiet.
Killasandra looked
round, startled.
'How do I
know? I know!' A tall
man was
arguing with the human attendant of
the restaurant
and trying
to get
to the
comunit which the attendant
was covering
with his body. 'Let me speak
to the
control tower. Is everyone deaf
up there?
Let me at the unit, man.
Do you
want a shutde explosion? Are you deaf that you
can't hear it?'
'I heard it,'
Killashandra said, rushing over to
the pair.
Any action might relieve the itch
which had replaced the agony
in her skull.
'You heard
it, miss?'
The attendant
was genuinely
surprised.
'I certainly did.
All but cracked
my skull
wide open. What was it?' she
asked the tall man. He
had an
air of
command about him, frustrated at the
moment by the officiousness of the stupid attendant. He carried his overlean
body with a haughty arrogance
that went with the fine
fabric of his clothes, obviously of an off-world design
and texture.
'She heard
it, too.
Now get
that control tower, man.'
'Really, sir. We
have the most explicit orders
-'
'Don't be
a complete
sub,' Killashandra said insultingly and gestured with operatic imperiousness
at the
console. 'He obviously knows what
he's talking about!'
The fact
that she was obviously a
Fuertan like himself did more to
persuade him than the insult
but he
was still
reluctant until the man,
ripping off an off-world oath
as colorful
as it
was descriptive of bureaucratic
stupidities, flipped open his card case.
Whatever identification he showed made
the attendant's
eyes bug out and his
fingers dash out a call
code on the comunit.
'I'm sorry,
sir. I didn't know, sir.
Here you are, sir.' There
was awe and a
certain amount of fear in
his manner.
The off-worlder
ignored his reaction. 'Control? That shutde
which just landed? It
can't be permitted to take
off. Crystal drive's gone sour. Must
be recut
or you'll
have an - No, this
is not a drunk and this
is not
a threat.
It's a fact. Why that
shutde pilot didn't insist on a
hold, I can't guess, but
he must
be deaf!
Of course I know
what I'm talking about! For
the sake
of whatever gods this mudball worships,
don't send that shutde off again! What do you
want, a drive check or
a blasted
port facility? Is this
shuttlestop of a world too
poor to employ a crystal tuner?'
The console muttered
something back to him but,
like all public facilities, the audio
was shielded
from anyone not in its
direct line.
'Well, now that's
a more
reasonable attitude,' the man said.
'As to my credentials, I'm Carrik
of the
Heptite Guild. Yes, that's what I
said. And I could hear
the crystal
whine right through the walls so
I know
farging well how bad the
drive is.' Another pause.
'Thanks, but I've paid my
bill already. No, that's all right.
Yes ...'
and Killashandra
could see that the gratitude irritated Carrik. 'Oh, as
you will.'
He stepped
back, jerking his head for the
attendant to take his place
at the
unit.
'And make that
for two,'
Carrik said over his shoulder
at the
man, as he cupped
his hands
under Killashandra's elbow and led her
to a
secluded booth.
'I've a bottie
of wine
over there,' she said, half-protesting,
half-laughing at his peremptory
escort.
'You'll have
better shortly. I'm Carrik and
you're ...'
'Killashandra Ree.'
He smiled, gray
eyes lighting briefly with surprise.
'That's a lovely name.'
'Oh, come
now. Surely you can do
better than that?'
He laughed,
absendy blotting the sweat on
his forehead
and upper lip as he slid
into his place.
'I could
and I
will but it still is
a lovely
name. A musical
one. What did I say
wrong?'
'Nothing. Nothing.'
He gave her
a skeptical
look for that insincere disclaimer
just as the attendant came busding up
with a chilled botde, bowing
as he offered it.
Carrik peered at
the label.
'I'd prefer the '72 and
... some
Forellan biscuits, if you
have them? Good,
and Aldebaran
paste? Hmmm.
Well, I'll revise my opinion
of Fuerte.'
'Really, I only just
finished ...' Killashandra began.
'On the contrary,
my dear
Killashandra Ree, you've only just
started.'
'Oh?' Any one
of Killashandra's
former associates would have modified his
attitude at that tone in
her voice.
'Yes,' Carrik continued
blithely, a sparkling challenge in
his eyes, 'for this is a
night for feasting and frolicking
- on
the management, as it
were. Having just saved the
facility from being leveled, my wish
- and
yours - is their command.
They'll be more grateful,' he continued
in a
droller tone, |when they take that
drive down and see the
cracks in the crystals. Off
the true by a hundred vibes
at least.'
Her half-formed intention of making a
dignified exit died and she stared
at Carrik.
It took
a highly
trained ear to have caught that variation in pitch.
'Off a hundred
vibes ...? What do you
mean? Are you a musician?'
Carrik stared at
her as
if she
ought to know who, or
what, he was. He looked to
see where
the attendant
was and
then, leaning indolentiy back in
the seat,
smiled at her in an
enigmatic fashion.
'Yes, I think you'd
say i was a musician. Are
you?'
'Not anymore,' Killashandra
replied in a caustic tone.
Her desire to leave returned with
irresistible intensity. She'd been able for
a very
short time to forget why
she was
at a
spaceport. He'd reminded her
and she
wanted no more such reminders.
His hand,
fingers gripping hard into the
flesh of her arm, held her
in her
seat. The attendant came bursting
back with another chilled botde which
Carrik accepted and gestured him
to pour. Carrik smiled
at Killashandra,
half daring her to contest
his restraint
in front
of the
attendant. Despite herself,
Killashandra discovered she couldn't start a
scene and she'd no real grounds
- yet
- for
a personal-liberty-infringements
charge. He grinned at her, knowing
her dilemma,
and had
the audacity
to give her a
semi-insolent toast as he took
the traditional
sample sip of the
wine.
'Yes, an excellent
vintage. How long must we
wait for the paste and biscuits?'
'A few moments, sir. We're
warming the biscuits. They take
the paste so much
better then.'
'At least
they know how to serve
it properly,'
Carrik told Killashandra in a patronizingly
blasé tone.
The attendant
who would
have screamed insult at any
other time bowed and smiled at
Carrik and scurried away for
the delicacies.
'How do
you get
away with that?' Killashandra asked Carrik.
He smiled.
'Try the wine, Killashandra.' And his smile suggested
that this was going to
be a
long evening and the prelude
to an intimate association.
In protest
Killashandra stood up, but she
sat down
again immediately, very hard,
an action
imposed on her by Carrik
whose eyes glittered with
anger and amusement.
'Who are
you?' she demanded, angry now.
'I'm Carrik
of the
Heptite Guild,' he repeated cryptically.
'And that gives
you the
right to infringe on my
personal freedom?'
'It does
if you
heard that crystal whine.' 'How do you construe that?'
'Try the wine
first, Killashandra Ree. Surely your
throat must be dry and I
imagine you've got a skull
ache from that subsonic torture. That
would account for your shrewish
temper.'
Actually she
did have
a pain
in her
head. The sudden reseating had made that obvious.
He was
right about her dry throat ... and about her
shrewish temper. But he'd modified
that criticism by stroking
her hand
caressingly.
'I must apologize
for my
bad manners,'
he said
without genuine remorse but
with a charming smile. 'That
crystal whine is so unnerving. It brings out the
worst in us.'
She nodded as
she sipped
the wine.
It was
fantastic. She looked at him with
delight and pleasure. He patted
her arm
again and gestured her
to drink
more.
'Who are
you, Carrik of the Heptite
Guild, that port authorities listen and control towers
order exorbitant delicacies in gratitude?'
'You don't
really know?'
T wouldn't
ask if
I did
know,' she said with a
show of her characteristic acerbity.
'Where have
you been
all your
life that you've never heard
of the Heptite Guild?'
'I've been studying
music in Fuerte,' she said,
spitting out the words.
'You wouldn't, by
any chance,
have perfect pitch?' The
question, both unexpected and too casually said,
caught her halfway into a foul
temper.
'Yes, I do but
I don't-'
His face which
was not
unattractive in its most supercilious
expressions became almost radiant
with unfeigned elation.
'What fantastic
luck! I shall have to
tip the
agent who ticketed me here! Why
this is unbelievable luck ...'
'Luck? If you
knew why I was here-'
'I don't
care why. You are and I am.' He
took both her hands and seemed
to devour
her face
with his eyes, grinning with
such intense joy she found herself
embarrassingly smiling back.
'Oh, luck indeed,
my dear
girl. Fate, destiny, Karma, Lequol,
Fidalkoram, whatever you care
to call
this coincidence of our life lines,
I ought
to order
botties of this wine for
that lousy shutde pilot for letting
his crystals
sour.'
T don't know what
you're ranting about, Carrik of
Heptite,' Killashandra said, but
she was
not impervious
to the
compliments or the charm he
exuded. She knew that she
tended to put men off by
her self-assurance
and here
was a
well-traveled off-worlder, a man
of obvious
rank and position, genuinely taken with her, however inexplicably.
'You don't?' He
teased her for the banality
of her
protest and she closed her mouth
on the
rest of her customary rebuff.
'Seriously,' he went on,
stroking the palms of her
hands with his fingers as if
to soothe
the anger
from her, 'have you never
heard of crystal singers?'
'Crystal singers? Crystal tuners, yes.'
He dismissed
tuners with a contemptuous flick of his fingers.
'Imagine singing a note,
a pure
clear C, and hearing it
answered across an entire
mountain range?'
She stared
at him.
'Go up
a third,
or down,
it makes
no difference.
Sing out and hear the harmony
come back at you. A
whole mountainside pitched to
C, and
another sheer wall of pink
quartz echoing back in a dominant.
Night brings out the minors,
like an ache in your breast,
the most
beautiful pain in the world
because the music of the crystal
is in
your bones, in your blood
...'
'You're mad!' Killashandra
dug her
fingers into his hands to shut
off those
words. They conjured too many
painful associations. She simply had
to forget
all that.
'I hate
music. I hate anything to do
with music'
He regarded her
with disbelief for a moment
and then,
with an unexpected tenderness and concern
reflected in his eyes, he
put an arm around her shoulders
and drew
himself against her despite her resistance.
'My dear
girl, what happened to you
today?'
A moment before
she would
have swallowed glass shards rather than confide in anyone
but the
warmth in his voice, his
solicitude, were so timely
and unexpected
that the whole of her
personal disaster came tumbling
out. He listened to every
word, occasionally squeezing her
hand with sympathetic understanding. But at the end
of the
recital, she was amazed to
see the
fullness in his eyes
as tears
threatened to embarrass her.
'My dear Killashandra,
what can I say? There's
no possible
consolation for such a
personal catastrophe as that! And
there you were,' and his eyes
were brilliant with what Killashandra
chose to interpret as
admiration, 'having a botde of
wine as coolly as a queen.
Or,' and he leaned over
her, grinning maliciously, 'were you
just gathering enough courage to
step under a shutde?' He kept
hold of her when she
tried to free herself at his outrageous suggestion. 'No, I can see
that suicide was furthest from your mind.' She subsided
at that
implicit compliment. 'Although,'
and his
expression altered thoughtfully, 'you
might have inadvertently succeeded if
that shutde'd been allowed to take
off again.
If I
hadn't been here to stop
it ...'
He flashed her that charmingly
reprehensible smile of his.
'You're full
of yourself,
aren't you?' But her accusation
was said in jest for she
found his autocratic manner an
irresistible contrast to anyone
of her
previous acquaintance.
He grinned
unrepentantly and nodded towards the
remains of their exotic snack, which
the attendant
had obsequiously
deposited on the table
at some
point during Killashandra's tale.
'Not without
justification, dear girl.
But look,
you're free of any commitments right now, aren't you?'
he asked,
eagerly. When she hesitantiy nodded, 'Or
is there
a friend
you've been seeing?' He asked that
almost savagely, as if he'd
eliminate any rival immediately.
Later Killashandra
might remember how adroidy Carrik
had handled her, preying on her
unsetded state of mind, on
her essential femininity, but that tinge
of jealousy
was highly
complimentary and the
eagerness in his eyes, in
his hands,
was not
feigned.
'No one
to matter
or miss
me.'
Carrik looked
so skeptical
that she reminded him that
she'd devoted all her energies to
singing.
'Surely not
all?' He
mocked her for such dedication.
'No one
to matter,'
she repeated
firmly.
'Then I will
make an honest invitation to you. I'm off-world
on holiday. I don't
have to be back to
the Guild
till ... well,' and he gave
a nonchalant
shrug, 'when I wish. I've
all the
credits I need ...
Help me spend them. It'll
purge the music school from your
system.'
She looked
at him
squarely, for their acquaintanceship was of so brief and
hectic a duration
she simply
hadn't thought of him as a
possible companion. She didn't quite
trust him. She was both attracted
and repelled
by his
domineering, highhanded ways and yet
he presented
a challenge
to her.
He was
certainly the diametric opposite
of the
young men she'd encountered on Fuerte.
'We don't
have to stay on this
mudball either.'
'Why did
you come?'
He laughed. 'I'm
told I haven't been on
Fuerte before. I can't say it
lives up to it's name -
or maybe
you'll live up to the
name for it? Oh
come now, Killashandra,' he said
when she bridled. 'Surely you've been
jollied before? Or have music
students changed so much
since my day?'
'You studied
music?'
An odd shadow
flickered through his eyes. 'Probably. I don't rightiy remember. Another time,
another life perhaps.' Then his charming
smile deepened, and a warmth came into his
expression that she found rather
unsettiing. 'Tell me, what's on
this planet that's fun
to do?'
Killashandra considered for a moment and
then blinked. 'You know, I haven't
an earthly.'
'Then we'll
find out together!'
What with
the wine,
his cajoling
importunities, her own
recklessness, Killashandra could not withstand his
invitation. She ought to do so
many things, she knew, but
'ought' got suspended someplace during
the third
botde of that classic vintage.
After spending the rest
of the
night in his arms in
the most
expensive accommodation of the
spaceport hostelry, Killashandra
decided that she'd suspend duty
for a
few days
and be
kind to the charming
visitor.
The travel
console popped out dozens of
cards on the resort possibilities of Fuerte,
more than she'd ever suspected
the planet boasted. But then her
means had been limited and
so had her time. She'd never
water-skiied so Carrik decided they'd
both try that. He
ordered a private skimmer to
be ready
within the hour. As he sang
cheerily at the top of
a dammed
good bass voice, floundering
in the
elegant sunken bathtub of the
suite, Killashandra recalled some
vestige of self-preserving shrewdness and tapped out a
few discreet
inquiries on the console.
'"Crystal singer"
- colloquial/universal
euphemism for the members of the
Heptite Guild, planet-based Ballybran, Regulus System, A-S-F/128/4. Ballybran crystals, vital to
the production
of coherent
light, and as modules in
tachyon drive components, are limited
to the
quartz mountains of Ballybran.' She skimmed the intricate geological
assay. 'The cutting of Ballybran
crystal is a highly skilled
art and
requires the inherent ability of perfect
pitch. Crystal cutters are perforce
members of the Heptite Guild which
trains and maintains its applicants,
exacting ten percent tithe
from all working members. The
current membership of the Guild
is 425
but fluctuates
considerably. Aspirants are advised
that this profession is rated
"highly dangerous" and the Heptite
Guild is required to give
full particulars of the dangers
involved before contracting new members.'
Four hundred
and twenty-five
was an
absurdly small membership for a
universal Guild supplying an element
essential to galactic intercourse,
Killashandra thought. Most guilds ran
to four hundred million on a
universal basis. But that explained
why Carrik had been
insistent to know if she'd
perfect pitch. 'Full particulars
of the
dangers involved' didn't dissuade Killashandra
one iota.
Danger was relative.
There was
more to the print out,
mainly about the type of
crystal cut, the types
of subsonic
cutters especially developed to slice the
living quartz from the mountains,
technical information which was beyond
Killashandra's musically oriented
education. She aborted the rest
of that
tape and asked for a
check on Heptite Guildman Carrik. Anyone
could pose as a member
of a Guild - chancers often
produced exquisitely forged documentation but a computer check
could not be forged. She
got the affirmation that Carrik was
a member
in good
standing of the Heptite Guild, currentiy
on leave
of absence,
and a
repro of Carrik rolled out of
the console,
dated a scant five days
before. Well, he was who
he said
he was,
and doing
what he said he was doing.
His being
a bona
fide Guild member was a
safeguard for her so she
could relax in his offer
of an
honest invitation to share
his holiday.
He'd not leave her to
pay the
charges if he decided
to skip
off-world unexpectedly. She smiled
to herself,
stretching sensuously. Carrik thought himself lucky, did he? Well,
so did
she. The
last vestige of 'ought' was the fleeting thought that she 'ought
to' register
herself with the Fuertan Central Computer
as a
transient but, as she was
by no
means obligated to do
so as
long as she didn't require
subsistence, she did nothing.
At that moment
several of her classmates began to experience some twinges of anxiety
for her.
Everyone knew Killashandra must have
been terribly upset by the
examiners' verdict. While it served her
right, in some opinions, for
being such an overbearing conceited grind,
the kinder
of heart
felt oddly disquieted about her disappearance.
So did
Maestro Esmond Valdi.
They propably wouldn't
have recognized Killashandra
sluicing about on waterskis on
the southern
waters of the western continent, or swathed in elegant
clothes, escorted by a tall
distinguished man to
whom the most supercilious hoteliers deferred.
It was
a glorious
feeling for Killashandra to have
unlimited funds. Carrik encouraged
her to
spend and practice permitted her to suspend what few
scruples remained to her from
years of barely getting by on
student credits. She did have
the grace
to protest his extravagance
at the
outset.
'Not to
worry, pet, I've got it
to spend,'
Carrik reassured her. 'I made a
killing in dominant thirds in
the Blue
Range about the time some idiot
revolutionists blew half
a planet's
reactors out of existence.'
He paused,
his eyes
narrowed as he recalled something not
quite pleasant. 'I was lucky
on shape,
too. It's not enough,
you see,
to catch
the resonances
when you're cutting. You've got to
chance what shape to cut
and that's where you're made or
broken as a crystal singer.
You've got to remember political scenes.
Like that revolution on Hardesty.' He pounded the table
in emphasis,
obtusely pleased with that memory. T
did remember
that all right when it
mattered.'
T don't understand.'
He gave
her a
quick look. 'Not to worry,
pet.' His standard
evasive phrase. 'Come give
me a
kiss and get the crystal
out of my blood.'
There was nothing
crystalline about his
love-making nor the enjoyment
he got
out of
her body,
so Killashandra
elected to forget how often he
avoided answering her questions about
crystal singing. At first
she felt
that, well, the man was
on holiday
and wouldn't
want to talk about his
work. Then she had the feeling
that he resented her questions
as if
they were distasteful to him
and that
he wanted,
above all other things, to
forget crystal singing. That
didn't forward her ends but
Carrik was not a malleable adolescent,
imploring her grace and favor.
So she helped him forget crystal
singing.
Which, in the
pursuit of the pleasure of
herself and Fuerte, he was patentiy
able to do until the
night he awakened her with
his groans and writhings.
'Carrik, what's
the matter?
Those shell fish from dinner?
Shall I get the
medic?'
'No, no!' He
twisted about frantically and caught
her hand
from the comunit. 'Don't
leave me. It'll pass.'
She held
him in
her arms
as he
cried out, clenching his teeth
against an internal agony.
Sweat oozed from his pores
and yet
he steadfasdy refused to
let her
get competent
help. The spasms racked him for
almost an hour before they
passed, leaving him spent and weak
in her
arms. Somehow, in that hour,
she realized
how much
he had
come to mean to her,
how much
fun he
was to be with, how much
she had
missed by denying herself any such intimate relationships before.
After he'd
slept, she ventured to ask
what had possessed him.
'Crystal, my girl, crystal.' His
manner, terse to sullen, and
the haggard expression on his face
- he
suddenly looked very old - made
her drop
the subject.
He was himself
... almost
... by
the afternoon.
But some
of his spontaneity of spirit was
missing. He seemed to go
through the motions of
enjoying himself, of egging her
on to
more daring exercises on
the waterskis while he only splashed
in the shallows.
They were finishing
a leisurely
meal at their favorite seaside
restaurant when he broke the
news that he must return
to work.
T can't say
"so soon?"' Killashandra
said with a light laugh.
'But isn't the decision
sudden?'
He gave her
an odd
smile. 'Yes, but most of
my decisions
are, aren't they? Like showing
you another
side of fusty fogey Fuerte.'
'And now
our idyll
is over?'
She tried
to sound
nonchalant but an edge
crept into her voice.
'I must
return to Ballybran. Ha, that
sounds like one of those fisherfolk
songs, doesn't it?' He hummed
a banal
tune, the melody so predictable she could join in
firm harmony.
'We do
make beautiful music together,' he said, his eyes
mocking her. 'I suppose
you'll go back to music
now.'
'Doing what?'
she asked.
'Lead soprano for the chorus
of some annotated, orchestrated
grunts and groans by Fififididi-pidi
of the
planet Grnch?'
'You could
tune crystals. They obviously need
a competent
one at your spaceport'
She made
a rude
noise in her throat and
looked at him ex-pectandy.
He smiled back,
turning his head politely awaiting
her verbal
answer.
'Or,' she
said in a drawl, watching
him obliquely,
'I could apply to the Heptite Guild
as a
crystal singer.'
His expression
went blank. 'You don't want
to be
a crystal
singer.'
'How do you
know what I want?' She
flared up in spite of
herself, in spite of
a gnawing
uncertainty about his feelihgs for
her. She might be
fine to loll about on
a sandy
beach, but as a constant companion in a dangerous
profession?
He smiled
sadly. 'You don't want to
be a
crystal singer.'
'Oh, fardles
with that nonsense in the
print out!'
'They mean
what they say.'
'Then if
I've perfect pitch, I can
apply.'
'You don't know
what you're getting in for.'
He said
that in a flat, toneless voice,
his expression
at once
wary and forbidding. 'Singing crystal
is a
terrible, lonely life. You can't
always find someone to sing with
you, the tones don't always
strike the right vibes for the
crystals. You do make terrific
cuts singing duo.' He seemed
to vacillate.
'How do you find
out?'
He gave
an unamused
snort. 'The hard
way, of course. But you don't
want to be a crystal
singer.'
There was
an almost
frightening sadness in his voice.
'Once you sing crystal, you don't
stop. That's why I urge
you not
to consider it.'
'So you've
urged me not to consider
it.'
He caught her
hand. 'You've never been in
a mach
storm in the Milekeys,' he said,
his voice
rough with remembered anxiety.
'They blow up out of
nowhere,' he gestured vigorously, 'and crash down on you
like all hell let loose.'
She felt
the tremor through his body into
her hand.
'That's what that phrase means, "the Guild maintains its
own." A mach storm can reduce
a man
to a
vegetable in one sonic crescendo.'
'There are other
- albeit
less violent - ways of
reducing a man to a vegetable,'
she said,
thinking of the attendant in
the restaurant, of the
busding supercargo worrying over drone-pod
weights, of teachers apathetically
reviewing the scales of novice
students. 'Surely there are
instruments that warn you of
approaching storms, even mach ones
in a
crystal range.'
He nodded.
'But you get to cutting
crystal, and you're halfway through,
you know
the pitches
will be changed once the
storm has passed and
you're cutting your safety margin
fine but that last crystal might
mean you get off-world ...'
'You don't
get off-world
with every trip to the
ranges?'
He shook
his head.
'You don't always clear the
costs of the trip, particularly if you cut the
wrong shape or tone.'
'As you
said, you have to pay
attention to the news and
outguess what'll be needed.' She
was serenely
confident that she could master that
facet of the new profession.
'You have
to remember the news,'
he said,
oddly emphasizing the change of
verb.
Killashandra was contemptuous
of such
a lapse.
Memory was only a matter of
habit, of training, of handy
mnemonic phrases which easily
triggered vital information.
'You wouldn't
by any
chance let me go back
to Ballybran
with you to see
if I
can join
that chorus?'
His hand
on hers,
his body,
even his breath, seemed to
halt for a moment. 'You asked.
Remember that!'
'Well, if
my company
is so
-'
'Kiss me and
don't say anything you'll regret,'
he said,
abrupdy pulling her with
rough urgency into his arms
and kissing
her so
thoroughly she couldn't speak.
The second convulsion
caught him so soon after
the climax
of their love-making that she thought, guiltdy,
that overstimulation was the cause.
The spasms
were even more severe and
he dropped into an exhausted sleep
when they finally eased.
He looked
old and
drawn when he woke some
fourteen hours later. And
he moved
like an advanced geriatric case.
'I've got
to get
back to Ballybran, Killa.'
'For treatment?'
He hesitated
and then
nodded. 'Get the spaceport on
the comunit and book us.' 'Us?'
'You may come
with me,' he said, nodding,
though she was piqued at the
phrasing and the invitation was more plea than
permission. 'I don't care
how often
we have
to reroute.
Get us
there as fast as
possible.'
She got
the spaceport
and routing,
and, after what seemed an
age and considerable ineptitude on the part
of the
ticketing clerk, they were
confirmed passengers on a shutde
flight leaving Fuerte in four
hours, with a four hour
satellite wait before the first liner
due to
relay in their direction.
There were a
good deal of oddments to
pack and Killashandra was for
just walking out and leaving
everything.
'You don't get
such goods on Ballybran, Killa,' Carrik told her, and
began, slowly, to fold the
bright gaudy shirts of a
pounded tree fibre. The
stimulus of confirmed passage had
given him a surge
of energy.
But Killashandra
had been
rather unnerved by the
transformation of a
charming, vital, if domineering man, into
a frail
shadow. 'Sometimes, something as flimsy as
a shirt
helps you remember so much.'
She was
touched by the sentiment, and vowed to be
kinder to him.
'There are
hazards to every profession. And the hazards to
crystal singing-'
'It depends on
what you're willing to consider
a hazard,'
Killashandra replied, soothingly. She was glad to
take along the filmy wraparounds in luminous dyes. They
were a far cry from coarse
durable student issue. Any hazard
seemed a fair price for these
bouts of high living. And only
four hundred twenty-five in the Guild.
'Do you
really understand what you'd be
giving up, Killashandra?' His voice
had a
guilty edge.
She looked
at his
lined, aging face and did
experience a twinge of honest apprehension. Anyone would
look appalling after the convulsions which had racked him.
She didn't
much care for Carrik in a
philosophical vein and hoped he
wasn't so dreary all the time
back on Ballybran. Was that
what he meant? A man on
holiday was often a different
personality to a man at
work?
'What have I
to look
forward to on Fuerte?' She
asked with a shrug of
her shoulders.
She wouldn't
necessarily have to team up with
Carrik once she got to
Ballybran. 'I'd rather take a
chance no matter what
it entails
in preference
to dragging
about on Fuerte!'
He stroked
her palm
with his thumb and, for
the first
time, the caress didn't send thrills
up her
spine but then, he was
scarcely in a condition
to make
love and the gesture reflected
that.
'You've only
seen the glamorous side of
crystal singing ...'
'You've told
me of
the dangers,
Carrik, as you're supposed to. The decision is mine.
And I'm
holding you to it.'
He gripped
her hand
tighdy and there was a
sort of gladness in his eyes
that reassured her more thoroughly
than any glib phrase.
'It's also
one of
the smallest
Guilds in the world,' she
went on, freeing her hand to
finish packing the last bits.
'I prefer
those odds.'
He raised his
eyebrows, giving her a sardonic
look more like the old Carrik.
'A two-cell in
a one-cell
pond?'
'If you please. I won't be
second-rate anything.'
'A dead
hero in preference to a
live coward?' He taunted her.
'If you prefer. There! That's all
our clothes.
We'd better skim back to the
spaceport. I've got to check
with planetary regulations if
I'm going
off-world. I might even have
some credit left'
She did the
flying back as Carrik dozed
in the
passenger seat. The rest did him
some good, or he was
mindful of his public image. Either way, Killashandra's doubts about him as
a partner
faded as he began ordering
the port
officials about imperiously, badgering the
routing agent to be certain
the man
hadn't overlooked a more
direct flight, or a more
advantageous connection.
Killashandra left him
to it
and began
to clear
her own
records with Fuerte Central.
The moment
she placed
her credit
card in the plate,.the console
began to chatter wildly. She
was starded. She'd programmed a credit
check and the information that she was going off-world
and wanted
to know
what immunization shots would comply
with the worlds they'd touch.
But the supervisor came leaping down the
ramp from his desk, all boredom
erased from his flushed face,
and two
port officials converged on
her. The exits of the
reception hall flashed warning red as
holdlocks were applied to the
consternation of people
trying to enter and leave.
Killashandra was too stunned to move
and stared
at the
men who
charged up to her.
'Killashandra Ree?'
asked the supervisor, panting.
'Yes?'
'You are
to be
detained.*
'Why?' Now
she was
angry. She could conceive of
no crime
she'd committed, no infringement
on anyone's
liberties. Nonregistration was no offense
so long
as she
didn't use planetary resources
without credit.
'Please come
with us,' the port officials
said in chorus.
'Why?'
'Ah, bmm,'
muttered the supervisor as both
officials turned to him. 'There's hold out
for you.' 'I've done
nothing wrong.'
'Here, what's
going on?' Carrik was indeed
his old
self as he pushed through to
place a protesting arm around
Killashandra. 'This young
lady is under my protection.'
At which
the supervisor
and the
officials looked suddenly stern and determined.
'The young lady
is under
the protecti
m of her
planet of origin,' said the supervisor
in a
stuffy tone. 'There is some
doubt as to her
mental health.'
'What? Because she accepted an
honest invitation from a visitor? Do you know who
I am?'
The man flushed.
'Indeed I do, sir,' and
he was
considerably more respectful suddenly.
'Well then,
take my assurances that Miss
Ree is
in excellent
mental health.'
The supervisor
was adamant.
'Please come this way.'
There was
nothing for it but to
comply, although Carrik reminded their
escorts that they'd booked a
shutde flight due to lift off
in one
hour and he had every
intention of keeping that schedule - and with Killashandra
Ree. She got the distinct
impression that this ambition might
be thwarted
and rather
than give rise to any speculation
about her mental health, she
remained uncharacteristically quiet.
T know,' she said
sotto voce to Carrik
as they
waited in the small office. 'The
Music School may've thought me
suicidal.' She giggled and
suppressed it behind her hand
when the supervisor glanced up
at her
nervously. 'I did just walk
out of
the Center and my digs, and
I saw
no one
on my
way here.
So they
did miss me! Well,
that's gratifying.' She was inordinately
pleased but Carrik wasn't.
She'd only to reassure the
authorities and she was certain
she could.
'I think
it's rather complimentary, actually. I'm
going to leave Fuerte dramatically
after all.'
Carrik snorted
but the
wait plainly irritated him.
Killashandra half
expected to see her father
though she couldn't have imagined him
bestirring himself on her behalf.
She didn't expect Maestro
Esmond Valdi to enter, acting
the outraged parent. Nor was she
prepared for the attack he
immediately launched on Carrik.
'You! You! I know what you
are! A silicate
spider paralyzing its prey, a
crystal cuckoo taking the promising
fledglings from their maternal
nest.'
As stunned
as everyone
else was at the almost
physical attack on the Heptite
Guildman, Killashandra stared at the
usually dignified and imperturbable
Maestro and wondered what operatic role
he was
playing. He had to be.
His dialogue
was so ... so extravagant. 'Silicate spider.'
'Crystal cuckoo.' And he had the
analogy wrong anyhow.
'Play on the
emotions of a young, innocent
girl. Shower her with unaccustomed luxuries and pervert her
until she's spoiled as a decent
contributing citizen. Until she's so
besotted she has to go to
that den of addled brains
and sonic-soured
nerves!'
Carrik made no
attempt to divert the flow
of vituperation
or counter the accusations. He stood,
head up, smiling tolerantiy down at the stalky figure
of Valdi.
'What lies has
he been
feeding you about crystal singing?
What extravagant tales has
he used
to lure
you there?'
Valdi whirled to Killashandra.
'I asked
to go.'
Valdi's wild
expression hardened into disbelief at
her calm
reply.
'You asked to go?'
'Yes. He
didn't ask me.' Killashandra saw Carrik smile with
relief.
'You heard
her, Valdi,' Carrik said and
glanced at the officials taking in
that admission.
The Maestro's shoulders
sagged. 'He's done his recruiting
work well,' he said
in a
defeated tone, even managing an
effective slight break in his
voice.
T don't think so,' Killashandra
said.
Maestro Valdi
took a breath, obviously going
to make
one last final attempt to dissuade
the poor
misguided girl. 'Did he tell you
about the mach storms?'
She nodded.
'That scramble your
brains and reduce you to
a vegetable?'
She nodded dutifully.
'Did he fill
your mind with a lot
of garbage
about mountains giving back symphonies of sound? Crystalline choruses? Valleys that
echo arpeggios?'
'No,' she
replied in an acid tone,
bored with the scene. 'And
he also didn't feed
me pap
that all I needed was
hard work and time.'
Esmond Valdi drew
himself up, more than ever
an exaggeration
of a
classical operatic pose.
'Did he
tell you that once you
start cutting crystal you can
never stop? And too
long away from Ballybran produces
convulsions?'
'I know
that'
'That something in
the water,
the soil,
the crystals affects
your mind? You don't
remember anything?'
'That could
be an
advantage,' Killashandra replied, staring at the little man until
he had
to drop
his glance.
She felt it
first of the three, an
itch behind her ears in
the mastoid bone, an itch that
rapidly became a wrenching nauseating
pain. She grabbed Carrik by
the arm
just as the subsonic noise touched him. As Esmond Valdi
lifted protecting hands to his ears.
'The fools!' cried
Carrik, panic in his face
and voice.
He threw aside the door panel,
running as fast as he
could toward the control tower, Killashandra
behind him. Anything
to shut
off that agonizing pain
in her
skull.
Carrik vaulted
the decorative
barrier into the restricted area, to be stopped by
the force
curtain.
'Stop it!
Stop it!' he screamed, rocking
in anguish.
The pain
was no
less supportable for Killashandra but she'd presence enough of
mind left to bang on
the nearest
comunit, to strike the fire buttons,
press the emergency signals.
'The shutde
coming in ... the crystals
are defective
... it's
going to blow,' she
yelled at the top of
operatically trained lungs. She was barely
conscious of the panic in
the vast
reception hall resulting from her
all too
audible warning.
But the wild
stampede of an
hysterical mob was evident to the control tower personnel
and automatically
someone slapped on the
abort signal to all incoming
and outgoing
shutties and craft. Moments
later, while the comunit was
demanding an explanation from Killashandra,
from anyone who could make themselves
heard over the bedlam in
the reception
area, a fireball blossomed
in the
sky, raining hot molten fragments
on the
spaceport below. The exploding shuttle
spewed bits and pieces over a
radius of several kilometers, several larger hunks burned craters in
the heavy
plastic dome of the port facility.
Had the
shutde exploded any closer, the
damage would have been disastrous.
Apart from bumps,
bruises, lacerations and a broken
arm sustained in the crush to
leave the hall, there were
only two serious casualties.
The shutde
pdot was dead and Carrik
would have been better off so.
The final
sonic blast knocked him out
and he never did recover his
senses with consciousness. After consultation with the Heptite Guild
medics it was decided to
return him to Ballybran
for treatment
and care.
'He won't
recover,' the medic told Killashandra
and Maestro
Valdi who instantiy assumed
the role
of her
comforter. His manner provided Killashandra with a fine counter-irritant
to her shock over Carrik's state.
She chose
to disbelieve
the medic
for surely
they could restore Carrik to mental
health on Ballybran. It was
just that he'd been away from
crystal too long: that he
was weakened
by the seizures. There'd been no
mach storm to scramble bis
mind. She'd escort him
back to Ballybran. She owed
him that
in any reckoning for teaching her
how to
live, fully, not vicariously as she'd been doing
rehearsing opera roles of by-gone
griefs and antedated conflicts.
She took
a good
long look at the posturing
Valdi and thanked her luck that
Carrick had removed the scales
from her eyes. How could she
have believed such an artificial
life as the theatre was suitable?
Just look at Valdi! Present
him with
a situation, hand him a cue
and he
was on
in the
appropriate role. None existed
for these
circumstances but Valdi was struggling to find one to
suit.
'What will you
do now,
Killashandra?' he asked
in sepulchral
tones, obviously settiing for
Dignified Elder Gentieman Consoling the Innocent Bereaved.
'I'll take
him to
Ballybran, of course.'
Valdi nodded
solemnly. 'I mean, when you
return from Ballybran.'
'I don't
intend to return.'
Valdi stared, dropping
out of
character, and then gestured theatrically as the
aircushion stretcher on which Carrick
was strapped drifted past them to
the shuttie
gate.
'After that?' Valdi
cried, full of dramatic plight.
'That won't
happen to me,' she said
confidentiy.
'But it could!
And you,
too, could be reduced to
a thing
with no mind, no
memories, unalterably scrambled brains.'
'I think,'
Killashandra said slowly, regarding the
mannered little man with
thinly veiled contempt, 'that everyone's
brains get scrambled some way or
other.'
'You'll rue
this day -' began Valdi,
raising his left arm in
a classical rejection gesture, fingers gracefully
spread.
'That is,
if I
remember it!' she
said and her mocking laugh
cut him off mid-scene.
Still laughing,
Killashandra made her exit, stage
center, through the passenger
shuttie door.
Gene
Wolfe THE DARK
OF THE
JUNE
Untouched by any
change of the last twenty-five
years, the Nailer living room continued
to reflect
(like a lost photograph unexpectedly found between
the pages
of a
book) the tastes of Henry's late
wife, May Nailer. These tastes
had been
simple but not good, and save
for Henry's
old trophies
and some
tattered physics books,
it was
just such a room as
May might
have seen in a newspaper the
day she
ordered the furniture. To this
unpromising setting Henry had
added little over the years
-though he had collaborated with May, the year
after the room was set up,
to produce
their daughter June. Except for
June and her clothing the nineteen-nineties
were not so
much excluded as denied.
On this spring
evening, June wore a soft
gown without visible hem or seam,
a gown
that fell to her ankles
and left
her right
breast bare. On her
right wrist was a bracelet
of glo-lite
bangles and in her right ear
a dangling
glo-lite earring. The nails of
her left hand were red, and
those of her right black;
her dramatic
lashes were her own
now, surgically implanted and gracefully
long; she was a
beautiful girl, Henry thought, although
somewhat too slender to look
her best
in the
current fashions. 'They're here,'
she said,
and he
nodded, pretending he had not
been looking at her.
'They really
are here,'
his daughter
continued as though he had denied
it. 'A
translucent thing like a scarf
came out of the bedroom and went into the
kitchen a moment ago.'
'I didn't
notice,' he said.
'We're living in
a haunted
world, Daddy, and it ought
to bother you - I know
you, and you're a thoroughgoing
materialist whose whole cast of
mind was formed before any
of this
started - but you
hardly seem to care.'
'They're not dead,'
her father
said. He was a broad-shouldered,
placid man who wore a
black patch over the socket
of an eye lost years before
in a
motorcycle accident; his curly, almost-full beard was going gray.
"They're just people.' He went
back to his book.
At midnight
the lights
flickered, a sign that the
rates had doubled; Henry waved a
hand at Bellini's Portrait of the Doge Loredano above the
fireplace; they went out leaving
only the night-light gleam of the
bank nearest the stair. He
used an old leather bookmark imprinted
with an unconvincing dragon to
record the fact that
he had
abandoned An Incident at Kreche-tovka Station before it
had had
time to make steam, and
went up to bed. There was
a note
on his
pillow, and he called the
police.
'She's over
eighteen?'
Henry nodded.
'Then there's
nothing we can do.'
'You could
stop her,' Henry said. 'You
could book her, if that were
necessary, on some minor charge,
give me time to talk to
her, give her time to
think.'
'I could give
the city
manager a jaywalking ticket too,'
the computer-generated police surrogate
said. Henry's old 3V made
him sallow and a
trifle unreal, even projecting into the darkened room. 'But I'm not going
to.'
A nothing
went past, a luminous wisp
that might have been steam from a coffee pot
if steam
were faintiy blue. 'Look at
that,' Henry said, 'that
might have been her.' He
felt as if he were about
to weep,
but no
tears came, only a greater
and greater ache in his chest.
'I didn't
see it,'
the police
surrogate said, 'but anyway it
couldn't have been that
quick. How old did you
say she
was?'
'Twenty-three. Junie's twenty-three, I think.'
'Then it couldn't
be anywhere
near that quick; the older
they are the longer it takes,
and they
flash in and out and
fade -that's why they won't
accept anybody over thirty. Did
you call
the center?'
Henry looked
at him
blankly.
'Didn't you
call the center yet? Call
them.'
'I didn't think
they'd cooperate - they want
people to come, don't they?'
'They got
to tell
you for
legal purposes - everybody leaves
an estate, you know
what I mean? I mean
she can't
take it with her. Even if it's
just clothes. Turn on your
recorder and tell them it's an
official request - they'll tell
you.'
Henry said,
'It's not as though they're
dead.' 'Not to them it ain't.'
The police
surrogate switched off. Henry coded the
center; the girl who answered
said, 'Who is it?'
'My name
is Henry
Boyce Nailer-' 'I mean who're you looking for? Man or
woman?' 'A woman.' Henry cleared
his throat.
'Her name is June Nailer, and she's my daughter.'
The girl
flipped through a register on
her desk.
'Recent?' 'Tonight.'
'She hasn't
been here. Now don't you
come down trying to make trouble;
we won't
even let you in the
budding.'
Outside the air
was soft
with the feeling of new
growth, the crickets were singing in
the grass.
He took
off the
suitcoat he had put on from
force of habit and carried
it over
his shoulder
as he strode toward the station;
twice black things passed over
the broad face of
the moon
as he
walked: one was a whippoor-will;
the other
a nin
- one
of them.
The nin
was like
a flying
flag, Henry thought, a
fluttering banner, this last bit
of someone
who would
soon - in a few
months or years - be
totally not in nature, the dark
flag of a vessel putting
out for
all the
wonders of the night
sky. He paid his tokens
to the
gate and stepped onto the starter
belt, then across it to
the speedup
belt, and then onto
the fast
belt. Even there at a
steady speed of forty kilometers an hour the wind
was not
cold, but his coat whipped behind
him; he was afraid his
checkbook would fall out and put
the coat
on. There
were boxes ahead of him, and
the boxman
came back to ask if
he wanted
to rent
one.
T guess
you're surprised I'm still open
this late, right, pal? I mean when it
ain't raining or nothing. Well,
when I said did you wanna
rent a box that was
just what I meant -
I got
a girl in one, you get
me? A nice
girl. Young. Young. You looking for a
girl, bud?'
'Yes' Henry said,
'but not your kind of
girl.' He discovered that he was
happy to have someone to
talk to, even the box-man.
'I'd show her
to you,'
the boxman
said, 'but she's taking a
litde nappy-poo in there
between tricks. Listen, if you
got any
interest I'll wake her
up and
show her to you anyhow.'
Henry told him to let his
girl sleep and got off
in the
downtown mall three kilometers down the
belt. He had felt an
irrational desire, though he would hardly
admit it to himself, to
see the
trans-tart - to order her
led yawning
out of
her box
(they were officially called rental-mobile weather shelters, and the
boxman paid an annual fee for
the privilege
of putting
each aboard the belts), her makeup
smeared with sleep, and the
inevitable pink-tinted three mil Saran
gown fluttering in the wind.
He imagined
himself escorting a much
younger woman into a restaurant
-they would be father and
daughter until the other diners
saw their hands clasped beneath the
table.
The building
was not
that, only a two-floor complex.
Amateurish posters in its
windows: the
butchers kill for you, and do you want to be
a part of all mankind has
done, and live without meat
- in you or on you - dis-incarnate, and resignation is the only way
out - so i'm
resigning. Henry
went inside; there was an
athletic young man at a desk
in the
first room, and a softball
bat leaning
in the corner behind the young
man. He said, 'What do
you want?'
'I want
to know
if my
daughter's here.'
'You can't
come farther than this,' the
young man said. 'There's a phone
on the
wall in back of you
- call
them up inside.'
'I did,'
Henry told him. 'Now I'm
going to see for myself.'
The young man
reached behind him for the
softball bat and laid it across
his desk.
'There's a switch in the
seat of this chair, and every
time I stand up without
shutting it off it rings
an alarm in police
headquarters. They like for people
to go
away - they think it reduces
the crime
rate. They don't like people who try to stop
it; sometimes
they shoot them.'
'Why don't
you go?'
'I am going,'
the young
man said,
'in November.
Someone else I know is
going to be ready to
go too
by then,
and we're going to do it
together. Meantime I want to
do something
right here. We're going to
go, and
we're never going to die.'
'Something else
happens to them,' Henry said.
'But not
death; they never die. That's
what they say.'
Someone came
in behind
Henry, a narrow-shouldered young man of
about nineteen. He said, 'This
is the
place, isn't it?' He had an
air of
desperate triumph, as though he
had won
through to some frightful goal.
'This is
the place,'
the young
man with
the ball
bat said,
and as he did Henry bolted
for the
inner door, slamming it and locking
it behind
him.
A man and
two women
sat talking
in a
room filled with ashtrays and stale
coffee cups; neither of the
women was June. As they stared
at Henry
one flickered
out of
sight, then, as he found the
next door, returned. She might
have been traced in neon, and
the bright
room a dark street.
He burst into
a third
room, and a young woman
(the same young woman, he realized
a moment
afterward, that he had talked to earlier) said, 'You're
Mr Nailer?'
He nodded.
'Good. She's still
on.' The young woman pressed
a switch
on the desk before her, and
Junie was in the room.
'Daddy,' she said.
'Where are you,
honey?' He recognized the chair
in which
she sat, the rug
around her feet, even as
he spoke.
'Daddy, I'm
home. I want to see
you before
I go.'
He said, 'Are
you going
so soon,
honey?' and as he spoke
she was flicked away.
The 3V
was still
on; the
old wing-backed
chair that had been
May's still stood on the
patternless blue carpet, but June was
no longer
there. He waited, watching it,
realizing that the young
woman at the desk was
watching too.
'She may
return in a few seconds,'
the young
woman said, 'but she may not.
If you
want to see her in
person I'd go back home if
I were
you.'
Henry nodded
and turned
to step
back into the room of
stale coffee cups. A
plainclothesman hit him
in the
mouth as he came through the
door; he fell to his
knees from the shock, and was jerked to his
feet again. He hit the
plainclothesman in the stomach,
kneed him, then grabbed his
lapels and smashed his nose with
his forehead.
Somehow the plainclothesman's gun
was no
longer attached to him and
went skittering across the floor. A
uniformed patrolman was coming through
the door Henry had to go
out of;
he made
the mistake
of diving
for the gun, and
Henry hit him in the
back of the neck.
When he
stepped off the belt he
was still
panting. He reflected on how
difficult it was for a
man his
age to
keep in condition; they could
discover who he was easily
enough - though perhaps they wouldn't
make too much trouble about
it -
it shouldn't be pleasant for them
to confess
they had been beaten by a
middle-aged scholar. Or perhaps they
would; with Junie gone he really
didn't care.
She met
him at
the gate.
'It's past your bedtime, Dad.
You shouldn't have gone into the
city at this time of
night.'
He said:
The-sun'11 be up
in two,
three more hours. I think
I'll just stay up
now.'
'To be
with me as long as
you can
- isn't
that it?'
He nodded.
'What do
you want
to do?'
'Let's just walk
in the
garden. For a
minute.' Her left
hand was in his, and he
could see the faint glow
of her
bracelet when she raised her right
hand to touch her hair,
the shine
of her
earring when she turned
to look
at him.
'When you were a little girl
I used
to think
about your dying,' he told
her. 'You do, you know, with
children; you were so fragile.
And your
mother had just died.
Now I'll
never see you dead, and
I'm glad; I want you to
know that.'
'I'll never
see you
dead either, Dad. That was
part of it.'
'What was
the rest
of it?'
'All you
expected of me, a litde.
And ...'
She was
gone, her hand no longer
in his.
'June!' he yelled.
'June!' He
ran past
the stone
birdbath and saw the twinkle
of her bracelet and earring under
the willow;
then the litde lights winked out
one by
one.
Edgar Tangborn THE CHILDREN'S CRUSADE
Malachi never shunted
off the
children and their questions, nor did he madden them
by promising
they'd understand when they were older.
He even
asked them questions in return.
If they
giggled or squirmed or
ran away
it was
not, he thought, in rejection, but because there was
crisis in his inquiries: - What
do YOU think is on the other side of the hill? - Where does the music go when
the sound stops? - Was there really a world before you were born? They lacked
the language
to deal
with this sort of thing, except
Jesse Lodson, the six-toed boy,
who read books and had a
mind of his own and
was old
enough to be allowed to sit
on the
steps of The Store and
listen to men's talk. Maybe the
other kids hoped to find
words by running off to search
for them
in green
pastures; but Malachi would still
be ahead of them, ready with
new questions
when they came running back.
Who does
have patience for long labor
over anything so slippery and ungentie
as a
question? Malachi's, and he knew
it, often raised thunder
out of
a past
that hung like a midnight
shadow over himself and
his people.
We may
scold the most appalling future into
quiet by proving it doesn't
exist, but the past did, once.
The challenges
of doubt
or denial
reverberate, though the cheeks
that flushed and lips that
curled in the passions of argument
are with
the leaf
mold.
Born among the
flailing ideologies of what we
call the late 20th Century, Malachi
Peters never admitted that children
should be spared the
peril of using their brains.
The red
plague followed the twenty-minute war; the Children's Crusade happened some thirty
years after that. Malachi's people were calling it the
Year 30; one might as
well go along with their chronology,
for they
weren't stupid, and many could
remember the 20th Century.
Most of them
also recalled the existence of
a religion
named Christianity. Hardly any
two could
have agreed about its doctrines and practice, but in
this time when a technological
culture was so recently
self-slain, religion had come to
seem important again. Among
the children
fantastic sparrow-arguments broke
out from
time to time about God
and the
Devil, heaven and hell
and all
that bit. And you could
hear endless adult exegesis, logomachy, and heart-burning on the
front porch of The
Store, or around the stove
in winter.
How do you ever define 'religion'
itself in terms that will
meet the dry thorny jabs of
the rebel
five percent - or three
percent, or whatever the minority amounts
to? Up
on the
northeastern shore of the
Hudson Sea, that minority presents
an irreducible
factor of serene cussedness:
they're Vermonters.
(Even three percent
may be
too big.
It doesn't
imply that the remaining ninety-seven percent are too dumb
or too
bland to enjoy the thrills of
theoretical squabblings; but they are
apt to
devote their energies to
timely, important problems, such
as the
distinction between Homoiousian and Homoousian, or immorality among the heathen, or
the Only
Decent Way to Make Clam Chowder.)
Malachi Peters of
Melton Village sometimes laid it
out openly for his cronies along
about these lines: Say a
village of one hundred heavenbound sons of bitches like
you supports
a population of one
sound atheist like Mr Goudy
over there; then you'll find about
four who'll venture to agree
with him out loud in a
half-ass kind of way, in
some place where nobody happens
to be
listening; makes a good five
percent rebellion, don't it?
Of course,
even if you add in
us agnostics
the rebellion still can't
so much
as elect
a town
clerk, but we make noise. By
the way,
did you
know it was T. H.
Huxley himself who invented
the word
'agnostic' for crackpots like me who'd
rather be truthful than sanctified?
And sometimes
he went
Socratic, though with caution:
What is God? Well - oh, a
Supreme Being.
What is the nature of Being?
Supreme over what? Why, hell,
everybody knows what being
is.
All but me. I'm ignorant. Supreme means infinite? Sure.
Jesus Christ was the son of God? Ayah, don't
the Book
say so?
God
is infinite? Well, sure. Therefore Christ was the son of Infinity? Ayah. How does Infinity beget a son? It's got
balls? You trying
to make a>man look stupid?
(Hearing it
reach this point, old Mr
Goudy chuckles, scratches his
desiccated crotch, and spits a
bollop over the porch rail. Fifty-five,
oldest man in town; has
a patch
of Connecticut tobacco and
does some business in the
fall blending marijuana with the
chaws, packing the mixture on
his back
through the neighbouring towns. Malachi often addressed
him as Messenger of Light, which
caused Mr Goudy to cackle
like one of Jud Hobart's guinea
hens; Jesse Lodson wasn't quite
old enough to figure
that one out.)
I'm just trying to find out the sex of
Infinity. Man your age
could get his mind
off sex,
seems like.
Why?
...
Melton Village
was typical
of those
shrunken communities on the northeastern coast of what people
were beginning to call the Hudson
Sea. The villages maintained a tenuous, suspicious communication with each other
along the mountain trads and the
disintegrating grandeur of
Old-Time roads. The people did cherish
a faith
in a
few things,
but not
in the
dollar anymore, with no
central government to create one,
and not
in the ancient air-casde fantasy of
squeezing an income out of
the goddamn summer people. Weren't any.
At fifty Malachi
Peters was typical of himself.
So increasingly,
was his
friend Jesse Lodson at fourteen,
who had
the run of Malachi's library and
who loved
him.
Melton Village
sprawls in the foothills of
a green
range looking down, yes, on the
Hudson Sea, that long arm
of ocean
extending now from the
Lorenta Sea all the long
way to
a confused tangle of islets and
inlets several hundred miles south,
where the Black Rocks
mark the site of New
York City. That tragic place was
stricken by the peripheral blast of a fusion
toy that annihilated the western end of
Long Island, including Brooklyn
and a
tree that is said to
have grown there. Then New
York's ruins were engulfed
in the
rising waters, the noisy history
done. West of Melton Village,
the opposite
shore is occasionally visible on
those days of clear atmosphere
that seem to be coming more
frequendy. Out there under windy
water and skittish tides lies the
bed of
what was Lake Champlain. The lake was beautiful, history says, until the
Age of
Progress shat in it and made
it, like
so many
others, a desolation
and a
stink. The waters climbed;
years of earthquake, cloudburst, landslide
crumbled the narrow watersheds. The ocean, itself a
universe in torment, perhaps
renews itself in long labor,
healing the worst afflictions of the
human visitation.
Malachi Peters was
in the
habit of sprawling on his
own elderly front porch, when he
wasn't tending his garden and
chickens or doing his
fastidious bachelor housekeeping, or mending a kite for the
kids, or describing the universe
to Jesse
who had (Malachi thought)
a rather
too dewy-eyed
view of it even for fourteen.
Or arguing, of
course, down at the venerable
shanty that retained the
name of The Store.
Trading was negligible:
all the
nearby communities were in the same
fix as
Melton Village. There was in
theory a sort of state government
still at Montpelier but you
never heard from it - sometimes
an excellent
thing in governments. The overland trails into Massachusetts or New Hampshire got
more snarled up each
year as the rise in
mean temperature transformed temperate
zone forest into subtropical - a few degrees are enough. A visit
to New
York meant a sea voyage
through tough waters by
a people
who had
scant taste for recovering the art of sailing
ships. Bud Maxon maintained The Store as a public
service; he couldn't support himself
and his
family with it, but
managed like everyone else with
a knee-scrabble
garden, chickens and goats and
pigs, and hunting. He owned the
town bull; his brother ran
a bit
of a
dairy. Bud learned archery, but kept
his old
rifle oiled just as if
he thought
there'd be cartridges for it again some
day. The Store's front steps and porch in summer,
its stove
in the
softening winters, drew the lonely in
their hunger for talk, that
limping substitute for love.
Malachi could also
watch the sea from his
own front
porch. To older generations of his
family Lake Champlain had gleamed more distantiy,
where the Lamoille River ran
into it. In that time a
group of islands stood out
there. Mr Goudy remembered hunting and
camping on Grand Isle when
he was
a boy. Watching the ocean, Malachi
could let his thoughts ride free, as he might
have if a world had
not ended.
Fifty now, he
had been
twenty, with two years experience
of Harvard, when civilization
encountered the Bang, and pre-sendy
the red
plague that made the 14th
Century Black Death look like a
cold in the head. Destroying
civilization, always a task for fools, was relatively easy with
the tools
constructed for the purpose in the
20th Century. To recreate one
you need
something stronger than divine
guidance.
In the Year
30 the
residents of Melton Village numbered
about a hundred adults
(the red plague having wiped
out the
old as you wipe chalk squiggles
off a
slate) and eighteen teenagers and children. The population
before the war and the
plague had been three
thousand.
Malachi Peters numbered
precisely one. Six-feet-two, weighed
160 pounds.
Standing erect he resembled a
weedy figure One,
with wind-wavering hair already ice-white.
Of the children,
thirteen were physically normal except
perhaps in their genes. The
village had no statistical information on the incidence of
radiation-induced birth deformities,
fetal deaths, and stillbirths. Many good
souls were inclined to blame
the trouble on the
infinite wisdom of God (after
all, it's been blamed for everything
else ever since we invented
it). The village did try to
cherish the children. Some of
the mues,
as they began to be called
about that time, were hard
to cherish,
especially the brain-mues who could only sit
where they were put, smile and
drool when they were fed,
cry when
they were cleaned. Others, like Jesse
who had
no physical
oddity except his six-toed feet, were
not yet
regarded with superstitious terror. As
for Jesse's
peculiarity, as Malachi told him
more than once, such things weren't
too uncommon
long before technology started monkeying
with the sunfire - except
that his extra toes were functional.
They gave a
special buoyancy to
his walking and running. Jesse was
slim like a marsh reed,
dark-haired and faun-eyed. At fourteen
he could
outrun anyone in the village and
not even
be winded.
Most of
the adults
could read, but books were
few -
some volumes that had been in
the tiny
public library in the Year
Zero, as many more
privately owned in houses that
survived flood, fire, night-raiders,
and abandonment
in the
worst of the bad years, and
Malachi's library of maybe three
thousand at the Old Peters Place
where he had lived most
of his
years alone since the crash. Except
for Malachi's
lot, a high proportion of the surviving books were
less than useful to a
society that might have liked to
recreate civilization, or anyhow Vermont,
if it had known how. But
to understand
that one shall see no
more new books, ever,
is a
horror even to some of
the illiterate,
like smashing blind into
a stone
wall.
A littie
school limped along under good
Miss Seton, whose resources were near
to nothing.
The greatest
difference the old lady noted after
the death
of American
culture was that in the
new age she was
treated with some respect even
by the
children. Especially by the children.
Malachi knew
(but seldom said to his
neighbors except for Tad Doremus thé
blacksmith) that the rise of
waters was engulfing the dry
land because of the determined
blundering of expert technological
man in
the recent
past. What else but man-made fumes, particularly those of
humanity's dearest buzztoy, had heated the
atmospheric greenhouse the critical few degrees that hastened the
melting of polar ice? And
choking on atmospheric garbage meant
Progress: so choke. All toward what conclusion - who
tried to know? Not the
engineers - it wasn't
their job. They were earnest
and righteous
about that: it was
never their job to forsee
anything beyond the immediate achievement and immediate profit. They
could only build and grow -
one says
that of cancer. 'We climbed
Mount Everest because it
was there!'
- that
was the
Golden Cliché of the 20th Century,
mock-modest bombast quite as banal and
unthinking as any 19th Century
godsaking, and like most popular swashbuckling
it went
unchallenged.
It was
an exhausted
world - beaten, raped, robbed,
mutilated by industrial greed and
political stupidity, and left for
dead. Malachi himself knew
exhaustion, hours when his head
could hold little except
despair at human folly. He
looked then on Jesse, the boy's
uncalculating goodness, simplicity, power to love
and to
wonder, and could only think:
This is the world they left
you. The rain itself as it falls on your head is poisoned. Sometimes instead
of they he said we; but Malachi was not
given to wallowing in
unearned guilt. A yeasty college
student at the age of twenty,
there wasn't much he could
have done to prevent the idiot
from pushing the button. If
burning himself with gasoline in front
of the
White House would have had
that effect, he was the sort
of ardent
youth who might have done
it; plain reason told him it
wouldn't: the Juggernaut is mindless.
The danger would remain
simply because those in power
had not the intelligence nor the
good will to remove it,
and what
had been representative government had given way
to the
corporate state. To say
these things in the 20th
Century usually seemed like hooting down
a rain-barrel.
In the
pig-scramble to be good consumers for
the blessed
state, honor and virtue and
reason could not be
heard; it was natural to
assume that they had died.
In the
Year 30 it seemed to
Malachi that not enough survivors existed to renew the
species. Within a generation or two there would be
a lights-out, somewhere a last
man perishing.
Hadn't a critical moment arrived
when the dinosaurs became dry bones
without issue? He could see
his contemporaries
as like
insects crowded to the high
end of
a piece
of driftwood and going out on
the flood.
He would
have been happy, if only for
Jesse, to invent God and
a heaven,
but he
couldn't do it. For
a mind
once honestiy wedded to reason
there is no divorce.
And yet,
mercilessly comparing grown-ups, the children
said of Malachi: 'Tshee, he never
acts boredV
Jesse's father
had been
a veterinary
who somehow
retained the conscience of a specialized
profession through years when the complex
drugs, antiseptics, antibiotics,
all that,
were no longer obtainable. No immunology,
no anesthetics,
nothing that depended on the vanished
20th Century laboratories and the huge
complex of supporting industries. Lost or broken instruments could not be replaced.
No more
scientific journals - no more science.
For the
blunder, the incomparable brass-bound goof, is one thing
that homo quasi-sapiens can carry off
magnificentiy: out goes
the baby
with the bath-water, and what's left (if anything is
left) is an astonished and very naked primate.
Dr Lodson did
what he could, with herbs,
observation, common sense, memory,
and that
mixture of hunch and sympathy which is justiy called
'a feeling
for animals,'
through years when probably no one
understood his difficulties except Dr Stern,
who was
in the
same fix with his human
patients, and Malachi Peters who liked
to play
chess with Dr Lodson and who was inclined to
take all Melton Village troubles
as his own - for no
good reason except that this
was Malachi's
way. It was not
meddlesome, nor particularly aristocratic, this concern of Malachi's for
his own
people. The village had an
exasperated, partly loving name
for it.
They called it Malachi's Thing.
In the Year
24, when
his son
Jesse was eight years old
(this was the same year Dr
Stern died of intestinal cancer with none to succeed
him), Dr Lodson got momentarily
careless while treating Bud Maxon's priceless
Jersey bull for a leg
ulcer. With the lightning-flash
of an
act of
God, the brute wheeled and
gored him to death.
In that
year Jesse began to see
that love and mercy. like hate, are man-made. He
had adored
his cheerful,
unexacting father. He was
there when it happened, though
Bud got
him out quickly. The death was
a hurricane
smashing a door inward -
maybe the house can't take
it. He
learned later that the world is
also beautiful - 'sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight
and hurt not,' as two-faced Caliban
murmured to him in the peace
of Malachi's
library - but on your
life, expect no conscious mercy except
from merciful people! The bull
can turn.
God's will, said
Jesse's meek mother. Jesse wished
at eight
-and at nine, and ten
- that
he could
discover what she meant. Couldn't God have stopped the
bull? At eight he was
only beginning to learn
he could
ask questions
of Malachi,
and this
one was too difficult.
By the
time he was ten Jesse
had acquired
a stepfather,
and Malachi's
library was not only a
haven but a necessity.
The stepfather, a hardworking religious man
who took
over Dr Lodson's haphazard little farm
and improved
it, didn't
like to have Jesse go barefoot.
Knowing a little about leather-work,
he cobbled
a pair
of shoes
that fitted Jesse's broad feet,
more or less. He
said it looked tacky for
the boy
to go
barefoot, as if his family
was no
better than the heathen mountain
folk. Even Jesse's mother
could hardly look at his
feet without her eyes brimming. Jesse
wore the painful shoes except
when he visited the Old Peters
Place. There he slipped them
off at
the door, and walked
with his friend.
His earliest
memory of Malachi dated back
to a
time when he had been small
enough for Malachi to take
him up
in his
lap. He remember a
long hand curving over his
bare feet, and some remark -
he did
not retain
the words
- that
made it seem a potent distinction
to possess
twelve working toes.
Love is
a wordless
thing in childhood and maybe
ought to be. Grown-ups forget this
at their
peril.
Mr Goudy
brought the first word of
Preacher Abraham to Melton Village, a
casual profane mention of one
more end-of-the-world preacher
spouting hellfire and resurrection - only this guy, he
said, is appealing to the
kids for God's
sake. Stuff about a pilgrimage to found the New Jerusalem.
Them golden streets, said Mr Goudy,
spitting over the rail. All
our troubles over, or some shit
like that.
Abraham was
a great
tall man with flame-colored hair and a voice of
thunder, said a traveling tinker
who hadn't
seen him - heard about him,
though, from an old woman
at Pittsfield
Ruins who told fortunes.
Abraham was come, she says,
to prophesy the Messiar just like
John the Baptist. The tinker
hemself didn't buy it,
much.
Later came
another man through Melton Village,
a burly
gendeman leading a caravan
- three
wagons which once had been half-ton
pickups and pulled easy on
the rims
if you
knew how to get the work
out of
the mules.
This gendeman, Homer Hobson,
and his
henchmen were heading for the
open country north of the St
Lawrence - might start a
colony, he thought. They were foreigners
from the south - New
Haven. That's in Connecticut. There he
had seen
Preacher Abraham, talked to him and
shaken him by the hand.
No, he said,
the fella
wasn't nine feet tall, just
average or a mite under. Big
voice though, that part was
true, and you could say his
beard was reddish like. No
Goddamn hippie, talked like a gendeman.
Peaceful-looking, said Hobson,
thinking back over it -
peaceful till you stared him
straight in the eye, and then
you felt
maybe a wildness. Blue
eyes, and Hobson
admitted he generally couldn't
remember the color of a
person's eyes. Bright blue -
stuck in his mind, sort
of.
'What does
he say, about the New Jerusalem?'
That was Jesse
Lodson, talking out of turn
and annoying
his stepfather, but Hobson
gazed down on him without
reproach, knitting his brows
and trying
to remember.
'Well, boy, he says the New
Jerusalem will be - be
a place
where the earth is so
cherished that God will
return and live among men.'
Then Hobson seemed surprised, and added:
'Why - don't sound so bad,
you say
it right
out like
that.'
At the
time Hobson saw Abraham the
Crusade must have been barely started.
Hobson saw no large crowd
with him, only a couple of
dozen children between ten and
fifteen - yes, quite a
few mues among them
- who
might have merely gathered there
in the New Haven street out
of curiosity
to hear
the red-bearded
man talk.
Time passed, and
word came that Preacher Abraham
was healing the sick with prayer
and laying
on of
hands. Word came that in New
Providence he raised from the
dead a poor man who had
perished of smallpox and lain
two days
without life. Elsewhere the Preacher
blessed a woman afflicted by
an evil spirit, and
the devil
passed out of her.
Word came that
a thousand
children followed Preacher Abraham,
foraging, taking care of their
prophet with certain miracles.
These tales
lit fires.
Until even Jesse Lodson, fourteen
and never foolish, began to wonder:
Can God after all exist?
Mother believes in him. Not all-benevolent, or the bull - but Mother says we
aren't wise enough to understand ... Should I place so much faith in my own
power of reason? Can there be miracles? Then what becomes of the natural order?
A New Jerusalem, 'where the earth is so cherished' — but the books, the books!
Or have I (and Malachi) been mistaken all this time? I pray, and it's all
silence.
He hungered
to believe
in the
marvelous. (Who doesn't?) For most of existence in Melton Village had a flatness, a sourness partly generated by adult despair, and he was lonely
in spite of Malachi. The other
children had little to do
with him, put off by the
strangeness of an original mind
that is not willing to hide
itself or has not learned
how. He was aching and changing with the needs
of puberty.
There was a
coolness in Malachi,
a steadiness
that Jesse Lodson sometimes felt
as a chill because he could
not yet
share it.
His mother
and stepfather
of course
distrusted the love of an old
man. Still, they did not
forbid him those many hours
with Malachi. Miss Seton
herself said there was nothing
more she was capable of teaching
him, and Malachi was, in
a way,
important to Melton Village,
like a monument or a
natural force.
On his side,
perhaps Malachi expected too much.
He needed
the freshness of youth
with the companionship of maturity.
And word
came that when Preacher Abraham
entered a village and preached and
asked who would help him
found the New Jerusalem, the mue-children
were first to forget their
afflictions and follow him.
He was coming
from the north. People talked
now not
only of Preacher Abraham but of
'Abraham's Army.' Or
'the Crusaders.'
They had gone
north, rumor said, through the
Maine and New Hampshire wilderness. Most of this had
already returned to the rude health
of nature,
but it
was still
possible to follow the roads of
the old
industrial culture, the skeletal remains
that demonstrate the articulation
of the
original monster, and its indifference to the welfare and
beauty of the planet that
endured it for so long
a century.
The Crusaders
had taken
one of
the highways into Canada,
and soon
headed south again, but instead of coming by the
Connecticut River they marched north of Lake Memphremagog to the Hudson Sea.
They were at Richford. They were
at St
Albans.
A thousand
were coming, said rumor -
uprooted, exalted, dangerous. Whatever
was not
freely given, these children took,
rumor said. Melton Village
stood next in their line
of march.
On the porch
of The
Store - it was summer
and robins
were nesting in their wonderfully increasing numbers - Bud
Maxon grumbled: 'By God,
them Crusaders better not come
this-away! We got to feed
'em when
we a'n't
got a
pot to
piss in ourself ?'
Malachi asked:
'You about to
stop 'em, Bud?'
Maxon looked
old and
frightened, a 20th Century man
hating every other way
of life.
Big Tad
Doremus, who made out as a
blacksmith in what had once
been his father's filling station near the Old Peters
Place, sat on the top
step whittling applewood. He
was always
at some
bit of
art work
that would have a woman's buttocks
in it,
though he might not be
up to
sculpting the rest of
her. Mr Goudy spat over
the rail.
Jesse Lodson sat on the bottom
step and kept his young
mouth shut and his young ears
open.
'Eating up
the Goddamn
country!' said Maxon. 'Grasshoppers !'
'Hippies is what they
be,' said Lucas Hackstraw. His face was like a
worm-chewed windfall, and he was
married to the saddest woman in
town. 'Boys and girls jumbled
up together.'
'How else
would they travel?' Tad Doremus
asked.
'And some
of 'em
pretty well growed,' said Mr
Goudy, who liked to keep Hackstraw
mentally goosed. 'Exceedingly well growed and also sprightly, I'm told. Lively times in
the hay-pile.'
'They got
no moral
sense,' said Hackstraw.
'I've always taken
a great
personal interest in the moral
sense,' said Malachi. 'By
the way,
does anybody know what it is,
to relieve
my ignorance?
Would you define the moral
sense, Brother Maxon?'
'Up yours
too, Malachi,' said Bud, but
his heart
wasn't in it.
Tad said
to his
sculpture: 'Anyway we got Malachi
going.'
'I don't
suppose I'm going anywhere, Tad,'
said Malachi. 'Doubt Preacher
Abraham is either.' Jesse looked
up at
him, unhappy, both remembering a recent
conversation. 'He's just traveling.'
'Malachi,' said Bud
Maxon, 'sometimes you don't make
sense.'
Tad said
to his
wooden woman's rump: 'He's making
sense.'
Jesse heard, before
the others,
a high
murmuring as though a thousand starlings
had setded
up the
road on the far side
of Maxon's woodlot. He thought at
first it might be that,
a gathering of litde birds. But
Malachi said: 'Ready or not,
gendemen, here they come!'
Jesse watched the
road. Yesterday in Malachi's library
the talk had turned to Preacher
Abraham, and Malachi had dropped
some casual sarcasm. Driven by
swift unexpected impulse, Jesse
had stumbled
into an awkward defense of
the preacher
as startiing to himself as to
Malachi. Maybe in making his
remark Malachi had taken
the boy's
agreement too much for granted.
Unused to anything resembling
antagonism in their relation, both had been wary, puzzled
and hurt.
'You know evangelists have promised to
save the world before, Jesse.
All they
do is
drum up faith in
magic. This one's no different.'
Supported by nothing
much but his own unease,
Jesse had demanded with too much
passion: 'How do you know he isn't?'
'Ah - 'scuse it,
I suppose
I don't.
I went
off half-cocked.
We wait until he shows up
and see
who's right, okay?'
Now from afternoon
shadow Malachi watched Jesse's in-tendy
listening face. Some airy voices
up there
beyond the woodlot were singing, and
with sweetness. Malachi had felt
no such fear since a long-ago
morning when he discovered ten-year-old Jesse walking cheerfully
along the ridgepole of this
house, arms out, six-toed
feet proudly sure of themselves,
miserable death or injury
waiting on either side, and
Malachi had not even dared to
yell. Who will deliver him from evil?
The holy
man came
around the turn of the
road with one of his disciples
on either
side of him. These were
scarcely older than Jesse but almost
as tall
as the
Preacher. Both were graceful, slim, yellow-haired, gray-eyed. They
were twins, Jesse would learn later -
Lucia and John. The Crusaders
rejected last names, to signify they
had given
up home,
family, everything, to follow die
Lord.
Preacher Abraham advanced
slowly, a smallish man with
shoulderlength sandy hair, straggle
of reddish
beard, lowered head of thoughtfulness. Like his followers, he wore grass sandals
and a
shapeless knee-length white smock; his
bony legs were muscular, toughened with
journeying. Malachi saw in him the
simplicity of a man prepared
to walk
through a stone wall in the
trust that the Lord would
turn it to vapor and
let him through. By such singlehearted
fantastics are the legends made; the Red Sea divides
at Moses'
command. How am I to contend with this for the life of
a boy?
The Crusaders
marched four abreast. They had
ceased singing. The watchers could
study the symbol they wore
on the
fronts of the shapeless,
sexless white smocks, done big
in crude
red paint on the
unbleached linen - a spoked
wheel crossed out with two zigzag
lines. Rumor had explained this
symbol - the wheel stood for
industry, mechanism, the things of
the marketplace,
all the
Crusaders conceived the old civilization
to have
been; and God had
crossed it out, utterly abolished
it. Henceforth
God's people were to live
by the
labor of their hands without machines, without enslaving animals
or hunting:
no meat, no money, no trade. Greed
and cruelty
would end forever in the kingdom
of heaven;
God and
the angels
would return.
The children
matched the slow pace of
Preacher Abraham, even the litde ones
and the
lame keeping orderly in the
ranks. When the Preacher was in
speaking distance of The Store,
the last ones had marched into
sight. Malachi estimated there were
not more than two
hundred of them: the rumors
of a
thousand were like most rumors.
He noticed
a few
considerably older men and
women in their twenties -
a dozen
of them
perhaps. There was no one
older than the Preacher, who
looked about thirty-five.
And Malachi
brooded on Melton Village, a
lonely society from which all the
old had
vanished, in which many of
the children were stillborn, sickly, deformed.
There had been serious talk
of stockading
the village;
Malachi favored it - maybe
it ought to become
a part
of Malachi's
Thing. A few years ago
the people had suffered
brutal raids by the mountain
people on their shaggy ponies. These
had ceased
after a party of young
men, skilled at archery
and equipped
with swords contrived by Tad Doremus,
had pursued
a band
of marauders
and wiped
them out - an
unpredictable fury that might not
have happened if Malachi had
gone along. They had strung
up the
bodies on the trees
and come
home not quite the same
youths they had been, having tasted
the style
of a
world that was bound to come.
For this
reason Malachi had not condemned
their action too severely:
in a
world going back to violence
perhaps the village could
not survive
without violent responses. Turn
back the clock and run
the bloody
course again! - if there's no
help for it. The mountain
people might forget the lesson. And other creatures prowled
the encroaching
forest that had not been known
there in the old time
- black
wolves, giant bear. A great tawny
cat had
been glimpsed twice, with faint
tiger markings of dark
yellow, no puma certainly, maybe something escaped from
an old-time
zoo, or the descendant of such an escape. Melton
Village was beset with strangeness
within and without, full of trouble,
and tired,
and excited,
and afraid.
Preacher Abraham
stopped in the sunny warmth
of the
road with his two beautiful disciples.
He said:
'God keep all here. We're come to promise you
the founding
of the
New Jerusalem.'
Malachi unfolded
his spidery
legs and went down the
porch steps, squeezing Jesse's shoulder in
passing. He stepped forward alone
to greet
the Preacher.
'We can't
do much
except wish you well.'
'Why, that's a
great deal,' said Preacher Abraham.
It was
a great voice to come from
such a common-seeming, middle-sized man. 'Your good will, something to feed the
children, opportunity to give
you our
good news - that's all
we ask.
We'll be gone tomorrow.'
'There's been a
scarcity of good news lately,'
said Malachi, and Jesse sat in
amazement: Malachi the one
to give
the Preacher friendly greeting, while the
rest including himself sat mute like
lunkheads? 'Little news
of any
kind. We did learn that a civilization died.'
The Preacher's gaze was level -
searching for his soul, Malachi supposed. 'Are you the
mayor, sir?'
'Why,' said Malachi,
'we haven't
rightly got one of those,
unless it'd be Bud
Maxon over there. How about that,
Bud?' He tried with a
backward glance to pry Bud
off his
butt and fetch him down to
share the chores; Bud wasn't
moving. Jesse's face was inaccessible; the Preacher had possession
of Jesse's
troubled eyes. 'About all
we have
in that
line is a Board of
Selectmen, and they don't
meet too regular. I'm just
Malachi
Peters, been
around since the flood. We're
a sort
of Sleepy
Hollow, Preacher, a wide place
in the
road.'
'It doesn't matter.
My children
can camp
here, I suppose? And I hope
they may go about among
your houses to ask bread, flour, a few vegetables,
whatever can be spared.'
'This man
is a
scoffer,' said the girl, the
beautiful disciple.
'Why, I don't
think I am, my dear,'
said Malachi. 'History has done the
scoffing. If you need a
camp site, Preacher, you can use
the field
below my house. Over there
- you
can see
my roof from here. There's a
stream, a pool where the
children could bathe.'
'Lucia,' said the
Preacher kindly, 'maybe you are
too quick
to judge.' The girl
flushed and looked away. 'I
thank you, Mr Peters, in the
name of all of us.
We are
happy to accept'
Hackstraw rasped: 'Them kids got anything
on under
them smocks?'
'Why, yes,' said
the Preacher,
'they have.' One of the
shining young who had gathered close
pulled up his smock, showing
a trim loin-cloth. The flirt of
the cloth
and jerk
of the
boy's hips amounted to more than
an answer
to the
question; he even tossed a wink
toward Jesse. 'No need of
that, Simon,' the Preacher said.
'Well, it didn't
look like they had,' said
Hackstraw, but he was routed, and
subsided into dithering and grumbling.
Mr Goudy
sighed, saying to the air:
'Malachi's Thing.'
'I'll show you
the path,
Preacher,' Malachi said. 'It's been
getting overgrown with the
munificence of nature since the
old lady foreclosed the mortgage on
her most
heedless borrower.'
'You have
an odd
way of
expressing yourself,' said Preacher Abraham, 'but I understand you. You say nature
when you mean God.'
'Or you may
be saying
God when
you mean
nature. If we don't understand each other now we
might arrive at it. This
way, please.'
And Jesse
went along.
So did
Tad Doremus,
who hadn't
spoken. He tucked his sculpture in his hip pocket
and slouched
down the single file path behind
Jesse, followed by the multitude;
he could
hear them breathing, and the brush
of young
feet in the grass. It
occurred to Tad that
the back
of Jesse's
neck looked thin and lonesome. Tad too was a
friend of Malachi Peters, and
wondered whether the old man
was slipping
from grace, if it's possible
for an
agnostic to do that.
Jesse stepped
to one
side when the path entered
the meadow.
He usually came this
way when
going to Malachi; his home
was in the village on the
dull Main Street and it
made a short cut; his feet
had done
more than any others to
keep the path trodden. Countiess times
he had
entered the meadow and seen
Malachi, white hair and
raggedy gray-brown clothes on the
porch two hundred yards
away, and waved, and made
a game
of his progress across the field
where now and then a
dip of
the surface would hide
him. In such a hollow
he'd pause, for the obscure thrill
of teasing
the old
man, and then v/hen amusement reached bursting point, bounce
over the crest and run like
a whirlwind,
arriving flushed, queer-in-the-head,
wondering what to say.
Paths move in
time. This was not the
old one,
now that
these strangers were filing
past on it curious-eyed. He stood apart, letting them fill the meadow.
The wave
of them
was murmuring,
breaking up into separate faces,
bodies, voices curiously soft. It dazed Jesse
to remember
that they came from everywhere
- Connecticut,
New Hampshire,
Massachusetts, even Maine. Maybe they didn't all
speak English. In a thirty-second
daydream he taught one
of the
girls English, and how she
loved him!
Malachi looked back,
finding him for a long
gaze, then walking on, matching his
stride to the Preacher's as a taller man should.
The countries of
love and terror border each
other here and there. Jesse became
a small
boy alone
in a
crowd.
Most of
these people were older, taller.
They were following a pattern familiar
to themselves.
Every third Crusader carried a rolled
strip of heavy cloth; these
were being joined in pairs
and pegged into long
pup tents,
big enough
to hold
three at each end with some
snuggling. Within ten minutes the
meadow had blossomed into a camp.
Some of the Crusaders brought
water from the pond,
others searched under the bordering
trees for fallen wood; a young
woman with flint and steel
went about lighting small campfires. Never a
whine or argument or quarrelsome
voice. Jesse shuffled off those
shoes, tying them together at his neck. He worked
his feet
in the
grass, swallowing something bitter, not
panic exactiy. Not merely loneliness.
He was
the only
one not
bound for the New Jerusalem.
The only one wearing
brown instead of white. Shirt and
loin-cloth, no tunic.
He walked
up the
meadow toward Malachi's house in
a dark passion of aloneness -
touch me not, touch me not,
take heed of loving me! - silendy passing
these friendly souls, some of whom
would have spoken to him
but for
that blind, unhealing look. He
was thinking:
/ could outrun every single one of you. Then one
of them
did speak,
a girl
with a warm voice, a mouth
like a geranium. 'Hello -
aren't you the son of
the man who's letting
us have this field?'
Jesse fell
in love.
'No, I'm not his son.'
He was
lost for more to say. She
did not
press for more, just waited,
smiling without mockery. 'I'm his friend.'
'Oh,' she
said, interested in him, not
in Malachi.
'I'm Philippa.'
'My name's
Jesse Lodson.'
'If you
come with us you'll be
just Jesse. We give up
family, and home, and all things,
for to
follow our Preacher to the
New Jerusalem.' And she
was so
happy about it - that
afternoon anyway, in that place
and time,
the sun
choosing gold lights in her brown
hair and blessing the freckles
on her
honesdy chubby cheeks -
that her speech was a
singing and her innocence like fresh
cream.
If
you come with us - but of course!
They expected it, took it for
granted; that was supposed to
be the
purpose of their pilgrimage. And Jesse
longed to say: 'I'll go
with you.' He could not, quite.
The town
hall bell rang five o'clock.
Almost time to go home
for heaven's sake, lend
a hand
with the chores, wash up for
supper. To be home
not later
than half past five was
the understood
price of being allowed to
tag around
after Malachi.
Malachi had
found that bell three years
ago in
the ruins
of a back-country church. Its village
had been
emptied - a raid by
mountain people, or pestilence,
or both;
forest was reclaiming everything;
bones were whitened, scattered, gnawed by wolves. As Malachi had told the
story to Jesse, the bronze
bell lay there among charred timbers
and rubbish,
gleaming like a great open mouth
of suffering.
Malachi and Tad Doremus had
brought the bell home
and installed
it in
the town
hall. Then Malachi had persuaded the
Board of Selectmen - there
really was one, Malachi was sometimes
president of it, and it
did provide about as much local
government as well-behaved people ought to
need - to employ half-witted
Jem Thorpe
to ring that bell every hour
through the days. In return
for this
and a bit of easy janitor
work, Jem got enough to
eat, a place to sleep, and
something to worship. He adored
the bell,
and the wonderful clock which he
had been
taught to wind and which told
him when
to pull
the rope.
He would
have happily died to protect the
bell, or the ritual, or
Malachi. Just another
part of that complex
of the
unpredictable that followed Malachi Peters like
a leitmotif
through the orchestration of these years
of sadness
and perplexity.
Malachi's Thing. 'I have to go
home.'
Philippa nodded
sweetiy. 'But the only real
home is the New Jerusalem, Jesse.'
He knew her
words came from Preacher Abraham,
yet her
sincerity made them hers
too. She had a warm
strange smell; her breasts were big
enough to push out against
the formless
smock, and she carried
them with no slouch. Jesse
realized he was staring, and flushed.
But she
put her
hands on his shoulders and kissed his cheek,
bumping against his dangling shoes.
'We want you with
us,' she said. He knew
she had
glanced down at his bare feet.
'Our Preacher says, Let all
who are
strange and lonely come
with us, for we go
to build
a place
where none shall be
lonely or strange.'
Part of
Jesse's mind protested that without
loneliness and strangeness this world would
not be
this world at all and
maybe not worth having; but it
was a
formless protest: he knew he
would have grass sandals
and a
white tunic, and go with
Philippa to the New
Jerusalem.
Malachi felt
silence around him as he
climbed the slope to his house.
The children's
voices had fallen behind them.
The Preacher had sent off those
attending him on various errands,
all but two young
men in
their early twenties whom he
called Andrew and Jude. Andrew seemed
cheerful - thoughtful too, plainfaced and kind. Jude's young
face was already cut with
worry lines and the
start of a chronic frown.
Tad Doremus
kept quiet - a natural
occupation, almost a life-work.
Malachi asked: 'Where
will you found the New
Jerusalem?' 'I think I
shall know the place when
I see
it,' said Preacher Abraham. 'We turned
south in Canada because Andrew
here
brought me
word of a place called
Nuber on the west shore
of the Hudson Sea. I must
go there
- it
may be
the place.'
'Nuber? There
was a
town, Newburgh,' said Malachi. 'I
drove through it the
summer I was eighteen. But
that area of the Hudson Valley
was destroyed,
you know,
in the
floods and earthquakes.'
'This place
is on
higher ground, ten or fifteen
miles inland.' 'You're a New Yorker,
sir?'
'I was
born in Maryland. I have
almost no memory of the
old time. Barely five,
the year
of the
war, and I spent my
youth in widess sin and folly
until I was given light.
Andrew is my right hand,' he
said, and smiled at the
young man as they climbed the steps of Malachi's
porch. 'We separated a few
months ago so that
he could
explore western New York while
we went through New
England. Then he rejoined us
in the
north. Tell Mr Peters
about Nuber, Andrew.'
They setded
on the
porch, for the Preacher wanted
to watch
the preparation of the
camp site in the meadow.
Andrew spoke almost bookishly.
'What they call Nuber is
an area
fifteen miles by twenty - say
three hundred square mUes -
where there were wealthy estates in
the old
time, and some arable land
too. not
spoiled by commercial agriculture. Long before the
last buildup of political tensions
in 1993
the rich
people of that region were running a private oligarchy,
nominally within the American political
framework. They had a litde
bit of
foresight, enough intelligence to see that the
commercial-technological rat race couldn't
keep up much longer -
raw materials
were running out for one thing
- and
they may have been wise
enough to fear the
end result
of political
insanity in a world with atomic power. At any
rate they were much concerned
with survival - their
own, that is. According to
their cult, so far as they
had any
beliefs, altruism was a bad
word, and they had always considered
their society as not much
more than a source of loot
and personal
power. They dug in against
the storm. They built underground refuges, hoarded enormous quantities of food, fuel, arms,
ammunition. They
couldn't make new guns, but even
now, I understand, there's a
miniature subterranean factory in Nuber
that turns out gunpowder, and usable cartridges for the
old weapons.'
'Nice people,'
said Malachi.
'It is
after all,' said Andrew sententiously,
'a primary
preoccupation of any
dictatorial state.'
'Yes,' said
Malachi. The Preacher watched the
meadow.
'They shall
be humbled,'
said Jude, his voice sudden
and harsh. His white hands knotted
in front
of him.
'It is
in Ezekiel: Moreover the word of the Lord came unto me,
saying, Son of man, when the house of Israel dwelt in their own land, they
defiled it by their own way and by their doings: their way was before me as the
uncleanness of a removed woman. Wherefore I poured my fury
upon them for the blood that they had shed upon the land, and their idols
wherewith they had polluted it.'
'Amen,' said Andrew
mildly. He might even have
a sense
of humor, Malachi thought, but his
devotion was complete and obvious. Intelligence and literacy he
possessed, both wholly at the service
of Preacher
Abraham. He continued: 'They hired
a lot of laborers, technicians, and a police force.
Also a great many more personal
servants than was usual among
the rich
at that time, paying
high for them. Mosdy they
seem to have been following the
advice of a man named
Bridgeman, one of history's little Hitlers.
Before the world blew up
the police
were called security guards - I
suppose nobody asked, security for
what? Then the world
did blow
up, they
did survive,
the police
force was an army,
some of the technicians were a
palace elite, Bridgeman was king in
everything but name, and the
blue-collar people and servants were
slaves. Specifically, Mr Peters. Nuber today
makes no secret of being
a slave-holding
state. Bridgeman had a
mint, turning out pretty gold
and silver
and copper money: trust him to
think of that and grab
control of it, among people who
had thought
all their
lives that money was a paper
fairy-tale told by themselves.'
'He must
have known a litde history.'
'Yes, Mr
Peters, but not enough to
do him
any good.
His official title, by the way,
assumed right after the twenty-minute
war, was -' Andrew
smiled, his young face pleasantly
professorial. 'Guess.'
'Couldn't.'
'Secretary,' said Andrew.
'Secretary of the
Nuber Historical Society. Well,
in a
year or so he began
hankering after something more like
imperial purple, the name as
well as the game, and somebody
eager for his job stuck
a ten-inch
knife in his back, taking the
job and the name of king. Bridgeman should
have expected it: it
was the
kind of political operation Nuber
was built to understand.'
Malachi asked: 'Preacher
Abraham, do you propose to
advance on a vicious
military state, with a horde
of defenseless
children? How? How and why?'
'I will first
explain the why,' said Preacher
Abraham. 'Because it
does seem impossible.
Mr Peters,
the world
cannot be saved unless we show
God's power in us by
doing the seemingly impossible.'
'Oh,' said
Malachi. 'The world is sickened
of attempts
to save it. The world is
saving itself now in the
only way it has or ever
can -
by small,
brave individual efforts at recovery
now that the storm's over. It
will take centuries. Institutions have never done it and
never will. Well, I see
you don't
agree, you're not hearing me.'
'To God nothing
is impossible,'
said the Preacher, as if
he truly had not heard. 'As
to the
how, Mr Peters, we go
there under God's guidance. As I have
been assured by his very
voice.' His face was
glowing. 'Do not tell me
this is a subjective experience - those wise
litde words! I know, Mr
Peters, I know! If we fail, then the failure
itself is God's will: we
can only die in the Lord
a litde
sooner than the natural time.'
'Have the
children asked to die young?'
'You seem angry.
The children
understand, as perhaps you do not
yet, the meaning of eternal
life.' The Preacher rose. 'Thank you for the meadow,
Mr Peters,
and for
this litde time of rest.'
But Malachi
had risen
too and
grasped his arm. The Preacher
gazed back unmoving. 'Preacher
Abraham, will you allow me
to come with you?
Will you give me your
light, as you see it,
and perhaps - perhaps
-'
'No one
who wishes
to follow
me is
refused,' said Preacher Abraham.
'I think
he has
no faith,'
said Jude.
'If some follow
me for
the wrong
reasons,' said Preacher Abraham mildly, 'perhaps
right reason will come later.
We shall break camp early in
the morning.
Come to me then if
you will.'
'Will you
- stop
in now
and have
something to eat?'
'Thank you,
sir, but I see you
keep goats and chickens. We
must no longer exploit
the captivity
of living
things. But thank you for the
offer, which was kindly meant.'
Malachi sagged,
watching the Preacher depart with
Andrew and Jude. Tad sighed harshly.
'I don't
think you sold him,
Malachi.'
'Come inside,
Tad. The elderberry's near-about the best I've got. I
distilled her some, see, and
exploited her captivity in a
botde, sort of. Maybe
she ain't
a living
thing, though.'
'Seemed like
one, time I sampled her
last.' Tad reached for the glass,
drank, and nibbled his lips.
'She's living.' Malachi dropped
in his
big armchair
by the
hearth, the armchair where Jesse discovered Shakespeare and Mark
Twain and Melville. 'You look a
mite bushed, Malachi.'
'Am.'
'I a'n't
Exactly making you
out.'
'Could you
look after this place a
while, Tad? Feed the stock - and help
yourself naturally. Keep an eye
out the
public doesn't go off
with the books for luck
charms?'
'Could of course,
Malachi.'
'Place'd be
yours, come to that, I'm
not back
in a
reasonable time. I'll write
that in the form of
a will,
tonight.'
'Jesus, Malachi,
I don't
see you
in one
of them
fucking nightgowns.'
'Maybe 111
be let to
keep my pants.' Malachi refilled
his glass. 'Jesse,' he said. 'I
believe Jesse is hooked on
the New
Jerusalem.'
Tad reached
down a blacksmith's hand to
Malachi's bowed scrawny shoulder.
'Ayah. Uhha.' 'Why do
we love?'
'I don't
know,' said Tad. 'I'll mind
the house.
No trouble.'
'Jesse? said Malachi,
and drank
his glass
empty, and flung it against the
fireplace stones.
There are
many new islands. Wherever the
land was low to the west
of the
Green Mountains the climbing water
intervened, carving them into
new solitude.
Littie islands, maybe
good for a family and a
farm if anyone chose to
come; larger islands, where deer could
breed, and bear, and the
new-come coyotes, and wildcat.
The toiling
waters were fresh in the
first few years except for flood
rubbish and other pollution, then brackish as the vastly
expanding Sea of St Lawrence
(but it was becoming easier to speak of the
Lawrent Sea, or sometimes just
the Lorenta) swallowed the Richelieu River,
and the
earthquake that destroyed St
Jean, Rouses Point, Plattsburg, a hundred other towns, brought
southward the taste of ocean.
In a
few years another earthquake, another adjustment
to the
fearful stresses of the
new weight
of water
on the
land, flung together Lake George, Sacandaga,
the upper
tributaries of the Hudson, in a muddy boiling confusion.
The Ontario
Sea breaks
through along the country that once
knew Lake Oneida and the
Mohawk River; some now call
that passage Moha Water. Where
the Lorenta and Hudson
and Ontario
Seas come together at the southeastern
corner of the great Adirondack
Island, outrageous complex tides tear
about in a crazy Sabbat
of the
elements, and scour an
unknown bottom. In the Year
9, they say, steam
hung for six months over
four hundred square miles of that
tidal country; there was no
one to
go in
under it and search for the
cause. No volcano - none
known, that is, not yet; but
today there are hot springs
along the southeastern coast of Adirondack
that certainly did not exist
in the
old days.
At a place
called Ticonderoga small sailing vessels
can often
make fair passage to
and from
Adirondack Island, passing out of sight
of land
for hardly
more than an hour if
the wind
is right. Where the sea is
narrower up in the north
there's too much jungle and, they
say, malaria or
something like it; the Ticonderoga crossing is the best.
Then, if you must go
south, there are several places -
Herkimer, Fonda, Amsterdam
-where Moha Water can be
crossed with not much danger
except from pirates. Amsterdam,
to be
sure, is a little too
near the tidal
country and its frequent mists,
which the pirates are apt to
understand better than the ferry
captains do. The devils come nipping out from the
heavily wooded shores in their
canoe fleets - true
savages, reversions to the Stone
Age, many of whose grandfathers must have sold insurance,
real estate, and advertising
just like anybody.
As for crossing
the Hudson
Sea in
the far
south, that's for professional
heroes. Those tidal waves are
treacherous and frightful. The pirates there
have all the advantages, and they can do things
with a lateen rig and
a shallow
craft that no decent saUor would
think of doing unless he'd
sold his soul to Shaitan. There, in fact, modern
piracy may have developed; the canoe operators up north
are imitators,
amateurs. That corner of the world
south of the Catskills needs
more earthquakes. 'The Crusaders
will have rough travel, if
they mean to go as
far as Nuber.'
'Yes,' said Jesse,
who had
come to Malachi dragging his
feet after Tad Doremus
went home. Malachi was back
on his
porch; bats were darting
in the
cool air; at the far
end of
the meadow some of
the children
were singing. 'But Andrew came north by way of
Fonda, and he didn't have
any trouble.
Malachi ...'
'Get it off
your mind.' Malachi patted the
step beside him, and Jesse sat
there. Malachi could feel his
warmth. Wisdom, or fear, or that
dismal blend of the two
called caution prevented Malachi from
putting an arm over the
boy's shoulder as he would have
done an evening or two
earlier.
'What does
it mean
when - when all of
a sudden
everything changes, like upside down
- I
mean, you start believing one or two things different,
or even
just try to think how
it would be if you did believe those things,
and then
a hundred
other things change, and
- and
-'
'Your syntax
is slipping.'
'I know.
I got
excited.'
'Like turning the
kaleidoscope?'
'Man, yes
- it
is like that,
sort of.'
'I guess,'
said Malachi presently, 'it means
you have
to look
at the new pattern ... Do
your folks know you're thinking
of leaving with the Preacher?'
'I haven't
been home,' said Jesse almost
sullenly. 'Gah, you always know everything.
If I
told 'em they'd lock me
up till
he's gone, you know
they would ... Are you
going to tell them?'
Malachi brooded. 'If
I intended
to, I
would tell you first. I
don't think of you
as a
child these days, Jesse.'
And Jesse
thought in panic and misery:
But I'm not ready - not
ready to be anything else. Oh, it's easy for YOU to be wise, Malachi! 'Malachi, I - oh,
I wish
to God my old man -the bull -'
Jesse was lost
in a
sudden agony of weeping such
as Malachi
had never seen. It
was easy
then to take hold of
him and
cherish him as if
he were
still a child. 'I know,'
said Malachi, rocking him lighdy. T
loved him too, your father.
We used
to play chess. He was a
wonderful man, Jesse. Everybody knew
it'
'So how
can you
believe he's dead? There has to be a - a -the
Preacher - yes, I talked
to the
Preacher for a minute, and
he blessed me. Don't
say anything,
Malachi, just don't
say anything for a while.' He
gasped and blew his nose.
'I'm not going back to the
house tonight. I'm to sleep
in John's
tent They're
going to have sandals for
me.' He took the leather
shoes from his neck,
and set
them inside the porch rail,
his hands saying: So
much for my stepfather. 'Can I leave
them there, Malachi?' 'Yes.'
'I guess
you're pretty disappointed with me.'
'No ...
Jesse, I am considering going with Preacher Abraham
myself, for my own sake.
I even
spoke to him about it.'
Jesse started
and turned
his wet
face to Malachi in the
dusk. 'You! Why?'
'Oh, let us
say that
sometimes I too find Melton
Village to be a kind of
dead end. I have worked
for the
town, and you might say loved
it - an
ugly duckling - ai-yah, Malachi's
Thing. But I need
to learn
what's happening in a bigger
world. I've got in a rut.
Why, man, for more than
your lifetime I've had no news
of the
world except what's trickled in
as gossip
from the occasional traveler or tramp, most
of it
worthless. I expect. It's shameful. I
needed something to fetch me
loose. Besides, Preacher Abraham
interests me, and he said
that no one who elected to
follow him was refused. He
has his
own kind of wisdom. It's not
my kind,
Jesse - I won't pretend.
But perhaps I can be of
some use to him, who
knows?'
Jesse's stare
would not let him go.
'You've got other reasons. You're not quite leveling with
me, Malachi.'
'Maybe not. Not
crooked either. Some things I
find hard to explain, even to
you. Suppose we just let
it work
out'
Jesse relaxed. 'AH
right' One of the natural
surges of affection that made him
what he was brought him
back to Malachi, warm and close.
He sat
still with his head resting
over Malachi's heart, and
said at last: 'Well, I'm
glad you're coming along.' Then he
was gone,
walking down the meadow to the
litde camp-fires.
Malachi carried the
shoes indoors and put them
away in an old trunk already
loaded with history - the
ancient kaleidoscope for instance, given
to Malachi
by his
grandmother long before the Year Zero
and still
miraculously unbroken for Jesse's brief pleasure
and amusement;
and his
father's diary that ended in the
old year
1972, when the extinction of the Republic was obvious;
and a
photograph of a girl who
had died with so many others
in 1993.
The company
of two
hundred started in the early
morning, marched east two
or three
miles to reach the old
mountain road, and followed
it south.
They camped for the night
where they could look toward distant
Burlington Ruins, an old wound of
flood and earthquake never healed.
Malachi slept alone that night under
the big
dark. He had brought on
his back a rolled blanket and
change of clothing. He contributed
a sack of potatoes to the
general supply and whatever else
he could find that seemed innocent in
the Crusaders'
terms. He also wore at his
belt his old hunting knife,
which Preacher Abraham deplored.
'I cut
my food
with it,' said Malachi, 'and
sometimes I whittie. And
no, sir,
I'll decline the tunic for
the present and just wear these.'
They studied each other, antagonists
not too
unfriendly; Malachi perhaps had an
advantage in knowing where the true
conflict lay. 'Now if you
can persuade
me of the existence of God,
Preacher, I will wear the
tunic and throw away my knife.
But don't
rush it, sir. I'm inclined
to make up my mind on
my own
time. Meanwhile let me be the
oddity among you. I
wash and I don't eat
little girls.' The Preacher brooded and
then smiled, and surprisingly patted Malachi's arm before he
turned away to more important
matters.
At home Malachi
had often
slept outdoors, in his back
yard or out in the meadow.
He knew
the Pleiades,
and the
wandering of the planets and
the stars.
He had
found his strength more than equal
to the
day's march, and was healthily
tired. The camp-fires burned low; Malachi
noticed Jude and one or
two others taking up
sentry duty out at the
fringes of the light. Then someone - Malachi could
not see
him in
the dark
-sounded on a bugle the
ancient army music of Taps.
How did
it happen the Preacher
had resurrected
that, and did he have
any idea of the
far-off associations of ideas? After
the music
died slowly - no
one can
hear it unmoved - there
was a
rhythmic murmuring all through
the camp;
it ended
all in
the same moment, and Malachi understood
it was
the sound
of the
children praying. Somewhere among them,
Jesse, snug in a tent with
the disciple
John and three or four
others. It would
take Jesse no time
to learn
the words
and rituals:
he was
always a quick study. Malachi
sighed, and after less pain
than he had feared, he slept.
In hilly country
Preacher Abraham did not demand
of his
children more than twelve
to fifteen
miles of marching in a
day. A majority of them, Malachi
guessed as the march resumed
in the morning, would have been
delighted to exceed that. But
an army, and sometimes a civilization,
must proceed at the pace
of its weakest marcher. Some were
very young. The mue-girl Dinah, twelve years old, slight
and small
with the patient look of sainthood,
had a
defect in her knee-structure that made her stiff-legged and slow. Whenever she
tired Jude carried her. These were the only times
when his haggard face lost
its frown
and became tender; but
with that frail burden he
could make no speed himself.
On the
second and third days Malachi
stayed most of the time in
the rear,
knowing that to all of
them, even to the Preacher and Jesse, he must
seem monstrously old. But the
rear was a good vantage point.
He could
see whatever
happened. He could watch Jesse's dark
head, and know at least
who his
new friends were, and read whatever
was told
by the
set of
the boy's
shoulders. And sometimes Jesse
dropped back to walk with
him; though in a
too exalted,
precarious way, Jesse did seem
happy, and full of
a natural
interest in the new country.
Reading history,
Malachi had noted that throughout
most of the past the counsel
of the
old had
been valued, even sought for; it was not until
the 20th
Century that old people were
declared obsolete and swept
under the rug; and the
20th Century itself was now merely
one more
lump in the record.
On the third
night out the company reached
the settlement
of Shorum, where the ferry sails
for Ticonderoga
now and
then if the captain considers it
worth his while. He has
been known to stir his stumps
for one
old woman
with her cat in a
basket who wanted to get over
to Chilson
Landing and see a new
grandchild; and once he made
the mayor
of Shorum
wait a week on account of
a few
cross words. About transporting two hundred kids from here
to nowhere
to found
the New
Jerusalem, he was not pleased,
pointing out that it would
take four trips, two days' work
considering the tides, and even
with four trips the crowding would
be somewhat
much. 'We are patient,' said Preacher Abraham, 'and used
to material
difficulties.'
'It'll cost
you a
dime a head,' said Captain
Gibbleson.
'Dependence on
money is the death of
the spirit.
What can you buy with it?'
asked the Preacher. 'The old
system's gone, Captain.'
'State gov'ment says
the old
coinage is still money. Naturally
I wouldn't
take no paper.'
'I've hardly
been aware you had a
state government.'
Very much
the wrong
thing to say. Malachi
intervened deprecatingly: 'We sort
of invoke
it, Preacher.
Some claim to've seen it.' But
his wink
at the
Captain did not restore the
peace.
'Got no
money,' said Captain Gibbleson, 'you can swim.'
Andrew took
over. 'Captain, I see you
have quite a miscellaneous log pile, there along
the bank.'
'Ayah, driftwood, some of it' Captain
chewed on his plug and eyed
him unhopefulfy;
the plug
smelled as if it had
been sold him by Mr Goudy.
'You wouldn't believe what high
water fetches in sometimes. Got a whole
cabin one day, with a
dead man in it. Blowed up
like a punkin he was,
you should've
seen.'
'I offer you
two alternatives,'
said Andrew. 'We will stack
that wood for you,
and split
any that's
worth splitting, in return for our
passage. Or, overriding your wishes
as it
were, we will simply take whatever
wood we need to build
a raft'
Behind Andrew's back the
disciple Simon explained further by
sticking out his tongue.
'Why, you'd drown,'
said Captain Gibbleson, chewing. 'Like
bugs. I can't have
that on my conscience. Stack the Goddamn wood and it's a deal.'
Later, hunkered on the pier
and watching
Andrew oversee the labor, he
confided to Malachi: 'Sometimes I almost
half-way like a man that
don't mind being
a damn fool.' His back turned
to the
Crusaders, Malachi slipped
him five
bucks in 1984 quarters.
The gray-blue reach
of the
Hudson Sea proved not unkind.
Preacher Abraham and Andrew
went with the first group
on the ferry, a flat-bottomed barge with a crude
square sail. Her name was Pug, after Gibbleson's third wife, and he
claimed she was too squat and
wide to turn over -
in a
hurricane she might go straight up
or straight
down, but she wouldn't tip.
Jude was in charge
of the
group that would go on
the fourth
sailing; Jesse lingered for
the transparent
reason that this group included Philippa. Malachi observed that
he won
no profit
from it beyond a staring and
a few
choked attempts at conversation. Philippa, Malachi thought,
was managing
Jesse's compulsive adoration rather
well. Malachi had also seen
the look
that Philippa had for Andrew only:
an ancient
story, one who loves and one
who is
loved; maybe a constant in
the human
pattern, the exceptions shining only for a
most fortunate few. But it seemed
to Malachi
that Philippa might be not
without the rudiments of compassion. Before Shorum, Jesse had
brought her to Malachi,
saying with glazed casualness: 'This is
Philippa.'
'How do
you do?'
said Malachi. The freckles were
appealing.
'We are
sure to do well in
the Lord's
grace,' said Philippa.
Now Malachi, loafing
in the
stern with Captain Gibbleson (almost a friend), watched the
clumsiness and grace of youth.
The scow crept torpidly
across a placid sea toward
a gray
excrescence of rock on
a hillside;
there's water all around it
now, a few people and goats
inhabit the island, and it
is still
overlooked by that mountain
which General Burgoyne's artillery found so convenient once upon
a time.
Malachi heard Jesse offering some news,
up forward:
'They restored the old fort
in 1909 -' What's he
done, memorized the Britannica? — 'but it probably isn't true
that Ethan Allen demanded its
surrender in the name of the
Great Jehovah and the continental
Congress.' Except for a passing
uneasiness Philippa looked quite blank.
Then up
on the
wharf and goodbye to Gibbleson,
and on
into the perilous world
of Adirondack
Island. There would be nearly a
hundred miles of it as
the trail
winds from Ticonderoga to Fonda,
following the roads of the
old time
whenever they seem practical. Nature is
trying not unsuccessfully to heal
those scars. The busy
vine spreads across with sucker
roodets, the innocent
seed reaches down through any
crack in the dreary concrete or asphalt and is
sustained.
Already at
many places the easiest route
will be a new earthen road with no decaying
metal hulks or broken slabs
of rubbish. (But the automobile corpses that held their
shape so persistentiy, when overgrown with
cool Virginia creeper are of
benefit to rabbits, weasels,
ground-birds, and such folk, who
know how to make
honest use of them.) In
this Adirondack Island country
you are
better off with a guide,
if you
find one you can trust.
There is for
instance the matter of bandits
and large
wild animals. If one of the
oudaw or savage groups does
come after you on those burr-shaggy
mountain ponies, bent on loot
or women or violence for its
own sake,
the guide
isn't much help, and whatever happens
will be soon over; but
the guide
is expected
to know
the latest
rumors about those devils, and
find you the safest routes. Guiding
is an
honorable profession, at least in theory.
A guide
must know the animals too,
and steer
you right if you
need to hunt. Some of
them of course are no
damn good.
A long
day's march from Fort Ti
brought the Crusaders to Brant Lake,
and they
camped beside it. Here in
the morning
a guide offered his services, a
small brown smiling man in
the skimpy G-string of a savage.
(We already
begin to hear something of the Cayugas in
the central
part of what used to
be New York; they are a
difficult people, with old grievances
rooted deep.) He wore
a more
civilized belt above his hips
to hold a steel hunting knife,
and he
carried at his shoulder a
quiver of brass-tipped arrows and a short
bow unpleasing
to Preacher Abraham. Andrew tried the
man with
sign-language and grunts, transmitting
the message
that he apparently wanted no money
in return
for showing
them a safe way southward,
but just their company
as far
as Moha
Water and a roll of
the linsey cloth their tunics were
cut from.
'The knife and
bow will
be his
living, Preacher,' said Malachi. 'No
one has
taught him any better.'
Preacher Abraham
sighed and said: T know. Grace does
not come unsought, nor overnight unless the Lord
wills.' Then he looked deep in
the guide's
squirrely brown eyes and inquired
in simple English whether
he believed
in God.
The guide
nodded with solemn reverence.
A few hours
later, when the brown man
had led
them down a wood-road that became
a pleasant
sun-speckled green trail, Malachi ranged ahead
to walk
beside him. Jesse came too,
evidently wanting just then
to reestablish
closeness. Speaking too softly for those
behind to hear, Malachi asked
the guide
whether he believed in
Satan and the ideological solidarity of the capitalist class. The little man
nodded again several times, delightedly.
Jesse smiled
too, but the smile wiped
itself out. 'Malachi,' he said, 'why
do people
always make such a tremendous
thing about words?'
Malachi worried over
it for
him, and presently said: 'They
are clumsy, and often
unnecessary. But 1 think they may
be the best means we have
for probing
certain kinds of darkness. As for communication, Jesse, we
might survive for a while
without it, but I'm
not sure
the survival
would be worth having. Words
weren't invented only
to conceal
thoughts as the old wheeze has
it. They
create thoughts, give thoughts, and
are thoughts. People live by honest
words and die by the
other kind.'
Frowning and
still bothered, Jesse said after
a while: 'Yes,
I guess that makes sense.'
There was
no denying
the guide's
usefulness. When they camped beside the
Sacandaga River he found early
mushrooms for them and showed them
edible marsh plants, so that
the grim diet of cornmeal mush
and potatoes
and soggy
wheat cakes could be a little
varied. It puzzled Malachi that
he should
have apparendy known the
Crusader's vegetarian principles without
being told, but no one
commented on it. At the
music of Taps the little guide
bowed his face to the
ground.
All the following day he led
his charges
along firm earth through a region
of brackish
swamp where the Sacandaga once
comfortably paralleled a 20th
Century road. Dark country here, too close to
that outrageous great tidal pocket
of the
Hudson Sea. Mists float
unexpected through the more open
reaches of the woods.
It is
quiet. No snowmobiles nor snarling
chain saws nor bulldozer
flatbeds shuddering uphill. Wind sometimes or the
other sounds of storm, or
of a
deer dying to feed panther or
wolf or brown tiger. You may hear a
coyote desolately howling, or
a loon
in the
marsh. No transistors.
On the
morning of the ninth day
after leaving Melton Village, an
inquiry from Andrew about Fonda
drew from the guide the gestured
response that the place was
two sleeps
away, meaning perhaps anywhere
from twenty-five to forty miles. The black flies that
day were
a torment.
The Crusaders
marched four abreast, a
cloud of needling misery all
about them. It was one of
the old
highways, in fair condition. Forest stood oppressively
deep on either side; imagination
provided glimpses of motion
in the
heavy green, hints of pathways
not to be followed. But the
march was bringing them into
open country, and shordy after the
second rest of the morning
-scant rest it was with
the tiny
black demons whining and setding, nothing to do but
slap and suffer - they
came out into it.
The deep woods
lay a
few hundred
yards behind them when Malachi saw another road up
ahead, a simple line of
reddish dirt emerging from thick tree
cover and snaking down a
long slope to meet their highway.
The guide
flung up his hand. The
company halted as Andrew
dutifully repeated the motion, and
stood raggedly, slapping at
the flies,
two hundred
children wondering, murmuring. Preacher Abraham called out:
'What is it? What's the matter?'
Andrew shook his head don't-know.
The guide
was running
forward bent over as one
might do to evade a stone
or arrow
from behind; in his stooping
haste Malachi saw a thing turned
suddenly feral and vicious. At
the end of his long rush
he flung
up his
arms and sent to that
wooden summit a sharp
yell, the word 'Here!' His mission
achieved, he crouched then,
smiling and ugly, holding an
arrow leveled toward Andrew as the
horsemen plunged out from under the trees.
Andrew shouted: 'Scatter!
Back to the
woods!' Malachi shouted it too, and he
saw Andrew
crumple and fall, the guide's arrow in his chest.
Jude had already snatched up
Dinah in his arms and was
running with her. John too
shrilled at the company: 'To the
woods! Hide!'
Too many
of the
children were slow to grasp
it, and
stood in a sick daze until
the Preacher
added his urgent voice. Then
they began to go,
stragglingly and late, staring over
their shoulders, maybe not
quite believing any of it
until they saw Lucia snatched up
and flung
across a pony's back, and
John leaping at the rider's leg,
falling back with blood spurting
from his throat.
The riders were
not more
than a dozen, and strangely
sUent except for a gurgle of
excited laughter. Naked but for
loin-rags and moccasins, they rode bareback
as if
they had spent half their lives that way, and
they were men of any
breed, all breeds. They did not
trouble to draw their small
bows, seeing (or knowing in advance)
that the victims were unarmed
- their
servant might do as
he pleased.
They wanted women, but young girls
would do very well. They
rode their fiery littie horses in and out among
the fleeing,
now terrified
children, and picked them off as
they chose, each man as
soon as he had secured his captive riding back
up the
long hill. It was over
in minutes. Europe's 5th Century would
have been proud of them.
Malachi looked at
the knife
in his
hand. He could have used it,
if there
had been
time, and anything in reach.
Maybe the sight of it was
what had made the riders
circle clear of him and Jesse.
Philippa had been with them
when the storm went by; now
she had
run to
where Andrew was lying and
flung herself
down. Malachi saw the last
rider disappear up the hill
and into the woods,
and behind
him scampered
the busy
small figure of their smiling guide.
The Preacher
was saying:
'Resist not evil. This was
the word
of Christ: Love your enemies, bless them that curse
you.' Was
the Preacher counseling
himself? The disciple John was
dead, Lucia and eleven others gone;
Andrew whom he had called
his right hand could
no longer
serve or hear him, though
Philippa with her clutching
hands and crying voice was
trying to make him live.
'For he maketh his sun to
rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth the rain on the just and the
unjust.'
'Philippa.' Malachi knelt by
her. 'You must come away.'
'Come away,'
said Jesse. 'Come away, Philippa.'
'Be ye therefore perfect even as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect.'
Philippa rose and
brushed past them. She stood
before Preacher Abraham and
said: 'You did this.'
'Forgive me
then,' said the Preacher.
Philippa stared at
Andrew's blood on her hands.
'We were
going to marry, in
the New
Jerusalem.' She turned her face
to the woods, and Malachi felt
Jesse tense with readiness to
run after her, bring her back
from that suicide. She took
a few
sleepwalking steps that way
and halted,
looking about her, saying: 'But I
have no place to go.'
'Philippa,' said
the Preacher,
'there is the New Jerusalem.'
She did
not answer.
They carried
the bodies
of Andrew
and John
down the road, and made a
burial place in the open
country; that wooded hilltop stood
vague in the north. The
day was
still, no sounds but those of
peace, and the Preacher spoke
to them.
T will
go to
Nuber,' he said, 'and
preach there the
founding of the New Jerusalem as I am commanded
to do
by my
Father which is in Heaven. I will wear on
my breast
this image of the conquered
wheel, and I will
testify.'
Malachi wondered:
Does he know who he is, in
his own mind at least and in the minds of many of us? Would he have us know?
'But I am
weak in the vessel of
the flesh,
and do
not always
see my way clearly, and at
times I may have been
deceived and unwise.'
Well,
Christ would not have said that.
'It may
be, my
children, that it is not
for us
to build
that city, in Nuber or anywhere,
by the
labor or our hands, though
I still hope it
will be so. Therefore I
do release
from the vows any of you
who for
any reason
no longer
hear the call of God
to follow me. There
are other
ways you may serve his
purpose, many honorable ways. From our
beloved disciple Andrew, I learned more
about the sorry kingdom of
Nuber than I have told you.
Perhaps I understand why it
is that
God plainly
directs me to that
place, but I will not
try to
explain it. Nuber is a city
of the
damned, a place of greed
and cruelty,
smallness of the spirit, evildoing and
blindness. So it may be
that I go there to my
death, and God's purpose in
this may not be understood for a long time
to come.
I will
demand nothing of you that is
not freely
given, and so God be
with you.'
He said
no more
that day, and he did
not preach
at Fonda.
Sympathy and friendliness
were strong in that lonely
village, but cooled somewhat at Malachi's
suggestion of an armed search party to rescue the
ravished girls. He was talking
to the
mayor of the town,
and the
good man said nothing about
resisting not evil, but
pointed out that those bloody
bandits would now be fifty or
a hundred
miles away in their own
kind of country, by trails nobody
knew. They were a familiar plague; it
had happened
before. Who could deal with
it except
the kind of police
force no town nowadays can
support? Be reasonable, man. Shortly thereafter
the townfolk
took up a collection to
pay for
the transport
of Abraham's
Army over Moha Water.
Here a maternally
minded citizen intervened, protesting the exposure of these children
to the
perils of such a journey.
Others before her had
felt it, but this was
a sensible
woman with tact. She talked long
and amiably
with the Preacher while the two
ferry captains were waiting on
the tide,
and then
with his permission spoke to the
chddren, praising their devotion, their hope of the New
Jerusalem (a hope she shared),
adding almost like an afterthought that if any of
them felt unequal to the task,
or wanted
more time to think about
it, why,
she and
some of her neighbors
were prepared to give them
shelter, or help for a journey
back home if that was
what they wanted.
Sitting on
the pier
with Malachi, Jesse heard him
murmur: 'Bravo!' But he
noticed the old man was
gazing at the Preacher, not at
this good Samaritan who looked as
if she
wanted to cuddle the
whole company in her lap.
'We ought
to stay with him,
Malachi?' And Jesse studied the
Preacher, trying to find
what Malachi had been observing
with surprise and respect.
'This woman
is blessed,'
said Preacher Abraham. 'Again I say, you
who wish
to remain
with her are released from
your vows.' And when he asked
for a
sign from those who elected
to leave him, more
than half the company raised
their hands, Philippa among them.
'He believes
it,' said Malachi, 'even to
the cup
that will not pass. Yes, I
think I ought to stay
with him, Jesse, in what
time he has left before death
or disillusion.
I have
heard about Nuber too. Once or
twice he has found it
possible to talk with me. But
you yourself
are first
with me: that is how
I've always loved you.'
Jesse looked
down at his feet. The
grass sandals had never fitted; he carried them, like
the old
shoes, at his neck. 'It
was to have been a city
for the
mues, among the rest.'
'You're not even
a mue.'
Malachi shook his shoulder. 'God,
Jesse, I hope you'll
marry some time and replenish
the bloody
earth with a pack
of six-toed
children. Think what it would
do to the ski industry!'
'The what?' Jesse
was bewildered.
'Never mind,'
said Malachi, and kissed the
top of
his head.
Nuber, a city of
wealth (which is always relative)
and poverty
(which is basic hell)
surrounded by a dutifully toiling
countryside with plantations of slave
labor, felt in those years
no foreign threat. Life could be
a little
relaxed. To enter the borders you had only to
convince the commandant of the
post that you nourished no pernicious
design against the stability of
the realm, and to
convince him might cost no
more than ten dollars. Malachi still
had a
mite more than that; or
the band
of Abraham's followers, less than fifty now,
might even be admitted free.
The very location
of the
border posts was subject to
the commandant's caprice. He
might move his little establishment
a mile or so down the
road if something that way
caught his fancy - a juicy
melon patch, or a farm
family with a good-looking daughter who might be
more contented as a citizen
of the Republic. (It is after
all something
of a
distinction, Malachi remarked to Jesse; not
every republic has a king
for a
dictator. And Jesse had been laughing
some that day, a kind
of half-choked
outbreak, maybe a new Jesse
trying to crack the chrysalis of a very solemn
boy.)
To the
camp at Trempa, a day's
march from the nearest border post of Nuber, came
an old
peddler - at least he
was dressed like one, and gnarled
like a fellow often exposed
to the
seasons, but he never
opened his shoulder-sack, nor paid
much heed an anyone but the
Preacher himself, beyond a few
puzzled glances at Malachi. 'You
ought to go back, Preacher,'
he said. 'Oh, you ought to
go back,
let it
pass from you. I come
from Nuber and I
know.'
'Who are
you?' asked the Preacher.
'A tinker, an
old man,
a nobody. I come and
go. I've
been called Ahasuerus - in jest
I suppose,
for never
did I
despise Christ and his
kindred; the old and slightly
wise become used to jesting at
their expense, it's only natural.
You ought
to go
back. Oh, they are
saying in Nuber, there's a
wheel for you, you that condemn
the wheel
and wear
that handsome symbol over your heart.
Why, they've found a great
steelbound wooden wheel, something
maybe from an old-time farm
wagon, I don't know.' He muttered
and flexed
his arthritic
hands, tired from carrying the sack
and from
age. 'They are saying that
if you
come to preach your
sedition at Nuber you shall
carry the wheel on your back
to the
market place, and it shall
be set
up there for the multitude; and they speak of
nailing your palms to the spokes.
And oh,
Abraham, there will
be one
to betray
you and one to
deny you, and one to
judge you and wash his
hands.'
'Why do
they hate me?' asked Preacher
Abraham.
'Because you
speak of the good that
all men
dream of as if it could
be real.'
At these words
the Preacher
was troubled,
and when
the peddler had received his blessing
and gone
away up the north road he came to Malachi
and asked
him: 'Why have you remained with me?' He shook
back the hair from his
shoulders, a young man's motion, but
looked tired and old as
he rubbed
his fingertips over the
frown that would not leave
his forehead.
The painted wheel on
his tunic
bore the dark appearance of blood. 'You have not
faith, Malachi, yet you are
faithful to promises, and have served
me and
my poor
children with devotion. I watched you
helping Jude care for Dinah
at Coble,
when she was dying.
And in
the weeks
at Gran
Gor, where the smallpox was, where
so many
died, you were tireless in
caring for the sick, those of
the town
as well
as our
own. If only for these things
I'm bound
to love
and respect
you. And now it seems you
are prepared
to go
with me, though I cannot
ask it,
even to the end
of the
journey.'
'Or perhaps
I will
deny you,' said Malachi Peters,
smiling, and the Preacher presendy smiled,
in his
own fashion.
'It's my belief that human beings
choose their own ends, Preacher
Abraham. There is no
purpose under the heaven until
living creatures on earth
create it. And there must
be few
indeed who don't cherish a faith
in some
things, because all knowledge remains incomplete; even though faith
is only
the fantasy
of things hoped for, the invention
of things
not seen.
I have
faith in the good will of
myself and certain others, faith
in the
Tightness of
love and virtue and mercy.
That faith will sustain me
as it has in the past,
while I live.'
The long
weeks lay behind Jesse like
a year
of difficult
growth. This was beginning
autumn. The border post at
Nuber stood only a few steps
down the road. Tomorrow they
would pass it, and that would
happen which was to happen.
Tomorrow would be the day
that Nuber celebrated as the
Day of
Coming Forth, the day
when according to their history
and legend they came out from
underground after the twenty-minute war and found that
the Earth
still lived. Jesse's memory brought him like a remote
music the Gospel of Matthew:
Ye know that after two days
is the feast of the passover, and the Son of man is
betrayed to be crucified.
Still and sleepless
under his half of Malachi's
blanket, Jesse gazed toward the south
horizon where a few strong
stars cut through the haze of
the night.
Malachi had said it would
rain before daylight. A huge roadside
oak spread
over them, big enough to shelter
most of the Preacher's litde company, and Malachi had pegged a strip
of canvas
over their heads.
How did
one learn
the ways
of earth
and sun
and sky
as the
old man knew them?
It was
more than observation. Observing the natural world, but also
continually knowing himself
a part
of it. He could speak like Saint Francis (though he
doesn't) of 'my brother the sun.' Here am I, says he (or is it myself speaking
for him?), a unique pattern briefly arranged on this earth for my only time to
think and feel and see. So may it not be that what I do to and for myself and
others is more important than what I believe? Belief governs what I do — yes,
partly. Well, I can be mistaken about many things and still be happy if there
is happiness, I can even be good. But I can never do evil without evil consequences,
no matter how pure my intentions. Who taught me this? - I've discovered only a
little bit of it just now. Why, Malachi. Malachi and the books
...
Tad
will be taking good care of the books. He'd better!
He shut away
the southern
stars beyond his eyelids, and
tried to measure the
time since he had last
attempted to pray as Preacher Abraham
had told
him it
ought to be done: 'Relax, Jesse, and think of
nothing directly, it's not a
matter of words. Open your mind
and give
yourself to God.' He could
not measure it -
a long
time, he knew. Maybe he
had not
attempted it since Dinah's
death.
Senseless. 'As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods -they kill us for their
sport.' Lear, said Jesse's complex,
accurate, toiling mind -
the Fourth Act, and spoken
by Gloster after his blinding. 7 have
no way, therefore I want no eyes; I stumbled when I saw ...' But the true
religious will have us believe God is merciful.
A senseless death. Some
hidden lethal thing, perhaps in
Dinah's deformed bones, had
stricken her with a sudden
paralysis. For two days
she could
not lift
herself, nor relieve her bladder, nor
even breathe unless supported. Her twelve-year-old face remained
sternly patient, asking no favors,
but she could not hide the
evidence of a racking pain.
Then a fever when she no
longer knew even Jude, and
death. When it was over, the
thing in Jude's face was
not the
appalled misery that Jesse had seen
in Philippa,
but hate,
a hate
that brooded and grieved and would
not declare
itself.
And while he yet spake, lo, Judas, one of the twelve, came, and with him a great
multitude with swords and staves, from the chief priests and elders of the people.
Jesse sighed,
in need
of sleep.
The Preacher's
advice concerning prayer gave him
nothing. At the last came two false witnesses, and
said, This fellow said, I am able to destroy the
temple of God, and to build it in
three days.
And Jesse remembered
the talk
of Malachi,
recent talk and that from long
ago, when the first rumors
of Preacher
Abraham came to Melton Village. 'How
often, Jesse, how often has
Christ been crucified! The old grim story
so many
times enacted - for the
poor human race has always
longed for a Redeemer to take
up the
burdens that human people themselves
alone must carry. Once he
was a
dying god on a spattered
altar. This Preacher Abraham will
make it plain that he
must be crucified, and there will be
those to do it as
blindly as the rabble and the
Roman soldiers. And maybe we
learn a little, century by century;
or sometimes
we forget
too much.'
Nevertheless tomorrow
they would go into Nuber,
the end
already known, carrying the
dream of the New Jerusalem,
'where the earth is
so cherished
that God will return -'
No, thought Jesse
- No. I have no wish to give myself to God,
even if God lives. Human love is greater than divine love, for divine love - he looked
for the
southern stars again but the rain
had taken
them, and was falling in
light haste up there on the
October leaves; with care he
shifted the weight of bis head
on Malachi's
arm -
divine love is at worst an
illusion, at best a dream for some imaginary future time. Human love is here
and now.
Dean
R. Koontz THE NIGHT OF
THE STORM
He was a
robot more than a hundred
years old, built by other
robots nearly eight centuries
after the end of human
civilization. His name
was Suranov,
and as
was the
custom of his kind, he roamed
the earth
in search
of interesting
things to do. Suranov had climbed
the highest
mountains in the world, with
the aid of special
body attachments (spikes in his
metal feet, tiny but strong hooks
on the
ends of his twelve fingers,
an emergency grappling rope coiled inside
his chest-area
storage compartment and ready
for a
swift ejection if he should
fall); his small, anti-grav flight motors
were removed to make this
climb as dangerous and,
therefore, as interesting as possible.
Having submitted to heavy-duty
component sealing procedures, Suranov once
spent eighteen months underwater, exploring a large
portion of the Pacific Ocean,
until he was bored even by
the mating
of whales
and by
the ever-shifting
beauty of the sea
bottom. Suranov had crossed deserts,
explored the artic circle on foot,
gone spelunking in countiess different
subterranean systems. He had been
caught in a blizzard, in a major flood, in
a hurricane,
and in
the middle
of an
earthquake that would have registered
10 on
the Richter
Scale, if the
Richter Scale had still been
in use.
Once, specially insulated, he had
descended halfway to the center
of the
earth, there to bask in pockets
of glowing
gases, between pools of molten
stone, scalded by erruptions
of magma,
feeling nothing. Eventually, he grew
weary of even this colorful
spectacle, and he surfaced again. He
wondered if, having lived only
one of
his two assigned centuries, he could
last through another hundred years of such tedium.
Suranov's private counselor,
a robot
named Bikermien, assured him that
this boredom was only temporary
and easily
alleviated. If one were
clever, Bikermien said, one could
find limidess excitement as well as
innumerable, valuable situations for
serious data collection both about
one's environment and one's mechanical aptitude and heritage. Bikermien,
in the
last half of his second century,
had developed
such an enormous and complex data
vault that he was assigned
stationary duty as a counselor, attached to a mother-computer
and utterly
immobile. By now, extremely adept
at finding
excitement even through second-hand
experience, Bikermien did not mourn
the loss of his mobility; he
was, after all, a spiritual
superior to the ordinary robot. Therefore,
when Bikermien advised, Sur-anov listened,
however skeptical he might be.
Suranov's problem, according
to Bikermien,
was that
he had
started out in life,
from the moment he'd left
the factory,
to pit himself against the greatest challenges
- the
wildest sea, the coldest cold, the
highest temperatures, the greatest pressures
- and
now, having conquered these things,
could see no interesting obstacles beyond
them. Yet, the counselor said Suranov had overlooked some of the most
fascinating explorations. The quality of
any challenge
was directiy
related to one's ability to meet
it; the
less adequate one felt, the
better the experience, the richer the
contest and the handsomer the
data reward.
Does this suggest anything to you? Bikermien inquired,
without speaking, the telebeam open
between them. Nothing.
So Bikermien
explained it:
Hand-to-hand combat
with a full-grown, male ape
might seem like an uninterestingly easy challenge, at first
glance; a robot was the mental
and physical
superior of any ape. However,
one could
always modify oneself in order
to even
the odds
of what might appear
to be
a sure
thing. If a robot couldn't
fly, couldn't see as
well at night as in
the daylight,
couldn't communicate except vocally,
couldn't run faster than an
antelope, couldn't hear a whisper
at a
thousand yards - in short,
if all of his standard abilities
were dulled, except for his
thinking capacity, might not
a robot
find that a hand-to-hand battle with an ape was
a supremely
exciting event?
/ see your point. Suranov admitted.
To understand the grandeur
of simple things, one must humble himself.
Exactly.
And so it
was that,
on the
following day, Suranov boarded the express train going north
to Rogale's
Province, where he was scheduled to
do some
hunting in the company of
four other robots, all of whom
had been
stripped to their essentials.
Ordinarily, they
would have flown under their
own power;
now, none of them
had that
ability.
Ordinarily, they would
have used their telebeams for
communication; now, they
were forced to talk to
one another
in that curious, clicking language that
had been
especially designed for machines but
which robots had been able
to do
without for more than six
hundred years.
Ordinarily, the thought
of going
north to hunt deer and
wolves would have bored
them all to tears, if
they had been able to cry;
now, however, each of them
felt a curious tingle of anticipation,
as if
this were a more important
ordeal than any he had faced
before.
A brisk,
efficient robot named Janus met
the group
at the
small stationhouse just outside
of Walker's
Watch, toward the northernmost
corner of the Province. To
Suranov, it was clear that Janus had spent several
months in this uneventful duty assignment, and that
he might
be near
the end
of his
obligatory two years' service
to the
Central Agency. He was actually
too brisk and
efficient. He spoke rapidly, and
he behaved,
altogether, as if he must
keep moving and doing in
order not to have time to
contemplate the uneventful and unexciting
days that he had spent in
Walker's Watch. He was the
kind of robot too eager for
excitement; one day, he would
tackle a challenge that he had
not been,
by degrees,
prepared for, and he would
end himself.
Suranov looked at
Tuttie, another robot who, on
the train
north, had begun an
interesting, if silly, argument about
the development of the
robot's personality. He had contended
that, until quite recentiy, in terms
of millenia
and centuries,
robots had not had individual personalities. Each, Tuttie claimed,
was quite like the other, cold
and sterile,
with no private dreams. A patenfly ridiculous theory.
Tuttie had been unable to
explain how this could have been,
but he
refused to back down from
his position. Watching Janus
chatter at them in a
nervous staccato, Suranov was
incapable of envisioning an era
when the Central Agency would have
dispatched mindless robots from the factories.
The whole
purpose of life was to
explore, to store data collected from
an individual
viewpoint, even if it were repetitive.
How could
mindless robots ever function in
the necessary manner?
As Steffan,
another of their group, had
said, such theories were on a
par with
belief in Second Awareness. (Some believed, without evidence,
that the Central Agency occasionally
made a mistake and, when a
robot's alloted lifespan was up,
only partially erased his
accumulated memory before refitting him and sending him out
of the
factory again. These robots, the superstitious claimed, had an
advantage and were among those who matured fast enough
to be
elevated to duty as counselors and, sometimes, even to
service in the Central Agency itself.)
Tuttie was
angered to hear his views
lumped with all sorts of wild
tales. To egg him on,
Steffan also suggested that Tutde
believed in that ultimate
of hobgoblins,
the 'human
being.' At this, disgusted, Tutde settled
into a grumpy silence, while
the other enjoyed the jest.
'And now,' Janus
said, calling Suranov back from
his reverie,
'I'll issue your supplies and
see you
on your
way.'
Suranov, Tuttie,
Steffan, Leeke, and Skowski crowded
forward, eager to begin the
adventure.
Each of
the five
were given: binoculars of rather
antique design, a pair
of snowshoes
that clipped and bolted to
their feet, a survival pack of
tools and greases with which
to repair
themselves in the event
of some
unforeseen emergency, an electric hand-torch, maps, and a drug
rifle complete with an extra clip
of one
thousand darts.
'This is all,
then?' Leeke asked. He had
seen as much danger as Suranov,
perhaps even more, but now
he sounded
frightened.
'What else
would you need?' Janus asked
impatientiy.
Leeke said, 'Well,
as you
know, certain modifications have been made
on us.
For one
thing, our eyes aren't what
they were, and -'
'You've a torch for
darkness,' Janus said.
'And then,
our ears
--' Leeke
began.
'Listen cautiously,
walk quietiy,' Janus suggested.
'We've had
a power
reduction to our legs,' Leeke
said. 'If we should have to
run -'
'Be stealthy; creep
upon your game before they
know you're there, and you'll not
need to chase them.'
'But,' Leeke persisted,
'weakened as we are, if
we should
have to run from
something -'
'You're only after
deer and wolves,' Janus reminded
him. 'The deer will not give
chase - and a wolf
hasn't any taste for steel flesh.'
Skowski, who
had thus
far been
exceptionally quiet, not even joining the good natured roasting
the others
had given
Tuttie on the train, now stepped
forward. He said, 'I've read
that this part of Rogale's Province
has an
unusual number of - unexplained
reports.'
'Reports of
what?' Janus
asked.
Skowski swept the
others with his yellow visual
receptors, then
looked back at Janus. 'Well
- reports
of footprints
similar to our own but not
those of any robot, and
reports of robotiike forms seen in
the woods-'
'Oh,' Janus
said, waving a glittering hand as if to
brush away Skowski's suggestion
like a fluff of dust,
'we get
a dozen
reports each month about "human
beings" sighted in the wilder
regions northwest of here.'
'Where we're
going?' Suranov asked.
'Yes,' Janus said.
'But I wouldn't worry. In
every case, those who make the
reports are robots like yourselves: they've had their perceptions
decreased in order to make
the hunt
a greater
challenge for them. Undoubtedly,
what they've seen has a
quite normal explanation. If they had
seen these things with the
full range of their perceptions, they would not have
come back with these crazy tales.'
'Does anyone
besides stripped down robots go
there?' Skowski asked.
'No,' Janus
said.
Skowski shook his
head. 'This isn't anything at
all like
I thought it would be. I
feel so weak, so .:.'
He dropped
his supplies at his feet. 'I
don't believe I want to
continue with this,' he said.
The others
were surprised.
'Afraid of goblins?' Steffan asked. He
was the
teaser in the group.
'No,' Skowski said.
'But T don't
like being a cripple, no
matter how much excitement
it adds
to the
adventure.'
'Very well,' Janus
said. 'There will be only
four of you, then.'
Leeke said, 'Don't
we get
any weapons
besides the drug rifle?'
'You'll need
nothing else,' Janus said.
Leeke's query had
been a strange one, Suranov
thought. The prime directive in every
robot's personality, when he left
the factory, forbade the taking of
life which could not be
restored. Yet, Suranov had
sympathized with Leeke, shared Leeke's
foreboding. He supposed that, with
a crippling
of their
perceptions, there was an inevitable
clouding of the thought processes
as well, for nothing
else explained their intense and
irrational fear.
'Now,' Janus
said, 'the only thing you'll
need to know is that
a natural storm is
predicted for the northern Rogale
area early tomorrow night. By then
you should
be to
the lodge
which will serve as your base
of operations,
and the
snow will pose no trouble. Questions?'
They had
none they cared to ask.
'Good luck to
the four
of you,
then,' Janus said. 'And may many weeks
pass before you lose interest
in the
challenge.' That was
a traditional
send-off, yet Janus appeared to
mean it. He would, Suranov guessed,
prefer to be hunting deer
and wolves under decreased perceptions rather than to continue
clerking at the stationhouse
in Walker's
Watch.
They thanked him,
consulted their maps, left the
station-house and were finally on
their way.
Skowski watched
them go and, when they
looked back at him, waved one
shiny arm in a stiff-fingered
salute.
They walked
all that
day, through the evening and
on into
the long night, not
requiring rest. Though the power
supply to their legs had been
cut back
and an
effective governor put on their walking
speed, they did not grow
weary. They could sense their lessened abilities, but they
could not grow tired. Even
when the drifts were
deep enough for them to
break out their wire-webbed snowshoes and
bolt those in place, they
maintained a steady pace.
Passing across broad
plains where the snow was
swept into eerie peaks and twisting
configurations, walking beneath
the dense roof of crossed pine
boughs in the virgin forests,
Suranov felt a twinge
of anticipation
which had been missing from his exploits for some
years now. Because his perceptions
were so much less
acute than usual, he sensed
danger in every shadow, imagined obstacles
and complications
around every turn. It was positively
exhilarating to be here.
Before dawn, a
light snow began to fall,
clinging to their cold, steel skin.
Two hours
later, by the day's first
light, they crested a small ridge
and looked
out across
an expanse
of pine
woods to the lodge
where it rested on the
other side of a shallow
valley. The place was made
of a
burnished, bluish metal, with oval windows,
very straight-walled and functional.
'We'll be
able to get some hunting
in today,'
Steffan said.
'Let's go,'
Tuttie said.
Single file, they
went down into the valley,
crossed it and came out almost
at the
doorstep of the lodge.
Suranov pulled
the trigger.
The magnificent buck, decorated with a
twelve-point rack of anders,
reared up onto its hind
legs, pawing at the air,
breathing steam.
'A hit!' Leeke
cried.
Suranov fired
again.
The buck
went down onto all four
legs.
The other deer,
behind it in the woods,
turned and galloped away, back along
the well-trampled
trail.
The buck shook
its huge
head, staggered forward as if
to follow its companions, stopped abruptiy,
then settied slowly onto its haunches
and, after one last valiant
effort to regain its footing, fell sideways into the
snow.
'Congratulations!' Steffan
said.
The four robots
rose from the drift where
they'd fallen when the deer had
come into sight, and they
crossed the small, open field to the sleeping buck.
Suranov bent and
felt the creature's
sedated heartbeat, watched its grainy, black
nostrils quiver as it took
a shallow
breath.
Tuttie, Steffan, and
Leeke crowded in, hunkering about
the creature, touching it, marveling at
the perfect
musculature, the powerful shoulders and the
hard-packed thighs. They agreed that bringing down such a
brute, when one's senses were
drastically damped, was indeed a
challenge. Then, one by one,
they got up and walked away,
leaving Suranov alone to more
fully appreciate his triumph
and to
carefully collect his own emotional
reactions to the event in
the micro-tapes
of his
data vault.
Suranov was
nearly finished with his evaluation
of the
challenge and of the resultant
confrontation, and the
buck was beginning to regain its
senses, when Tutde cried out
as if
his systems had been accidentally overloaded.
'Here! Look
here!'
Tuttie stood,
Suranov saw, two hundred yards
away, near the dark trees, waving
his arms.
Steffan and Leeke were already
moving toward him.
At Suranov's
feet, the buck snorted and
tried to stand, failed to manage
that yet, blinked its gummed
eyelids. With little or nothing more
to record
in his
data vault, Suranov rose and left
the beast,
walked toward his three companions.
'What is
it?' he asked when he
arrived.
The stared
at him
with glowing amber visual receptors
which seemed especially bright in the gray
light of late afternoon.
'There,' Tutde
said, pointing at the ground
before them.
'Footprints,' Suranov
said.
Leeke said,
'They don't belong to any
of us.'
'So?' Suranov
asked.
'And they're not
robot prints,' Tutde said. 'Of course
they are.' Tutde said, 'Look closer.'
Suranov bent
down and realized that his
eyes, with half their power gone, had at first
deceived him in the weak
light. These weren't robot prints in
anything but shape. A robot's
feet were cross-hatched with
rubber tread; these prints showed
none of that. A robot's feet
were bottomed with two holes
that acted as vents for the
anti-grav system when the unit
was in
flight; these prints showed no holes.
Suranov said, 'I
didn't know there were any
apes in the north.'
'There aren't,'
Tuttie said.
'Then -'
'These,' Tutde said,
'are the prints - of
a man.'
'Preposterous!' Steffan said.
'How else do
you explain
them?' Tuttie asked. He didn't
sound happy with his
explanation, but he was prepared
to stick with it until someone
offered something more acceptable.
'A hoax,'
Steffan said.
'Perpetrated by
whom?' Tutde asked.
'One of us.'
They looked at
each other, as if the
guilt would be evident in their identical, bland metal
faces. Then Leeke said, 'That's
no good. We've been
together. These tracks were made
re-cendy, or they'd be covered
over with snow; none of
us has
had a chance, all afternoon, to sneak off and
form them.'
'I still say
it's a hoax,' Steffan insisted.
'Perhaps someone was sent out by
the Central
Agency to leave these for
us to
find.'
'Why would
Central bother?' Tuttie asked.
'Maybe it's part
of our
therapy,' Steffan said. 'Maybe this
is to sharpen the challenge for
us, add
excitement to the hunt.' He gestured
vaguely at the prints, as
if he
hoped they'd vanish. 'Maybe Central does
this for everyone who's been
sated, to restore the sense of
wonder that -'
'Highly unlikely,' Tuttie said. 'You know
that it's the responsibility of each individual to engineer his own
adventures and to generate
his own
storable responses. The Central Agency
never interferes; it is
merely a judge. It evaluates,
after the fact, and gives promotions
to those
whose data vaults have reached
maturity.'
By way of
cutting the argument short, Suranov
said, 'Where do these prints lead?'
Leeke indicated the
marks with a shiny finger.
'It looks
as if
the creature came out
of the
woods and stood here for
a while
- perhaps watching us
as we
stalked the buck. Then he
turned and went back the way
he came.'
The four
of them
followed the footprints into the
first of the pine trees, but
they hesitated to go into
the deeper
regions of the forest.
'Darkness is coming,'
Leeke said. 'The storm's almost on
us, as Janus predicted. With our
senses as restricted as they
are, we should be getting back
to the
lodge while we've still light
enough to see by.'
Suranov wondered
if their
surprising cowardice were as evident
to the
others as it was to
him. They all professed not
to believe in the monsters of
myth, and yet they rebelled
at the
thought of following these
footprints. However, Suranov had to admit,
when he tried to envision
the beast
that might have made these tracks
- a
'man' - he was even
more anxious than ever to reach
the sanctity
of the
lodge.
The lodge
had only
one room,
which was really all that
they required. Since each
of the
four was physically identical to
the others, no one
felt a need for geographical
privacy. Each could obtain a more
rewarding isolation merely by tuning
out all exterior events in one
of the
lodge's inactivation nooks, thereby
dwelling within his own mind,
recycling old data and searching for previously overlooked juxtapositions of seemingly unrelated information. Therefore, no one was discomfited
by the single, gray-walled, nearly featureless
room where they would spend as
much as several weeks together,
barring any complications or any lessening
of their
interest in the challenge of the hunt...
They racked their
drug rifles on a metal
shelf that ran the length of one wall, and
they unbolted their other supplies
which, until now, they
had carried
at various
points on their functional body shells.
As they stood
at the
largest window, watching the snow
sheet past them in a blindingly
white fury, Tuttie said, 'If
the myths
are true, think what
would be done to modem
philosophy.'
'What myths?'
Suranov asked.
'About human beings.'
Steffan, as rigid
as ever,
was quick
to counter
the thrust
of Tuttle's undeveloped line of thought.
He said,
'I've seen nothing to make
me believe
in myths.'
Tutde was wise
enough, just then, to avoid
an argument
about the footprints in the snow. But
he was
not prepared
to drop the conversation altogether. He said 'We've always thought that intelligence was a
manifestation, solely, of
the mechanized mind. If
we should
find that a fleshy creature
could -'
'But none
can,' Steffan interrupted.
Suranov thought
that Steffan must be rather
young, no more than thirty or
forty years out of the
factory. Otherwise, he would not be
so quick
to reject
anything that even slightiy threatened the status quo that
the Central
Agency had oudined and established. With the decades, Suranov
knew, one learned that what had
once been impossible was now
considered only commonplace.
"There are myths
about human beings,' Tutde said,
'which say that robots sprang from
them.'
'From flesh?' Steffan
asked, incredulous.
'I know it
sounds odd,' Tuttie said. 'But
at various
times in my life, I have
seen the oddest things prove
true.'
'You've been all
over the earth, in more
corners than I have been. In all your travels,
you must
have seen tens of thousands
of fleshy species, animals
of all
descriptions.' Steffan paused,
for effect, then said, 'Have you ever
encountered a single fleshy creature with
even rudimentary intelligence
in the
manner of the robot?'
'Never,' Tuttie
admitted.
'Flesh was not
designed for high-level sentience,' Steffan said.
They were
quiet a while, then.
The snow
fell, pulling the gray sky
closer to the land.
None would
admit the private, inner fear
he nurtured.
'Many things fascinate
me,' Tuttie said, surprising Suranov who had thought the
other robot was done with
his postulating.
'For one - where did
the Central
Agency come from? What were its
origins?'
Steffan waved a
hand disparagingly. 'There has always been a Central Agency.'
'But that's
no answer,'
Tutde said.
'Why isn't it?'
Steffan asked. 'We accept, for
answer, that there has always been a universe, stars and planets
and everything
in between.'
'Suppose,' Tutde said,
'just for the sake of
argument, that there has not always been a Central Agency. The
Agency is constantly doing research into
its own
nature, redesigning itself. Vast stores
of data
are transferred
into increasingly more
sophisticated repositories every fifty
to a
hundred years. Isn't it possible that,
occasionally, the Agency loses bits
and pieces,
accidentally destroys some of
its memory
in the
move?'
'Impossible,' Steffan said.
'There would be any number
of safeguards taken against such an
eventuality.'
Suranov, aware of
many of the Central Agency's
bungles over the past hundred years,
was not
so sure.
He was
intrigued by Tuttle's theory.
Tuttie said, 'If
the Central
Agency somehow lost most of
its early stores of data, its
knowledge of human beings might
have vanished along with coundess other
bits and pieces.'
Steffan was disgusted.
He said,
'Earlier, you ranted about Second Awareness. You amuse me,
Tutde. Your data vault must be a treasure trove
of silly
information and useless theorizing.
If you
believe in these human beings
- then
do you
also believe in all
the attendant
myths? Do you think they
can only be killed with an
instrument of wood? Do you
think they sleep at night, in
dark rooms, like beasts? And
do you
think that, though they're made of
flesh, they cannot be dispatched
but that they pop
up somewhere
else in a new body?'
Confronted with
these obviously insupportable
superstitions, Tutde backed down
from his entire point. He
turned his amber visual receptors on
the whirling
snow beyond the window, and
he said, 'I was
only supposing. I was just
spinning a litde fantasy to
help pass the time.'
Triumphant, Steffan said,
'However, fantasy doesn't contribute to a maturation of one's data vault.'
'And I suppose that
you're eager to mature enough
to gain
a promotion from the Agency,' Tuttie
said.
'Of course,' Steffan
said. 'We're only alloted two
hundred years. And, besides,
what else is the purpose
of life?'
Perhaps to have
an opportunity
to mull
over his strange 'supposings,'
Tuttie soon retired to an
inactivation nook in the wall beneath
the metal
shelf where the guns lay.
He slid
in feet first, pulled the hatch
shut behind his head, leaving
the others to their own devices.
Fifteen minutes later,
Leeke said, T believe I'll
follow Tutde's example. I
need time to consider my
responses to this afternoon's hunt.'
Suranov knew that
Leeke was only making excuses
to be
gone; he was not
a particularly
gregarious robot and seemed most comfortable when he was
unaddressed and left to himself.
Alone with
Steffan in the lodge, Suranov
was in
an un-pleasandy delicate position. He felt
that he, too, needed time
to think inside a
deactivation nook. However, he did
not want
to hurt Steffan's feelings,
did not
want to give him the
impression that they were all
anxious to be away from
him. For the most part, Suranov
liked the young robot; Steffan
was fresh,
energetic, obviously a first-line
mentality. The only thing he
found grating about the
youth was his innocence, his undisciplined drive to
be accepted
and to
achieve. Time, of course, would mellow
and richen
Steffan; he did not, therefore,
deserve to be hurt.
How, then, to excuse oneself
without slighting Steffan in any
way?
The younger robot
solved the problem, by suggesting
that he, too, needed time in
a nook.
When he was safely shut
away, Suranov went to the fourth
of the
five wall slots, slid into
it, pulled the hatch shut, and
felt all of his senses
drained away from him, so that
he was
only a mind, floating in
darkness, contemplating the wealth
of ideas
in his
data vault ...
Adrift in nothingness, Suranov considers the
superstition which has begun to be the center of this adventure: the human
being, the man:
1.
Though
of flesh, the man thinks and knows.
2. He sleeps by night, like an animal.
3.
He
devours other flesh, as does the beast.
4.
He
defecates.
5.
He
dies and rots, is susceptible to disease and corruption.
6.
He
spawns his young in a terrifyingly unmechanical way, and yet his young are also
sentient.
7.
He
kills.
8.
He
can overpower a robot.
9. He
dismantles robots, though none but other men know
what he does with their parts.
10.
He
is the antithesis of the robot. If the robot represents the proper way of life,
man is the improper.
11.
Man
stalks in safety, registering to the robot's senses, unless seen, as only
another harmless animal - until it is too late.
12.
He
can be permanently killed only with a wooden implement. Wood is the product of
an organic lifeform, yet lasts as metal does; halfway between flesh and metal,
it can destroy human flesh.
13.
If
killed in any other way, by any means other than wood, the man will only appear
to be dead. In reality, the moment he drops before his assailant, he springs to
life elsewhere, unharmed, in a new body.
Although the list goes on, Suranov abandons
that avenue of thought, for it disturbs him deeply. Tuttle's
fantasy can be nothing more than that - conjecture, supposing, imagination.
If the human being actually existed, how could one believe the Central Agency's
prime rule: that the universe is, in every way, entirely logical and rational?
'The rifles
are gone,'
Tuttie said, when Suranov slid
out of
the deactivation nook and
got to
his feet.
'That's why I recalled you.'
'Gone?' Suranov
asked, looking at the shelf.
'Gone where?'
'Leeke's taken them,'
Steffan said. He stood by
the window,
his long, bluish arms
beaded with cold droplets of
water which had been precipitated out of the air.
'Is Leeke
gone too?' Suranov asked.
'Yes.'
He thought
about this for a moment,
then said, 'But where
would he
go in
the storm?
And why
would he need all the
rifles?'
T'm sure that
it's nothing to be concerned
about' Steffan said. 'He must have
had a
good reason, and he can
tell us all about it when
he comes
back.'
Tuttie said,
7/ he
comes back.'
Suranov said, 'Tuttie,
you sound
as if
you think
he might
be in danger.'
'In light
of what's
happened recently - those prints
we found
- I'd say that could be
a possibility.'
Steffan scoffed at this.
'Whatever's happening,' Tuttie said, 'you must
admit it's odd.' He turned to
Suranov. T wish
we hadn't
submitted to the operations before we
came out here. I'd do
anything to have my full senses
again.' He hesitated, then said, 'I
think we have to go find
Leeke.'
'He'll be back,'
Steffan argued. 'He'll return when
he wants
to.'
T'm still for
initiating a search,' Tuttie said.
Suranov went to
the window
and stood
next to Steffan, looked out at
the driving
snow. It had covered the
ground with at least twelve new
inches of white, had bowed
the proud
trees, and still it fell faster
than Suranov had ever seen
it fall
in all
his many journies.
'Well?' Tuttie
asked again.
'I concur,'
Suranov said. 'We should look
for him,
but we
should do it together.
With our lessened perceptions, we might easily get separated
and lost
out there.
If one
of us
became damaged in a
fall, he would most likely
experience a complete battery depletion before
anyone found him.'
'You're right,'
Tuttie said. He turned to
Steffan 'And you?'
'Oh, all
right,' Steffan said. 'I'll come
along.'
Their torches
cut bright
wounds in the darkness but
did little
to melt through the
curtain of wind-driven snow. They
walked abreast around the
lodge, making a circle search.
Each time they completed another turn
about the building, they widened
their search pattern. They
had decided
to cover
all of
the open
land, but they would
not enter
the trees,
even if they had not
located Leeke by then.
They all agreed to this
limitation, though none -
not even
Steffan - admitted that half
the reason
for ignoring the woods
was based
on a
purely irrational fear of them ...
In the end,
however, it was not necessary
to enter
the woods,
for they found Leeke
less than twenty yards away
from the lodge. He was lying
on his
side in the snow.
'He's been
terminated,' Steffan said.
The others
didn't need to be told.
Both of
Leeke's legs were missing.
'Who could
have done something like this?'
Steffan asked.
Neither Tutde
nor Suranov
answered him.
Leeke's head hung
limply on his neck, because
several of the links in his
ring cable had been bent
out of
alignment. His visual perceptors had been
smashed, and the mechanism behind
them ripped out through the
shattered sockets. When Suranov bent closer,
he saw
that someone had poked a
sharp object into Leeke's data vaults,
through his eye tubes, and
had scrambled his tapes into a
useless mess; he hoped Leeke
had been dead by then.
'Horrible,' Steffan
said. He turned away from
the scene
and began to walk back toward
the lodge,
stopped abrupdy as he realized that he should not
be out
of the
other robots' company. He shuddered,
mentally.
'What should
we do
with him?' Tutde asked.
'Leave him,'
Suranov said.
'Here to
rust?'
'He'll sense
nothing more.'
'Still-'
'We should
be getting
back,' Suranov said, shining his
light around the snowy scene. 'We
shouldn't expose ourselves.' Keeping
close to one another, they
returned to the lodge.
9. He dismantles robots, though none but other men know what he does with
their parts ...
'As I see it,'
Suranov told them, when they
were once again inside the lodge,
'Leeke did not take the
rifles. Someone - or something - entered the lodge
to steal
them. Leeke must have come out
of his
inactivation nook just as the
culprits were leaving. Without pausing to
wake us, he gave chase.'
'Or was
forced to go with them,'
Tutde said.
'I doubt that
he was
taken out by force,' Suranov
said. 'In the lodge, with enough
light to see by and
enough space to maneuver in, even
with lessened perceptions, Leeke could
have kept himself from being hurt
or forced
to leave.
However, once he was outside, in
the storm,
he was
at their
mercy.'
The wind
screamed across the peaked roof
of the
lodge, rattied the windows
in their
metal frames.
They stood
still, listening until the gust
died away, as if the
noise were not made
by the
wind but by some enormous
beast that had reared up over
the building
and was
intent on tearing it to
pieces.
Suranov went
on: 'When
I examined
Leeke, I found that he
was felled by a
sharp blow to the ring
cable, just under the head -
the kind
of blow
that would have had to
come suddenly, from behind, without
warning. In a room as
well lighted as this, nothing could
have gotten behind Leeke without
his knowing it was there.'
Steffan turned away
from the window and said,
'Do you
think that Leeke was
already terminated when ...' His
voice trailed away, but in a
moment he had found the
discipline to go on: 'Was he
terminated when they dismanded his
legs?'
'We can
only hope that he was,'
Suranov said.
Steffan said,
'Who could have done such
a thing?'
'A man,'
Tuttie said.
'Or men,'
Suranov amended.
'No,' Steffan said.
But his
denial was not so adamant as
it had been before. He said,
'What would they have done
with his legs?'
'No one knows
what they do with what
they take,' Suranov said.
Steffan said, 'You're
beginning to sound as if
Tutde's convinced you, as if
you believe
in these
creatures.'
'Until I have
a better
answer to the question of
who terminated
Leeke, I think it's safest
to believe
in human
beings,' Suranov explained.
For a time, they
were silent.
Then, Suranov
said, 'I think we should
start back to Walker's Watch in the morning, first
thing.'
"They'll think we're
immature,' Steffan said, 'if we
come back with wild tales about
men prowling
about the lodge in the
darkness. You saw how
disdainful Janus was of others
who'd made similar reports.'
'We've poor,
dead Leeke as proof,' Tuttie
said.
'Or,' Suranov
said, 'we can say Leeke
was terminated
in an
accident and that we're
returning because we're bored with
the challenge.'
'You mean, we wouldn't even
have to mention - human
beings?' Steffan wanted to know.
'Possibly,' Suranov said.
'That would
be the
best way to handle it,
by far,'
Steffan said. 'Then, no second-hand reports of our temporary
irrationality would get
back to the Central Agency.
We could
spend much time in the inactivation
nooks, until we finally saw
the real explanation of Leeke's termination, which somehow
now eludes us; if we meditate
long enough, a proper solution is bound to arise. Then,
by the
time of our next data
vault audits by the Agency, we'd
have covered over all traces
of this
illogical reaction we now suffer
from.'
'However,' Tutde
said, 'we might already know
the real explanation of Leeke's death. After all,
we've seen the footprints in the snow, and
we've seen the dismantied body ... Might it
be that
men -
human beings - really are
behind it?'
'No,' Steffan
said. 'That's superstitious. That's irrational.'
'At dawn,' Suranov
said, 'we'll set out for
Walker's Watch, no matter how bad
the storm
is by
then.'
As he finished
speaking, the distant hum of
the lodge's
generator - which was
a comforting
background noise that never abated -
now cut
out, and they were plunged
into darkness.
With snow
crusted on their chilled metal
skins, they focused three electric torches
on the
generator in its niche behind
the lodge. The top of the
machine's casing had been removed,
exposing the complex inner works
to the
elements; in, the center of all
that tangled wiring lay an obvious
hole where some part or other
should have been.
'Someone's removed
the power
core,' Suranov said.
'But who?' Steffan
asked.
Suranov directed
the beam
of his
torch to the ground. The others did likewise.
Mingled with their
own footprints
were other prints similar but not made by any
robot: those same, strange tracks
that they had seen by the
trees in the late afternoon,
and which
had profusely marked the snow all
around Leeke's body.
'No,' Steffan
said. 'No, no, no.'
'I think it's
best that we set out
for Walker's
Watch tonifihi.'
Suranov said. 'I
don't think it would be
wise, any longer, to wait until
morning.' He looked at Tuttie
who was
mottled by the snow which clung
to him
in icy
lumps. 'What do you think?'
'Agreed,' Tuttie said.
'But I suspect it's not
going to be an easy journey.
I wish
I had
all my
senses to full power.'
'We can still
move fast,' Suranov said. 'And
we don't
need to rest, as fleshy creatures
must. If we're pursued, we
have the advantage.'
'In theory,'
Tuttie said.
'We'll have
to be
satisfied with that.'
7.
He
kills.
8.
He
can overpower a robot.
In the
lodge, by the eerie light
of their
hand torches, they bolted on their
snowshoes, attached their emergency repair
kits, and picked up
their maps. The beams of
their lamps preceding them, they
went outside again, staying quite
close together.
The wind
beat upon their broad backs,
while the snow worked hard to
coat them in hard-packed, icy suits.
They crossed the
clearing, half by dead reckoning
and half
by the few landmarks the torches
revealed, each wishing to himself that he
had his
full powers of sight, and
his radar,
in operation again. Soon, they came
to the
opening in the trees which lead down the side
of the
valley and back toward Walker's Watch. They stopped there,
staring into the dark tunnel which the sheltering pines formed, and they
seemed reluctant to go
any farther.
'There are
so many
shadows -' Tuttie said.
'Shadows can't
hurt us,' Suranov said. Throughout
their association, from the moment
they had met one another
on the
train coming north, Suranov
had known
that he was the leader
among them. He had
exercised his leadership sparingly, but now he must take
full command. He started forward,
into the trees, between the shadows,
moving down the snowy slope.
In a moment, reluctantly,
Steffan followed.
Tuttie came
last.
Halfway down toward
the valley
floor, the tunnel between the trees narrowed drastically. The trees loomed closer,
spread their boughs lower. And it
was here,
in these
tight quarters, in the deepest shadows,
that they were attacked.
Something howled
in triumph,
its mad
voice echoing above the constant whine
of the
wind.
Suranov whirled,
not certain
from which direction the sound
had come, lancing the
trees with torchlight.
Behind, Tutde
cried out.
Suranov turned,
as Steffan
did, and both their torches
illuminated the struggling robot. Tt can't be!' Steffan said.
Tuttie had fallen
back under the relentiess attack of a two-legged
creature which moved almost exactiy
as a
robot might move, though it was
clearly a fleshy creature. It
was dressed
in furs, its feet booted, and
it wielded
a metal
axe.
It drove
the blunted
blade at Tuttie's ring cable.
Tuttie raised an
arm, threw back the weapon,
saved himself - at
the cost
of a
severely damaged elbow joint.
Suranov started
forward to help, but was
stopped as a second of the
fleshy beasts belivered a blow
from behind. The weapon struck the
center of Suranov's back and
drove him, totteringly, to his knees.
Suranov fell sideways,
rolled, got to his feet in
one well-coordinated
maneuver, turned quickly to confront
his assailant.
A fleshy face
stared back at him from
a dozen
feet away, blowing steam into the
cold air. It was framed
in a
fur-lined hood, a grotesque
parody of a robot's face.
Its eyes
were too small for visual receptors,
and they
did not
glow. Its face was not perfecdy
symmetrical as it should have
been; instead, it was out of
proportion - and it was
puffed and mottied from the cold.
It did
not even
shine in the torchlight, and yet ... Yet,
there was obvious intelligence there - malevolent intelligence, perhaps even maniacal,
but intelligence
nonetheless.
Surprisingly, the
monster spoke to Suranov. Its
voice was deep, its language full
of rounded,
softened syllables, not at all
like the clattering language the
robots spoke to one another.
Abruptly, the beast
leapt forward, crying out, and
swung a length of metal pipe
at Suranov's
neck.
The robot
danced backwards, out of range.
The demon
came forward.
Suranov glanced at
the others, saw the first demon
had Tuttie
backed almost into the
woods. A third had attacked
Steffan, who was barely managing to
hold his own.
Screaming, the
man before
Suranov charged, plowed the end
of the pipe into Suranov's chest.
The robot fell, hard.
The man
came in close, raising his
bludgeon.
Man thinks, though he's of flesh ... sleeps like an animal, devours other
flesh, defecates, rots, dies ... he
spawns his young in an unmechanical manner, though his young are sentient ... he kills ... he kills ... he
ovdrpowers robots, dismantles them, does {what?) with their parts ... can be killed, permanently, only with a
wooden implement... if killed in any
other way, he does not die a true death, but springs up elsewhere in a new
body ...
As the
monster swung his club. Suranov
rolled, rose up and struck out with his long-fingered
hand.
The man's
face tore, gave blood.
The demon
stepped back, bewildered.
Suranov's terror had
metamorphosed into rage, and he
made use of that rage as
he stepped
forward and struck out again.
And again.
Flailing with all of his
reduced strength, he broke the demon's
body, temporarily killed it, leaving
the snow
spattered with blood.
Turning from his
own assailant,
he moved
in on
the beast
that was after Steffan
and, clubbing from behind, broke
its neck with one blow of
his steel
hand.
By the time
he reached
Tuttie and had dispatched with the third demon, Tuttie
had sustained
one totally
demolished arm, another smashed hand, and
damage to the ring cable
which, luckily, had not
terminated him. The three of
them, with any luck, would survive.
'I thought
it was
finished,' Tuttie said.
Dazed, Steffan said
to Suranov,
'You killed all three of
them!'
'They would have
terminated us,' Suranov said. Inside,
where they could not
see, he was in a turmoil.
'But,' Steffan said,
'the prime directive from the
Central Agency forbids the
taking of life -'
'Not quite,' Suranov
said. 'It forbids the taking
of life
which cannot be restored.'
'These lives will
be restored?'
Steffan asked, looking at the
hideous corpses, unable to
understand.
'You've seen human
beings now,' Suranov said. 'Do
you believe
the myths,
or do
you still
scoff?'
'How can
I scoff?'
'Then,' Suranov said,
'if you
believe that such demons exist,
you must believe what
else is said of them.'
He quoted
his own
store of data on
the subject:
'If killed
in any
other way, by any means other
than wood, the man will
only appear to be dead. In
reality, the moment he drops
before his assailant, he springs to life elsewhere, unharmed, in a new
body.'
Steffan nodded,
unwilling to argue the point.
Tutde said,
'What now?'
'We continue
back to Walker's Watch,' Suranov
said.
'And tell
them what we found?'
'No.'
'But,' Tutde said,
'we can
lead them back here, show
them these corpses.'
'Look around you,'
Suranov said. 'There are other
demons watching from the
trees.'
Tuttie looked, saw a dozen
white faces on both sides,
leering.
Suranov said, 'I
don't think they'll attack us
again. They've seen what we can
do, how
we have
learned that, with them, the
prime directive does not
apply. But they're sure to
remove and bury the corpses when
we've gone.'
'We can
take a body along with
us,' Tutde said.
Suranov said,
'No. Both of your hands
are useless,
and Steffan's right arm is uncontrollable.
I couldn't
carry one of those bodies all
the way
back to Walker's Watch with
my power as reduced as it
is.'
'Then,' Tutde said,
'we still
won't tell anyone about what
we've seen up here?'
'We can't afford
to, if
we ever
want to be promoted,' Suranov said. 'Our only
hope is to spend a
very long time in some
inactivation nook, contemplating until we've learned to
cope with what we've witnessed.'
They picked their
torches out of the snow
and, staying close to one another,
started down toward the valley
once more.
'Walk slowly
and show
no fear,'
Suranov warned.
They walked
slowly, but each of them
was certain
that his fear was painfully evident
to the
unearthly creatures crouching in the shadows
beneath the pine trees.
They walked all
that night and most of
the following
day before they reached the stationhouse
at Walker's
Watch. In that time, the storm
died down and winked out
altogether. The landscape was serene, white,
quite peaceful. Looking
at it,
one felt sure the universe was
rational. But Suranov knew, with
a terrible, sick
premonition, that - if he
must believe in specters and other-worldly beings like men
- he
would never be able to
think of the universe
in rational
terms again.
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CONTINUUM 1
is a
revolutionary concept in anthologies. This volume is the first of a series in
which eight leading S.F. writers create their own very different worlds to
which they will return in volumes 2, 3 & 4. Among them are:
anne McCaffrey,
who
recreates the World of the Crystal Singers, a dreadful, god-forsaken colony
planet of terrible danger;
edgar pangborn,
who t^kes us to the post-holocaust Earth of his
novel
Davy;
poul
anderson,
who
sets his tale in his world of Orbit Unlimited;
philip
jose farmer,
who takes his hero, Paul Eyre, to his first
'Station of the Nightmare'.
A
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