CONTINUUM 3
Edited by
ROGER ELWOOD
Published
by BERKLEY PUBLISHING
CORPORATION Distributed
by G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS,
NEW YORK
copyright © 1974
by roger elwood
All
rights reserved. This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form
without permission in writing from the publisher. Published simultaneously in
Canada by Longman Canada Limited, Toronto.
SBN: 399-11293-6
Library
of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73-87184
printed in the united states of america
Contents
INTRODUCTION 1
Roger
Elwood
STATIONS OF THE NIGHTMARE—
Part 3 : THE EVOLUTION OF PAUL
EYRE 3
Philip José Farmer
A
FAIR EXCHANGE 29
Poul Anderson
THE MIDDLE MAN 55
Chad Oliver
THE ARMAGEDDON TAPES—TAPE III 85
Thomas N. Scortia
MILEKEY
MOUNTAIN
(From the Crystal Singer series) 11 1
Anne McCaffrey
FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF DOCTOR STEIN
137
Gene Wolfe
THE WITCHES OF NUPAL 145
Edgar Pangborn
DARKNESS OF DAY 173
Pamela Sargent and George Zebrowski
INTRODUCTION
CONTINUUM
is now three books old. Thus far, the critical response has been gratifying—the
concept and its execution praised by most reviewers.
How
was Continuum created? Well, it seemed important to have
anthologies that were connected by other than the quality of the stories
represented therein. Every other series done over the years has had that
quality orientation. The feat was to add a greater strength to them
individually as well as collectively. And the only way this could have been
accomplished is the format presently utilized.
When
the idea was presented to the authors, they greeted it with marked enthusiasm,
which is apparent in the vibrancy of the material they have contributed. Edgar Pangborn has rarely done better than his stories centered
in the general period of Davy; Poul
Anderson's Orbit
Unlimited world
is the stuff of adventure and solid characterization; Philip Jose Farmer's Stations of the Nightmare shows this author at his best, with a strong
plot and social significance; Anne McCaffrey's Crystal Singer stories may be among the most unusual herein,
and very possibly among the best this author has done to date. And, finally,
the revolving authorship series created by Dean Koontz and continued by Barry Malzberg, Gail Kimberly, and George
Zebrowski and Pamela Sargent . . . sensitive material, each author carrying the
theme of a world of robots in a way true to the Koontz concept but also fresh
and inventive.
Solid
science fiction . . . top authors ...
an unusual format—this is the tapestry from which Continuum was created. After the initial four books,
there may be others. You, the reader, are the key. We hope you enjoy the
adventures upon which you are about to embark.
Roger
Elwood Linwood, N.J.
Philip
José Farmer
STATIONS
OF THE NIGHTMARE
Part 3: the evolution of paul eyre
[1.]
AWARE
that he was being watched, Paul Eyre rolled under the bed. Here, the TV camera
could not see him. The watchers would be frantic, but they would not dare to
enter his cell. They did not want to drop dead.
Nude,
he lay flat on his back, staring at the bedsprings and the mattress. Above the
mattress were the sheets and the blankets, then the roof, then the clouds. And
above the clouds was the night sky. And in the sky was a star that held a
planet which was his home. No, not really his home. It
was the birthplace of the thing hiding in his brain, the thing causing him to
change.
That
thought was not quite correct. The thing was becoming him and he was becoming
the thing. The tiny yellow-brick thing in him had grown and was taking over.
And he was taking it over. He and it were melding.
He was scared but not as scared as he thought
he
should
be. Anticipation was mixed with the fright. Besides, the change was
inevitable. He had seen it in dreams twelve nights in a row. The thing was communicating
with him in dreams, in images and in feelings. They had no common language,
but they did not need it.
His
body was contracting, rounding, flattening. The flesh and the bones were
softening, just as his daughter's bones had softened when he had seen her in
the car in the high-school parking lot while fleeing from the police. But her
skeleton had become semi-jelly so that she could assume, or be shaped into,
human form. Not a human form, he thought, since she had been all-too-human. An acceptable human form with a straight spine and full breasts and
full legs. But he was going to have a nonhuman form. One,
in fact, which no human had ever had before.
Where would his bones and
organs go?
He
held up one hand under the springs. The fingernails were shimmering; the flesh
was glowing. Would the watchers see the darkness under the sheets hanging over
the sides dissolve before a bright light? Would they think that he had set
himself on fire? And then, knowing that he had no matches or flammable fluid,
would they know that he could not be on fire? They would want to send someone
into his room, but they would not dare. They could only watch and wonder.
He
had enough wonder for all of them. How could his one hundred and fifty pounds
be altered and squeezed so without killing him? How could his brain be
flattened and condensed without killing him?
His
body sagged and spread out. He tried to lift his head but could not. His eyes
were separating, one drifting to the left, one to the
right. At the same time, his vision was becoming weaker. Only the bright light
enabled him to see at all. They felt smaller, and they were starting to sink
within his skull. But they could not go far because his skull was spread out
and at the same time shrinking.
For
a while, his eyes were at the bottoms of wells or seemed to be. He remembered
reading that a man could stand at the bottom of a deep well in the daytime and
see, faintly, the stars. And here came the stars. And comets.
And novas. But they were within him; the nerves were
flashing signals. And soon, the nerves would be gone. Or
changed into a structure which the neurologists of Earth could not understand.
And changed in function, too, a function beyond their understanding.
His
body moved across the floor as if it were an amoeba. Though he could not see
himself, he knew that he must look as if he were becoming an amoeba. His trunk
was flattening and becoming circular. His legs, his arms, his
head were changing into flat, circular forms and also shrinking. He was
an amoeba withdrawing its pseudopods.
Where
would his brain go? What would happen to his eyes? What about his veins and
arteries and capillaries? What would his bones become? His
fingers? His toes? His ears?
His nose? His teeth? What
would become of him, Paul Eyre?
He
had always believed that he had a soul. When his body died, he would ascend to
heaven. Unchangeable, incorruptible, eternal Paul Eyre.
But
his soul would be squeezed and flattened along with his body. Souls follow the
map of the body. What the body writes, the soul reads.
And
he did not know the language in which the writing was set.
He could not scream when
the terror of full realization struck. He had no throat, and his lips were
melted into each other.
Something
within did scream then. Its voice echoed back and forth as if it were a man
lost and screaming in a labyrinth deep underground. Somewhere in the dimness a
form rose up and moved toward him. It was blacker than the blackness and only
half-human in shape. It was menacing, yet when it spoke its voice was soft and
reassuring. Paul Eyre did not want to be reassured and he wanted to run.
He
felt his body swelling. A feeling of triumph and of disappointment filled him,
and suddenly, he had a throat and a mouth. Instead of screaming, he whimpered.
[2.]
At ten in the morning he awoke. He was in his
pajamas and lying flat on his back on the bed. He felt tired and hungry and
also ashamed. Why should he be ashamed? Was it because he was a coward?
He
got out of bed and wobbled to the only door to his room. A third of the way
down on this door was a smaller door. He swung this open, and a shelf holding a
tray of food and milk swiveled inward. He took the tray off and shut the little
door. He carried the tray to a small folding table, set it on the table and sat
down in the chair before the table. While he ate ham and eggs, toast and
butter, and a grapefruit, he wondered what he would have eaten if he had
allowed his new form to take over. What could a being with no mouth and no
digestive organs, as far as he knew, use for food? Or fuel?
There
was only one way to find out, a way he did not want to take. Or did he?
What he should be wondering about, he
reminded himself, was why he accepted the change as reality. Once, he would
have said that it was impossible. Anyone who actually thought he could change
shape had to be crazy. Now, the universe seemed as flexible to him as his body.
He
put the tray back on the swinging door and went into the bathroom. When he left
it, he went to the doorless closet and changed from
his pajamas into his clothes. At one time, he had gone into the bathroom to
dress because there he would not be watched. At least, he had hoped he wasn't.
Now he did not care, even if women were watching him. And that meant that he
was changing not only in body but in his attitudes. Before he had been brought
here, he would not have undressed before any female. Even when going to bed
with his wife, he had shed his clothes in the dark so she could not see him
naked.
That
reminded him of some of his dreams. Though fifty-four years old, no, fifty-five
now, he had a strong sex drive. He had insisted that Mavice
relieve him at least three times a week. It had not mattered to him whether or
not she were sick or just disinclined. It was her duty
to take care of him. Mavice had usually submitted
but she had complained or else been silent and had let him know through her
sullenness that she was angry.
If
he were to be released, he would not go back to Mavice.
She hated him, though he had to admit that she had cause. But he hated her,
too. Perhaps part of his hate for her was hate
reflected, hate for himself. Or contempt. But there
was no use thinking about that. That was in a past that seemed even more
bizarre than the present.
What a pair of wretches
they had been!
"Falcons in a
net," Tincrowder had once said of them. The
writer was probably quoting some poem or book; his talk was half-quotation, as
if he had no power to make up his own phrases. But that wasn't true. Tin-crowder had then said, "No, not falcons. You and Mavice are more like vultures in a net. Or
hyenas. Or rats in a hole plugged up with cyanide."
He
had hated Tincrowder, too. No wonder that the man was
afraid to meet him face to face now. Not that he blamed him. Why should Tincrowder take a chance on dropping dead?
The
sex drive had not been shut off when the door of his cell closed on him. He
would have gone insane with desire if it had not been for those dreams. He
would sleep, and he would see that glittering green city at the far end of many
fields covered with red flowers. He would be walking across it on four feet,
paws, rather. He was a creature half-human and half-feline. A
leocentaur. And he was female. He had a
beautiful human face, white shoulders and arms, and magnificent breasts. From
the human torso down, his body was that of a lioness. A strange and powerful
odor emanated from him, or, rather, her. His sexual organ twitched and stank
with desire. He—she—was mad with desire, but, being sentient, could control
somewhat his—her —lust.
And
then a great male leocentaur would come leaping and
bounding across the red fields, and he—she —and the male would couple.
What
a difference eight hundred pounds of feline muscle, sweating, fur, a tail, and
four paws with two hands and no inhibitions made!
Eyre
quivered with memory of the ecstasy, far beyond anything he had experienced as
a human. He also felt shame, but, as the day passed, the shame dwindled.
He could not understand why, if he was the
female, he woke up with his pajamas sticky. But the orgasms of himself, the
female, in the dream were paralleled by himself, the male, in his human body.
Or form.
There
were other dreams, dreams in which he was a small body with a hard shell,
flying through the air, flying also through emptiness where stars were the only
light. He saw the stars, or, rather, felt them in a way that he could not
comprehend. This "seeing" was better than "seeing" with
eyes.
Did
the little yellow brick in his brain carry inside it ancestral memories? Memories that it could transmit to him via dreams?
He
did not know. There were many things he could not explain. For instance, the
thing in him could kill or cure human beings. If it saw a diseased or crippled
human being, it cured that being. If it thought it was threatened, it killed.
Paul Eyre was the agent through which the thing worked, but he had no control
over it.
Yet,
when he had been out hunting and had fired his shotgun at the saucerthing, why hadn't it killed him? When he had searched
for it afterward in those woods, why hadn't it killed him then? It could not
have been in doubt about his intentions.
He
thought he had wounded it. How else explain the yellow haze that issued from
some opening in its side? An opening his shotgun pellets must have made.
Or
had it? Tincrowder had said that perhaps it was
spawning or sporing. The cloud had been composed of
microscopic quicksilver-like objects, and these were the saucerthing's
young. Some had undoubtedly gone into Paul Eyre, through his nose and perhaps
through his skin. They had become millions of yellow-brick-shaped things in his
blood cells and in his skin tissues. He had excreted all but one, which had
lodged in his brain. The others, sneezed out, digested out, sweated out, had
not affected any other living being. They seemed to have died.
While
in the woods, he had seen the saucer, and he had also seen the female leocentaur, a creature of unsurpassed beauty. Only now did
he understand that she was the saucerthing in another
shape.
He
could accept that because he had to. But why hadn't the thing killed him with
its thoughts or whatever power it used to kill?
If
he allowed himself to become a saucerthing, then he
might understand.
Tincrowder might have a theory. Tincrowder
was a writer whose field was mainly science fiction. When Eyre had related his
experiences in the woods, Tincrowder had given some
fairly plausible theories to explain what had happened. Eyre felt that Tincrowder had, somehow, hit close to the truth.
He would ask Tincrowder.
Two
days later, the closed-circuit TV screen lit up, and a broad red face appeared.
For a minute, Eyre did not recognize him. Tincrowder
had a shaggy red and white beard, and his eyes were sunken in black. He looked
as if he had grown a beard to disguise himself from Death.
"Hello,
Paul," he said. "They flew me in, but the cheapos
made me go second-class. I had to buy my own champagne."
"Listen,"
Eyre said. "The others might think I'm crazy, but that doesn't matter. My
situation won't be changed by their opinions."
He paused
and then said, "Last night I almost turned into a flying saucer."
[3.]
Tincrowder listened without interrupting. He said,
"Some years ago, I would have thought you crazy, too. Now, I'm not so
sure. What the hell, I know
you're not crazy! I'll tell
you why I believe what very few can believe. A few years ago an anthropological
student named Carlos Castaneda wrote three books about his experiences with
Yaqui Indian magic. Put quotes around the word magic, because that's a word
loaded with superstition and prejudice among Westerners. To the Yaqui brujos, sorcerers we'd call them, there are many worlds coexistent with ours.
Parallel worlds, if you will, which intersect ours. By use of their quote magic
unquote, the brujos can use entities, or forces, in these other
worlds. Castaneda called these worlds nonordinary
reality. That is, they are realities which we don't usually encounter.
"I
won't go into how these brujos can perform their so-called magic. It's not magic, but a rigid and
always dangerous science. Or a discipline. Never mind
the terms. The thing is that the brujos Castaneda knew, Don Juan and Don Genaro and
some others, could perform incredible feats. They had
powers we Westerners have always thought were mumbo-jumbo, fantasies, superstitions.
Castaneda was convinced that the powers existed, have existed since the Old
Stone Age. For instance, and I cite only one because it is relevant to your
case, the brujos can change themselves into birds and fly. I
became convinced after reading his books that they can do this. Castaneda is a
level-headed scientist and no hoaxer."
"You
mean that I met a creature from this, this nonordinary
reality, and that it has made these changes in me?" Eyre said.
Tincrowder shook his head. "Not entirely. You have
met a nonordinary creature and are undergoing some nonordinary changes. But these are not of the nature which Castañeda described. Your saucerthing
and your sphinx come from this world, this hard universe. They are nonordinary only because they have just arrived. Probably,
many things here are nonordinary to them, or it, I
should say, since the forms seem to be metamorphous, not discrete.
"Apparently,
the yellow-thing in you is capable of causing these changes in shape. It many not derive its power solely from itself. We human
beings may have this power but have never realized it. Rather, only a few have
ever realized it. The devices exist in our bodies, and the yellow-thing knows
how to use them.
"Here's
what I think the situation could be. Postulate a species of sentient, or maybe nonsentient, beings which can live in space. They can also
travel through space, perhaps using gravitons as a means of propulsion.
Gravitons are wavicles. Wavicles
are phenomena which act as if they're both frequency waves and particles.
Gravitons are wavicles responsible for gravity, just
as photons are wavicles responsible for light. Well,
that doesn't matter. It's not how they can propel themselves through space and
atmosphere but their biological setup that is important.
"I
can't guess at how they have sexual intercourse and have children with genes
from male and female. Maybe they have a sexual-reproductive process that isn't
remotely like what we know on Earth. Anyway, these ufos, let's call them that and not flying saucers,
these ufos, originated on some planet or maybe in
space. Their planet was long ago crowded, or else they have a drive to seed
other planets. In any event, many leave their native world. They go to other
planets that are like Earth.
These
have sentients. Some are humanoids. Some cen-tauroids. Some are only
God knows what.
"The
pregnant female lands and releases the egg-bearing cloud. The microscopic eggs,
or spores, or what have you, enter the tissues of sentients.
Only one of the millions of eggs in a sentient's body
survives, just as only one sperm out of millions in an ejaculation survives to
unite with an ovum in the womb. Whoever gets to the brain first is the winner.
"The
egg and the sperm, that's you, Paul, a bipedal thinking sperm, unite. The process is half-fusion, half-symbiosis. You think
it's parasitism because you're an unwilling and very
conscious host. A reluctant sper-matozoan.
Strange things happen. You have the power to cure or kill even when unconscious
or sleeping. Only it's not being done by you but by the ufo-egg,
which goes all the way in its healing or its self-defense.
"Why
does the symbiote kill those who threaten you? Obviously because it's protecting itself and you, the host.
Why does it heal nonthreatening humans? Obviously because it
regards them as future hosts, or sperm.
"And
so you're shut up in a prison hospital for observation by scientists who can't
believe what they're seeing but have to believe.
"Meanwhile,
the zygote becomes embryo becomes an adult. The adulus,
or will be, the ufo-egg plus the host. My analogies
are, biologically speaking, mixed up. A symbiote, or
parasite, and its host are not two gametes. But this doesn't matter. You get
the idea. You start to change shape. You resist, but you will eventually go all
the way. You will become a saucerthing. What will happen
to the brain in that saucer? I don't know. I suspect you'll become half-human,
half-alien. You'll grow to like your powers. After all, it's only human to
desire powers that other humans don't have. Nor will you be bound to one shape.
At times, maybe whenever you wish, you can change back to your original shape.
"That
the saucer you saw changes into the shape of its original leocentaur
form demonstrates that.
"Then,
one day, you get out of this prison. You either stay on Earth to look for a
male or go out into space for a male. You get fertilized, how, don't ask me.
You spread your seed. Other humans suffer the same strange space-change that
you have suffered. And so on. Eventually, we have an Earth populated by ufo-humans. What happens then? I don't know. I suspect that
some will take off into space to seek virgin planets."
Eyre said, "You don't
believe that."
Tincrowder said, "Do you believe it?"
"I
don't know," Eyre said. "I do know that I don't like it."
[4.]
That was not the end of the conversation.
What about the ufos? Why had
so many been sighted and why, if there were so many, hadn't any man been
affected by them, as Eyre now was?
"I
don't know that any have actually been sighted here," Tincrowder
said. "The Air Force investigation explained away all but about two
percent as misinterpreted natural phenomena, delusions, hoaxes, or the result
of mass hysteria. That an unexplainable two percent remains might be due to
the investigators' failure of rationalizing powers. Or perhaps the two percent
were composed of actual ufos.
These could have been males looking for females, which weren't at that time on
Earth."
"But they weren't all of the same
type," Eyre said.
"Some
were balls that acted more like electrical phenomena than anything. Some were
cigar-shaped. Some had blinking lights. Almost all were much larger than the
saucer I saw."
Tincrowder shrugged and said, "If they existed in
some place other than the observer's mind, they may have belonged to different
species or genera than your saucer. Or perhaps the males have different shapes.
Maybe the differing types were hostile toward each other and expended their
energies chasing each other. They may have exterminated each other in a secret
unseen war or perhaps declared Earth a dangerous area and so avoid it from now
on. Maybe they have a treaty that has declared Earth off-limits, and your
saucer was here illegally. Or maybe she was sick or out of food and had to land
here.
"You
want me to explain all about them, and I can't even tell you all about the how
and why of human beings. Besides, everything I've said may be wrong."
Tincrowder seemed to* find this amusing. Eyre did not.
When
the dialogue was ended, Eyre paced back and forth—he could not sit still long
unless he was reading or watching TV—and wondered what the effect of the
conversation would be on the authorities. Would they assume he was crazy? If
they did, then they would do nothing. Things would proceed as they had been.
They might want to give him therapy, but they would be afraid to try it. If
they believed his story, then they might become so alarmed that they would try
to kill him. They would justify murder as in the best interest of the majority.
The majority: all humanity with the exception of Paul Eyre. Logically, he had
to agree with them.
[5.]
The
following morning, Tincrowder's face appeared again
on the screen. He looked pale and frightened.
"Paul,"
he said, "you've been told that, if it looks as
if you might escape, cyanide gas will be released in your room. It's a terrible
thing, but they
can't allow you even to get
out into the hall. They're afraid they couldn't stop you, since you can kill
with a glance. Well, last night. . . ."
He
paused and swallowed, then said, "Last night one of them made up his own mind to take action. Apparently, he believed what we
said yesterday. He sneaked into the room in which the valves and the off-on
button controlling the cyanide gas are located. This is guarded by one man, and
an alarm is set off if any unauthorized person enters. He bludgeoned the guard
and made a dash for the controls. He had to turn two valves before he could
press the release button. He never got the first valve turned. As he touched
it, he dropped dead. Now tell me. Did you somehow know all this was going
on?"
Eyre
was silent for a moment, then he said, "Not at
all."
Tincrowder swallowed again and said, "Well, you
see the implications, don't you?"
Eyre could not keep the
exultation out of his voice.
"Yes,
I—this thing in me, rather—can kill even if I can't see the one who's
threatening us."
A
few seconds later, the shock hit him. He sat down trembling. People were
actually trying to kill him. Yet he had done nothing except to defend himself.
No, he had not done even that. It was the creature inside him. But even as he
thought that, he knew that that was not true. There was no longer any clearly
defined Paul Eyre or ufo-child. Their borders were
dissolving; their identities were merging.
He
had to get out and away, but to do that he had to experience something the
thought of which terrified him.
"They,"
Tincrowder said, "are divided. Half think you are
telling the truth; half think you're crazy. But the latter half isn't certain.
They saw the bright light emanating from under the bed, and they know that it
wasn't caused by fire. Your room is monitored for any change in temperature,
and there was none then. That was a cold light."
"Why
aren't Polar and Kowalski talking to me?" Eyre said. "Why have you
suddenly become the spokesman?"
"I
don't have a degree in science, but I do have a free-wheeling imagination. This
is a situation which requires a mind that is at ease with the fantastic. Set a
thief to catch a thief. Put a science-fiction author in a science-fiction
situation. Besides, I don't think they trust me to keep my mouth shut. They can
watch me while I'm working for them." *
"Are
you actually going to help them to kill me?" Eyre said.
Tincrowder looked distressed. "I don't think you
can be killed." "But you're willing to try," Eyre said. Tincrowder was silent.
Eyre
said, "And you're the one who was always raising hell because the U.S. was
needlessly killing so many in Vietnam. You're the one who was too
tender-hearted to shoot deer."
Tincrowder
was obviously frightened. For all he knew, he might drop dead at this moment.
Actually, Eyre thought, Tincrowder wasn't as cowardly
and soft-hearted as he had supposed him to be. He must have courage to be able
to tell him all this and to chance making him angry.
Or
perhaps Tincrowder wanted to be struck dead. He felt guilt because he had not made the public aware of what was
being done to Eyre. This guilt was increased by his participation in the
imprisonment of Eyre. Moreover, he could not keep from trying to figure out
ways to kill the unkillable. It was a challenge to
the intellect, which he had no doubt justified with all sorts of
rationalization.
Suddenly Eyre realized that the face on the
screen belonged to his most dangerous enemy.
That
knowledge was followed by a slight shock. Why hadn't Tincrowder
fallen dead?
Could
it be because Tincrowder was also secretly rooting
for him? Tincrowder had once said that it would be a
good thing if something did wipe out all of mankind. Insanity, grief, sorrow,
greed, murder, rape, brutality, hopelessness, despair, prejudice, hypocrisy,
and persecution would vanish from Earth. Tincrowder
had admitted that poetry, art, and music would also disappear, but the price
paid for a few worthwhile poems, dramas, paintings, sculptures, and symphonies
wasn't worth it. Besides, very few people appreciated art. According to him,
money, power, and tearing other people apart, verbally and physically, were
what most people cared about.
"On
the other hand," Tincrowder had said, "if man goes, love and compassion also go. Perhaps we're just a
stage in evolution toward a species all of whose members will be filled with
love and compassion. But I ask our Creator why, if this is true, we stages have
to suffer so? Don't we count for anything?"
Tincrowder had once written a short story, What You
See, in which
visitors from the star Algol, as a parting gift, had
spread an aerosol all over Earth. This covered all the mirrors in the world, and whenever anybody looked
in one, he saw himself as he truly was. This did not have the desired effect of
causing changes for the better in the viewers of self. Instead, all mirrors
were smashed and a law passed making it a capital offense to manufacture
mirrors. The law wasn't necessary. Nobody except a few masochists wanted
mirrors.
Eyre
had asked Tincrowder why, if he felt that way, he
didn't commit suicide.
"I
like to make myself and others miserable," the writer had said.
And
now Tincrowder was torn in two. He wanted to survive
and hence wanted Eyre to die. He also wanted Eyre to survive, because he might
be the next stage in man's evolution.
That
Eyre could perceive this meant that he had evolved
in one respect. There was a time when he would have been too dull to see
what" was troubling Tincrowder. Eyre was, had
been, an engineer who could analyze malfunctions in machines down to the last
nut and bolt. But troubleshooting people had been beyond him. They were
impenetrable and irrational.
[6.]
That
night, Eyre awoke from a sleep untroubled by dreams. He rose, drank some water,
and went to the single window to look at the night scene. The stars were out,
the river beyond the walls and the city on both sides of the river were
speckled and striped with lights. Like a zebra with the measles, he thought.
Between his building and the high stone walls
was a paved area. This was bright with floodlights on the building and the
wall. A tower at a corner of the walls to his left thrust up
like the hand of a traffic cop signaling for a stop. It held two guards
armed with rifles, and a machine gun.
He
was surprised, though not shocked, to see the female leocentaur
standing on the pavement below. The light gleamed whitely on her bare upper
trunk, blackly on her long hair and tawnily on the
leonine underbody. She was smiling up at him and waving with one hand.
The
last time he had seen her, she had been a saucer-shaped thing hanging in the
air outside his window. From her whirling body had come a sound that had seemed
to him a farewell. But he had been mistaken. She was still around, still
watching over him. Like a mother over her child.
Shouts
came from the watchtower. She bounded to one side as rifle bullets struck the
pavement and then she loped away out of Eyre's sight to the right. A moment
later, the machine gun opened up, but, after five bursts, it stopped. There
were no more shots, but there was much excitement.
Three-quarters
of an hour after the guards and the dogs had quit running around on the
pavement, Tincrowder's face filled the TV.
"Up
to now I've been a sort of John the Baptist for a weird messiah," he said.
"Faith was noticeable only by its absence. But they believe now! They've not only got two eye witnesses, but they've got photographs!
The watch-tower was equipped with a motion picture camera, you know. No, you
wouldn't. Anyway here are some stills."
The
first was of the leocentauress running away. The
third showed her leaping high into the air. At least fifteen feet, Eyre
estimated. The fifth showed an elongated blur. The next one was of a blurred
but undeniably saucer-shaped object. The last showed the saucer as it shot by
a floodlight.
"Apparently,
she didn't think she was really in danger," Tincrowder
said. "Otherwise, the guards would be dead. Of course, it may be that the
adult isn't capable of killing through ESP means or however it's done. In which
case, you, if you become an adult, may no longer be a danger. At least, not one kind of danger. You'll always be a menace.
"One
reason I think that the adult form may not be able to kill is that you didn't
kill the guards. You, that thing in you, anyway, must have wanted to protect
its mother. So why didn't it do it?
"Or is there something
we don't know?"
Eyre
repressed any show of joy at the mother's escape. He said, "So what
happens now?"
"I
don't know. I think they're going to let the White House in on what's been
going on. They've been very secretive so far. Very few officials know that a
man is being held without any judicial processes at all and with no
consideration of his civil rights. And fewer yet know the real reason why. But
now that they have evidence that even the most unimaginative will have to
accept, they will have to inform the highest authority. It may take some time
to convince him,
though."
What
you're not saying, Eyre thought, is that everybody in the know is going to be
scared to death. To my death.
And
that morning, while it was still dark, he undressed and went under the bed.
Sometime later he emerged, shaking, weak, and frightened. Halfway through, he
had quit. For a long time, he lay in bed, tossing and turning, and cursing
himself for a weakling. Yet he was glad that something in him, himself this
time, had refused to become nonhuman. He finally fell asleep, waking at
ten-thirty. He ate breakfast and read several pages of a book on a tribe in
highland New Guinea. He had been reading much and widely of late, trying to
make up for all the years when he had read only the daily local newspaper and
sports magazines.
As
he began pacing back and forth, the closed-circuit TV came on. Tincrowder said, "This'll be the last time I'll be
seeing you, Paul. Here, anyway. I'm quitting. I don't want anything more to do
with these people. Or with you. I can't take it any
longer. I'm being ripped apart between my conscience and what I believe, logically,
should be done with you. And this last incident is too much for me. It was my
idea, I'll admit, but I didn't like it when it was put in practice."
"What last idea?"
Paul said.
Somebody
out of sight said something to Tincrowder. He
snarled, "What the hell's the difference?" and turned back to Eyre.
"I suggested a device to turn on the cyanide by a remote control machine.
And they installed one. Two, rather. The
light-sensing monitor on you was to send a radio signal to a machine in Washington,
D.C., when it detected that glow from under the bed. This in turn would signal
back to the automatic controller of the cyanide-release machine. The setup was
arranged so that there would be no human agency involved in the actual
operation of gas release. That way, no one would die, they hoped."
He
swallowed, looked contrite, and said, "I did it, Paul, because I'm human!
I want humanity to survive! As humans. Better the
devil you know, I thought. And anyway, I didn't believe that you could be
killed, and I wanted to find out if I was wrong. I hoped I was at the same time
I hoped I wasn't. Can you understand?"
"I suppose that if I were in your shoes,
I'd do the same," Eyre said. "But you can't expect me to be very
friendly with a man who's been trying to kill me."
"Of
course I don't. I'm not very friendly to myself just now. But here's what
happened. As soon as the light glowed, a signal was sent to the machine in
Washington. That machine never got to send a signal back. Both it and the
control device here burned up! The circuits apparently became overloaded and burst
into flames. They had fused but it made no difference. Up they went!"
"You
can keep on trying, and you'll never succeed," Eyre said.
He
was startled. He had had no intention of saying that. Was the thing in him
talking? Or was the merger, the fusion as Tincrowder
called it, almost complete?
"Listen, Paul!" Tincrowder shouted.
"That window is
shatterproof, but you can get through it! Their
plan___ "
A
hand clamped down on Tincrowder's mouth. Polar and
Kowalski appeared behind him and dragged him, struggling, out of sight.
Eyre
wished Polar and Kowalski dead, but a moment later Polar appeared. Eyre was
glad that he had not killed him. Perhaps it was better that he had no control
over his powers. The responsibility and the guilt were not his.
"I
assure you, Eyre, that we're not planning anything more," Polar said in a
high-pitched voice. "Not against you, not in a positive manner, I mean. We
know we can't do anything to you. So we're just going to keep you here until,
by the grace of God, we can reach a satisfactory solution."
Polar was lying, of course.
"Die!
Die!" Eyre shouted, forgetting in another burst of anger his gladness of a
moment ago.
Polar screamed and ran out of sight. A moment
later, the screen went blank. Eyre quit laughing and stretched out on the
floor. He closed his eyes but opened them almost at once. This time, the light
was coming not from his skin but from deep within himself. And it was not
steady but pulsing.
There
was horror again, though it was as much less as the light was more. Or so it
seemed to him. And the metamorphosis went so swiftly that his head would have
swum—if he had had a head. Suddenly, he didn't. It had collapsed and withdrawn
and changed.
He
rose from the floor humming. He was rotating or at least aware that he was, but
he had at the same time no sense of dizziness or disorientation. Without eyes,
he could see. The room around him was a black sphere, not a cube. The furniture
was violet bowls. The electrical wiring within the walls was helixes of
pulsing blue. The window was hexagonal, and the light from the flood lights was
mauve, and the stars were of many colors and many shapes. One was a huge russet
doughnut.
He
had no hands to feel his shell, but he could feel with a sense strange to him.
The shell was far more resistant than steel but as flexible as rubber.
He
thought, Forward, and the shatterproof glass flew out
from in front of him, the shards flaming and falling like comets with green
tails. As they struck the yellow pavement below, they became brown.
If
he had had a voice, he would have shouted with exultation. Instead, a tiny
electric spark seemed to pass through him. It glowed as it traveled from one
edge of his shell to the other, sputtered, and was gone.
Where
were his eyes, his ears, his arms, his legs, his mouth, his genitals? Who
cared? He certainly did not, as he swept out and up, curving almost vertically
into the air. His change of angle brought visions of a lightning streak,
colored scarlet. He was riding on it. Below, machine-gun bullets made orange
pyramids that became increasingly brown as gravity carried them back to Earth.
When they landed, they became flat hexagons.
Babies
play, and Eyre played for a long time. Up and down, in and out, skimming the
fields, climbing above the atmosphere where the sun blazed azure and space
blazed greenly, down again, the air moving around him like snow on a TV screen,
the snow melting as he slowed down, down into a river, moving through the
blood-colored water, fishes pentagons of dark violet, the weeds upside-down
beige towers of Babel. And up and out again, through clouds that looked like
cerulean toadstools.
He
did not get tired or hungry. Exerting or resting, he was "feeding."
He did not understand how he did it, any more than a savage would understand
the processes by which food entering his mouth became energy and flesh. All he
knew was that, munching mouthlessly, he devoured photonsyand gravitons and chronotrons and radio waves and
magnetic lines of force. When in space, he would be eating all these and x-ray
energy. His mouth was his shell.
As
an engineer, he would have supposed that the surface area of his shell was too
small to absorb enough energy to keep him alive. As what he now was, he knew
that he could take in more than enough energy.
And
then, as he soared up in a catenary curve that left
behind a mile-long line of glimmering sapphire porcupine quills, quickly
fading, he saw his mother. Going three times as fast, she was an ankh-shaped
thing, striped with scarlet and blue and trailing yellow energy particles
shaped like stars of David. She did not slow down, she went on up, out into
space, headed toward some star. But as she passed, she whispered—or so it
seemed to him—that he should follow her. She would love to have him accompany
her. If he did not wish to, however, she bade him a
fond farewell and hello.
"And
what shall we do, brother?" he said in his non-voice.
His
brother did not answer. The little yellow thing in him was he; his brother was
he, and he was his brother.
He
turned and raced around the planet, which was a shifting pattern of triangles
and cubes below him. He sped in his orbit as if circularity was a means for
arriving at a decision.
And it was.
[V.]
The doorbell rang.
Mavice Eyre got up from her chair before the TV set
and walked through babble and smoke to the front door. She opened it onto the
night and Paul Eyre. Two seconds passed, during which he could have covered
fifty miles while out of the atmosphere and in the other form. Then Mavice fainted.
There
was confusion and consternation. Paul Eyre acted calmly and did what had to be
done. With order restored, the TV set off, and Mavice
and his children, Roger and Glenda, in their chairs, he began to tell them a
little of what had happened. Of his metamorphosis, he said nothing.
When
he had finished, Mavice said, "Why didn't they tell us that they were letting you go? Why
didn't you phone us? I almost died when I saw you!"
"They
would like to keep this a secret," he said. "Your oaths of silence
still hold. I'm well now, though I'm not what I was. Not by a long shot. And I
didn't notify you I was coming because they asked me not to. Why, I don't know.
Security reasons, I suppose."
He could not tell them the truth, of course.
There
was a silence. His wife and his son were still afraid of him. Glenda did not
fear him, but she did not trust him all the way. Of the three, she suspected
that he was far more changed than he had admitted.
"Dad,
where'd you get those clothes?" Roger said. "They look as if they
came off a skid-row bum. And they sure smell like it!"
"I'll
get rid of them," he said. And he thought, they
did come from a wino. I took his clothes and in return I cured his diseased
liver and his incipient tuberculosis and I may have altered the chemical
imbalance that has made him an alcoholic. Maybe. I
don't know what was sick about him. But if he had a cirrhosed
liver and that cough was from TB and his lust for drink comes from chemistry
and not from the pysche, then he's healed.
"Are
you going back to work at Trackless Diesel, Dad?" Glenda said.
"Never. The idea makes me sick."
"But
what will you do!" Mavice said shrilly.
"You're fifty-five, and in only ten years you'll be able to retire! If you
quit, you'll lose your retirement pension and the group medical insurance and.
. . ."
"I have better things to do,"he said.
"Such as what?" Mavice said.
"Such
as finding out what a human being is and why he is," Eyre said. "Before I go on." "Go on where?" Glenda
said. "Wherever my destiny takes me."
"And what is that?"
"Whatever
seems to be best. Or whatever is good."
"Look, Dad," Glenda said. She stood up. "Look at me.
I
was a cripple and a hunchback, and you healed me just by looking at me! Think
of what you can do for others!"
Glenda
was radiant with joy, but Roger and Mavice had a
better foundation for their emotion than Glenda did for hers. Not that they
should be so afraid of him. They should dread what others would try to do to
him and to them. Perhaps he should not have come back here. He had put them in
jeopardy, whereas, if he had gone to some distant place, they would be safe.
But
that wasn't true either. As long as he stayed on Earth, no human was safe.
Change was dangerous, and he was here to see that all were changed. It didn't
matter if he went to Timbuktu (and he might), change would spread out from him
in an all-engulfing wave. It would lap over the
Earth.
He stood up. "Let's go
to bed. Tomorrow. . . ."
Mavice said, "Yes. .
. ?"
"I begin
looking."
Mavice assumed that he meant he would search for
another job. It was his duty to support his family.
And
so it was. But a far stronger duty was to find a mate. And then the seeding
would begin.
Poul
Anderson
A
FAIR EXCHANGE
NOWHERE
on Rustum was autumn like that season anywhere on
Earth. But on the plateau of High America it did recall, a little, the falls
and Indian summers of the land whence this one had its name^if
only because many plants from another mother planet now grew there. Or so the
oldest colonists said. They had become very few. Daniel Coffin knew Earth from
books and pictures and a dim star near Bootes, which
his stepfather had pointed out as Sol.
Red
leaves of maple, yellow leaves of birch, gold-streaked scarlet leaves of gim tree, scrittled on the wind,
while overhead tossed the blue featheriness of plume oak that does not shed for
winter. The founders of Anchor were forethoughtful men and women, who laid out
broad streets lined with saplings when they were huddling in tents or sod huts.
The timber grew with the town. In summer it gave shade, today it gave radiance
to pavement, to walls of brick and tinted concrete and what frame buildings
remained from earlier times, to groundcars and
trucks—and an occasional horse-drawn wagon, likewise a souvenir of the
pioneers—that bustled along the ways.
Children
bound for school dodged in and out among elder pedestrians. Their shouts rang.
Coffin remem-
bered the toil and poverty he had lived with, like
everyone else, and smiled a bit. Yes, there is such a thing as progress, he thought.
Air flowed and murmured, cool on his face, crisp in his nostrils. The sky arched altogether clear, pale blue,
full of southbound wings. Eastward, the early morning sun stood ruddy-orange at
the end of street and town, above the snowpeaks of
the distant Hercules range. Though Anchor's hinterland was an entire planet, it
was itself not large: about ten thousand permanent residents, more than half of
them children. To be sure, this was a fourth of the world's humanity.
Glancing
the opposite way, Coffin saw a tattered drift of smoke above the mostly low
roofs. A flaw of wind brought a rotten-egg stench. He scowled. Progress can get overdone. Though he had never seen it in person,
writings, films, and the tales of witnesses had driven into his bones what too
much population and industry had done to Earth.
And
as for children—the cheerfulness of the weather departed. Here was the
hospital. His heart knocked and he mounted the steps more slowly than was his
wont.
"Good
morning, Mr. Coffin." The nurse on desk duty was quite young. She
addressed him with an awe which hitherto he had found
wryly amusing. Him, plain Dan Coffin, lowland farmer?
Well,
of course he'd made a name for himself as a young man, one of the few who could
explore the immensities down yonder and gain the knowledge of Rustum that all men must have. And, yes, he'd had
experiences that made sensational stories. But he'd always winced at those,
recollecting the ancient saying that adventure happens only to the
incompetent—then excusing himself with the fact that in so much unknownness, it was impossible to foresee every working of
Murphy's Law.
And
anyhow, that was long behind him. He'd been settled down at Lake Moondance for—was it thirty-five years? (Which'd be about twenty Terrestrial, said an echo from his
childhood, when people were still trying to keep up traditions like Christmas.)
Oh yes, he did have by far the biggest plantation in those parts, or anywhere
in the lowlands. He could be reckoned as well-off. His neighbors for three or
four hundred kilometers around considered him a sort of leader, and had
informally commissioned him to speak for them in High America. Nevertheless!
"Good
morning, Miss Herskowitz," he said, bowing as
was expected in Anchor, where they went in more for mannerly gestures than folk
did on the frontier. "Uh, I wonder, I know, it's early but I have an
appointment soon and—"
The
sudden compassion on her face struck him with terror. "Yes, by all means,
Mr. Coffin. Your wife's awake. Go right on in."
That
gaze followed him as he strode: a stocky, muscular man, roughly clad for his
field trip later today, his features broad and weathered, his black hair
streaked with gray. He felt it on his back, in his heart.
The
door was open to Eva's room. He closed it behind him. For a moment he stood
mute. Against propped-up pillows, sunlight through a window gave her mane back
the redness it had had when first they knew each other. She was nursing their
baby. On a table stood a vase of roses. He hadn't
brought them, hadn't even known the town now boasted a conservatory. The
hospital staff must have given them. That meant—
She
raised her eyes to him. Their green was faded by weariness and (he could tell)
recent crying. For the same reason, the freckles stood forth sharply on her
snub-nosed countenance. And yet she was making a recovery from childbirth that
would have been fast and good in a much younger woman.
"Dan—" He had long had a little trouble
hearing, in the High American air that was scarcely thicker than Earth's. Now
he must almost read her lips. "We can't keep him."
He clamped his fists. "Oh, no."
She
spoke a bit louder, word by word. "It's final. They've made every clinical
test and there is no doubt. If we bring Charlie to the lowlands, he'll
die."
He
slumped on a chair at the bedside and groped for her hand. She didn't give it
to him. Holding the infant close in both arms, she stared at the wall before her
and said, flat-voiced: "That was twelve or thirteen hours ago. They tried
to get hold of you, but you weren't to be found."
"No, I—I had business,
urgent business."
"You've had a lot of
that, the whole while I was here."
"Oh,
God, darling, don't I know it!" He barely, lightly grasped her shoulder.
His hand shook. "Don't you know it, too?" he begged. "I've
explained—"
"Yes.
Of course." She turned to him with the resolution
he knew. She even tried to smile, though that failed. "I've just . . .
been lonely. I've missed you. . . ." Then she could hold out no longer,
and she bent her head and wept.
He
rose, stooped over her, gathered clumsily to his bosom her and the last child
the doctors said she could ever have. "I know half a dozen fine homes
that'd be happy to foster him," he said. "That's one thing that kept
me busy, looking into this matter, in case. We can come see him whenever we
want. It's not like him being dead, is it? And, sure, we'll adopt an exogene as soon as possible. Sweetheart, we both knew our
luck couldn't hold out forever. Three children of our own that we could keep
may actually have bucked the odds. We've a lot to be glad of. Really we
do."
"Y-yes. It, it's only that . . . little Charlie, here at my breast, m-m-milking
me this minute—Could we move here, Dan?"
He
stiffened before answering slowly: "No. Wouldn't work.
You've got to realize that. We'd lose everything we and—the the rest of our
kids—ever hoped and worked for. We'd be too homesick—"
—for soaring mountains, rivers gleaming and
belling down their cliffs; for boundless forests, turquoise, russet, and gold,
spilling out to boundless prairies darkened by herds of beautiful beasts; for
seas made wild by sun and outer moon, challenging men to sail around the curve
of the world; for skies argent with cloud deck, or bright and changeable when
that broke apart, or ablaze with lightning till the mighty rains came cataracting; for air so dense and rich with odors of soil
and water and life, that the life in humans who could breathe it burned doubly
bright, ran doubly strong; for the house that had grown under their hands from
cabin to gracious-ness, the gardens and arbors and
enormous fields that were theirs, the lake like a sea before them and wild-woods
elsewhere around it; for friends with whom roots had intertwined over the years
until they were more than friends and a daughter of theirs became the first
love of a boy called Joshua Coffin—
"You're
right," Eva said. "It wouldn't work. I, I, I'll be okay . . . later
on. . . . But hold me for a while, Dan, darling. Stay near me."
He let her go and stood up.
"I can't, Eva. Not yet."
She stared as if in horror.
"The whole community
depends on, well, on me," he said wretchedly. "The
negotiations. We've discussed them often enough, you and I."
"But—" She shifted the gurgling baby, in
order to hold out one arm in beseeching. "Can't that wait for a while?
It's waited plenty long already."
"That's
part of the point. Everything I've been working for is coming to a head. I
dare not hesitate. The time's as good as it'll ever
be. I feel that. I can't let. .. my man . . . cool off; he'll back
away from the commitment he's close to making. I've gotten to know him, believe
me. In politics, you either grab the chance when it comes, or—"
"Politics!"
He
consoled her for the short span he was able. At least, she accepted his
farewell kiss and his promise to come back soon, bearing his triumph and their
people's for a gift. He did not tell her that the triumph was not guaranteed.
Doubtless she understood that. Her brain and will had been half of his
throughout the years. In this hour she was worn down, she needed him, and he
had never done anything harder than to leave her alone, crying, while he went
to do his damned duty.
Or
try to. Nothing is certain, on a world never meant for man.
Consider
that world, its manifold strangenesses, and the fact
that no help could possibly come from an Earth which a handful of
freedom-lovers had left behind them. Consider, especially, a gravity one-fourth
again as great as that under which our species, and its ancestors back to the
first half-alive mote, evolved.
Hardy
folk adapted to the weight. Children who grew up under it became still better
fitted. But the bearing of those children had not been easy. It would never be
easy for most women, until natural selection had created an entire new race.
Worse,
that gravity held down immensely more atmosphere than did Earth's. Because
this was more compressed, men could breathe comfortably near the tops of the
loftiest mountains. As they descended, however, the gas concentration rose
sharply, until it became too much for most of them. Carbon dioxide acidosis,
nitrogen narcosis, the slower but equally deadly
effects of excess oxygen: these made the average adult sick, and killed him if
he was exposed overly long. Babies died sooner.
Now
the human species is infinitely varied. One man's meat can quite literally be
another man's poison. Such variability requires a gene pool big enough to
contain it. The original colonists of Rustum were too
few—had too few different chromosomes between them—to assure long-range
survival in an alien environment. But they could take with them the sperms and
ova of donors, preserved in the same fashion as were those of animals. These
could be united and brought to full fetal development in exogenetic
"tanks," on whatever schedule circumstances might allow. Thus man on
Rustum had a million future parents.
And:
as far as practicable, the donors back on Earth had been chosen with a view to
air-pressure tolerance.
Some
of the original settlers could stand the conditions at intermediate altitudes;
some could actually thrive. But exogenes like Daniel
Coffin and Eva Spain could live well throughout the entire range, from ocean to
alp. To them and their descendants, and whoever else happened to be born
equally lucky, the whole planet stood open.
The human species is infinitely varied. A
type on the far end of a distribution curve will not always breed true. There
will be throwbacks to the median —perfectly normal, healthy children, perfectly
well suited to live on Earth. Certain among them will be so vulnerable to
unearthliness that they die already in the womb.
Because
of that possibility, every woman who could manage it spent the latter halves of
her pregnancies on High America. In earlier years, Coffin had often been able
to visit Eva there. During this final wait she had seen little of him, in spite
of all the time he spent on the plateau.
Thomas de Smet was
a fairly young man; the accidental death of his father had early put him in
charge of the Smithy. He ran it well, producing most of the heavy machinery on Rustum, and planned to diversify. Thus far, businesses were
small, family affairs. They were, that is, with respect to number of employees.
Since machines had started to beget machines, the volume of production—given
the resources of an entire unrav-aged world—was
becoming impressive. Manpower was the worst bottleneck, and the settlers were
doing their lusty best to deal with that.
Coffin
had known de Smet since their youth, albeit slightly.
On Rustum, everybody of the least importance knew
everybody else of the same. When the first glimmerings of his scheme came to
him, Coffin decided that this was the man to zero in on. He had spent as much
of the past year as he could, cultivating his
friendship.
The worst of it is, Coffin thought, / like the fellow. I like him a lot, and feel
like a hound for what I hope to do.
"Hi, Tom," he
said. "Sorry I'm late."
"Who cares?" de Smet replied. "This is my day off."
"Not quite."
"Dan, you don't mean to propagandize me
again, do you? I thought we were going fishing."
"First
I want to show you something. It'll interest you."
De Smet, a lanky towhead, studied Coffin for a second.
Nothing in the lowlander's squint-eyed smile, relaxed stance, and easy drawl
suggested a serious intent. However, that was Coffin's way at the poker table. "As you wish. Shall we flit?"
They
entered the aircar. Since Coffin would be guide on
the first stage of the outing, de Smet waved him to
the pilot's seat. The vehicle quivered and murmured up from the lot behind the
Smithy. Anchor became a collection of dollhouses, where the Swift and Smoky
rivers ran together to form the Emperor and all three gleamed like drawn
swords. The countryside spread brown in plowland and stubblefields, amber in late-ripening crops, fading green
in Terrestrial grasses and clovers, blue-green in their native equivalents, mul-tihued in timberlots and
woods, one vast subtle chessboard. Dirt roads meandered between widely spaced
farmsteads. Far to the north, where the tableland dropped off, a white sea of
cloud deck shone above the low country. Eastward reared the Hercules;
southward, the yet mightier Centaur Mountains came into sight above the
horizon; westward, cultivation presently gave way to wilderness.
Coffin
aimed in that last direction, set the autopilot, leaned back, drew forth a pipe
and tobacco pouch. He hadn't commanded a high speed of the machine. Equinox was
barely past; daylight prevailed for better than thirty hours.
"How's Eva?" de Smet asked.
"Herself healthy." Coffin was silent for a heartbeat. "As
we feared, we can't take the kid home."
De Smet winced. "That's hard." His fingers stole
forth to touch his companion's arm. "I'm awfully damn sorry."
Coffin
grew busy charging his pipe. "We've seen it happen to neighbors of ours.
Eva feels bad, but she's tough. We'll get us another exogene
baby who can live with us." They had long since added to their brood the
one that law required every family to adopt. "I reminded her of how she,
and I for that matter, how we're as fond of Betty as of those we made
ourselves. Which is true."
"Naturally. Uh, have you made any arrangements for . . . yours?"
"Not
yet. We couldn't, before we got the verdict." Coffin hesitated.
"Don't be afraid to say no, I realize this is none of my business and we
do have ample opportunities. But what might you and Jane think about taking
our Charlie in?"
"Huh? Why, mmm—"
"You
haven't taken your exogene yet. Well, we'll be
adopting a second. The rules allow a family to do that on another's behalf, you
know. Eva and I would be mighty glad to have you raise Charlie. Then you'd be
free to order an exogene later on, or not, whichever
you chose."
"This
is rather sudden, Dan." De Smet sat awhile in
thought. "I'll have to discuss it with Jane, of course. Frankly, though,
to me it looks like a very attractive proposition. Instead of getting some
doubtless nice kid, but one whose parentage is a total blank, we'd get one that
we're certain comes of high-grade stock." After a moment: "And, hmm,
it'd create a tie between two influential houses, in highlands and
lowlands."
Coffin
chuckled. "In effect," he said, "we'd swap babies. You'd have to
adopt a tank-orphan—except that now Eva must take
a second. So you gain freedom of choice, we gain a proper home for Charlie,
both families gain, a you say, a kind of alliance . . . and, well, the babies
gain, too. Mind you, this is my own notion. I'll have to talk it over with Eva
also. I'm sure she'll agree if Jane does."
He
kindled his pipe. De Smet, though a nonsmoker, didn't
object. Among numerous achievements on his plantation, Coffin had, with the
help of a consulting agronomist, developed tobacco that could grow in Rus-tumite soil without becoming utterly vile.
He
puffed for a bit before he added, "It's what you've kept insisting, Tom,
as we argued. A fair exchange is no robbery."
De Smet hadfirst quoted that proverb
of economists to Coffin on the first occasion that the two men seriously
discussed business. This was several lunations after
they began to be well acquainted. They amused themselves by calculating
precisely how many, since only a short while before, the lunation—the time it
took for both moons to return to the same positions in the sky—had been defined
officially, if not quite truthfully, as five Rustumite
days.
Coffin
had returned from one of his frequent expeditions into the highland wilds, returned
to Anchor and Eva. The de Smets invited him to
dinner. Later the men sat far into the night, talking.
That
meant less on Rustum than it did on Earth. Here, folk
were regularly active through part of each long darkness.
Nevertheless, most of the town was abed when Coffin asked: "Why won't you? I tell you, and I'd expect you and
your experts to check me out beforehand, I tell you, it'll pay. The Smithy
will turn a profit."
De Smet was slow to
respond. They sat side by side in companionable wise, whisky and soda to hand,
pipe in the fist of the guest, out on a balcony. The
air was warm; somewhere a fiddlebug stridulated, and
rivers boomed and clucked; the windows of Anchor were lightless, and it had no
street lamps, but it glowed coppery-silver beneath a
sky full of stars, in which the moons were aloft, gibbous Raksh
and tiny hurtling Shorab.
"I
hate to sound like a Scrooge," de Smet said at
length. "You leave me no choice, though. The profit's too small."
"Really? The resources we've got—"
De Smet drew breath. "Let me make a speech at you, Dan. I
sympathize with you lowlanders, especially your own Moondance
community, which is the largest. You want industries, too, besides agriculture
and timber and suchlike nature-dependent enterprises. Currently, the machines
that make machines are all here, because that's where colonization started and
High America is where the great majority of people still live. You want me to
bring down a lot of expensive apparatus and technical personnel, and build you
facilities that'll belong to you, not me."
"True.
True. Except we're not asking for any handouts. We
have money from the sale of what we produce—"
De Smet raised a palm. "Please. Let me continue. I'm
going to get a little abstract, if you don't mind.
"Money
is nothing but a symbol. It gives the owner a certain call on the labor and
property of others. One can play many different games with money, until at last
one loses sight of what the stuff is and
ends by wrecking its value. Luckily, that's no danger on Rustum,
yet. First, we're too few to maintain elaborate fiscal schemes. Second, we
have a free-market economy with a strictly gold-standard currency.
"Why
do we have that? First, because the founders of this colony wanted to be free,
free as individuals; and the right to buy, sell, or trade as one chooses is an
important part of this. Second, they'd read their history. They knew what
funny money leads to, always, as inevitably as fire will burn if you stick your
bare hand in it. Therefore the Covenant ties the currency to gold, whose supply
grows too slowly to outrun the growth of real wealth. This causes most
transactions to be in cash. One can borrow, of course, if one can find a willing
lender; but the lender had better have that claim-on-wealth in her personal
pocket.
"As
a result, now that the hard early days are behind us, now that production is
expanding faster than the money supply, the price of nearly everything is
falling."
"I
know that," Coffin protested. "What I got for my wheat last year
barely paid the cost of raising it."
De Smet nodded. "That was bound to happen. Fertile soil,
new varieties of grain suited to local conditions —how easily we get surpluses
that drive prices down! Meanwhile machinery and human labor are in shorter
supply, with more call on them. Hence their price gets bid up; or, to be exact,
it doesn't fall in proportion to the price of natural products."
"Easy
for you to say."
"You
aren't starving, are you? One advantage of tight money is that it discourages
speculation, especially by an individual. He can't have a mortgage foreclosed
on his land because he was never able to get a mortgage on it in the first
place, valuable though it is." In haste: "I don't mean to insult your
intelligence, Dan. This is the same elementary economics you and I both learned
in
school.
I'm simply recapitulating. I want to spell out that I have better reasons than
greed for saying no to you."
"Well,
but look, Tom, I'm better off than most of my friends down there, and I often
feel the pinch."
"What
you mean is, you'd like to do certain things, and can't do them without High
American help. You might wish for an up-to-date flour mill, for instance,
instead of a waterwheel or windmill—or instead of selling your wheat here and
buying back part of it, as bread, at a considerable markup. Yes, surely. The
fact is, however, I regret it very much, but the fact is you will simply have
to do without until there's enough machinery available to bring its rental or
purchase price down. Meanwhile, you can be self-sufficient. And nobody is
pointing a gun at your head forcing you to overproduce."
De Smet filled his lungs afresh before he continued: "You
see, if we gave you a subsidy, the cost of that would
have to be met either through taxation or inflation. No matter which way, it'd
amount to taking earnings from the highlander for the benefit of the lowlander,
who gives nothing in return. Price controls would have the same effect. In
fact, any kind of official intervention would distort the economy. Instead of
meeting our difficulties head-on and solving them once and for all, we'd hide
them behind a screen of paper, where they'd grow worse and breed new troubles
to boot.
"Machinery
and labor are costly because there's a demand for them—they're wanted, in both senses of the word—and at the same time,
for the nonce, they remain scarce. In a free market, the price of a commodity
is nothing more nor less than an index of how much
people are prepared to exchange for it."
"You
High Americans, though"—Coffin chopped the air with his hand—"you've
got more than your share of machines. Even per capita you do. Which means, yours is the way the money flows, no matter what we
lowlanders do. It isn't right!"
De Smet took a sip of whisky before he shook his head and
sighed, "Dan, Dan, you're a frontiersman. You know better than I, from
experience, no two people ever have identical luck.
"It
isn't as if your folk were in dire want. If they were, I'd be the first to
bring them relief. The free market doesn't forbid helping your fellow man. It
only makes such acts voluntary—and so in the long run, I believe, encourages
altruism, though I admit that's just my opinion.
"Your
folk aren't suffering, except in their own minds. The poorest of them eats
well, dresses decently, has adequate shelter. You,
yourself, to judge from the pictures you've shown me, you live in a bigger and
better house than mine, live like a medieval squire. All you lowlanders enjoy
many things we don't, such as unlimited room to move around. And
. .. whoever
can't stand it is welcome here. We have this chronic labor shortage; he can
earn excellent wages."
"We
want to be our own men," Coffin growled, albeit not hostilely.
"I
admire you for that," de Smet said in a mild
tone. "Still, recall your origins. Individuals who could live in the low
country went there first to study it, paid by High America because the
knowledge they could get was essential. They fell in love with the land and
settled. And this was right. Mankind ought to take over the whole planet.
"That'll
be slow, however. Meanwhile, most of us are confined to the uplands. We have
the same right as you to improve our standards of living, don't we? Since you
lowlanders can come join us but would rather not, why should we sacrifice to
support you in your own free choice—a much freer choice than we have?
"That's where the social utility of the
supply-demand law shows itself, Dan. High America is also still young, has
plenty left to do. Plenty that must be done, because we'll be crowded long
before the typical lowlander can see his neighbor's chimney smoke. The quicker
return—the effectively higher profit—to be made here, simply reflects that
urgency, as well as the fact that here, today, are far more persons needing to
be served.
"Please
don't take this wrong; but honestly, it looks to me as if your community is the
one asking for more than is fair, not ours."
"I
told you, we don't want a handout," Coffin answered with somewhat
strained patience. "I can prove to you that the return on any investment
you make among us will be good. Okay, granted, maybe not as good as equal
investment made on High America. Still, you'll gain, and gain well."
"We
already have considerable investments in the lowlands," de Smet pointed out.
Coffin
nodded violently. "Yes! Mines, power stations, transport lines that you
own, you High Americans. You employ lowlanders to work in them, but they're
your property, and the profits go to you."
He
leaned over. His pipestem jabbed, stopping barely
short of the other man's chest. "Now let me explain some home
truths," he said. "Believe it or not, I understand your economics. I
know that I'm asking, on behalf of my community, I'm asking you to use part of
the stuff and staff you command, part of it to come build us—oh, that flour
mill, or a factory producing machine tools, or whatever—come build that for us,
instead of building something like it for High America.
"Well, I tell you, my friend, economics
is not all there is to life. Rightly or wrongly, the lowlanders are starting to
feel slighted. After a while they'll come to feel neglected, and then go on to
feeling exploited. I'm not saying that makes sense, but I am saying it's
true."
"I
know," de Smet replied as if half-apologetic.
"I've been down there myself, inside an air helmet, remember. You're not
the first lowlander I've talked to at length. Yes, you're already beginning to
think of yourselves as a separate breed, rough, tough, bluff frontiersmen
opposed to us dandified, calculating upland-ers. That
notion hasn't developed far yet—"
"It
will. Unless you come help us. If you do, maybe this
will stay a unified planet. Or don't you care about your grandchildren?"
Coffin waited before he added, gravely, "This is not a threat. But do bear
in mind, Tom, several generations from tonight the highlanders will be an
enclave. The population will nearly all be down yonder. And so will the power.
Man, win their good will before it's too late."
"I've
thought about that. I genuinely have. I'm aware that this isn't a problem with
any neat either-or solution. If some
arrangement could be made, an economically sensible arrangement, so it'd
endure. . . . But why should the lowlands be
industrialized? In time, and not such a terribly long time, the prices of food
and timber will soar, as High America fills up. Wouldn't it be wiser to wait
for that day? Meanwhile you'd keep your attractive surroundings."
"They're
not that attractive, when we have to overwork our kids for lack of equipment
we know could be built. Anyway, nobody wants to found an industrial slum. Of course not. We just want a few specific items. We've
ample space to locate them properly, ample resources to treat the wastes so
they don't poison the land."
"We haven't. At least, we don't have
that kind of chance much longer, at the rate we're going." De Smet locked eyes with his guest and said in a voice
tautened by intensity: "That's my main reason for wanting to get rich
fast. I mean to buy up as much virgin highland as possible and make a preserve
of it."
Coffin
smiled in fellow feeling. De Smet's outdoors-manship was what had originally brought them together. It
is hard not to like a man with whom you have been hiking, riding, boating, camping for days on end.
"Maybe
we can work something out," de Smet finished.
"However, it has got to involve a quid pro quo, or it's no good. As the
saying goes, a fair exchange is no robbery."
Lake Royal, where they planned to fish,
gleamed remotely on the right. Still the car whined ahead. A ways further came a break in the forest, an ugly scar where the ground
had been ripped open across several kilometers. No life save a few weeds had
returned to heal it.
Coffin
gestured with his pipestem. "How old is that
thing, anyway?"
De Smet peered out the canopy. "Oh, the strip mine?" He grimaced. "Seventy
, eighty years, I guess. From the early days."
"Industrialization,"
Coffin grunted.
De Smet stared at him. "What're you talking about? Necessity. They had to have fuel. Their nuclear generator
was broken down, couldn't be fixed soon, and winter was coming on. Here was a
surface seam of coal which they could easily quarry and airlift out."
"Nevertheless, industry, huh? Earlier this morning, I caught a
knock-you-over stink from the refinery."
"That'll
have to be corrected. I'm leaning on the owners. So are others. Mainly, Dan,
you know as well as I do, we've had to take temporary measures, but we're
almost back to a clean hydrogen-fueled technology."
"Then
why do you worry about industrialization? Why do you want to set aside parts of
High America?"
De Smet seemed bewildered. "Isn't it obvious? Because ... I, highlanders who feel like me, we can
never really belong in your unspoiled lowland nature. Shouldn't we too have
a few places to be, well, alone with our souls?" He uttered a nervous
laugh. "Sorry. Didn't mean to get sententious."
"No matter." Coffin blew a smoke ring. "As population grows, won't there be
more and more pressure to turn this whole plateau into a big loose city? Do you
really think your wilderness areas won't be bought out, or simply seized? Unless ample goods are coming from the lowlands. Then High
Americans will be able to afford letting plenty of land lie fallow. . . . Well,
that can't happen without trade, which can't happen unless the lowlanders have
something—not only raw materials but finished products—to trade with.
"Don't
you think, even today, even at the cost of some profit, it makes better sense
to spread the industry more thin?"
De Smet leaned back and regarded Coffin for a while before he
said, "You promised me, no further arguments on our holiday."
"Nor've I broken my promise, Tom.
I just reminded you about what I'd said before, to help you appreciate the
interesting thing I also promised to show you."
The
autopilot beeped. Coffin switched it off, took the controls, checked landmarks,
and slanted the car downward. Below was a rough and lovely upthrust
of hills. A lake gleamed among them like a star, and overhead circled uncountably many waterfowl. Sunlight made rainbow
iridescences on their wings.
"You
recall, several close friends and I have been around here quite a bit,"
Coffin said. "We gave out that we were investigating botanical matters, to
try to get a line on a problem we're having in our home ecology. It wasn't
altogether false—we did even get the information we wanted—and nobody paid
much attention anyhow."
De Smet
waited, braced.
"In addition,"
Coffin said, "we prospected."
Air
whistled around the hull. Ground leaped dizzy-ingly
upward.
"You
see," Coffin went on, "if we lowlanders don't have the wherewithal to
develop our country as we'd like, and if nobody'll
help us get it, why, we'd better go help ourselves. If we could stake out a
claim in your
country, then
transportation to Anchor would be fast and cheap, giving us a competitive
break. Or we might sell out to a highland combine, or maybe take a royalty. In
any case, we'd have the money we need to bid for the equipment and personnel we
need."
"Nobody's
prospected these parts to speak of," de Smet
said slowly.
"That's
why we did. You think of this section as being far from home, but to us, it's
no further than Anchor."
The
car came to a halt, then descended straight into a meadow.
Coffin opened the door on his side. A thousand songs and soughings
flowed in, autumn crispness and the fragrance of that forest which stood
everywhere around, ripe. Grasses rippled, trees tossed
their myriad colors, not far off blinked the lake.
"Marvelous spot," Coffin said.
"You're lucky to own it."
"Not
lucky." De Smet smiled,
however worried he perhaps was. "Smart. I decided this ought to be the
heart of my preserve, and claimed the maximum which the Homestead Rule
allows."
"You
don't mind that my gang and I camped here for a bit?"
"Oh,
no, certainly not. You'd leave the place clean."
"You
see, in searching for clues to minerals on unclaimed land, we needed an idea
of the whole region. So we checked here too. We made quite a discovery. Congratulations,
Tom."
De Smet grew less eager than alarmed. "What'd you
find?" he snapped.
"Gold. Lots and lots of
gold."
"Hoy?"
"Mighty useful industrial metal, like for electrical conductors and
chemically durable plating. Making it available ought to be a real social service." Coffin's
thumb gestured aft. "You'll want to see for yourself, no doubt. I brought
the equipment. I knew you know how to use it, otherwise I'd've
invited along any technician you named. Go ahead. Inspect the quartz veins in
the boulders. Put samples through the crusher and assayer. Pan that brook, sift
the lakeshore sands. My friend, you'll find every indication that you're
sitting on a mother lode."
De Smet shook his head like a man stunned. "Industry
can't use a lot of gold. Not for decades to come. The currency—"
"Yeh. That should be exciting, what happens to
this hard currency you're so proud of. Not to mention what happens to the
wilderness, the majority of it that you don't own, when the rush starts. And
it'll be tough to get labor for producing things we can merely eat and wear.
You, though, Tom, you'll become the richest man on Rustum."
Coffin
knocked the dottle from his pipe, stretched, and
rose. "Go ahead, look around," he suggested. "I'll make camp.
I've brought a collapsible canoe, and the fishing's even better here than at
Lake Royal."
De Smet's look searched him. "Do you . . . plan ... to join the gold rush?"
Coffin
shrugged. "Under the circumstances, we low-landers
won't have much choice, will we?"
"I—See
here, Dan—"
"Go on, Tom. Do your checking around, and your thinking. I'll have lunch ready when
you come back. Afterward we can go out on the water, and maybe dicker while we
fish."
He strode into the hospital room, grabbed Eva
from her bed to him, and bestowed upon her a mighty kiss. "Dan!" she
cried low. "I didn't expect—" "Nor
I," he said, and laughed. "I never dared hope things'd
go this fast or this well." The sun stood at noon. "But they did, and
it's done, and from this minute forward, sweetheart, I am yours altogether and
forever."
"What—what—Dan,
let me go! I love you, too, but you're strangling me."
"Sorry."
He released her, except to lower her most gently, bent over her, and kissed her
again with unending tenderness. Afterward he sat down and took her hand.
"What's
happened?" she demanded. "Speak up, Daniel Coffin, or before heaven,
I'll personally wring the truth out of you." She was half weeping, half
aglow.
He glanced at the door, to make doubly sure
he had closed it, and dropped his voice. "We've got our contract, Eva.
Tom de Smet called in his counselor as soon as we
returned, a couple hours ago, and we wrote a contract for the Smithy to come do
work at Moondance, and you know Tom never goes back
on his word. That's one reason I was after him particularly."
"You finally persuaded
him? Oh, wonderful!"
"I
s'pose you could call it persuasion. I—Okay, I've
told you before, strictly confidentially, how my gang and I weren't just doing
research in the High American backwoods, we were trying for a mineral
strike."
"Yes.
I couldn't understand why the hurry." Her tone did not accuse. Nor did it
forgive. It said that now she saw nothing which needed forgiving, and merely
asked for reasons. "I kept telling you, the minerals would wait, and the
ecological trouble wasn't that urgent."
"But
getting the contract I was after was." He stared downward, and his free
hand knotted into a fist. "I had to leave you mostly alone, and I knew it
hurt you, and yet I didn't dare explain even to you."
She
leaned over to kiss him afresh. When he could talk again, he said: "You
see, machinery and engineers are scarce. The Smithy
itself has none too big a supply. Any day, someone else might've instigated a
project which'd tie everything up for years to come.
And in fact, if word should leak out that we lowlanders might seriously bid,
why, then chances were that somebody else would tie the Smithy up, and invent a project afterward. Not to suppress us or
anything, but because it's true that profits are higher here than amongst us.
"It
wouldn't've mattered if you, under anesthesia or
whatever, if you let slip that I was quietly prospecting. I knew there'd be
suspicion of that in Anchor; and what the hell, plenty of people go on such
ventures, even if not quite that far afield. This other thing, though, this
real aim of mine—"
"I see, I see. And you
did succeed? You're a marvel."
"According
to Tom de Smet, I'm a bastard." He grinned.
"Then after we'd talked awhile, he said I was a damn fine bastard who he
was proud to call a friend, and we shook on it and have a date later today to
go out and get roaring drunk."
Puzzlement
darkened her eyes. "What do you mean, Dan? First you talk about
prospecting, but evidently you didn't find your mine. Then you talk about
getting this contract that you were actually after all the while. Didn't you
simply, finally, persuade Tom to give it to you?"
He
shook his head. "No. I tried and tried, for lunations,
and he wouldn't agree. I grew sure that he wanted to, down inside. But his
silly social economic conscience insisted he stick by the dictates of economic
theory. In the end, I told him I knew I'd gotten to be a bore on the subject,
and I'd dog my hatch, and why not go fishing?"
"And—?" she said
like a word of love.
"This
is a secret you and I take to our graves with us. Promise?
Fine, your nod is worth more than most people's oaths.
"I
took him to a mother lode of gold I'd found on land of his. I explained that I
hated, the same as him, how a gold rush would destroy the wilderness, let alone
the currency, and draw effort away from things more useful. But I had a duty
to my own community, I said, to my friends who'd asked me to speak for them. I
offered my silence, and my fellow prospectors'—I'd picked them very carefully—I
offered him that in return for his contract with us. We could write that in, as
a provision not made public unless our blabbing gave him cause to cancel the
deal. Take it or leave it, I said. A fair exchange is no robbery.
"He took it, and I really am convinced
he was personally glad to have that excuse for helping us. Say, how about
letting him and Jane foster Charlie? They're more than
willing."
"Dan, Dan, Dan! Come here—"
He
knelt by the bed and they held each other for a long while.
Eventually,
calmed a little, he took his chair and she lowered herself back onto her
pillows. Eyes remained with eyes.
One
of hers closed in a wink. "You don't fool me, Dan Coffin," she said.
"What do you
mean?"
"That
act of yours. The simple, hearty rural squire. Nobody
gets to lead as many people as you do without being bloody damn shrewd."
"Well. . . ." He
looked a trifle smug.
"My
love," she said, barely audible, "this may be the first time in
history that anyone salted a mine which the victim already owned."
"I
have my contract, which Tom de Smet will honor in
word and spirit both. Further than that, deponent saith
not."
Eva
cocked her head. "Have you considered, Dan, that the possibility may have
occurred to Tom, and he decided not to check the facts too closely?"
"Huh?"
Seldom before had she seen
or enjoyed seeing her husband rocked back hard.
But
when at last he left her—for a while, only a while—he walked again like a young
buccaneer. The wind outside had strengthened, a trumpet voice beneath heaven,
and every autumn leaf was a banner flying in challenge.
Chad
Oliver
THE
MIDDLE MAN
OUT
of all the millions of planets in that small sector of the universe that we
refer to quaintly as our
galaxy, few have names of
their own. Worlds, by and large, are nameless things. They may have
designations assigned to them from outside, but numbers are not names and in
any case the numbers are unknown to the life-forms that dwell there.
The
giving of names is a characteristic of man and manlike beings, although it also
occurs among a few other language-oriented genera. Moreover, the naming of
planets is a special thing. First, you have to know what a planet is and that it needs to be distinguished from other planets—otherwise, it
remains simply "the" world, if indeed it gets that far. It is not
enough to name a territory, a river, a mountain. A concept of a total world is
required—and most people don't have it.
It
takes a complex and sophisticated culture to name a planet. Of course, the
lightships of Caravans Unlimited tended to steer clear of civilizations more
advanced than that of Earth. They had not encountered many, and the few they
had touched briefly were almost totally alien. There was no basis for a trading
relationship, and certainly not a profitable one. Caravans had
little to
offer to such a culture, and no bargaining power at all.
Caravans
left the handful of complex civilizations alone—which meant that Earth had no
effective contact with them. The exploration of space was too costly to be
undertaken by governments swamped by more urgent demands; the business
corporations such as Caravans could pursue it only as long as it showed a
profit. On the other side, it was a curious fact that the alien civilizations
seemed to lack any interest in space travel.
The
Caravans lightships had never detected an alien ship in space.
Alex
Porvenir had long been convinced that this was
nothing but a sampling error. The universe was immensely large, and the
Caravans ships were few. The dimensional technique of moving a ship through
not-space was tricky; the chances of direct contact with another ship were
remote. The itch to explore the universe might not be universal. Certainly,
there were civilizations that seemed unconcerned, or knew all they wished to
know. But curiosity is a prerequisite to intelligent life, and somewhere. . .
.
Alex
was by no means certain that he wanted to encounter unknown ships in the
depths of space. He had troubles enough as it was.
For
example, the problem on Arctica.
Arctica was that rare thing, a world with a name. It
had been named by the Caravans traders and had no official tag, but Arctica it was. It had to
be.
A cold planet, adrift with silver snow and sheeted with glinting ice. A world of howling
blizzards and long stillnesses. A land of slow magnificent glaciers and sudden explosive thaws.
Of course, it was not all snow and ice and
barren frozen rock. Few life-sustaining worlds are that uniform. There was a
broad equatorial belt that was moderate in its climate, there were
transitional zones of treeless bush-covered plains, and there were deep central
open seas.
But
the Lupani lived on the fringes of the snow and ice,
and it was the Lupani who brought the traders to Arctica. There were other, more populous tribes south of
the Lupani, but they had nothing that Caravans could
use.
On
the charts, Arctica was Sirius XI, almost nine
light-years from Earth.
Nobody ever thought of it
as Sirius XI.
Now,
as the Caravans lightship carrying Alex Por-venir
approached the Sirius system, spring was coming to Arctica.
That was no accident.
What
happened—or failed to happen—in the spring was the obvious key to the riddle of
the Lupani.
The
Lupani were a tough, resourceful people who somewhat
resembled the Eskimos of an older Earth. They even looked like them in a purely
physical sense, and for very good reasons. They had the same narrow eyes, the
same high cheekbones and fatty pads protecting the nose, the same somewhat
globular body build. When you confront the stresses of extreme cold, wide-open
eyes are vulnerable to freezing, a projecting beak of a nose is an invitation to
disaster, and a body that does not retain heat does not survive.
When
you have no wood, you build your houses of snow or rock and line the walls with
skins. When you have to walk in a blizzard, you don't go naked or with just a
couple of strategically placed feathers.
The old Eskimos—extinct now in the manswarm that was Earth—would have recognized the Lupani, and understood them.
They had faced many of the
same problems.
The
Lupani could not just park themselves
in one spot and live off the land. Farming was impossible. They had to shift
with the seasons, utilizing the resources of each to the maximum.
Summers
were hard and lonely, but productive. During the summer months, the askaggen moved in small groups onto the suddenly flowering
treeless plains that formed the southern edge of the Lupani
range. The askaggen were not herd animals. Large,
hairy, and formidably tusked, they were more like a stunted mammoth than
anything else. Scattered in little knots of four or five animals, they feasted
on the grasses and shrubs of the summer plains. In order to hunt them —and even
to find them—the Lupani had to split up into family
groups and fan out over a huge territory. It took a lot of walking, and friends
that parted when summer began would not see each other again for many long
months.
In
the fall, when the chill winds began to blow, the askaggen
drifted southward out of the land of the Lupani. The
scattered Lupani began their trek north toward their
winter villages, carrying their collected tusk-ivory with them. They lived on
berries and marsh birds and the small rodents that burrowed in the damp soil.
Winter
was the best time, despite the bitter cold. The Lupani
were together and snug in their rock villages with the interior walls lined
with hides. There were sea mammals beneath the ice, sleek propoise-like
karibu that maintained breathing holes in the crust
ice. The harpoons of the Lupani hunters sought them
out with ease; it took skill and patience but it was not really hard work. Winter
was a time of enforced leisure, a time for sewing skins and repairing weapons
and carving dreams and memories out of ivory. It was also a time of awesome
frozen beauty, and the Lupani were by no means
unaware of the magic of their winter world.
The
onslaught of spring was no cause for rejoicing; the Lupani
sang no songs to spring. It was a time for thaws and open rushing water, a time
for drenching rains and snarling knife-edged winds. The karibu
swam far to the south to bear their young in warmer water that splashed against
distant islands. For the Lupani, it was a time for
farewells and a time of gnawing hunger. The people of the villages delayed as
long as they could, and then broke up into tiny groups that moved toward the
barren wet plains, waiting for the askaggen to come
again. Meanwhile, they scavenged what they could.
That was the annual cycle
of the Lupani.
That
was the way it had always worked. That was the way it was supposed to work.
The problem was simple. It
wasn't working now.
The cycle was broken.
The Caravans lightship, operating now in
normal space, flashed toward Arctica. The huge white
sun that was Sirius bathed the ship in silver. The symbol of the laden camel on
the bow seemed somehow right at home. Had there been anyone to see, it would
not have been difficult to imagine another burning sun, a sea of shifting sand,
the patient tinkling of the harness bells. . . .
And men. Men of a special breed. Men with an ancient
lineage. Men who knew about far journeys and strange ports
of call. Men who for most of their adult lives sought out products that were worth transporting across immense distances. Men
who lived with the stars—
"It just can't be that way," Tucker
Olton said. "There has to be some other explanation."
Alex
Porvenir filled one of his habitually foul pipes and
fired it up. "Great," he said. "I'm all ears. Clue me in on that
other explanation."
"I
wish I could. Just once, I'd like to reverse our roles. It would do my ego a
lot of good—what's left of it."
Alex
Porvenir smiled. "Your time will come. Besides,
we worked this one out together, remember? It wasn't just my idea. I don't understand it either. But there's no other way the thing
will work."
"It
won't work this way either. You know it won't. I don't give a damn what the
computer says. Yveseen the Lupani. I know what they can do and what they can't
do. The theory may sound good, but it has the slight defect of being
impossible."
Alex
nodded and stretched out his long legs. His disconcertingly direct brown eyes
narrowed slightly. He passed a lean hard hand through his graying hair. He
liked Tucker Olton. The two men had been through a lot together, intellectually
and otherwise. Alex was proud of the younger man. He had learned his lessons
well but he had a mind of his own. He had the too-rare gift of being able to
see what he looked at. He saw what was there, not what was supposed to be
there.
"You
will grant two facts," Alex said, puffing on his pipe. "One, the Lupani have virtually stopped
producing their carved ivory artifacts. Two, they told the probe team that
they were out of ivory. They said they no longer hunted the askaggen.
No askaggen, no ivory. No ivory and thus no more of
those wonderful carvings. And no product for Caravans; we can't market harpoons
and skin hats. Correct?"
"Okay except for one small item. They have to hunt the askageen. They can't survive any
other way. The karibu aren't available in the summer,
and even if they were the Lupani couldn't eat them.
The strongest tabu in their culture involves
consuming out-of-season food. You remember Bob Edgerton's classic
article?"
"The
Ecological Base of Lupani Food Prohibitions} I think I vaguely recall it. In fact, I
talked it over with Bob before he wrote it, and I showed it to you when it
first came out."
Tucker
Olton flushed. "Well, anyway. They can't eat askaggen
meat except in the summer. They can't eat the flesh of the karibu
except in the winter. Under no circumstances can they eat both at the same
time. Even allowing for overlapping distributions, it works out very neatly.
They don't harvest enough karibu to affect the
breeding population and the same goes for the askaggen.
They are assured a perpetual food supply—"
"I grasp the
argument."
"Yeah,
but consider the implications. They have to
hunt the askaggen in the summer. Otherwise, they'd
starve. If they go after the askaggen, they get the
ivory from the tusks. The karibu have no tusks;
they're not built like a walrus. Okay, no askaggen
and no ivory. What in the hell are they doing?"
Alex
knocked out his pipe. "Obviously, our friends are staying put in their
winter villages. Instead of dispersing in the spring and heading for the askaggen range, they are staying together where they
are."
"My
point is that they can't do that.
People have to eat. That's as solid a law as we can have in what we laughingly
refer to as the behavioral sciences."
Alex
shrugged. "When you can't get an answer or the answer is impossible the
chances are that you're asking the wrong question. The Lupani
are not hunting the askaggen. They are parked on
their posteriors in their winter villages. Presumably, they aren't eating each
other. Therefore, they have found a food resource that we don't understand. The
question is simple. What is this food and where is it coming from?"
"Swell. Does that get
us closer to an answer?"
"Maybe. If we know the question we're halfway to a solution. There's something
to be said for the old Boasian approach. We don't
need a speculative theory. We need some facts."
"I
have a hunch that those facts are going to be pretty damned peculiar."
"Facts
are generally more peculiar than imaginative guesses. I'm inclined to agree
with you. I don't pretend to know the answer to this one. I am sure that there's only one place to find the answer."
Tucker
Olton shivered. "It's not my idea of an ideal vacation spot. I don't have
enough fat on my bones. I also regret to inform you that I'm not
waterproof."
"It
won't be fun," Alex Porvenir conceded.
"Just the same, it's the only way. No sacrifice is too great for dear old
Caravans. If the old man can take it, you'll survive. No matter how you slice
it, we're stuck. The two of us have to go down there and find out what is going
on."
Tucker Olton shivered
again. He did not look happy.
The
spherical landing shuttle drifted silently down through a cold gray sky. Like a
fragile bubble it came to rest, hardly breaking the crust of the old, melting
snow. The wind moaned eerily outside, a wind untamed and unbroken by
obstructions of any sort. It was not a playful wind. It had teeth in it and it
meant business.
"Mush,"
Tucker Olton muttered. "Nanook rides
again."
"Nanook walks " Alex Porvenir corrected him. "But not very far, fortunately."
The
two men left the shuttle, moving from an artificial world in which everything
was controlled. The transition was a shock.
The
howling wind almost knocked Alex down. The cold got to him at once despite the
special clothing that he wore. His face burned and then became numb.
It
was impossible to talk. The two men just had to bend their bodies against the
wind and force themselves through the snow. Their boots sank in almost to their
knees.
Alex
could see; there was no danger of losing his way. He had put the shuttle down
within sight of the stone walls of the village, walls that glinted icily in the
diffused white light of the cloud-hidden sun. He could see the forbidding sea
beyond the village, with turbulent, open black water frothing between great
piles of shifting pack ice.
They
kept going, stumbling through the snow. It took them a good thirty minutes to
reach the Lupani village.
Alex
led the way to the house of Korigh,.
who was the nearest thing the Lupani
had to a leader. There was no way to knock against the hides that sealed the
tunnel entrance. Alex dropped down on his hands and knees, pulled aside the
flap, and crawled inside. The passageway was cool, dark, and damp. But there
was no wind and the silence was startling.
"Horani!" he shouted. His voice didn't perform up to
his expectations. He swallowed and tried again. "Horani!"
There
was a stirring against the inner seal. He thought he heard an answering call.
Alex shoved the second flap open and crawled
in. He stood up, sensing Tucker behind him. The heat hit him like a hot fist. The chamber smelled heavily of burning fish-oil and half-cured
hides and sweating bodies. It took him a long minute before his eyes
adjusted to the dim light from the oil lamps hanging on thongs from the roof.
He felt singularly vulnerable although he knew he had nothing to fear from Korigh under normal circumstances. Korigh
had always welcomed the traders and the good things the traders had brought to
the Lupani.
Alex
recognized the fat old man despite the fact that it had been years since he had
last seen him. Korigh was not a man you forget
easily. Strong he was, with arms like a wrestler. His long black hair shone
with fresh grease. His round face was lined and weathered, but his eyes were as
sharp as those of any man that Alex had ever known.
Alex
remembered one of Korigh's wives too. She was no
beauty and never had been, but there had been a time when she had extended the
hospitality of the house to Alex and he had been only too happy to accept.
Not a word was spoken.
That was not the way.
Alex
shucked off his clothes, stripping down to the loin cloth that was proper
indoors attire. He stepped forward and embraced Korigh.
The old man smelled as bad
as ever.
Then the conversation
exploded.
Alex
could not keep up with all of it. As a younger man, he had dealt directly with
many different peoples on a variety of worlds; even then, using the best
linguistic boosters that were available, he could not possibly be fluent in
all of the varied languages he had to speak and understand. Now, when he was
essentially a policy planner and occasional troubleshooter, his linguistic
skills were rusty. It was only the necessity of visiting the Lupani in the spring that had saved him. There had been
time, utilized in between other jobs, to brush up on the language. He was far
from perfect, but he was not totally out of it either.
Tucker,
he noticed, was in better shape. Languages got tougher with age.
There
were a few peoples in the galaxy with whom you could come straight to the
point. The Lupani, emphatically, were not among
them.
They
drank a kind of sweet berry wine that did nothing to improve Alex's powers of
communication. He was not a wine man; wine made him sleepy and gave him a
colossal headache. They ate slabs of rubbery karibu
flesh. The karibu were still acceptable in Lupani terms, since it was too early to hunt the askaggen and spring was only beginning, but the karibu were not wholly acceptable to Alex. The meat was
nearly raw and full of fat.
The
heat inside the hide-lined house was terrific. It was hard to believe that a
cold wind whined over fields of snow just beyond the walls.
And the talk went on and
on. Korigh was in no hurry.
They
spoke of when the traders had first come to the Lupani.
They joked of the ivory heirloom that Korigh had
always refused to trade. The old man laughed and brought it out for Alex to
examine. It was a fantastic thing, alive, half dream and half memory. It was
less than two feet long, yellowed with age, carved with an extraordinary skill.
When you held it in your hands, you saw the ancient gods of sea and snow, you
lived the old hunts and the old loves, you felt the pride of a people who had
met a tough world head-on and licked the worst it had to offer—
As art, it was a masterpiece.
As
a product for Caravans, it was ideal. Small, portable,
eminently marketable.
But
it was not for sale. And the other carvings, living legends created from the
ivory of the askaggen tusks, were not being produced.
. . .
They
talked of blizzards and blinding white sunlight and drenching rains that
scoured the land. They talked of feasts and starvation. They talked of stalking
the karibu on shoals of ice and harpooning them
through their breathing holes. They talked of how the sinew line whistled into
the deep black water when the harpoon foreshaft
detached and the karibu dived, and how the warm red
blood stained the snow.
They talked of everything
except the askaggen hunts.
Try
as he would, Alex could not make a dent in that one. He knew that Korigh was fencing with him, and Korigh
was a master. He would speak of the askaggen and the
carvings when he was ready.
That might be a long, long
time.
Alex
was not sure whether he finally passed out from the heat and the wine or just
went to sleep.
He was sure that he had not made the slightest progress.
The next day, Alex walked through the
village. It was raining hard and it was cold. The wind blew in gusts that
almost knocked him off his feet. He didn't care. After the sweltering oily heat
of a Lupani house, the chilly rain was downright
refreshing.
Why
the Lupani did not all die of pneumonia he did not
know. Nor did he care at the moment. He simply needed to clear his head and wash
the stink off his clothing.
The
village looked the same. He could not detect any basic change in it at all.
The
same bleak, square rock houses with their extended tunnel entry-corridors. The
same elevated stone platforms supporting glistening, inverted skin-lined
canoes. The same stacked toboggans, flat-bottomed and wet, with their arched
pushing-handles. The same bundled-up children, oblivious to
the cold and the rain, hurling their small harpoons at improvised targets.
Everything
was the same and yet there was a subtle sense of strangeness. The timing was wrong.
There
was a notable lack of industry in the village, and the Lupani
were a hard-working people. It was the beginning of spring and that meant that
the Lupani were facing the worst time of the year. It
was normal for them to delay leaving their winter villages as long as they
could, but they had to prepare for dispersal and the endurance of the lean
season. There were traps to be repaired, packs to be sewn, compound bows to be
rewound, arrows to be tested. They could not hunt the askaggen with harpoons; despite this, not a single child
was practicing with the bow and arrow. . . .
It
was as though the Lupani were expecting easy times, a
season of plenty. Certainly, there was no sign of preparations to start the
long trek toward the range of the askaggen.
Alex
shook his head. He did not understand what was going on.
He
returned to the house of Korigh, removing his
dripping clothes and immersing himself in the oily heat.
"Well?"
said Tucker Olton, wiping a film of sweat from his forehead. "Where are we
now?"
"In a word," Alex
replied, "nowhere."
Old Korigh rubbed
his fat hands together and smiled an unreadable smile.
Alex
gave it a week and reached an unavoidable conclusion. He was no closer to a
solution than when he had arrived. The Lupani were
friendly enough and they were as talkative as ever. But they would not discuss
the askaggen even when prodded by direct questions.
And they did nothing at all to get themselves ready to leave the village.
The
rains poured down and there were cold rivers winding through the snow. The
winds moaned against the rock walls and icy breakers from the sea pounded the
slippery shores.
The
Lupani sat cozily in their houses and did nothing.
They simply waited.
Alex
did not know what they were waiting/or and he could not find out. He was more
than a little frustrated and he was not enchanted with the stench of the hot Lupani houses. He was sick of berry wine and he had a
perpetual headache. The blubbery karibu meat gave
out, and that was a minor blessing. The spring season was far enough along now
so that the karibu were moving south to bear their
young, and in any event it was too late to eat karibu.
The Lupani had not changed enough to violate their
most ancient food prohibition. They were living on small dried fish and the
supply was already getting low.
They
could not exist on fish for long. There were not enough of them in the cold sea
and they were making no attempt to replenish their stock.
They just waited.
That was fine for the Lupani. They knew what they were doing, and a less suicidally inclined people could hardly be imagined.
It was not fine for Alex.
Caravans was in business to make a profit. It was a difficult enterprise, hemmed in
as they were by a multitude of legal restrictions. They could not simply provide
the Lupani with a supply of ivory; that would be a
clear case of cultural manipulation that could lead to drastic consequences
both for the Lupani and for Caravans. The U.N. ET
Council would have a collective hemorrhage.
In
interstellar trade, time was a factor that had to be taken into account. As
long as the lightship orbited Arctica without
positive results, it was wasting time. There were other planets in the Sirius
system, and other products. Caravans could not afford to go into suspended
animation while Alex Porvenir tried to figure out
what in hell the Lupani were up to.
And
Alex was not inclined to let the lightship go without him. It was always wise
to stay within hollering distance.
Therefore: leave.
Admit defeat for now.
Come
back later. If the Lupani would not explain, a
month's time would explain for them. They could not hide events.
Beyond
that, Alex was human. He was a man; he had no ambition to be a disembodied
intellect. He missed Helen. He wanted some gut-cleansing Scotch. He wanted to
puff on a pipe that did not reek of oil.
"Come on, Tuck,"
he said. "I've had enough."
Tucker
Olton grinned. "You mean the Old Man is going back empty-handed? No
solution? No fancy scheme up his sleeve? I never thought I'd live to see the
day."
"Do you have a solution?" "If I have, it's
invisible."
"Then
you've lived to see the day. We'll save our fancy schemes for another
time."
"Mush!"
yelled Tucker Olton. He was not enchanted with the Lupani.
The two men said their farewells.
They splashed through a driving rain to the
shuttle.
The
spheroid lifted into the stormy sky, having accomplished exactly nothing.
Exactly one month later, the lightship
returned.
The landing shuttle touched down.
A
grim-faced Alex Porvenir stepped out, followed by a
dubious Tucker Olton.
It
was almost summer now. The winds of Arctica had softened. There was still snow on the ground,
but it was not piled high into drifts. There was cold black water everywhere.
Miraculously, the rains had stopped.
The
white fire of Sirius was far from balmy, but there was a trace of warmth in the air.
The
two men sloshed through the muddy snow toward the Lupani
village. It was easier going than it had been before, although not Alex's idea
of a pleasant stroll.
He
was angry at his own previous failure. He blamed himself. He had no hostility toward
the Lupani. After all, they owed him nothing. On
their own merits, they were a remarkable people. They had a right to be secretive
if that was their desire.
Within
minutes, it was obvious that the Lupani were still in
their winter village. It was impossible, but there they were.
Before he ever actually got into the village,
Alex Porvenir knew where the answer to the riddle
was. He did not know what
the answer was, but he knew
where it was.
He stopped short. A chill ran through him
that owed nothing to the weather of Arctica.
"Look at that," he whispered.
Tucker
Olton had turned very pale. "I don't believe it. Alex, you know what this
means. Here, among the Lupani, of all the people on
all the worlds—"
Alex
shrugged. He noticed that he was trembling. His mind fastened on little things:
the brownish color of the snow, the wet cold against his boots, the pale blue of the cloudless sky. "Why not
here?" he asked. He did not expect an answer. "Why
not here?"
The
two men knew what they were seeing. They knew it with an instant certainty. It
was something they had half-anticipated for much of their adult lives, and yet
the reality staggered them.
"Little
man, what now?" Tucker Olton released a breath he had not been conscious
of holding. "We'd better turn back. This is too big for us, Alex."
Alex
Porvenir hesitated, then
made up his mind. "It may be too big for us, but who else is there? I vote
we go ahead."
Tucker
Olton searched for a way out and found none. "I guess we're all there
is," he admitted.
The
two men moved forward, their boots squishing in the muck. Their eyes never left
the thing that waited for them just outside the Lupani
village.
In
itself, the thing was not spectacular. The facts about it could be easily
discerned. It was a structure of some sort. It was about sixty feet across. It
was hemispherical in shape. It was gray in color and appeared to be metallic.
It most certainly had not been built by the Lupani, or by any other people on the world of Arctica.
It had also not been built
by anyone from Earth.
The
structure was plainly and clearly alien. It had no business being there, but
there it emphatically was.
Alex
Porvenir was perfectly capable of putting two and two
together. It was one of his talents. He knew, at least roughly, what was inside
that building.
So did Tucker Olton.
"Let's
check it out first," Alex said. "We want to be sure of our
facts."
They
walked right up to the structure. Nobody tried to stop them. It was no great
trick to find the entrance. The pathway was marked by the tracks of many boots.
There was a door, almost square, with a handle. There was a simple latch. The
door was not locked.
"Naturally," Alex
muttered.
He
opened the door and stepped inside. There was interior illumination, apparently
coming from the dome itself. The chamber was just a big room, like a vault. It
was unheated.
Stacked
in orderly rows were little gleaming boxes, about a foot square. There were
thousands of them, piled all the way up to the curved roof. They filled the
structure.
Alex
pulled one of the boxes down. It was not particularly heavy. The glittering
covering was simply a wrapping foil. He peeled it off.
There
were four brownish cubes inside the box. The stuff was granular and slightly
greasy to the touch. It had a faintly aromatic smell.
Alex
licked one of the cubes, gingerly. It had a meaty flavor.
"It's
food concentrate of some sort," he said.
"That was a foregone conclusion. What
the devil do we do now?"
Alex
considered. "I think we want an analysis of this stuff," he said. His
voice seemed very small in the packed vault. "Take a box and haul it back
to the ship. Find out exactly what it is. You'll have to make a full report, of
course. It's going to cause a bit of a stir."
"That's the
understatement of the day."
"It
doesn't matter how excited they get. Keep them out of here until I decide what to do. You'll have to go straight to Carlos and
Captain Dryden. Just keep reminding them that I am the senior cultural officer
and this is my responsibility until and unless the U.N. directs otherwise. The
ship is in no danger as far as I can see; Dryden will have to make that
judgment. You tell Carlos I will look after the interests of Caravans. That
should keep him
happy. By the time the U.N.
ET Council receives a report and«acts and gets a
message back we'll be long gone from here. Understand?"
"Oh, sure. Nothing to it. I just go back and calmly
inform them that man has made his first contact with an alien civilization
operating in space. I tell them that they're messing around with the Lupani. And I tell our boys just to sit tight."
"Exactly."
"And meanwhile, what
do / do?"
"You
get an exact analysis of that junk. You make damned sure the communications men
are on the alert for my instructions and a landing crew is at the ready. Then
bring the shuttle back. Park it where I can see it from the village. I'll tell
you what to do then."
Tucker
Olton looked at him with something like awe. "Just what are you going to do?"
Alex
Porvenir smiled. "I haven't the foggiest
notion," he said.
The younger man started to object, gave it up
as a bad job, and scooped up a shiny box.
He waved and headed back
for the shuttle.
Alex
Porvenir put his hands on his hips and stared
intently at the food concentrates piled in the dome.
He was quite confident on
one point.
For man, for Caravans, for
the future—
Nothing would ever be the
same again.
The
oily heat in the house of Korigh was as bad as ever.
The smells were a little different, though. The bubbling food that was
stone-boiling in the hide kettle had an aromatic, pungent odor. The smell was
stronger than it had been in the alien warehouse.
Alex
wiped the sweat from his brow. "We have always traded fairly with our
friends, the Lupani," he said. He knew he was
repeating himself. He and Korigh had been getting
nowhere fast for two days.
"That
is true," the fat old man with the sharp eyes conceded.
"Why did you not tell me about the
food?" "They
said not to speak of
it." "We are your friends."
"You
trade fairly. They
give something for nothing.
We no longer must leave our companions and hunt the askaggen.
There is much food. Enough to last until the karibu
come again. We are happy."
"Who gives something
for nothing?"
"They do. The strangers."
"What do they look
like?"
"They come from the
sky."
"Do they look like
us?"
"They are not Lupani."
"We are not Lupani, either."
"You
are more like Lupani than they are." "Do
they have a name?"
"They
are the Others. They are very powerful. They bring
much food."
"How
long did it take them to build the food-house?"
"Not
long. The Others came. Then it was there."
"In
the winter, where does the food-house go?"
"It
is not there."
"Why
don't they just leave it?"
"They
are not like us. They are Others."
"And
you will not hunt the askaggen again?"
"This
food is good. It is easy. We do nothing for it. Why hunt the askaggen?"
"You
have always hunted the askaggen."
The
old man grinned and flexed his naked massive arms. "But you have not. It
is very hard. It is very lonely. We will find other things to trade."
"What?"
Korigh shrugged. The folds of fat on his belly quivered.
It was plain that he could not care less. There was more food than he could
eat. It was free for the taking. That was a bargain that was hard to beat.
"It
will destroy the Lupani," Alex said. "Once,
you were strong. Now you will be weak."
"We
still harpoon the karibu. We cannot eat them now.
Life has been hard for my people. Now it is easier. If you are my friend, you
will understand that."
"What
if the food stops coming?"
"Then
we will hunt the askaggen as before."
Heads we win, tails you lose.
Alex
was getting a headache again.
"Korigh, there are some things you do not understand."
"Do
you understand everything?"
Alex shook his head and regretted it. The
pain sharpened. He did not
understand everything. He
did not like what he had to do.
Still, there were some
things he understood very well.
And there were some things
he could do.
"I
will show you why the Lupani must hunt the askag-gen," he said. "I will show you because it
is right."
"My
eyes will be open," the old man assured him. He meant: It had better be good.
Alex Porvenir
put on his clothes and left.
Back in the shuttle, Alex explained his plan
to Tucker.
"You've got to be kidding." Tucker
Olton looked more harassed than Alex had ever seen him. "You don't think
it will work?"
"Oh,
it'll work as far as the Lupani are concerned. I can see the logic of it. But if you think I'm going back up to the ship
and set this one up you're crazy. You don't know what it's like up there.
Dryden and Carlos are both mad enough to chew nails."
"I
had the authority, as long as the ship was not in danger."
"I
know that. They know that. But be reasonable, Alex. This thing is big."
Alex
sighed. "Okay, Tuck. Take her up. I'll give them my instructions
personally."
Tucker
Olton moved to the controls. "This I have to see.
"You will," Alex Porvenir promised.
It took them two weeks to get things ready.
The
machine itself, which Alex insisted on calling the Converter, was not too
troublesome. It was even kind of fun for the shop crew—a dream assignment,
except for the pressure involved. After all, it did not have to do much of anything. It just had to look right and perform a few simple
functions.
The
scout ship that went after the porpoise-like karibu
had a tougher job. The sea was large and the karibu
were not easy to locate. They were not simple to catch either, particularly the
females who were close to bearing their young. Once caught, it was difficult to
keep them alive.
Still,
a Caravans ship was nothing if not adaptable. It had handled stickier problems
than this in its time.
Alex
Porvenir did not argue and he explained no more than
he had to. That could wait.
If he had self-doubts, he did not express
them.
He knew what he had to do.
He did it.
The Converter was ready.
It
was assembled not far from the alien warehouse. It stood there in the muck with
a solid go-to-hell assurance. It was basically square and it glittered
impressively in the pale white sunlight. It had lots of buzzers, dials, lights,
and bells. It had a contracting chute at the top. Near the bottom there was a
high-visibility slot. It too was square.
The
Lupani had gathered to watch—men, women, and
children. Old Korigh had been true to his word. The
old man stood in front of his people, strong arms folded across his massive
chest, his sharp eyes keen and alert.
"Are you
prepared?" Alex Porvenir asked.
"We are
prepared," Korigh replied.
"Watch, then. See the
source of your new food."
Alex waved his hand for a
signal.
Three traders went to work.
They had been carefully rehearsed, but it was still sloppy work. They heaved a
tranquilized karibu out of the portable tank. They
held it up high so the Lupani could see it.
The
Lupani reacted with murmurs and gestures. They knew a
karibu when they saw one.
The
three men hauled the gleaming sea-mammal up the ladder to the top of the
Converter. They held the karibu up high again, giving
the Lupani a good look.
They dropped the karibu down the chute.
The
Converter went into action. It chugged and whined and hissed. Steam shot out
through vents. Needles moved on dials. Buzzers sounded and bells rang. Colored
lights flashed.
After
ninety seconds of feverish mechanical activity, the Converter gave a conclusive
terminal cough. Glittering boxes about a foot square shot out through the
bottom slot. There were ten of the boxes, identical to the ones in the alien
warehouse. They lay there, in the slush, impassively.
Alex
picked one up and handed it to Korigh. The old man
peeled back the foil. He sniffed one of the greasy brown cubes. The aromatic
smell could not be mistaken.
Korigh stepped forward and selected one of the
boxes for himSelf. He repeated his investigation.
Alex waved his hand.
The
three men grabbed another karibu and dropped it down
the chute.
The Converter did its stuff
again.
Alex waved his hand for the
third time.
When
the Converter finished its dramatic chugging and buzzing, there was a goodly
stack of boxes of food concentrate confronting the Lupani.
"This
new food the strangers brought to you," Alex said loudly, "is not new
food at all. It is old food. It is made from the karibu,
as we have shown you. You have been eating the karibu
in the spring and summer. As your friends, we felt that you should know this
thing." There was a long, slow silence.
Then
the Lupani began to back away, expressions of horror
on their faces.
They
had eaten a lot
of that stuff. Karibu! They had violated the most ancient law of their
people.
Many
of the Lupani became violently ill. Old Korigh led the way into the warehouse. The people went to
work angrily. They hauled the gleaming boxes of food concentrate out of the
vault. They ran with them to the dark sea and heaved them into the water.
Alex gave the signal to
dismantle the Converter.
Tucker
Olton stared at the village and shook his head. "Proud of yourself?" he asked.
Alex
Porvenir managed a tight smile. "A little,"
he admitted. "On balance, just a little."
The Caravans lightship was flashing through
the gray wastes of not-space. Even in dimensional terms, it was already far
from the Sirius system.
Alex
Porvenir poured himself a glass of Scotch, tasted it,
and carefully added two cubes of ice. There were some things, he felt, that could not be improved upon. He stoked up his pipe
and lit it. The smoke was a shade on the bitter side. He had expected that.
Alex never had much luck with his pipes.
"Want to talk about
it?" asked Tucker Olton.
"You've read the
report."
"Yeah, but what do you
really think?"
"I told the
truth."
"Nobody
ever tells the full truth in an official report. You taught me that,
Alex."
"Maybe." Alex fiddled with his pipe and fired it up
again. It was not significantly improved. "Suppose we take the Lupani for openers."
"You put them in one
hell of a spot."
"No.
I didn't put them anywhere. In effect, I returned them to their traditional
way of life. I let them alone."
"Come on."
Alex
fixed himself another drink. It made the pipe taste better. "Look at it
this way. You know the cycle of the Lupani.
Basically, they stay put in their villages during the winter, harpooning the karibu. Then they break up into small groups and head for
the askaggen range for the summer hunting. Suppose
that we had broken that cycle by dumping in enough
food to hold them in their villages. We could have supplied askaggen
tusks, too, for that matter. Then what?"
"It
would have been a clear case of cultural manipulation. The U.N. ET Council
would have blown their collective stacks. The Caravans lawyers would have been
demolished; there would have been no case to defend. But that's not the point—"
"It
is the point. If we had done that, we would have
been in hot water legally. Beyond that, it would have been morally wrong—I'm an
old graybeard who still worries about morality, you know. Ultimately, it would
have destroyed the Lupani by destroying their
culture. This was not a change thatthey had made. They would just be pawns. When we tired of the game, the food
would stop. The Lupani have to work out their own future. It is their right."
"But—"
"Okay,
we didn't break the cycle. This time, we were
completely innocent. We found the
cycle broken. It was a bad business, from our viewpoint and from that of the Lupani. We restored the cycle. The Lupani
will hunt the askaggen again. They won't eat food
they believe to be karibu during the summer. They
have nothing else. They'll break up and go after the askaggen."
"And
we'll have our ivory carvings again. Caravans saves
another product."
"I
grant you it's not the central issue. But I did protect the interests of
Caravans. That's my job."
"What
difference does that make now? You of all people must realize what we ran into
down there. . . ."
"Yes."
Alex tried another pipe. It was a shade better. "Don't you see how
important this makes Caravans?"
"I'm
afraid I don't. It seems to me that it reduces our little trading game to utter
insignificance."
"Why? Because of the Others?"
"Of course. We're not alone in space any longer. We've contacted an alien
civilization that's trying to do something.
They have a plan,
whoever or whatever they
are. We can't just go on with business as usual."
"What plan do they
have?"
"I
don't know the details, of course. How could I? They are alien, for one thing. We can't read their minds. But some aspects of
what they're up to are clear enough."
"Such
as?"
"There's
just one sensible reason for supplying the Lupani
with enough food to carry them through the summer. That's to keep them from
moving and splitting up. If they stay put in those winter villages, it will
change their social structure. The most obvious consequence would be that the Lupani will develop a different pattern of leadership.
Instead of an informal headman like old Korigh, who
has no real authority, they will evolve a chief system or some mechanism that
can control a stable and sedentary unit. In short, the Others
would create a situation there where they could deal with responsible
leadership—leadership that could back up its commitments with force. It must be
part of a plan designated to produce a network of
controlled cultures in scattered star systems. I can't even begin to guess
what the ultimate purpose is. But I'm damned well sure they're not doing it for
our benefit. And I'm certain they're not
concerned about the basic rights of the people they are pushing around,
either—they're using them as pawns. In my book, that's ominous. And it's
dangerous."
"I'll
buy that. But you've got to push the wagon a little further down the
road."
"Meaning?"
Alex
poured himself a final drink. The strain of the decisions that he had made were
beginning to tell on him. He was tired and he was worried. He needed to justify
himself, if he could.
"The
Others have a plan of some sort," Alex said.
"We don't. But it's a very long-range
scheme, whatever it is. It would take decades to produce the kind of change
they want in the Lupani, and let's face it—the Lupani are a very small cog in a very large plan. I confess
that I don't understand why they picked the Lupani at
all; there are other peoples right there on Arctica
that would seem to be better suited to their purposes. But we don't have to understand the details of what they are doing. I suspect that it was
just a coincidence that we both had an interest in the Lupani.
Anyway, I think they'll leave the Lupani alone now.
The Lupani won't be easy for them to deal with after
this little misadventure, and there are so many other cultures on so many other
worlds. . . ."
"Okay, we may have saved the Lupani. So?"
"So
that's something—and it's also a key to the future. We have no master plan of
our own, and we're not likely to have one in our lifetimes. But we can try to undo what they do whenever and wherever we meet—as long as it is in our best
interests to do so, and as long as what they are doing is clearly counter to
the best interests of the peoples involved. And that's all we can do." "But surely—"
"Look,
friend. There ain't no convenient
Space Patrol—unless we're it. There is no magnificent space navy that is
going to take decisive and imaginative action. We come from a world that
didn't care enough about the universe it lived in to finance interstellar
exploration. We come from a planet of deadheads."
"That's putting it
pretty strongly, Alex."
"What
do you think will happen when our report reaches Earth—meaning the U.N. ET
Council? There will be all kinds of flapping and screaming and the tri-di pundits will editorialize for maybe two whole weeks
about What This Really Means. Then the local political priorities will assert
themselves. Sirius is a long way from Earth and there is no dramatic threat—it isn't as though an alien space
fleet were about to vaporize the planet. The end result will be a decision that
we can't afford to spend vast sums of money needed at home to encounter a
hypothetical something
out there in space. Our
friends at home will saddle us with fifty-five new regulations and that will be
it. Earth will do nothing. We're all there is—Caravans and the other trading
companies."
"We
can't take that kind of responsibility. What if we made mistakes? Our goofs
could affect the whole future of mankind—"
"We
have to do what we can. We can probably make on-the-spot decisions that will be
better than those produced by a pack of politicians who have never even seen another planet. We can't do much. We can't come up with big-deal Final
Solutions. We can't be sure we're right—but who is? I am sure of one thing."
"Hit me with it quick.
My head is spinning."
"Just this. It is imperative that we keep Caravans in operation. Without the
trading companies, we have no eyes in space. And we need some eyes now. We need
some vision."
"It isn't much,
Alex."
"I
know that. Sometimes you just have to do the best you can with what you've got.
This peculiar human animal has muddled through before that way. Maybe he can again."
"I'm scared,
Alex."
"So
am I. But right now I'm more sleepy than frightened. This peculiar human
animal is going to sack out."
The Caravans lightship thrust on through the
gray-ness of not-space.
It
carried a fragile cargo of men and women and tools and trinkets and strange art
objects and stranger dreams.
The
symbol of the laden camel seemed curiously mundane and inadequate. An anachronism, perhaps.
The
universe was vast, an endless sea in which floated so many flaming suns, so
many waiting worlds. . . .
But the camel was a patient
animal.
It would make it to the
next port of call, and the next.
It might get the job done.
Thomas
N. Scortia
THE ARMAGEDDON TAPES — TAPE III
AFTER
the fusion of the insect-like Angae and the growing
masses that followed the outcast Messiah Martin, the fate of the Holy State was
inevitable. The State had been the ultimate statement of arrogant humanism and
sought in its own way to bring about the unique racial fusion that Martin had
found naturally in his period of being a part of the Angae
family. It seems incredible that such a primitive society should have resisted
so long the singleness of purpose that Martin displayed. His motivation, of course,
was his knowledge that the Angae had been fleeing the
Theos, the force that had already extinguished the
life in one galaxy. It was only a matter of time before it entered this galaxy
and there seemed only one way that such a force could be defeated. If his
methods appear cruel, consider the alternate approaches that the Holy State
had. . . .
Die Anelan de Galactea—Vol. II, ca. 3400
I am the Inquisitor Jarvis on the service of
His Most Exalted Plurality, the Premier Anointed of this, our Holy State of
Earth. It may seem that in preparing this tape, I take an undue burden of pride
upon myself in speaking knowledgeably of this, our Time of Troubles, but my
insight into the events leading to this great chaos that is upon us is both
intimate and complete. Since I have served as Inquisitor throughout the advent
of the thing called Martin, I have collected a number of interrogation and
subsidiary tapes and will, as my purpose seems suited, interject these into
this recorded document.
There
is no God but the State and the Earth is its abiding Mother!
When
did I first hear that? It seems centuries ago rather than a mere three decades.
It was a part of the teachings of the creche to
reinforce the subtle conditioning of the Mettler
serum. The general DNA conditioning was implicit in the molecule of the serum,
but the specific semantic content had to be inculcated in us. The finely
structured logic of the State would have been apparent to any observer, but it
was necessary that each learn a particular esthetic in viewing the grandeur of
this final creation that had preserved the human race against its own savagery.
It
is this Thing called Martin and the creatures he called down from the stars
that have returned us to the brutalized existence of the days before the State.
(Hard to imagine but there were days before the State realized its ideal.)
Granted, we, and I in particular, limited the infection when we killed the
other children in the first prelude to Armageddon in the Great Smokies. Still, Martin remains and is alive and the very
embodiment of the Chaos Principle against which all the vassals and the
anointed ministers of the State have preached. He is, believe me, the ultimate
evil, the Anti-State.
For
this reason I pursued him long after that terrible day in the Great Smokies when the alien ship came down from the skies to
avenge the loss of the lesser ship, the one upon which Martin and his
companions were prisoners. Well, not prisoners really, since they were captured
in a remote part of Canada where their parents had taken them and were
incorporated into the strange insect life of the ship. Imagine aliens whose
knowledge of biochemistry was so superb, whose understanding of the
manipulation of the most subtle forces of the universe was so complete that
they could change human beings into something that could merge with their
society. Martin described himself and his fellow children as "cows."
It seems from all that I have learned that the insect-like aliens (I still do
not know what they call themselves) changed the human biochemistry so that the
children became "kreels," leading an
aphid-like existence to provide sustenance for the aliens. They became a part
of that ship's group mind, drawing from it the aliens' most prized talents and
secrets. This was the chief mistake of the aliens for they did not realize that
Martin and his fellows were different from the normal strain of humans, that
this was indeed the reason that their parents had fled our Holy State and taken
refuge in the most inhospitable part of the north country.
So
Martin and his fellows took charge of the ship, a part of the great fleet that
was about to depart from our solar system forever, fleeing some indefinable
menace that had destroyed their world. They took the ship and threw the
creatures into a sleep, crashing the ship near Cherokee in the Great Smokies. When we attacked the ship finally, we destroyed it
and the aliens. How were we to know that this was the first strike in what has
become Armageddon for our race? Martin said the aliens were peaceful, that They meant us no harm. Only why have They
returned to soar over our cities, meet our air fleets in battle, and devastate
our lands? I know now that it stems from a great fear, an overriding fear that
transcends their fear of that distant thing that destroyed their world.
It is the fear of Martin.
Martin,
who was a departure from humanity, who was changed by them to something
inhuman, who returned to his people and found for a moment a friendship he had never had with John Talltrees
in the hills beyond Cherokee. Martin, who has since gone on,
growing in the human image, expanding in nonhuman ways, carrying a corrupting
messianic mission to the shattered peoples of my world. Martin, who
threatens the final dissolution of our Holy State, the greatest monolithic
spiritual and political structure humans have ever built. The
structure that was to usher in a thousand years of peace to our troubled
species.
I
am resolved, implacable. I will seek him, and kill him. Somehow I will kill him
for this is necessary to our survival. Perhaps then the aliens will leave us
alone.
After
the savage attack against our forces at Cherokee and the destruction of my
interrogation van beyond the town (They must somehow have detected that
residual personality of Martin lodged in John Talltrees,
whom I was interrogating), I managed to summon help and. was returned to
Washington where my wounds were tended. Even with the vast resources of St.
Bethesda, it was weeks before I could again walk freely and without pain. In
the meantime Martin had disappeared, after his fellows had been destroyed in
Cherokee.
*(Face it, admit it. It was I who had them killed. Why not? They were a
terrible menace and we had Martin. Besides, they were younger and underdeveloped.
I doubt if we could have killed him.)
How
find an illusion; how trap a wraith? This was the problem I faced. Yet it had
to be done. The first of the alien raids have been carried out against Rome and
Chicago, tentatively as though They were testing our
strength. They did not use their large ships, as though They
feared their power. They were probing and even then our defenses, so long
fallow, were almost equal to Them. The rocket pursuits
(there were five in Chicago) drove the ship away, but not before it had left
the Loop a smoldering ruin. The solution was obvious. Driven by the immediate
threat of Martin as They were, I knew that They would
sense his death and go away. I had to find him and destroy him. I requested the
assignment from my consecrated director, and he, in his wisdom, gave me the
blessings of the Holy State.
My
taped journal of the period after my hospitalization extracts as:
. . . the land down to Lake Michigan like one
slick of rippled glass with no sign of the grand avenues, the delicate soaring
buildings that were our pride... nothing
but the mottled glassy greens and browns of fused earth where the beams reached
from the sky and made the very ground flow like molasses.
But
why Chicago"?
And
why Rome?
The very antipodes of our culture. Yet of all the cities of the earth, they
chose to fall on these two great cities and reduce parts of each to mere spatterings of melted glass and metal. The destroyed area
in Rome touched the Augustan Forum but saved most of the rest of the city. We ourselves had long ago reduced the
Anti-State symbol of the Vatican, but we had preserved some of the stately
buildings. Much of the art we had dismantled and stored in deep parts of the
catacombs, recognizing that, while these were dangerous reminders of an earlier
chaotic period, no State can truly exist in the minds of men without some
evidence of historical continuity. The rationale of this eludes me since these
are the relics of the foremost religious state against which we warred a particularly long and vicious battle, but the
theosophists and theoreticians of the Holy State had decided that this was
necessary. But why Rome?
Then it came to me. Believing as I now do in
racial inspiration I can see the source. Then it was baffling but I knew that
it was because he was there. Martin, the Anti-State. Yet how could he be in two
places at once? I knew enough of Martin by then not to be dismayed by this
question. Martin could. I began to. . . .
I was young then. The voice on the tape is
crisp and vigorous with no vacillation. It holds a fervor that has only
recently left my tired spirit. If only the Beast could be met and destroyed,
these things from another galaxy would simply depart. They would recognize that
we no longer posed a threat to Them and They would continue
Their flight from the unknown menace that had destroyed Their planet.
That
wasn't my motive, of course. My motive was one of sheer impersonal hate. I
could not hate as an individual, not then. My service and devotion to our Holy
State was too complete, so rigid that I would never allow myself the luxury of
hate. I was the implacable force of this great creation of man, determined to
destroy the final blasphemy . . . the Anti-State . . . the Anti-Man.
I
read the newscripts that were issued during my months
of recuperation and slowly, though the day-to-day news was carefully edited to
avoid needless spiritual troubling of the citizens, I saw the pattern emerge.
At first there were signs of selective affluence in several of the lower
economic areas where rationing was particularly rigid. UObservatore, the east City tape news, mentioned that the
San Togliatti area had met its final tax bill completely and had followed this
by three days of unseemly feasting and rejoicing. The tape wondered at the
masses of food and drink when there had been no discernible drain on the
strained peripheral transportation system. (In those days, in spite of the
Great Confrontation, Rome had rebuilt to the limits of its valley and had burst
forth to sprawl all along the southern coastline to the very edge of the deadly
areas. The problem of maintaining food supplies to the interior of the city
was astronomical. The State Chambers of the Blessed Fields were even turning
aside applicants, who perforce went to their homes and lay quietly expiring
from lack of food.
Yet
here was a celebration—no, a bacchanal in the very center of the city, with
food and drink abounding in such disgusting plenty that the very inner spirit
of a man rose in disgust at such gluttony. The people of the district must have
consumed millions of kilos of food and drink in one night and yet there was no
sign of unusual drains upon the transportation facilities. Indeed, the tape
remarked, enough food had been diverted from the district because of this to
supplement the rations of two badly deprived but politically and spiritually
less desirable districts.
I considered a similar event in Chicago, but
this district had been wiped out in the alien raid while the San Togliatti
district was on the edge of the attack, as though the aliens had somehow failed
to pinpoint Their target properly. Of course, the
Mediterranean forces of Anointed Plurality were based near at hand along the
edges of the Belgradian Lake (which peculiar natives
still insist was once a thriving capital), and they responded within minutes
of the appearance of the ship. They managed to drive it off, seriously damaged,
and the San Togliatti district survived.
The
decision was, of course, obvious. I prayed for the blessings of food and
comfort from my superiors and set out for Rome. Had I been allowed military
transport, I would have been there in three hours but the trip required an
unhappy four days and when I arrived there was little evidence left of the
visitation. Only the scattered baffled words of the people of the district
until. . . .
It is true, Senor. I saw him. The others saw
him but they will not tell.
Don't be a fool, Casaletto.
They are part of the Holy State. They must tell. They cannot help but tell.
As He said, if all is
obedience and all must tell, then why the existence of the Inquisitors?
He? Who is this man you call He?
He was the one who spoke of the great destiny
of our human race and the thing it was to become. He spoke of power, power that
was to be apart of all of us and was to be our
ultimate proud stance among the stars. He spoke of our greatness to wage war
against the ultimate evil.
An
unconditioned one, an Anti-State?
No, a man of goodness and
strength and terrible vengeance against those that would destroy him.
Let me tell you, Casaletto,
what he looked like. He was tall and lean, scarcely more than eighteen with
deep burning eyes with odd pupils that looked into your very inner mind. . . .
No,
he was not that way at all. He was well above the middle years with fierce
yellow-white hair and a look that seemed to hold you close to him and dare you
to breathe in his presence. We feared
him and thought he was mad.
No,
that's not possible. The creature I want is still only a boy in appearance.
I
know nothing of this. He had the appearance of our ancient Moses even to the
horn upon his head. As to his features, they seemed to change from day to day
as he assimilated followers.
Assimilated?
They
became a part of his substance though they still lived. It was his way, but,
even though they did not die, their children and their parents spoke to them
through him, testing him, and he did not fail a single test.
He
taught you to disobey the State, to deny us our terrible need for children?
No,
he taught us to be fecund for there are personalities beyond life, crying to
be born, and no man is ever lost. He proved that.
He spoke of the Holy
State's failure to feed you?
He
spoke of the Holy State as a desperate need of the human race and not lightly
to be discarded.
Liar! He is the Anti-State.
No,
he is the ultimate consummation of the Holy State.
He is our enemy.
He
is our friend and our ally against the ultimate evil that will in too short a
time come from the heavens to destroy us and all the spirits that might
otherwise be forever immortal.
The aliens'? They are strong but we can defeat Them.
No,
not Them. Something vastly greater, vastly more
deadly, something that is anti-life.
Disgusting. This is an intolerable mons.
. . .
There is more to the tape, of course, but
only the ravings of a madman. I sent him to the Fields. In those days I could
make quick and effective decisions. I don't know why it is so hard for me to do
this now. Has his influence infiltrated my brain in this latter year of my
life? No matter. I sent him to the Fields, and after
him almost a thousand others who raved in a similar manner. The details were
all different. All saw him in some dissimilar manner, although no one ever saw
him as an eighteen-year-old boy. They spoke of his powers of persuasion, of the
same message of unspeakable menace coming to the human race. They spoke of his
powers to create light above them in the darkness, his ability to summon food
and drink from nowhere, his ability to strike a peace deacon in his tracks with
a gesture, his ability to move great masses by the merest flicker of an
eyebrow, of the energies of hell itself that seemed to crawl around his person
as he spoke. It was like rabid hysterical mouthings
out of some medieval witchcraft trials. In their contact with this creature,
they had all become insane and it became necessary that they leave this society
of sane men. I had no qualms about it. After all, was this not the total of my
conditioning from childhood and that of my father before me?
I
left that blighted city and returned painfully to the Americas, crossing the
inland ocean and arriving finally in Chicago where the other attack had
followed rumors of a similar appearance. Although the descriptions in Rome and
in Chicago were different, there was no doubt that it was the same creature.
And that it was the creature named Martin who had escaped me in the Carolina mountains after I had brought the State's Peace to the other
children of his group.
I
was troubled by what I had read in the distorted ramblings of the lambs of the
State in the San Togliatti district. Was his constantly changing appearance
mere hysteria or perhaps some kind of mind control that he exerted on the
people? Or was it more? The thought that he could indeed incorporate other
personalities into him nagged me and I wondered if this was the source of this
phenomenon. The method whereby the aliens did this . . . the method he must
have learned from their minds disgusted me . . . but I would not discount it.
After all, insects eat their dead. . . .
But humans?
But Martin is not human.
(And the thought persisted that this had not
happened to John Talltrees but he still harbored a
residual personality that seemed to be Martin's. I dismissed this finally as a
particularly subtle form of hypnosis. Like the summoning of
the two personalities in the brain of the first Interrogator who met him.
Induced schizophrenia, nothing more. Whether or not
the personality of his victims persisted, I knew what he and the children I had
killed did in the village of Cherokee and the thought brought my dinner boiling
up in my mouth.)
The
Loop showed the same signs of attack as had the melted area south of the San
Togliatti district. (I wonder at the old names. There is nothing in the
geography of the area that resembles a "loop," yet the name for this
district persists.) The new buildings in which the State had so gloried were
gone, mere dimples of slag against the broader melted swath that the aliens'
beams had cut through the city. Here, the defense had not been so quick and the
ship had found a full ten minutes to do its damage. Surprisingly, it had not
attacked any other part of the city. Only this section was damaged, and
witnesses told me that the great sphere of the ship had hovered above this
area, raking it with high-energy beams again and again until the ground boiled
and for days thereafter the air was foul with the vapors from the area.
They
know. Somehow They know. They can detect him and They are determined to destroy him. I have tried to convey
this to my anointed superiors, but they are convinced that the aliens mean the
complete destruction of our cities. It is obvious to me that THEY DO NOT. They
want to destroy only one thing, the thing that I want most to destroy. .. this demon in human flesh that I have called
Martin.
There
were only a few witnesses to interrogate. Most of the people had been trapped
in the area and their ashes were mingled with the melted rock and the brackish
seawater that had poured in from the lake afterwards. These few I gathered
together. Amazingly, they were terrified, but they were more terrified of him
than they were of me. I set about to change that.
Citizen, doctrine teaches us that the most
exquisite agonies are to be endured for the Holy State, not just endured but
gloried in.
Please, Inquisitor, don't
hurt me.
What is pain, dear woman? A
transitory thing that exalts the spirit when it serves the greater goals.
It is nothing that I joy in giving but I joy in your ability to give this to
the Holy State even as much as I joy in your pleasure in giving her something
more valuable, the information I need.
About him? I
don't know anything about him. Perhaps if you commune with
your inner senses. Oh, God, God.
There
is no God. Only the ideal State that is the expression of
centuries of human God-making.
Please,
no more, no more.
You
are exalted. I can see it in your expression. Extend your spirit and embrace
the State's anointed servants. Tell us about him.
I
will tell you. I'll tell you. Only . . .
Is
he truly dead?
Him? Dead? Of course not. He cannot die
any more than I can die.
Your
spirit lives in the State but you can die. I assure you, I can demonstrate to
you that you can die.
This
part of me but I cannot die. I have shared blood with him.
And
flesh? Oh, I have known about that filthy doctrine, that illusion he preaches.
No, blood. He
learned that somewhere in the mountains, he said. It is the blood only that is
needed. Now, we are one. I am he and he is I.
So
that he is in this room, I suppose. He is watching and savoring your pain?
Silently.
Yes. He is here. Oh-h-h-h.
This
is a small part of the loving care I have reserved for him. There will be a
day. I will find him and, free of all his tricks, I will talk with him as you
and I talk now. I promise you.
Is
there that much hate in you?
I
serve the Holy State. There is no room for hate, only devotion to this highest
of ideals. Tell me about him. Did he take you as a lover?
Me?
I would have been honored. No, there was another. He is after all still a young
man, scarcely eighteen or nineteen, I would say, but tall and lean with a
mature man's figure and a face with eyes that look into you and beyond and seem
to be filled with a million souls looking out of a single window.
Tell
me about this other, the whore of the Anti-State.
You call her that?
Isn't that what she was?
No,
she was one of the group who first came down to the
lake to listen to him. Only it wasn't a matter of listening, but rather of
experiencing, of seeing in a new way by new colors, of feeling with new nerves,
of tasting tastes that had never crossed a human palate before. He was that
way. He could expand your consciousness until it encompassed the world in dimensions
that had been alien to you.
Drugs,
surely drugs.
No,
this was something completely different. He was trying to make us see, to bring
us into greater unity against the day of Armageddon.
Armageddon? Did he use that term? Did he dare call upon that sacred term?
These
are my words. I suppose we each used our own terms, found ways to vocalize what
was after all a feeling and a sensing more than a message. It was not that he
said anything but rather that we walked with him and experienced what he
experienced. The small seconds we were with him seemed like an eternity and
his taste-smell-sense-sight-thought became our taste-smell-sense-sight-thought.
It was like being in a multiple of worlds, like entering into the real
three-dimensional world after having been condemned to live a life confined to
the life of a single line.
That's very poetic. You are obviously an
educated woman. Has your education been so sadly neglected that you would
abandon the sure teachings of the Holy State for this charlatan?
There is no difference, he told us. He is the
extension of the principle of the State, the ideal of unity made flesh. He is
not your enemy but your successor.
Enough, enough, I cannot tolerate . . .
I was stupid, of course. To let my emotions,
no matter what my devotion to the State, override my control and my primary
mission. Still, I have been absolved by my anointed superiors who themselves
were horrified at the tape. They understood even though they disapproved. I
wept as I had her body removed but I was more determined. I would hunt the Beast down and in the end he would go with my hand
to the Fields.
There
were others, of course. She was not the only one who had vital information and
her loss was not a particularly great one. Had it been, I'm sure that my
anointed superiors would have been less tolerant of my weakness. As it was,
their reaction held a sort of grudging approbation and one of the Sacred
College of the Diet even privately praised my devotion to our ideals. It was
enough to fill my spirits, but I promised myself that I would not make such a
mistake again.
There
were others, as I said. Only a few but enough. . . .
He walked among us and he was good. He was
the full realization of humanity. You saw him?
I touched him. I shared blood with him. Where
did he go?
Away. He
went away and took many of us with him. He took me with him.
You
went with him ? What luck! Where did he go ? I don't know.
Another:
Yes, I remember her. She had lived in a small
lean-to on the edge of the Loop since her mother died, a rickety lean-to of
iron and discarded wood against the back wall of one of the great sacred
buildings. She had little to eat, of course. No more than any of us who have
not yet conceived or who are past the age of childbearing. She was very
dark-haired with deep brown-black eyes, very large so that they seemed to fill
a good part of her face. Her skin was pale and perfect except for one small
black mole set high on her left cheek. I think it was the cheekbones, thin and
marvel-ously molded with smooth hollows underneath
that gave her that delicate fine look with its underlying strength.
Very pretty. You speak like a man rather than a citizen.
She was that way. She could make you feel
very much a man. Not that she was conscious of it. It was simply that she
responded to you and you to her and there was something like an undercurrent of
empathy, of liking . . . no, loving . . . that flowed from her. I can
understand why in his youth he would find her so desirable. I envy him.
Envy the Anti-State? Never mind. Where did
they go?
South, I have heard.
Don't
you know? You said you went with them, just as a dozen before you have said the
same thing.
A part of me will always be with him, will
always live.
The Holy State has forbidden mysticism. I am
a product of the State and its serum. I could not be a mystic if I wished, but
this is not mysticism...
And another:
South, that's all I know. He said it was
imperative that he go south.
And another:
He could see a distance into the future, I
know. Not as much as he would like but enough. I heard him tell her that he had
to go south and that she would come with him. Something about
a ship.
And still another:
Yes, he said that there would be a ship. On
that last night as they lay together and made love.
You heard this? He allowed
you to hear this.
I
shared blood with him. He could not have changed it even had he wished. When he
made love with her, we all made love with her . . . and with him. . . .
What about the ship?
One of the alien ships. He knew it would crash or be forced down. I
don't know which, but he had to be there.
He hated Them.
He plans to destroy Them?
There was a hate, of course, but there was a
love too, strange warring emotions. No, he will not kill any of Them. He will become a part of Them
and They of him, for that is his ultimate plan.
Part of those . . . things? Those insects that breed humans for food? They
keep men like cows to be milked of their sustenance?
I cannot find this as disgusting as you,
Inquisitor. It is all a part of an order that invests life. Even you, for all
of your lack of humanity, are a part ofit...
That is enough. That is enough. ENOUGH!
South. South. South. That was all I heard. I had to know where south, but
I could find nothing more than this vague direction. There were nearly thirty
that I questioned, using all of the subtleties of the art I had learned as an
apprentice but the artifices of the Inquisitor were not enough. One cannot
elicit information where there is no information to be had. I sent them to the
Fields, each and every one of them, save a single girl that I kept for my own
devices for several days but eventually she too went the way of the others. I
might have kept her, but she insisted on sharing blood, that disgusting ritual
these beings have developed . . . and I led her personally into her blessedness
... or cursedness. After that I spent
over an hour in the bath, ridding myself of her smell and the memory of her
touch on my body.
I
waited for a week, hoping to find another who could tell me but to no avail. In
the latter part of the last week the news came to me. There had been another
incursion of the aliens. A ship had come in rapidly (our radar net was now
complete and the pursuits were increasingly effective so that the aliens were
finding Their match in us, at least in a planetary
atmosphere). It attacked a small village in the island between the Mississippi
and the Missouri rivers and the pursuits were upon it. It had little chance to
escape. They shot it down and it crashed in the overgrowth along the
Mississippi, spilling its fragments out over a limestone bluff. There was
little doubt in the observer's mind that all were lost. I knew better.
You
can't imagine the excitement I felt. They would not have attacked in this way
if he were not there. That was obvious, and more obvious, from my interrogations, he expected one or more of Them to survive.
That was why he was there. The Thing I called Martin was reestablishing his
contact with these creatures, perhaps forming an alliance with Them. Between his powers and Theirs,
they would grind humanity and the State into the most abject slavery.
But
I knew, I knew,
and I moved with as much
speed as I could command. I claimed priorities that not even my anointed
superiors had thought to give me and I commandeered one of the five rocket
pursuits vital to the Chicago area. I knew that I would not be dangerously
weakening the city because he was south and They would
not attack here while he was there.
The
flight took minutes and we landed near an old hamlet called Collinsville that
had somehow survived the great disasters and was still much as it had been in
the eighties. The pursuit hovered over the field, landed roughly, and before I
climbed from the copilot compartment, a lorry was racing across the field to
meet me. They had complete instructions and they had brought an interrogation
van north from New Cairo literally minutes before I arrived.
Within
the hour they brought me reports on the alien ship. The flamedozers
cut through the rank vegetation to the south, the vegetation that had sprung up
after the St. Louis miss and still carried a dangerous activity. It must have
been a hellish mission and several of the men had to be hospitalized but they
cut through in an hour and found the ship. It was completely destroyed, its
crew dead, Their bodies badly charred. One of the
dozer crews spotted the tracks on the sand before the bluff. Somehow one of Them had escaped or been thrown free and the three-clawed
tracks led off into the underbrush and disappeared. Another member of the same
crew found the human footsteps nearby. These were fresher steps with the
moisture not yet evaporated from them and I knew.
He
was there. He had come and he was tracking the thing, seeking to contact it.
Somewhere out in that jungle growth he stalked the insect creature from the
ship, not to kill it but to enlist its aid in the final destruction of
humanity and the Holy State.
But
I knew that she had come with him, that she must still be with him. She could
not be on this stalk but she must be close at hand. I became fairly rabid at the
thought, the chance to capture her and through her finally to confront him
again, but to confront him this time with the power and the might of the Holy
State arrayed against him. To bring him to his knees and watch him wither before my eyes. To kill him and dissolve his
body and consign his liquids to the Fields.
I
sent out interrogation teams. The reports came back. Yes, they had been in the
area for nearly a week. They had walked through the villages and they had done
as they did in the larger cities, spread corruption among the citizens. They
had talked of a universal melding of all mankind, of the implacable menace that
human and alien life of the galaxy must meet. They had done this sickening
thing they called sharing blood.
She
was always with him, silent and waiting. They knew of her, knew her role as his
whore, watched them make love at night (or at least experienced it) and they
were neither ashamed nor even silent in the memory. God, how
they loved to talk about it. I reviewed tape after tape, feeling the
disgust rise in me. Only the sure knowledge that the voices no longer existed,
that their authors had joined so many others in the Fields comforted me.
Still,
I had to have her and now I knew that there was a strong possibility that I
might, since his physical protection was for the moment withdrawn. It was only
a matter of finding her in what after all was a fairly small geographical area.
I ordered spycells to be set out in all the villages,
since we could not depend on the citizens to report her presence. We literally
carpeted the river valley in sensors, over four thousand from the invoices. We
flew them in from Chicago and New Cairo and the delta area, and in twenty-four
hours a mayfly could not spread its wings in any village along the river
without my ears hearing the rustle of its transparent wings.
Within
twelve hours we had located her. They spoke knowingly of her in the homes of
this small town called Grafton. That was the first time I knew her name to be
Vera. She was there, of that I was sure. I sent two companions to Deacons of
the Faithful West and they surrounded the town, entered it and went from house
to house. By midafternoon I had the news. They had
her. There was no doubt that it was she. She freely confessed it, showing no
shame or fear. By nightfall they had brought her to the edge of Collinsville to
my van where I waited.
I
was surprised when they brought her in and bound her to the interrogation
table. I had not expected her to be a Black. They spoke of her high cheekbones,
which was true, and the delicacy of her beauty, which
was true, and they had spoken of her pale skin. I had assumed they meant that
pale waxy kind of complexion that many women develop from undernutrition
or long absence from the sun. She was pale for a Black but it was a paleness
that was still like burnt ginger with a fine textured skin that showed
the" flush of blood underneath. She was for all of her youth remarkably
beautiful.
I am told that you are Vera who is with the
creature called Martin. Yes, I am.
The
whore of the Anti-State.
If
you wish.
Words have little meaning.
It's not you I want. I promise you a quick
peace if you will tell me where he is.
I don't know. It doesn't matter, however. He
will come to you before too long. He told me of this.
Just, I'm sure, as he told you of your
capture and what we would say and do here.
Yes, that too.
If that were so, you would
have fled. You would have done anything to avoid confronting me. No, not if
that is what he wanted.
And
it went this way for several hours. It was not that she withheld information. I
applied all of my techniques and I was sure that she withheld nothing. It was
just that she had nothing to offer. He had freely abandoned her to pursue the
thing from the ship, knowing that I would take her, knowing what I would do to
her. She was carrying his child, I found, but this seemed not at all to matter.
She
parroted all of the nonsense that I had heard from those in Rome and Chicago.
She spoke frighten-ingly of some menace descending
upon us and his intention of forging humanity and the insect race and others .
. . for the first time I heard of others . . . into a galaxy-spanning organism
that would meet this menace. She spoke of sharing blood but did not seem to
understand its full import. She built a fantasy structure for me that rivaled
the elaborate hells of the hopelessly insane. In the end she collapsed,
exhausted, and I waited for her revival.
I
must have dozed myself. When I awoke he was in the room. Suddenly and as simply as that, with no warning from the pickets, he was in
the room. The tape was still running and. . . .
Wake up, Jarvis.
ƒ...ƒ... What are you doing here?
I came as you expected me
to.
I did not expect you to. .
. .
But
you did. Although you will not admit it, you know me too well by now. We have met and a part of you has analyzed
me completely to the point that you can almost predict my actions. You don't
dare admit this consciously, for to do so would be to admit the validity of my
motives, but you do.
Another example of your infectious madness. Will you now fragment my personality as you
did to the poor interrogator when we first met?
No,
you have a much fuller destiny. Even I can't change that. We are bound together by bonds of time that
I cannot dissolve.
You seem to have remarkable powers. Yet you
can't handle a thing as simple as this?
Yes, yes, I suppose I could, but at what
cost? Remember my conversation long ago with John Talltrees,
the time when we went badger hunting in the mountains and found the willow trap
with the ragged leg of the poor beast? He had gnawed his leg free of the trap
and crawled into the underbrush to die.
ƒ remember that. Disgusting.
You and I are like that. We are bound together and we may free
ourselves from each other only at peril to our own lives and our own race. If
it weren't for that, I would never spare an animal like you after what you've
done tonight.
I needed the information.
She gave you everything she knew. I made sure
of that.
How could I be sure?
No matter, she will heal and we have a great
deal to do with each other yet. Only I am as human as you and I cannot let you
go free after this, not without some satisfaction that you will suffer as she
did.
Revenge? The self-styled savior of the^ race stoops
to revenge?
We will leave you now but before we go . . .
We?
Here, my companion. Don't ask for his name
for it's quite unpronounceable, fust
call him... I'm sure you'll
appreciate my jest eventually . . .just call him
Peter.
The
thing came out of the shadows in the rear of the van and I realized that I had been smelling its rank smell for minutes. It was tall and
lean and gleamed like burnished gold in the lights above the couch. I had seen
pictures of their corpses but to see one alive.... It made my stomach churn.
The
thing came forward and passed Martin to the couch where it freed the girl,
gathered her up in chitin-ous arms that were
remarkably gentle.
"We'll
go now," Martin said, "but there is one thing left. I will not share
with you but I will take from you."
With that he leaned forward
and I saw the gleam of the knife in his hand. I realized that it had been all
talk. He would kill me now and I would die in the service of the State, which
was as it should be. I tried to move but I could not. My muscles would not
respond. I waited for the end.
Instead,
he took my right hand and the knife made a sudden motion, opening the flesh on
the wrist. Bright blood spurted forward and I knew that he would watch me bleed
out my life. Instead he raised my wrist and I watched with sick disgust as he
drank my blood. My stomach heaved at the sight but he continued for moments.
Then
he lowered my arm to my side and stared at it for moments. I watched as the
blood slackened, stopped, and the raw wound closed and in a second healed.
"It
is not the end, you see," he said tiredly. "There will be other times
and eventually you will understand our special trap. You and
me, two savage badgers in a single trap."
And
they left while I lay, waiting for the paralysis to leave. That was a year ago
and! find that I weary easily as I write this. It's
the kind of fatigue you would not expect a man of thirty-three to have, but it
is common to me these days.
To
have his throat in my hands, to squeeze the life from him for what he has done!
I
can remember the horror, the agony as I rose from the couch, feeling the first
stirrings of what was happening to me. Was it a venom
from this creature that used to be human or something more sublte?
I
stood before the mirror and watched my body sag, watched the skin coarsen and
flow about my face, felt the heavy weight of softening muscles upon my bones. I
looked in the mirror and saw in minutes my face take on the cast of a man of
seventy, the very face I wear now. I stood and felt my youth dissolve about me
and vanish.
But
I am not too old to run him down, to have my final revenge. I will find him and
kill him, slowly and painfully.
The monster. The State preaches there are no such things but I know.
The monster has stolen my
soul.
Anne
McCaffrey
MILEKEY
MOUNTAIN
AS
A planet, thought Killashandra, Ballybran
rated the parenthesized question mark in the Galactic Guidebook. It made even
fusty Fuerte, her birthworld
and one she'd previously maligned, seem a pleasure planet in comparison. Fuerte at least looked interesting from space, which Ballybran with its lowish rounded
hills and monotonous plains didn't.
"There's
not much on Ballybran," she'd been told
repeatedly as she shepherded the mindless Carrik back
to the tender loving care of the Heptite Guild after
his brain-blowing supersonic overload.
She'd
been tremendously impressed by the Guild's omnipotence: high-rank medicorps men had awaited her inert charge at every
intermediary port and she herself had been accorded the most deferential treatment.
She'd been required to do very little more than check the life support cradle
which carried Carrik; i.v.
feeding, therapy, bathing, etc., had all been expertly managed by appropriately
trained personnel. Nothing, apparently, was too good for a Heptite
Guild member. Or his escort. She had open credit in
the ships' stores and preferential treatment when they transferred ships. She
was at every captain's table. Except for the
fact
that she was left strictly alone she thoroughly enjoyed her position.
She
did learn a good deal about crystal singing and Ballybran:
not all of it encouraging but certainly nothing that Carrik
hadn't warned her about previously. Crystal singers did, indeed, have
tremendous credit when they went off-world. They whooped it up, big spenders,
fun people. Until the shakes started.
"I
hear tell," one transport captain told her while deep in his puce-colored
wine, "that crystal gets into your blood. Keeps you young, but you gotta sing it again. You sure you want that? There're lots
of other professions that don't have inherent addiction."
Killashandra had smiled and led him to expand. He was
young and virile and he'd've been willing if Carrik hadn't been witless down the corridor. There were
disadvantages to her present occupation.
"I've
done this journey-leg nineteen times now," the captain went on after a
gulp of wine, "and I've had quite a few crystal singers on board, both in
and out. Out they can't wait to get to civilization." He snorted. "Can't blame 'em. There's
nothing but ploddy dull-witted clods on Ballybran. Their conversation is limited to the size of
their crop and who could grow the largest what-ever-you-call the long green
thin things they pickle in vats down there. The only item they can export is
crystals. And singers."
"D'you
see many coming back like Carrik?"
she asked.
He
shook his head, uncomfortably glancing down the corridor that led to the master
cabin assigned to Killashandra and Carrik.
"He's
the first like that. They're usually awfully shaky, though. What happened to
him? He wait too long?"
"No, but when we were about to ship out,
a shuttle came in with sour crystals ready to explode. He got caught in the
sensory overload."
"Good of you to come
back with him."
"I
owed him that." Killashandra meant it. She was
in Carrik's debt for introducing her to the notion of
being a crystal singer. She might have a flawed voice, too grating for the
career of a solo singer, but she had perfect pitch, which was the first requirement
for singing crystal. Taking any risk involved in this profession was more
preferable to Killashandra than being a second-rate
chanter with neither prestige nor the chance to make Stellar
rating.
"Are
you certain"—and the captain was dubious and uneasy—"you want to be a
crystal singer, too? I mean, I've seen enough of 'em
to know the crazy rumors are space-drek, but. . . ," and he shook his head.
She shrugged. "We'll see. I'll analyze
the situation when I reach Ballybran."
He
turned the conversation to other matters then, such as what would Killashandra do after she'd safely delivered Carrik to his Guild's care. There was no doubt in her mind
what he had on his mind, so she'd smiled enigmatically.
Whatever
reception shed subconsciously
hoped to receive was vastly different from the one she got from Lanzecki, the Resident Master of the Heptite
Guild. He was at the space portal when the ship opened its airlock: a
dour-faced man with a swarthy complexion and a squat figure, clothed in dull
colors. The only things bright and active about him were his wide-set piercing
brown eyes. They seemed to move incessantly, seeing more in one darting glance
than they ought.
He
gestured to the two men with him (they were dun-colored, too), who silently
paced down the corridor to Carrik's cabin.
"Thank you, Killashandra
Ree. You have an open ticket to whatever destination
you desire and a credit of 1,000 galactic units." He proffered her two
vouchers, each emblazoned with the Heptite Guild
crest of a quartz crystal. He accorded her a deferential bow and then, as the
men conducting the air-cushion stretcher with Carrik
returned, he preceded them back through the portal and down the accordioned entrance maw.
For
a long stunned moment, Killashandra stared after him,
the two metallic slips limp in her fingers.
"Guildmaster? Lanzecki, sir? Wait. . . ."
The stately progress continued without pause.
"Of all the
ungrateful. . . ."
"I'd
not call them ungrateful," said the captain, stopping beside her and
craning his neck to glance at the vouchers.
"I
didn't expect a brass band," exclaimed Killashandra,
"but a word or two. . . ."
"The important words are there,"
the captain said, pointing to the slips. "But they are an odd lot,"
he went on, staring at the retreating figures. "You hear all kinds of
rumors about that Guild, like I said. But I see lots of strange things in my
profession and I don't believe the half of it." Suddenly he slid an arm
around her shoulders. "Now that the dead meat's gone, how about you and
me. . . ."
"Later, later," Killashandra
said, irritably pushing his hand away. "I want a word or two with that Guildmaster." And she strode rapidly after the trio
guiding Carrik.
She
never did see Carrik again, though his name appeared
on the membership rolls as inactive for a good many years. Not that she
remembered the name past the first four. Eventually the only face she could
recognize and name was Lanzecki's. And that was for
a variety of curious reasons, most of which were credit-oriented.
Right
now she had tremendous difficulty getting an interview with Lanzecki.
Though she arrived at the Guildhall a mere quarter of an hour after he did, he
was "occupied." Well, she could understand that. She waited two hours
in the prism-like reception chamber of the Guildhall. Hunger got the better of
her then.
"They
don't want you," said the captain after her third try. "Leave. That travel voucher'11 take you anywhere. There's sure
nothing on this planet to hang around for." He looked around the public
house where they were dining—the food was superb—at the dull faces.
"I've
never met such sullen, rude, disinterested people in my life," Killashandra said, thoroughly piqued, "but I'm not
leaving until I see Lanzecki and that's that!"
It nearly was, but at the sixth refusal she
lost her temper.
"I've
got perfect pitch," she said on a clear B-flat, the characteristic grating
of her voice thrown back at her from the multisided reception hall. "I've
been informed of all the hazards, including indifference, ingratitude, and
rudeness. I'm going to join!"
The
poor receptionist cringed away from the operatic announcement.
"I
can't help you," the woman said piteously. "You have to see Guildmaster Lanzecki."
"Then
let me see him! And don't"—Valkyries had chanted
in whispers in comparison to Killashandra's
projection—"come back without him." She dropped to a conversational
pitch. "I've been informed that I've a voice that can shatter glass. Shall
I try?" And she waved at the hall with its crystal mirrors and
chandeliers.
The pace at which the woman scurried from the
room soothed Killashandra's ego, and she stared
around the hall, idly wondering if her voice could crack Ballybran
crystal.
"You
don't give up, do you?" said Lanzecki as he
glided into the hall, the receptionist hovering about anxiously.
"No,
I don't." One didn't antagonize the Master of the Guild one wished to
join. At least not face to face.
"That's
as well." He seemed pleased by her obduracy. "You've perfect pitch
all right, according to the Fuertan report."
So Lanzecki'd
been checking up on her.
He
nodded. "And you've seen what supersonic overloads do to a crystal
singer." He gestured toward the back of the building where the infirmary
wing was situated. "Members of the Heptite
Guild," and he gave a sour smile, "are prone to sensory overload.
Sooner or later it will happen to you. But you insist on joining?" He
waited until she nodded. "Despite repeated warnings and attempts to
dissuade you?" She nodded more vigorously. "Will you swear that there
have been no attempts to coerce you against your will to become an apprentice
in the Heptite Guild?"
"Of course!" Killashandra's irritation returned, doubled.
To
her surprise, Lanzecki strode past her, beckoning her
to follow him out of the Guildhall and down the main street of the city into
the communications building, where they were instantly ushered into the
Spaceport Commissioner's office.
"This
young woman insists on becoming an apprentice to the Heptite
Guild," Lanzecki said. He then stepped out of
the room.
"Now
what. . . ," began Killashandra,
whirling at his exit.
"Your name, rank and planet of origin,
young woman," asked the Commissioner in a stern forbidding voice.
She
gave it to him, startled by his unaccountable attitude. After all, his bloody
planet was Mudball #1 if it weren't for the crystals.
. . .
She
was then subjected to an intensive physical examination, and a series of
mental-health routines. She had to recite her life's history, up to and
including her reasons for leaving the Arts Center on Fuerte.
Two
intensive attempts were made to dissuade her, one including an hour-long
documented film of the condition of storm-maddened victims. Finally Lanzecki was recalled and she was permitted—permitted!—to
announce her official intention of becoming an apprentice to the Heptite Guild.
"I've
never been through such a rigmarole in my life,"
she said, fuming, to her new Guildmaster on their way
back to the Hall.
"You
won't be again," Lanzecki said in a droll
fashion but his manner was subtly altered. He seemed less austere, but not
happy.
"Well, that's
something."
"As
you've been reminded, there are certain advantages to being a crystal singer, Killashandra. Very few, however.
But then, there are some advantages to every situation ... if you care to look on the positive side of events. Take
myself." He gave her an odd smile. "I'm totally deaf."
"I'd never've guessed."
He
inclined his head, smiling again. "An advantage, I assure you. I need
only turn my back and I can hear nothing." His smile was tinged with a certain malice. "You'll find, however, that the
inhabitants of Ballybran, save only the singers, are
either tone-deaf or have some serious impairment of that sensory faculty. In
fact, these past few generations of babies are now born with impaired
hearing." That seemed to please him. "You may wish you had been,
too."
"In
the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king," she said, and he
nodded, humorlessly. "That accounts for everyone seeming so rude,
then," she added.
"Probably."
"Here,
you'd better have these back," she said, suddenly remembering the
vouchers and thrusting them at him.
He
glanced indifferently at the chits, and waved aside her offer.
"The
Guild was grateful, a signal event I assure you in this profession. Make the
most of it. Such opportunities will soon be beyond you."
They
had reached the Guildhall and Lanzecki directed her
to what was obviously a training room.
"Enough
time has been wasted," he said. "Now, some of the necessary
reeducation will be done by an aural teacher, for I am useless but I am your
principal instructor. Initiation lasts until you have completed your first
solo trip into the crystal-bearing ranges and return." He smiled sourly.
"The ranges are not, by the way, mountains in the upward sense of the
word, but deeps."
Lanzecki had gestured her to a seat at a small desk
that bore writing materials and a taper. He pulled down a tri-d screen and took
a pointer.
"Ballybran,"
and he indicated the fourth planet of the system on the tri-d visualization,
"has a low volcanic action, being an old planet and well settled down. As
you are aware from primary school galactology, quartz
structures take eons to produce and occur where volcanic action is negligible, as it is on Ballybran. This planet has achieved an almost circular
orbit so there are few changes of season such as you might have experienced on
Fuerte or other planets you've visited."
He
went on in detail about Ballybran's discovery on a
routine survey and how its potential was overlooked until a vacationing
engineer escaped from the crystal canyons only seconds before a mach storm.
He'd been nearly driven mad by the sounds stroked by the freak high winds from
the quartz hills and had returned later to
investigate the phenomen. Since there was always a
dearth of usable quartz crystal to focus the coherent light needed by lasers
and communication devices, his discovery made him a wealthy man. One day he
didn't outrun a mach storm. He and fifty other crystal prospectors.
Galactic
Overgovernment had interdicted the planet until the
hazard had been thoroughly assessed, and proper precautions could be specified.
The Heptite Guild was formed to recruit ("Ha,
dissuade," Kil-lashandra thought to herself),
train and maintain quartz prospectors. The Guild very properly tithed active
members throughout their working lives and then cared for those incapacitated.
Since humans with perfect pitch were in a minority and since the Guild was
required to explain the hazards of the profession in detail, the active
membership remained small and the price of crystal high. No research disclosed
a reliable substitute for Ballybran-mined crystal and
blackmarket mining was notably unsuccessful for the
improperly equipped pirates.
By
constant handling, Killashandra learned the various
marketable shapes. She had intensive drill on her pitch, which remained
accurate to the machine-oriented vibrations: a simple matter with her background
as a musical student. Easy, too, for her to sound a pitch and
then key the polydiamond supersonic cutter to that
exact note. She learned to tune soured crystal as an exercise
preparatory to the actual cutting of quartz from the living hills. She studied
thousands of diagrams and slides of crystal walls until she was able to discern
at a glance where major fractures had been caused by alignment and realignment
as the crystal was "born" from the tremendous pressures of volcanic
action in the planet's surface. She began to appreciate micro-errors, those
impure molecules that might, at a later date, cause a seemingly perfect crystal
to fracture and explode, just as the shuttle's crystal had blown apart at Fuerte. Sometimes one could "hear" the micro-errors
when one sounded a note and cut a "good" crystal above or below the
error. But she wasn't to learn that trick until she got out into the ranges.
Though
she fumed about the delay, she was forced to endure equally boring rehearsals
of Guild rules, precepts and regulations until she'd wake herself up chanting
Section and Paragraph. She was held in training for excessively long drills on
the dangers, spotting and evasion of mach storms.
Because
Ballybran was an old world, with few respectable
mountain ranges, a storm literally raced around the planet, gathering terrific
speed—often exceeding the sound barrier (hence the designation "mach
storm"). The other three small planets in the system had asymmetrical
orbits, occasionally exerting a malefic pull on the largest sibling of their
sun. And the primary of Ballybran was given to
spectacular gaseous eruptions. The resultant "sunspots" exerted undue
gravitational effects on poor Ballybran: any and all
combinations of the above contributed to the birth of the mach storms.
Warning devices were numerous and, Killashandra decided privately, it was a case of crying
wolf in such chorus that the warnee mentally tuned
out the claxons. She determined to keep only one monitor operative and thus
more effective. She was also warned against considering this.
"You
can't be warned too much about a mach storm," she was told repeatedly by Lanzecki, by the various technicians, by her only undeaf instructor. The woman had briefly been a crystal
singer. She'd inadvertently cut off most of her right hand.
The
day came when Killashandra could tolerate no further
classroom antics. In theory she knew all there was to know about cutting
crystal. She'd returned half the planet's crystals in practice and the mere
thought of tracking another mach storm or reciting a Guild rule made her
apoplectic.
"Lanzecki, if you remind me once more that I asked to join this benighted Guild, I'll rearrange your face," Killashandra told the Guildmaster
when he declined, again, to let her solo.
"There
isn't a singer available to shepherd you, Killashandra,"
he said, sighing heavily. He was as weary of her complaints as she was of
making them.
"I thought I was to
solo."
He
shook his head. "Not your first time
out in the ranges. And don't remind me how well versed you are in theory. What
you have in your mind is not reliable in the crystal hills. Theoretical
knowledge must be transmuted into reflex actions along with instinctive reactions
in the successful crystal singer, not conscious considerations."
Killashandra made a rude noise and started to comment on
her eidetic memory.
"Memory
distortion," Lanzecki was saying. "Well
now, Killashandra, most of our active members, and
inactive ones too had that eidetic faculty at one time. It is as if that is a
corollary of perfect pitch. . . . But memory distortion is one of the cruel
facts of crystal singing, girl. Sensory overload is no joke and no crystal
singer is immune to it. I would to the gods one of you was. But I can't permit
you to venture forth the first time without a seasoned singer along. Oh, you'll
be in your own flitter and you'll undoubtedly be sent off on your own in a few
days but you will have had the benefit of watching the actual work in the
ranges. And we have to wait until a reliable singer is available. Ah, speaking
of which. . . ."
A
panel behind them was flashing brilliant red/ orange/white. All warning devices
on Ballybran activated color as well as sound. Lanzecki turned in his chair, gesturing Killashandra
to attend. The panel blanked briefly and then a meteorological chart was
superimposed on a blow-up of the Milekey Mountain
Range, showing the incredibly fast spread of a high-intensity mach storm.
"They'll
be coming in from this. Mach 4, at that." Lanzecki's dour face reflected both concern and satisfaction.
"I hope someone remembered to cut subtonic cylinders. You may help me
compute their cargoes. Nineteen singers are signed out to the Milekeys at the moment."
Killashandra had, in the course of her training, assisted
Lanzecki before. In fact, she had met most of the
current active members who were not off-planet. There were two hundred
forty-three members capable of singing crystal, but of that number almost half
were off-world on leave.
Those
who had come in with partial loads immediately got as drunk as possible and
stayed drunk until their flitters were serviced and refueled, at which point
they went straight back into the crystal ranges. Those who had caught the
market at a good price got as drunk as possible until they could catch a ship
off-world for leave.
"Why
didn't you ever tell me that I had to have a guide my first time out?" Killashandra asked, remembering that there were one or two
men who could make passable partners.
"You
hadn't been sufficiently saturated with theory which they wouldn't remember to
tell you."
So
she sat with Lanzecki as the flitters came in and
precious crystal was duly weighed, assessed and the market price established.
Twelve made small fortunes. Of the remainder, only two singers were considered
possible guides for her: a rather striking brunette with wild hair and eyes to
whom Killashandra took an instant dislike. (The woman
reminded her of a Stellar contralto in the
Trans-Romantic Repertoire company.) And an intensely sullen
yellow-skinned Coombsite with whom Killashandra had previously had a long drunken argument.
"He's
good in the upper registers, which would be an asset for you," Lanzecki told her, but he wasn't keen on Ardlor Bart at all. "Ibray
is really less disoriented despite her appearance."
"I'd rather pair with
the man."
"You
could wait another. . . . No, I see you couldn't. I'll speak to Bart."
Bart had no great desire to double with her his
next trip out, Lanzecki reported. The man was
determined to make enough crystal to get off-world and he didn't want anyone
around.
"He
says the fee's only a drop in the bucket of what he needs," Lanzecki went on, when Killashandra
pointed out that aspect, Section 14, Paragraph 9. "I'd forget him and go
with Ibray. She cuts well in the Tortugal
Hills and she's much more reliable." Killashandra
was adamant.
"Then
you'll have to convince Ardlor yourself," Lan-zecki told her, shrugging off further responsibility.
Killashandra found such convincing rather elementary
although Ardlor had a marked tendency to call her by
any name other than her own.
Three
days later as she was in her flitter, checking it and her gear, the special
ear-padded helmet that offered some protection against the worst of the
sensory overload, the eye-lenses that filtered the blinding light refractions
from open-face quartz mining, Lanzecki made a final
attempt to persuade her to go with Ibray.
"Then
don't trust Ardlor's memory about anything," Lanzecki warned her. "He's cut crystal too long and
sung too long alone now."
"Then why must I go
with him or anyone?"
"His
hands will remember. Watch what he does, not what he says. If he's difficult,
you can switch on the Playback. That'll be official recall. And don't—for the sake of your
sanity—turn off any of the mach storm alarms. Remember that!"
Then
to her surprise, Lanzecki gave her a warm and hearty
handshake and said that she'd been one of his keenest students.
Ardlor had shown her on the range charts where he
intended to take her.
"That
storm will have bared some rose quartz. Lanzecki
told me to remember about rose quartz. In octagon."
Ardlor's face twisted with the effort of implanting
that fact in his spongy mind. "It was octagons, wasn't it?"
"Yes, it was."
"No
sunspot activity," he told her, riffling through the pre-flight reports in
his hand. "That last storm was planetary conjunction stuff. So long as
there's no sun-spot activity there'll be clear days of cutting." He
winced. "I gotta remember rose quartz." He
tapped a scrawled note to that effect on the top of the p-f flimsies. "Not
everyone can cut it. But you've a good upper register, haven't you? I remember
that." He pulled nervously at his fringe of hair saying, "Now you
follow me. Remember," and then darted off to his craft.
Killashandra experienced a certain rush of elation as she
guided her flitter up over the Guild field, dipping eastward to follow Ardlor's brightly striped flyer.
There
were five crystal-bearing areas on Ballybran, the
largest of which was whimsically named Milekey
Mountains. Various theories circulated as to why: the most popular was ascribed
to the discoverer of the Ballybran crystal (whose
name no one ever remembered). It was bruited about that he'd.ventured
a mile into the range before he'd notice the crystal, the planet's unsuspected
treasure.
Now,
Ardlor and Killashandra
penetrated a hundred and fifty kilometers into the Milekeys.
Then Ardlor turned, speeding suddenly as if trying to
lose her. One good look at the ripples of apparently identical deep troughs and
canyons, and Killashandra wanted to be nearer him,
who knew, presumably, where he was going.
"Stupid
twit's forgotten I'm supposed to be with him," she muttered grimly and
steeled herself for a chase.
Ardlor
was a wild flitter-pilot and she was hard pressed to keep him in her viewplate as he swerved and tumbled deep into this canyon,
zooming up, out and over into a still darker gorge so that she almost lost
sight of him a couple of times in the shadows. Only the sun's telltale
refraction on his bumble-bee striped flitter cued her as to his whereabouts.
At
length he settled to a ledge, barely big enough for the two flitters.
"Why
are you following me? Claim-jumpers are fined to the fullest extent, Section 2,
Paragraph 3. You'll not get credit from my hard work!" He was jumping up
and down in rage as she emerged exhausted from her flitter.
With a desperate and totally uncharacteristic
display of diplomacy, she got Ardlor to switch on the
Playback. She soothed him further with an exceptional feast from her own
galley.
"Well,
you've got to remember that you can't stay here all the time," Ardlor finally said, demurring, once the Playback proved to
him he'd agreed to shepherd her. "Two days and then you'll have to go the
next range over. And if you ever. . . ."
"Section
2, Paragraph 3. I won't claim-jump," she vowed earnestly. "Not that
I'd ever be able to find my way back here anyhow. I was so busy keeping you in
my sights, how could I remember directional changes?"
Ardlor grumbled but that admission pacified him as
much as the well-cooked food.
Flitters
were equipped with tracking devices and homing signals. Traditional compasses,
excellent guides on most Earth-type planets, tended to be unreliable on Ballybran: something to do with the storms and the crystal
and the absence of much heavy metal in the planet's crust. A directional finder
could have been further developed to surmount such problems, but the crystal
singers raised such a fuss about how that would facilitate claim-jumping that
the research was abandoned. After all, the singer could get home on the
directional finder and if he were "gone," the Guild Cruiser could
locate him.
As Killashandra was to discover, instinct caused something to
blossom in the inner ear that enabled a singer to find his or her way back to a
lode they'd once cut . . . some familiar note in the special crystalline
chorus.
For
the hills did sing back at you, in harmony, counterpoint or descant. Sing out
a note and the whole side of a canyon answered you, ringing up and down the
valley; velvet in the unseen shadowy depths that the sun might never lighten;
high, clear, sweet on the crest of the ridges.
Nighttime
was an exquisite pain of beautiful sound as the crystal sang and cried in the
cooling air, diminishing to pianissimo multiple-part harmonies, so gentle the
whisper was a mere caress in the blood.
"Crystal
song is addictive and exhausting," Killashandra
announced (softly—so as not to start echoes) to herself on the fourth morning.
She'd managed to sleep that night by wearing the padded helmet and closing the
flitter's ports.
She'd
stayed beside Ardlor the first two days, watching
him closely and noticing his mistakes, too, though he didn't appear to note his
errors in judgment. She did remind him about rose quartz in octagons and he
thanked her gratefully the first nineteen times. After that he'd sullenly told
her as he'd obstinately cut another tetrahedron that he'd been cutting crystal
for longer than she'd been alive and she'd better mind her own business.
The third day she took his advice and hopped
her flitter over not one but two ridges. Someone had worked this mountain
before. She could see the old cuts, now wind-beveled and roughened by bombardment
of shard and dirt.
Despite
her self-confidence, Killashandra could not keep her
hand from shaking as she held the supersonic cutter, preparatory to making her
debut as a crystal singer. She took a good deep breath or two, pressed against
her diaphragm and let an A-sharp above middle C emerge from her throat.
Instantly
she was bombarded with echoes. It was one thing to listen to Ardlor making crystal sing, another to hear your own note
bounce back at you from all sides. Slightly sour to the left, her ear told her,
but true and pure directly in front of her where the rock
face was scarred by old cuttings.
"Octagons,"
she told herself firmly and made the first cut.
Crystal
cries! A dissonance like no other, a complaint of an agony so
primitive that it shook Killashandra to the roots of
her teeth. She was so startled by the unexpected "pain" that
she froze, and the agony turned to pure sound, as clear as the note she then
hurriedly tuned on the cutter.
As
she'd been forewarned, itwas different cutting live crystal and different when your hand was guiding
the cutter, and your bones echoed the sound. She excised the octagon from the
quartz face, pared the outer sides and turned off the cutter. Almost reverently
she held the finished prism in her hands. Reverberations from the cut-echoes
vibrated against her flesh and she experienced a genuine awe for the dazzling
object she had wrested from such a dull womb. Sunlight coruscated from all
faces. The last thrum of sound was absorbed in her skin and yet Killashandra could not part with this, her first crystal
song.
How
long she stood musing over her handiwork she never knew, but a cloud passing
over the sun roused her to sensations of cold and hunger. As much because she
was yearning to repeat this magical rapport with her victims, Killashandra forced herself instead to eat and find a
heavier jacket. She remembered the storm alarms. They were comfortably
inactive.
She
approached her second cut with more confidence, working about the first incision.
This crystal sounded true, a third higher, and the finished octagon was
smaller. But the experience of cutting, of holding the finished crystal like a
warm pulsing rock-heart in her hand, was as exquisitely beautiful.
She'd
cut only four crystals by the time the range began its night song. She puzzled
over this phenomenon, having watched Ardlor cut
thirty and more crystals as large or larger in a single day. She wondered if
she was working too slowly, though she had no sense of slacking, knowing herself
to be manually dextrous.
She
was forced to the conclusion that she must be spending an inordinate amount of
time communing with the finished prism. She took herself sternly to task the
second morning and determinedly placed each crystal in the protective casing as
soon as she made the final slice.
Obviously
she'd lost hours of time in the sensual contemplation of her handiwork for that
day she cut 19 rose quartz octagons in A-sharp or higher, triumphantly
finishing the day with a five-tone dominant of matched rose crystal.
She
woke in the night, suddenly, an odd apprehension driving sleep from her mind.
Uneasily she checked the crystal, wondering if something might be causing them
to sing, but the smooth sides were silent when she flicked back the protective
sheathings.
Outside
the night was clear and cold and the range somnolent.
Only the faintest whisper of their lullabies was audible. She glanced at the
storm alarms and thought she detected a flicker on the DEW, but it might have
been her imagination for nothing else blurped in a
space of five minutes.
She
gained some uneasy sleep for the remainder of the night, but by the first crack
of light she was wide awake and doubly apprehensive. Two widely spaced flickers
marred the dull face of the DEW. If there were a storm in the making, she would
have plenty of other warning. She buried herself in work, but despite the
involvement with crystal song, she was continually aware of something being not
quite right. She was storing the first full crate of the day in the hold when
she heard more alarms singing out.
Mach
storm! She knew the drill and computed its arrival in approximately three
hours, building from the northwest and due to sweep her relative area in the
southeast. She had two hours leeway to escape the consequences.
She
cleared away her equipment, grav-locked the precious
cargo and strapped herself in. Not that she'd need the storm fastenings. She
took off, activating the homing device as she'd not worked out where she actually
was, thanks to Ardlor's evasive tactics. Ardlor!
She
veered left, over his working, and saw him busily chewing out a large
tetrahedron. She wondered if he'd remembered octagons at all.
He
was furious when he saw her, screaming vituperative curses and chanting
Section 2, Paragraph 3. He'd report her to Lanzecki.
Infringement! She'd not have any of his tetrahedrons.
When she tried to leave her flitter, he attacked her with his cutter. She
evaded him and moving swiftly got into his flitter and snapped up the Remind
toggle.
"I'm
supposed to be with you, you addle-pated baritone," she roared at him as
the replay intoned the original orders. "Listen! It's Lanzecki's
voice."
The
crystal singer paused in his efforts to slice her up. And she took advantage of
his momentary armistice to flick on the storm warnings. They blared forth,
above Lanzecki's recital, at top, urgent volume.
"There's a mach storm
coming. We've got to leave."
"Leave?"
Panic replaced anger in Ardlor's wizened face.
"I can't leave. I've struck a pure vein. . . . I've. . . ." He
clamped his mouth shut with remembered caution and was about to renew his
attack on her when the storm klaxons hit a new dissonance. "I'll just cut
one more. Just one more," he pleaded with her piteously. "I've got to
get off-world this time. I've got to get crystal out of my blood."
Killashandra snagged the cutter from his relaxed grip.
"You
can't cut crystal with a mach storm coming, you fool."
"Crystal
really sings when a storm's coming. Can't you hear it? Are you deaf?"
Now
she fell for his ploy, stepping to the flitter entrance and hearing the
distant thrumming as the ranges began to echo the stroking of approaching
winds. Ard-lor wrenched his cutter from her hand and
leapt from the flitter. Cursing, Killashandra followed
him, caught his tunic and, applying pressure, swung him toward her, lashing out
with a sure fist to the side of his jaw. He collapsed.
She caught the cutter from his lax hand, let him easily to the ground. She put the cutter
carefully in its cradle before she struggled to get him aboard and into his
couch. The storm warnings added their wild obbligato to her exertions, reaching
a well-nigh unendurable wail.
"Oh,
shut up. Shut up!" she cried, exasperated in her efforts to save Ardlor, his crystals and his ship.
It
was then she caught sight of her own craft and realized her dilemma. Two ships and one conscious pilot. She tried to rouse Ardlor but he was impervious to stimulus.
Killashandra searched her memory for a Section and
Paragraph covering rescue and salvage, but she simply couldn't think what it
was. She did remember the two vouchers for escorting Carrik
back and decided that there'd be something and she'd recall it later. After
all, she owed Ardlor something for shepherding her
when he didn't want to and he did want to get off-world this trip, so it was up
to her to preserve his everlasting unwanted tetrahedrons. A quick glance told
her that his cargo space wasn't full. She might be able to save something
herself. She raced to her ship and scurried back with the dominant fifths.
They'd be worth something. Would she have time for more?
The
warning systems had climbed several deafening decibels toward the supersonic.
She could now see the darkening of the horizon and the storm's approach. She
risked one more trip, almost stumbling in her haste to get the crate aboard.
She took care to secure them, vowing that she was going to exorcise her
conscience as soon as possible for the nuisancy thing
it was.
All
flitters had similar control panels, though Ardlor's
was somewhat the worse for wear and, despite a recent
servicing, dirt engrained.
She lifted off, slamming on the homing device
and veering upward as fast as she dared. His craft was sluggish. Didn't Ardlor believe in maintenance? And he all
ready to cut again with the storm speeding down on them? He took
ridiculous risks.
She
cast one last look at her own trim flitter, wondering if she'd ever see it
again, wondering how much damage the storm would wreak on it. She'd have to pay
for the repairs, Sections 9, 10, 11 ...
all paragraphs. Funny she couldn't think what the salvage rule was.
She
was glad she'd secured Ardlor, because he came to
before they'd quite cleared the Milekeys and he
turned into a raving maniac. She could appreciate his agony because she felt
the mach-tuned dissonances herself, jabbing her nerve ends, scoring her
eardrums despite the buffering helmet.
He
finally knocked himself out again, throwing his head against the duralloy wall so the last few hours into Ballybran City gave her the requisite quiet to restore her
own nerves. Nonetheless she was feeling rather pleased with herself as she
landed Ardlor's flitter and reported to field control
that she had Ardlor with her.
She
stood and watched the medics take the man's limp body off, even though she was
told to report instantly to Lanzecki.
"He'll
probably be all right," the medics told her diffidently.
She
was miffed that they didn't seem to care about him or comment on her
self-sacrifice. She'd not expected bouquets but a remark somehow seemed in
order. If anything, the ground crew was uncomplimen-tarily
annoyed with her for rescuing the older flitter.
Despite
that prelude, she was hardly prepared for Lanzecki's
castigations.
"Lost
your flitter first time out? And a new one at that! How did you contrive to be
so careless?" he demanded.
"I
wasn't careless. I had to rescue Ardlor and I
couldn't transfer everything to my flitter. Not with a storm ranging down on
us."
"You
rescued Ardlor?" Lanzecki
was astounded. "I gave you more credit than that."
Killashandra gagged. "But... he wouldn't listen. He even tried to slice me as a
claim-jumper. . . ." She couldn't believe Lanzecki's
reaction. "I had to knock him out to save his neck. What'd you expect me
to do?"
"Leave him there, of
course."
She stared, aghast, at the Guildmaster.
"He'd've shown no compunction about leaving you in similar
circumstances, I assure you. You did all that could be required of you by
apprising him of the storm's approach. Then you should have taken off and saved
your own nerves . .. and
cuttings. As it is," and Lanzecki made a few
passes at his computer, "you're now in debt to the Guild to the tune of
8,000 credits." He looked at her sternly. "You're responsible for the
repairs ... if any can be effected when your flitter
is recovered. . . ."
"But the crystals I'd
already cut. . . ."
Lanzecki shrugged. "The containers are designed
to keep the crystal safe through the normal hazards of air travel, not being
bucked down mile-deep canyons. I doubt any will survive.
"I
got two crates of rose quartz octagons out of my ship before I lifted
off."
"You
did?" Lanzecki's sour expression lightened and
he seemed less forbidding. "What did you salvage?" His fingers poised
over the computer keys.
"It's on the docket. .
. ." She pointed.
"On
Ardlor's?"
"Well,
certainly. . . ." "Then it's to his credit."
"Oh,
come now. How else could I get mine back? And no one told me I had to sort
cargo, too." She was mad now.
Lanzecki continued obdurate. "The rules which
govern the members of this Guild were clearly explained to you, Killashandra Ree. This is
covered. . . ."
"I
can't remember all of your forsaken rules for the gods' sakes!"
'"Ah!"
Lanzecki's face brightened suddenly. "Fair enough. In the emergency you did not remember the
need to personalize your crates."
"I
had rose quartz, cut in octagons, one set is five
octagons in a dominant A-major chord."
"Ah, very good. Very good indeed." Lanzecki
nodded approvingly as he jabbed computer buttons. The computer chattered back
at him and he beamed up at her. "Even better. Six
crates of octagons . . . two rose quartz, four black. . . ."
"Ah.
. . ."
"Ardlor is
screaming that if you claim any tetrahedrons, you're stealing his
cuttings." "But I. . . ."
"Therefore the octagons are undeniably
yours." Lanzecki eyed her so sternly that her
attempts to be honest caught in her throat. "Now," and he made
another pass at the keyboard, glanced at the print-out, "you are only
5,750 credits in the Guild's debt. Rose quartz octagons bring a premium market
price. Especially that chord!"
"There's
the voucher from you for bringing Carrik back,
too."
"Why
so there is." He tallied that in as well and then beamed at her.
"Well, you haven't done badly your first trip out. Now if the flitter can
be salvaged. . . ."
"Speaking of salvage, do I get nothing
for Ardlor and his cargo?"
Lanzecki looked her straight in the eye. "I
think, my
dear Killashandra, you've realized more than your due
out of this affair. I wouldn't push my luck any further.
Or Ardlor may remember that you returned, unasked
to his claim. He might even file a charge against
you___ "
Lanzecki held his hand up against her protest.
"I accept your version unconditionally because you're too new in the Guild
to be disoriented. However, you've had a valuable lesson, which I hope you'll
never forget. Don't worry about another man's ears in the crystal ranges. Keep
your own clear. Gratitude is dependent on memory. That's one thing that you
can't count on anymore."
"I'll remember that," Killashandra said grimly.
Gene Wolfe
FROM
THE NOTEBOOK OF DOCTOR STEIN
THE
patient DW was brought by her parents and an aunt. DW a girl
of nineteen, tall, rather slender, of English-Scottish stock. Mother
called earlier, asked I come there, see her. Nurse
refused but gave her emergency appointment after hours.
Mother
says acute onset, girl normal until yesterday, naturally quiet girl, no
flapper, somewhat religious, "great reader," knew few boys. Confirmed by father. Aunt says willful, "flighty,"
sometimes made unnecessary noise to disturb her (aunt). Agrees
normal until yesterday.
In
interview DW appeared tense, twisted handkerchief and repeatedly picked up
various small objects from my desk, replacing them whenever her attention was
directed toward them. Johnson, transcribe from Dictaphone.
Dr. Stein:
Now, Donna, what seems to be the trouble? DW: I don't know.
Dr. S:
You know what kind of doctor I am, don't you,
Donna? I am an alienist. Why is it you think
your father and mother wish me to treat you? DW: I have people inside me. Dr. S: Do you mean you are pregnant? DW: I have people inside me, walking around,
pulling the strings.
Dr.
S: You are a marionette—is that what you're
saying? You feel you are mechanical?
DW: No. I feel like myself, but they're in
there. The
woman is looking out through my left eye now.
Dr. S: How many of them are
there?
DW: Three unless you count the
other one.
Dr. S: Do you know their names?
DW: The man, the girl, and the
woman.
Dr.
S: The man is your father, the girl is
yourself, and
the woman is your mother—isn't that right?
DW: No, I'm outside.
Dr.
S: You are holding your arms oddly and twisting your legs. Why do you do that?
(Patient was sitting in an extremely
contorted position which gave the impression that her knees and shoulders were
dislocated, but seemed to suffer no discomfort.—HS)
DW:
The other.
Dr.
S: The one who is not the man, the girl, or the woman—is that correct?
DW: Doctor, this is going to be quite difficult
for you
to
understand, but this girl is not ill; we—my friends
and
I—have found out that she is being used as an
energy
base by Thag, and we're trying to protect her
from him until we can dislodge him.
Dr.
S: You have a deep voice. I presume you
are a
man.
DW:
My name is Harry Nailer. Dr. S: Donna, what are you doing?
(Patient had left her chair and was walking
about the room on all fours with a motion sometimes bestial, sometimes insectile.—HS)
Dr.
S: Donna, if you don't get back into your chair I'm not going to talk to you
anymore. . ..
That's better. You may lie on my sofa if you like. Do you mind if I smoke? Does
your father smoke? Do you know that my wife won't let me smoke in the dining
room at home? She says the smoke gets into the drapes, but I like a good cigar.
DW: We could evict Thag by killing her, of
course,
but besides the moral issue we don't think it would do
much good—he'd probably find somebody else, and
we'd have a hard time finding him. If we can cut him
off____
Dr.
S: I don't like the light way in which
you dismiss the moral issue, Donna. Your life is very valuable. DW: You see, from our point of view she's
already dead.
Dr. S:
No, no!
DW:
What year is this?
Dr. S:
It is nineteen thirty-five, Donna.
DW:
We are from nineteen ninety-seven.
Dr. S:
I would like to talk to Donna, please.
DW: All right, but she's not going to be able to
tell you
much.
Dr.
S: Donna, you are going to break your
own bones—you frighten me. Have you been practicing to become a contortionist?
DW: No.
Dr.
S: That is better, now you sound like a
pretty girl.
Can you tell me who these people are?
DW: My father's already told you about Thag, and
there's Laurel Baker. I'm June Nailer.
Dr.
S: I have told you that I wish to speak
to Donna
—the
voice is fine, much better, but it must be Donna. I
will talk to no one else.
DW:
I could pretend to be Donna and you wouldn't know the difference. But we need
your help. In our time, you see, there were too many people, so some of them
became nin—that's
what we called them. It meant that you resigned from nature to exist in a
purely subjective framework. Since we exist at a lower eneigy
level, independent of physical reality, we'll last much longer, and fade away
instead of dying. . . .
(The man's voice here, Doctor. I assume this is still the patient? ?—jj)
The nin
approach a zero energy level asymptotically. Theoretically we will remain in
existence forever—or at least, indefinitely. That was my father. I was going to
say that when you're a nin
you don't consume the planetary resources. But you bounce back and forth for a
long time—father and I are still bouncing, and Laurel, too, now that she's
close to us.
Dr.
S: JoanlWill you come in here a moment, please? Nurse
Johnson: Yes, Dr. Stein.
Dr.
S: From this girl's parents I want the blanket release, or I'm not accepting
this patient. You know the one I mean? Everything. All. If they say yes, get them to sign and show them out. If
they will not sign tell me and we will give her back to them. Nurse Johnson: I understand, Doctor. DW: The bouncing—as June calls it—isn't
important.
Personalities
newly arrived carry a heavy life-charge
that
draws them back from time to time, and draws
others
with them. Thag and those like him are
important—we don't know how many there are.
Dr.
S: So now you are an older woman, a
lady. You
wish me
to believe you have multiple personalities—is
that
not so? That is very rare, Donna. Most often we
find
that those who seem to have them have really other
illnesses, and this is a disguise for them.
DW: This would go better, wouldn't you say,
Doctor,
if we could control her arms and legs?
Dr.
S: Also if you would control your
voice. It is a good
voice
for an opera singer, all that vibrato, but not for a
young girl.
DW:
But we cannot. It's all that the three of us can do to hold the speech centers
and the involuntary nervous system. You see, we have discovered that many of
the nin are not simply human
beings who have crossed over, but creatures who by the strength of their energy
can assume that semblance to the others; and by some inversion we don't
understand, they attenuate into the past rather than the future. Once there
they are able to seize someone—like this poor baby—devour her energies, and
use them to return.
Dr.
S: You have tripped yourself up, Donna.
If only
the Thags, as you call them, can go back to the present,
how did your other three voices get here?
DW: We seized Thag and
forced him to draw us back
with
him, Doctor. And I was not a singer in nature; I was
a medium, and one of the first to cross.
Dr.
S: Of course. So you have been
listening to the
spiritualists, Donna? Or perhaps only reading their
books?
Nurse Johnson: Here is the release, Dr. Stein.
Dr.
S: Thank you. We will try the Cerletti treatment in a few minutes, I think. Donna, you
seem to want me to do something to help you. What is it? DW: This is Harry Nailer again, Dr. Stein. As Miss Baker explained, we among
the nin see Thag and others like him simply as powerful—perhaps eccentric—human
personalities. The strength of their energies allows him to project this. As
time passes and their energy level is reduced, we sometimes sense what I might
call wrong notes. Miss Baker, who was a clairvoyant in nature, is very
sensitive to this; and with my help and my daughter June's she began keeping a
particular watch on Thag. At first we thought that
he might be an unusually strong and bad personality fragment—all personalities
shatter to some extent when they make the crossing, unless they have achieved
complete union, what Miss Baker calls interior peace, while in nature.
Dr.
S: So your Thag is not a human being or even a part
of one, but what is he? I wish you would allow him to talk to me.
DW:
Laurel Baker again, Doctor. I doubt that we could. Never having existed as a
human in nature, Thag is an unskillful operator of
the human body as you have seen. He may be a creature of a different sphere, or
a spiritual survivor of a prehuman race.
(The masculine voice again—jj)
Something that might work would be to lower
this girl's energy—that might force Thag to make some
move that would let us get at him. As things are now, we're deadlocked. If she were confined, for example, and placed on a very restricted
diet; or if she were forced to donate blood.
Dr.
S: Well, we may come to confinement in
time,
Donna,
but first we are going to try something else, something new. You would not be
familiar with the work of Cerletti and Bini in Italy; but they have developed a technique that
shows great promise, and I have been using it experimentally. We place metal
rods—they are called electrodes—to the temples; there is a conductive cream
applied also which contains metal particles so that there are no burns. Then an
electric current is passed, very briefly, through the brain. DW: Wait, Harry,
let me talk to him. We are familiar with that treatment, Dr. Stein, but it will
do no good here.
Dr.
S: I expected you to say that, Madame opera singer. Is
it because you are above all that? So superhuman that you cannot be removed
from a poor girl's brain by mere electricity? Or is it that so much energy will
raise your level and catapult you into your future again? Or will you bounce,
as you call it when you speak in your natural voice, and appear to me in my
surgery wearing ray pistols and rocket belts? You see I have begun to talk like
Dr. Huer in the funnies, but I'm going to try the Cerletti treatment just the same. DW: Electrical energies
are far too coarse to do the things you suggest, Doctor, but what their effect
will be upon our ability to protect this girl, or on ourselves,
I cannot say. From what I know of Thag, the thing
that is sucking her life-energies—
Dr.
S: Ah, I have it now. The way you move around the room, Donna—it had seemed to
me that it was like the walking of a spider, yet there was something of the way
a rat runs too, but now I know. You are a bat! In Germany, when I was a boy, we
would sometimes throw things to knock them from the eaves of the coal shed, and
when they are on the ground they walk just as you do. So your Thag is a blutsauger and next you will want me to pound a stick into you, which Dr. Freud and
I
understand. No, Donna, but you need help with all
those people inside you, and we will try the Cerletti
treatment.
DW: Dr. Stein—
(End of cylinder.—jj)
The
electrical treatment was administered to the patient as described on pp.
16-17. She convulsed satisfactorily and lapsed into normal sleep as soon as
the current was discontinued. About one hour later I visited her bedside; she
appeared rational but exhausted and not inclined to converse. Nurse reports she
had said earlier, "I feel something gnawing at my heart." I left and
a few minutes later nurse, who had gone to get patient soup, found her dead. I
am preparing an account of this case for forwarding to Drs. Cerletti and Bini.
Edgar
Pangborn
THE
WITCHES OF NUPAL
I
WILL interrupt the secret work on my History of Heresy to write you a story of murder, love, and witchcraft.
When
I read about the burning of witches in Old Time—reading snug down here in the
cellars of the Ecclesia at Nuber among ancient books
the Holy Mur-can Church hasn't yet destroyed—I note that they were never called
martyrs except by a few outraged historians of a later age which considered itself humanitarian. That was the same age that invented
napalm, some kind of jellied fuel designed for the purpose of clinging to the
skin and burning to the bone. And these historians, good gentlemen all, usually
declined to believe that the victims were witches—an unkind cut. For
martyrdom you must hold beliefs later guaranteed to be holy, as Joan of Arc
did: had she been a true witch no one would have found her death noteworthy.
Poor girl, I suppose she was one more homosexual who became important enough so
that she had to be made first a devil and then a saint.
I
am Fifth Assistant Librarian to the Ecclesia, and in this blessed century,
third since the supposed birth and
death of
Abraham, witchcraft has been declared a delusion of barbaric and unmurcan minds. (I could still be burned for that
"supposed," maybe, although the bonfires are rapidly losing favor as
public entertainments, but this code I write in is not likely to be broken by
those muttonheads upstairs, and my explosive notebooks ought to be safe behind
the massive Complete
Works of J. Fenimore Cooper.) Fifth Assistant is a soft, hideaway job. Here
in the Ecclesiastical State of Nuber we are within my
native land of Katskil but not of it, as the antique
papal state once sheltered within the body of Italy. I am a mean, cynical,
respectable old man, almost invisible, less vulnerable than most citizens to
arrest and torture in the cause of modern alignment. Down here in the cellars I
read, scribble at my History,
and am sometimes almost
happy. I am the jolly worm in your apple, O Ecclesia—look to the bloom on your
cheek! For I shall one day be transfigured by a printing press into a book, and
chew my way out clear through you, and spread my wings, while you fall to the
mud, and rot.
I
am thinking back to the St. George's Hatchet Day of the year 266, thirty-five
years ago. I will write this moral tale for your someday instruction, whoever
you are —my fellow man, poor sod!—because I have found out where the powers of
darkness reside.
We
thirteen silly adolescents met that June day according to our by-laws in the
clearing below Simon's Mound, and Rudi Zavier was
talking to us, resting his hand on the Stone of Sacrifice. "You have been
faithful, my twelve," he said. "You shall learn more about the Master
of the Horns." If you listened to Rudi, already loving him, your common
sense wouldn't be yours to use again until he said so. He was close to twenty,
by several years the oldest of us, full of inner fires.
That day he wore a brass pin on his shirt, a
cherry and-hatchet symbol of St. George, the way any conventional citizen
might do. We knew Rudi scoffed at the Murcan
Saints—it was part of our fun—but wearing such trash was what he called policy.
He saw me look at the pin and took it off, grinning, making a half-motion as if
wiping his arse with it, but his eyes were chilly,
bits of blue sharp sky, probing us, searching and measuring. He was taller than
any of us except me, but not weedy as I was—Rudi could bend the seven-foot bow.
He stood by the Stone, easy and beautiful, and behind him rose
the colossus, Mafairson's Oak.
I
wonder if it still stands—but I'm not going back to Nupal.
It was said to be the tree where they hanged Fiddler Mafairson
for robbing the Kingstone mail coach in former days,
and the brave fella broke his fiddle over a stone
before they strung him up. Some claim it's only a story from an Old-Time song;
and I don't know. That day a moody wind was intruding on our sheltered space. I
thought of Mafairson's ghost, craving human sounds,
interrupting them with a sigh.
The
sun came out a moment on Rudi's bright hair. Almost white it was, silver spun
to gossamer, an imitation of age above a face of youthful splendor, demonic,
secret. Rudi (at the time I knew him, when his childhood was spent) was not
one for explaining himself. Maybe he tried to when his mother was living. She
was a big pale woman with suffering eyes, who died a year after his family
moved to Nupal from Albania up in Moha!
That
day maybe our youngest—fat Nell Kunak or Jo Makepeace
or poor Jena Doren who never stopped loving
Rudi—believed the sun came out because he summoned it. Not Piet Horver. I think that big unhappy boy, the only one of us
who never laughed, was already feeling the Church drag him back from our
naughtiness. He had been the first member of the coven when Rudi started it,
and worshipped Rudi fantastically for a while, but the bond was straining to
the snapping point. Understand, my good readers of the future who may never
exist, when I was a boy it was a common belief that witches could command the
sun and moon, vagaries of storm and calm. And though today I see a few signs of
reaction against such credulous nonsense, I promise you the multitudes will
cherish it for a long time yet, for faith is easily generated, but the use of
reason demands courage.
At
seventeen I may not have believed that Rudi could dominate the sun and moon and
rain. But there was a time when I think I would have jumped into the tarpits of Hell for him.
He
had won me four years earlier, soon after he and his family came to Nupal. I was thirteen, all hands and feet and long bones—awkwardest damned boy in Nupal,
my father said. Rudi won me by listening to my stumbling talk of becoming an
explorer, when my sailor father couldn't hear it without a noisy snigger. And
look you, for a few years I did that! In my early forties, as a Clerical in the
company of only two scouts, I penetrated the southern jungle, marking out a new
trail to the empire of Misipa. I know how its harbors
gaze south over the sea, over the round turning world toward tropic-hearted Velen, cruel land of spices, coffee, mahogany, slaves for
the brutal Misipan markets. But it's too late for me
to go again, and I'll never sail to Velen. (Besides,
those are other tales.) Four years after Rudi thus won me,
I was still in subjection to his brilliance and power, my own will spellbound.
"You
have been faithful," Rudi said to us. "When we formed this coven last
year we swore loyalty. We haven't accomplished much yet—it had to be a time of
testing.
You've
done nobly." We looked, we hoped, nobly modest. "I'm proud of you. No one has left our company nor betrayed our secrets—pity for him
if he had!" According to our by-laws, the penalty for betrayal was
death. I suppose none of us except Rudi (and maybe Piet Horver)
had more than a dim idea of what we had agreed to there.
Our "secrets" included our naked
romps and orgies in this clearing. At our feasts each of us was required to
bring liberated goodies—liberated not just from family but from outside victims
who might holler for the Nupal constables. And there
were the sacrifices on the Stone under Mafairson's
Oak. Stolen chickens mostly; but a month ago at the May meeting Elder Meehan's
smelly old half-blind dog Prince had waddled along to the gathering at Jon Bright's heels and Jon had not been able to send him home.
Poor fool, he shambled up to the slanted Sacrificial Stone, lifted his leg at
it, and climbed on it gazing down at us, tongue dribbling. I remember mifky spots where cataracts were forming on both his eyes;
they were fuzzy at the iris and stupid with age. Before there was time for Jo
Makepeace or any other softhearted one among us to protest, Rudi Zavier—no one else was allowed to touch the Sacrificial
Knife —drove that knife into Prince's heart. Some of us trembled while his
blood drenched the Stone.
(Elder
Meehan, ancient and simple, searched all over town, speculating and grieving.
We knew every pitiable move he made, and most of us were guilt-sick, but even
little Jo Makepeace couldn't speak.)
I felt sometimes that Jo was with us as a sort of elfin observer. I
don't mean a spy; I mean he inhabited the world itself like a stranger
marveling at the darkness and occasional brightness of human ways. A fancy, of
course—Jo was just a sweet kid with imagination, which is miracle enough, and
maybe he let himself be drawn into Rudi's foolish coven because the poet in him
wanted to discover what shadows are.
"Have
I done wrong?" said Rudi, wiping the knife and smiling at us like bright
death. "If so, let him who is without sin cast the first stone."
"How
shall I become without sin?" That was Piet Horver,
but what he said only began as a shout; it ended in a mumble, as Rudi walked to
him and took hold of his fist, gently straightening the fingers.
"See, Piet," he
said. "There's no stone."
If
any townsman had found the Sacrificial Stone and the blood, other witches might
have been blamed, though I doubt whether there were any in Nupal
in our time; a hundred years earlier perhaps. Certainly in the remoter Katskil towns, deeper in the wilderness, witchcraft may
well have been practiced. I wouldn't care to say it doesn't go on even
nowadays, back in the hills. There's no mystery thicker than the things good
people prefer not to mention.
Now
at that June meeting in evening sunlight, Rudi said: "Because of your
faithfulness I'll tell you one thing: what the Church says about the existence
of only one god is the biggest of all the Church's lies. And soon I'll prove it
to you."
We
gaped—not at the notion of more than one god, which is probably natural to children, nor at the idea that the Church would
tell fibs, but just at hearing Rudi put such things in words. We knew what
would happen if any Church person heard him and passed on information to the
College of Examiners at Nuber, that grim gang of
inquisitors which was rapidly becoming the dread official conscience of all Katskil. Rudi's youth wouldn't save him from the bonfire.
Public opinion might be saying no about witchcraft; not about heresy. We had
also the thrilling second thought: He is trusting us, saying to us what he would
say to no others.
And
there was the mingy little chance that Jehovah might hear him, although thus far heaven had rudely ignored our toughest
blasphemies. Believing in Lucifer does imply at least some belief in Jehovah.
If you don't believe in a god, how can you defy him? The ones who truly don't
believe, I've noticed, are the only ones who don't get uptye
about religion. (I'm giving this an entire chapter in my History of Heresy.) They leave the roaring and the acid forgiving
to the true believers, and get on with their own affairs.
"There
are many gods," Rudi said. "Little gods, great ones. Think of the
thousands of happenings, all day long. How could one god deal with them?"
To many of us ignoramuses this was a clincher. Jena Doren
nodded her bright head; she had to believe that Rudi, who constantly hurt and
humiliated her, couldn't be wrong. "But the one greatest of all gods is
Lucifer, Master of the Horns—Lucifer, Son of the Morning. They say he fell from
heaven, do they? Why, he rejected the god of heaven, found heaven to be a poor
sorry place." Rudi spread his arms, holding us with his yearning, mocking
eyes. A number of his tricks were borrowed from Father Rupet's
pulpit mannerisms; more were his own. Rudi was original; the devil dwelling
behind his eyes stayed consistent with itself, even to the end. (Remember,
too, we were stuffed full of our juicy 3rd Century romances, those
hell-love-and-disaster yarns that promise to bloom better than ever in the 4th,
with the growth of printing houses and what passes for literacy.) "No, he
didn't fall from heaven, my twelve. He flew down to us of his own free will, to
be Lord of Hell and Lord of the Earth also—the Earth to which he brought the
floods, the pestilence, the cleansing fire of Old Time—the Earth that he holds
in the cup of his left hand."
I
have heard more practiced soul-rousers since then, but none with Rudi's
voice-music, his power to shove that voice under your skin till you felt on the
edge of orgasm from sheer scare and goosepimples.
"Serve him, serve the Master of the Horns! He is
the lightning-fire of the dark!" He had us swaying and moaning, as the
most devout Abramites do in church. The girls closed
their eyes in ecstasy. I saw Anna Hiel's nipples
stiffen under her thin smock, and she slid me a glance. "He is the spark
in the tiger's eye." (Who cared about making sense out of Rudi's
rhapsody?—the purpose was the music, not the meaning: it was our Hear us, O Abraham and our Kyrie eleison.) "He is the black wolf s cry, the blade
of sacrifice, the blood that follows it. And you shall see him in the
flesh."
He
stopped, his silence shocking us out of our fuzzy trance. He was waiting and
smiling. Rudi knew how to outwait an audience. Then he leered and said in a
luscious imitation of Father Rupet's cadence:
"Ay-y-men." We laughed and pressed close with our questions.
Relaxed
now and amiable, he said, oh, he just meant that at the next meeting we'd see
him put on the attributes of Lucifer, that was all—yes, my good
loves, including the horns—and when he did, the Master's spirit would enter
him. He couldn't predict what he might then be obliged to do—we wouldn't mind
kissing his arse, would we? He laughed, too, watching
us. In a true sense, he would be Lucifer
while the spirit made use of him.
The
rest of that June meeting became an orgy as it grew dark. I chased Anna Hiels three times around the
Oak
and got her down squealing with her legs open. Jon Bright took her twice after
I had spent. But we were uneasy, though we had sentinels posted. Maybe we felt
ourselves under the regard of Lucifer and it chilled us, gave us the sense of
something enormous, wanton, consuming, outside our trivial posturing and
capering.
Adam
Ganz, who loved boys, got into a fight with Piet Horver, who shouted that his games with little Jo Makepeace
were depraved—that from a witch! Sometimes we were more than comic. Rudi had
to separate them when Piet earned himself a bloody nose and started to rave and
cry. And Jena Doren fell to weeping, too, and
couldn't stop, when we went through our Black Mass, the Maharba
(Abraham said backwards), making her naked body the table for our mock
communion.
Before the Fourth of July Night meeting, hell
was loose in Nupal. Three young girls—Dora Mallon and
Ethel Lyme, and Dasi Stiles, who was seventeen but
queer in the head, or "tarded" to use a Katskil expression—were having fits and screaming of
bewitchment. Dora and Ethel were cousins, and inseparable. Dora was a
hunchback and for that reason suspected by some of being a mue,
but the Church had let her live. Ethel's bland round face was purpled by a
great birthmark on the left side. They had named no names, so far. When some
fool asked whether one Mam Shiller
might be responsible for their pitiable state, the wenches were supposed to
have screamed louder.
At Sudler's Dairy, where Rudi and I were working that summer,
Rudi told me our coven might be involved, if not up to the neck at least up to
the balls. Dora Mallon, he told me, had suspected the existence of our group
and approached him with hints, wanting to join. He had put her off with
evasions. "She may have seen some of us slipping away to Simon's
Mound," he said. "She's a bitch we don't need. Sharp, though. I don't
think any of us would have betrayed the coven. Do you, Sam?" He was
looking into me with ice-blue coldness. "Sam?"
"No,
Rudi. No." His look changed then to one of dreaminess, and some kind of
exhilaration. Rudi's job at Sudler's was a joke,
possibly due to some democratic notion of his father's that it would be
"good for the boy." The Zaviers lived in a
great gloomy house with ten acres of fenced-in privacy and a mess of servants.
But Rudi rather liked the work, and it kept him in touch with me.
Here
in my cozy cellars I have dug up and read some accounts of the Salem witchcraft
episode of 1692, the addled trial, the hangings, the pressing to death of brave
Giles Corey. In Nupal I suppose history was repeating
itself with a big squeak, as it may easily do for any people who have discarded
knowledge and kept no understanding of the past. In old Massachusetts, however,
the madness was followed by a significant revulsion against that kind of
emotional garbage: the outrages did clear the air. In Nupal
we had no Robert Calef or Thomas Brattle to risk
their necks by pillorying the holy ghouls with indignation and laughter.
Mam Shiller was a
fierce old twice-widowed reprobate living in a shanty outside of town, off the
old Kingstone Road (which hadn't gone through to the
national capital since the earthquake of 260 and still doesn't). She kept
chickens, a few goats, a garden cherished behind thick hedges. In her late
forties, she was currently giving bed and board to a traveling tinker who had
holed up with her, scandalizing the town. I never could see that she was
depriving Nupal's good ladies of anything, except the
tinker, who was perfectly useless.
Mam Shiller wouldn't
have strangers near her garden; she believed their sole object was to trample
her flower beds. She'd take out after them with a broom or anything else handy.
She also believed the town was dead set against her, and in that of course she
was right—they are always against the queer and the lonely.
Dasi
Stiles may have started the outbreak. Dasi nourished
an ungovernable passion for flowers. She didn't admire them—she ate them. They
must have done her good, too, for she had the creamiest complexion of any
chick in Nupal, along with the weakest mind. Mam Shiller had recently chased
her a quarter-mile with a pair of shears, Dasi
chewing and strewing rose petals all the way. Slow to anger like any halfwit, Dasi did resent being chased, and I suppose Mam Shiller's roaring threats
were impressive, though the old woman wouldn't have hurt a mouse. Dasi must have gabbled to the other girls.
All
three were children of poor families in the shanty section, but when Dora
toppled screaming and frothing on the church steps on Friday morning while the
congregation was filing out, she got enough attention for minor nobility. Ask
Baron Reilla—he was there, and gave a few orders.
They
carried her across the street into the house of the Elder Meehan. His wife, Mam Clotilda, was as pious-vague
and sweet and cloth-headed as he was, while his sister-in-law Miz Beulah saw to it that they remembered to eat and get up
and go to bed. Left to himself, Elder Meehan would
have sat reading the Book of Abraham until he dried up and blew away. The Meehans should have had children, everyone said. They made
a huge tremulous fuss over afflicted Dora, and over Ethel who followed along
shouting: "O my poor Dora, my darling, will they never cease a-persecuting
you?"—at which words the people in their good church clothes did marvel.
Baron Reilla remarked she could hardly have got them
out of a romance-book, since he didn't suppose she could read. And we all
chewed on the fact that Ethel Lyme had said they. Ethel then flopped on the bed along with Dora, frothing and wailing like
a skinned wildcat. Presently both were speaking with tongues—that's what the faithful
call it when the gobbling sounds almost like words.
Dasi
Stiles had squeezed in along with the rest of us. When the girls were well
launched on that sad ecstasy, I'll Be damned if Dasi
wasn't down there prancing on all fours wagging her handsome big rump and
barking like a dog.
Father
Rupet tore over from the church, limping with his bad
knee. At his arrival those three maidens really sucked up their lungs and tried
for a record. I heard Ethel roaring: "Don't you dare touch me with that
thing, you beast, you monster! I already said I wouldn't tell—ooh, ooh, that hurts!" I was crowded into a corner; being tall I
didn't miss anything. Rudi was there, but didn't try to elbow forward; the
girls may not have seen him. And then—I don't know quite how it started, or who
asked the first question—presently the name Mam Shiller was zizzing around
the room like a captive hornet.
By
evening Mam Shiller was
secured in the town lock-up. We heard she was to be tried when the Ecclesiastical
Circuit Court arrived at Nupal in September. They
said it required two men to get the chain fastened to her leg.
At
the dairy, from the corner of his mouth as we were cleaning the milking stalls,
Rudi said: "Those bitches are just warming up. They didn't name Mam Shiller, they just picked it
up. I don't know why Dora hasn't named us."
Men
were nearby, pitching hay into the loft. I said in the same kind of voice:
"Could she be trying to scare us, hoping to get admitted?"
"Jasus-Abraham!" He thought about it. "Just
maybe. But I'm sorry for Mam Shiller. I'm sorry for her." I couldn't recall ever
hearing him say that about anyone else; but the devil was shining out of him
still, and that exhilaration.
"Could she be a witch,
Rudi?"
"Mam Shiller?" Again I'd said
something that made him think. "I don't think so, Sam. No, she's a victim.
We ought to do something for her." He thought some more, and laughed under
his breath. "Ayah, something to turn the bloody town
upside down." He was standing on the milking platform; for a fact,
that was the only thing that made him taller than me when he put his arm around
my shoulder, but I felt him taller. I was remembering who and what would be
occupying his body on Fourth of July Night and believing every bit of it.
"My good love, are you with me ? Sam?"
"What do you take me
for? Of course I'm with you."
Not smiling anymore, he
asked: "To the death?"
"Of
course, Rudi. ... To the death."
"Sam,
what happens if we're betrayed to the Gentiles?"
"Gentiles?"
He
was impatient, shaking me; he'd taught us that word and I'd forgotten.
"Gentiles means common folk, Sam. People like—oh,
Elder Meehan, or even Baron Reilla, or my own
crawling son of a bitch of a father." Rudi's father was a lawyer, bland and
clammy, a busy deacon of the Church. I may have been the only person who knew
how savagely Rudi hated him, for both masked their feelings in public very
well—for that matter the deacon himself probably didn't know the whole of it,
being so thickly concerned with his own righteousness that he may have seen
those around him as not much more than animated dolls. Nobody could have liked
rich and sanctimonious Deacon Zavier, nobody with any
sense or warm blood, but Rudi's loathing went beyond anything I could imagine
happening in my own insides. Rudi never spoke of his mother, that big sad-faced
woman who was thought by some to possess the second sight. The deacon had
remarried, a blowsy matron whom Rudi spoke of to me (and maybe not only to me)
as The Sow. "So what happens if we're betrayed? Come on, Sam, think! We
burn, don't we?"
Without
thinking I made the sign of the Wheel, Church-fashion. Rudi grabbed my wrist
and forced me to make the circle out from the body and in, the witch way,
instead of tracing it flat across the chest. You're supposed to make the witch
motion with a closed fist too, middle finger stuck out to look like a cock. His
eyes were probing at me unbearably, inches away. "But Rudi, there haven't
been any burnings for—oh, for years. Since before we was
born."
"Means nothing." He still had his arm around me. "Hide your big dumb head if you
got to." I could feel him using the contempt as a tool to push me around,
and I couldn't be angry. "I was going to ask you to help me spring Mam Shiller, for that's what I'm
going to do. But maybe you'd wish to be excused."
"I'm
with you," I said, feeling all torn inside. "But Jasus-Abraham,
Rudi, they got that lock-up guarded day and night."
His
eyes were spitting blue fire. "Buck Winters, night guard—if a flea goosed
him he'd run a mile. My good
Sam,
I know one or two things about prison guards. You take my father for
instance—he's sort of a prison guard, you might say, though too stupid to know
it. I know one thing about prison guards, that's for sure."
"All right—what?"
'"They are
mortal."
"Rudi! Rudi, you never would."
"Poor
little Sam!" said that dear miserable devil, and he lifted up on his toes
to kiss my cheek.
We got her free that same night, Rudi and I,
with no word about it to the coven. Some of them, he remarked, were still
mighty young, not to be counted on as much as he'd led them to believe when he
was speechmaking. Me?—I was just about old enough to know I was being flattered
by that confidence.
We
stole down to the lock-up wearing black cloth masks and tight caps to hide our
hair, after midnight when the town was in bed. Rudi had been watching the
lock-up for two nights, and knew the guard Buck Winters' habits to the last
yawn. The building was a small thing in a scrubby yard back of the town hall,
approached by an alley; they'd had no one in it for years but an occasional
tramp or drunk, and now no one but Mam
Shiller. All we had to do was wait
in the bushes near the back wall until Buck waddled out to take a leak. When he
was squared away at the wall Rudi slid out shadow-soft and snapped him with a
stone in a sock. You can kill a man easily with one of those, but we were
lucky, or else somehow Rudi knew just how hard to hit without finishing him.
Buck was tall as well as fat, but with not much muscle. I had the gag crammed
in his mouth and tied back of his thick neck before he finished collapsing. He
was already coming around by the time we had him blindfolded, legs and arms
trussed. Rudi told him to stop moaning or he'd get gut-sliced; he stopped it.
Then Rudi hissed in his ear: "We are of the Old Religion." A tremor
shook his whole carcass; he couldn't answer but he went on breathing. Rudi snatched
the key ring off his belt and we were inside.
There
was a cubbyhole office for the guard, a storeroom, and an -shaped corridor with
two cells, both empty. I carried the small lamp from the office for Rudi. She
was crouched on a foul heap of straw, chained to the wall, and poor soul, she
was naked. While Rudi was getting the cell door open she probably saw our
masks. She said; "I can't tell you anything. Don't hurt me anymore."
"Nay,
we're friends." And to me Rudi said: "Go find her clothes. Take the
lamp."
"O my lordagod!" she said. "O my good loves!"
"Nay, Mother, don't
talk now. We'll get you out."
"O
Jesus and Abraham! They've hurt me some, my good
loves. Will I have to walk far?"
As
I went to look for the clothes I heard him say: "Not far, Mother—nay, I
don't know, it might be far." I had never heard him call any other old
woman Mother, though it's a common thing in Katskil.
"You're not safe in Nupal," he
said—"ever, I guess."
Her
clothes weren't to be found, not in the office nor in a ghastly storeroom, where
I blundered into a heap of rusty tools dating from the old days that the Church
says need never come again—all we have to do is trust in the faith and pay the
taxes and the tithes. When I returned to the cell Rudi had unlocked her
leg-iron. He still wore his cap and mask, so I kept mine. "No clothes. Nowhere."
Rudi
was furious, but it was like him not to lash out at me or go looking where I'd
looked. Mam Shiller was
crying. "It's all right, boys—I won't try to find out who you are. I guess
you're the good angels—you got fresh young voices like boys—never mind, I won't
ask, I'll do anything you say. Is my man waiting for me? My Wat?"
That
was the tinker. I never knew a last name for him. Nobody had glimpsed him since
her arrest. "Gone," Rudi said. "He's no good."
"O
my lordagod, don't say that!—no, never mind, I expect
it's so, I never counted on him for nothing. A'n't anybody seeing to my goats,
my little hens? They won't tell me."
"The
town took them, Mam," I told her, talking soft
like Rudi through the bottom of my mask. She looked at me keenly as if she
might have recognized my voice, but I felt she'd never tell.
"The
town," she said—"oh, the town, their balls can rot off and drop in
the jakes, I won't cry. But boys, I can't travel without no
clothes. I'm not decent."
"Wait,"
he said, "sit calm." He jerked his head at me. We slipped outside and
skinned the clothes off Buck Winters and dressed him up again in the ropes. He
was wide awake now, eyes rolling, but he played it safe and chewed quiet on his
gag.
"All
right," she said, and chuckled. "They got a p'ison
smell of polis about 'em, but we can't be choosers.
It's my back hurts where they broke a stick onto me." She supported herself
on Rudi's shoulder while she struggled into the trousers. They were tight for
her in the leg but not in the rump, for old Buck had a spread bottom like a
lump of warm butter.
"Have
you friends outside of Nupal, Mam
Shiller?" Rudi was treating her like a lady and
she knew it. There was a big streak of gentleman in Rudi; I don't think he got
it from his father.
"Ah, by the last hear-tell I heard, my old father's still alive in Maplestock.
Used to say himself he was too mean to die. He'll be gone seventy, or
past."
"Go
home to him," says Rudi, gentle and mild. "He'll take you, won't he, Mam?"
Strength
was rising in her just from the taste of freedom, though she'd been miserably
beaten and likely half starved. "He'll take me," she said, "or
I'll sit howling on his doorstep. Look you, there's milk-and-egg money under a
stone in my garden if the town ha'n't smelled it out.
Wat never knew about it. If it's there it's yours. Under the second flat stone behind the rodidenders."
"No, you'll need that, we won't take it.
We'll see you safe up there, and then you better be off for Maplestock
across country, and fast. But don't risk the roads after sun-up, and wade
upstream a piece through Myler's Brook, in case they
go for dogs."
She
was crying and blessing us. We got her moving, and out past the naked guard.
She would have gone by him in the night dark, but Rudi stopped there. I could
feel an ugliness rising, and when I put my hand on his arm he was tight as a
drawn seven-foot bow, and breathing hard as if something hurt too much.
"This bag of crap here," he said—"remind
you of anybody?"
I
remembered how he had talked wild about his father being like a prison guard,
and I snatched hold of that frozen arm, my own strength surprising me. "No!" I said. "It's nothing but old Buck
Winters, and you know it. Come on—we got to help Mam Shiller get clear." I think it was anyone's guess for
a minute whether old Buck would live or die, but the moment crawled past and
Rudi was coming along with us.
We
saw Mam Shiller safe
through the spooky sleeping town, as far as her shanty. It had already taken
on that horrible haunted look that comes to any dwelling just because people
have stopped caring; we stumbled over trash in the yard that looters had left
there, and the shanty door was swinging wide and groaning under a little
breeze. She found her money safe, though, and then we saw her a short way on
the road to Maplestock, Rudi making her promise again
to take to the woods before sunrise, and wade through Myler's
Brook.
Maybe
that moment with the bound guard was the first time I had thought of Rudi in
words like "mad." And yet I loved him.
They made a wonder of it that grew every time
Buck Winters told the story—that is, eight or ten times a day. Rudi had not
only turned the town upside down, he'd shaken it, with just those few words
whispered to Buck about the Old Religion. According to Buck, he counted five witches, and they made him climb the
roof of the town hall, driving him with whips and pins. Given a week, good old
Buck would have worked in a trip around the moon. But another wonder crowded
us, at about the time people were getting tired of listening to Buck.
Two
mornings after we sprang Mam Shiller,
Dora Mallon was found strangled in an alley near the shanty where she had lived
with her parents; Ethel Lyme had disappeared. They had been last seen together,
the evening before, walking toward Main Street on the way to the church, where
Father Rupet was to hold a prayer meeting for the
guidance concerning their bewitchment and the prodigy of Mam
Shiller's escape. They would have had to pass the
opening of that alley.
Rumor
and speculation fed the town's thunderstorm of terror. My own storm was worse.
I lay awake all night after the discovery, maybe for fear that a nightmare
would show me the truth, but I thought I knew it anyway. Rudi never came to
work at the dairy that day, nor the next. Fourth of July Night was coming on,
and to me that meant other nightmares.
The
people did search for Ethel Lyme, but Nupal is a
small town in a pocket of heavily wooded hills, several thousand acres of them.
Search all the trails, gullies, thickets, bear dens? How?
The
majority were convinced that Mam Shiller
had murdered Dora, likely with supernatural help. Buck Winters, of course, was
a wholehearted spokesman for that party. By then I'm sure he devoutly believed
in his witches himself, all five of them. But some began remembering out loud
that bland-looking Ethel Lyme possessed large hands and strong fingers, good at
kneading bread dough. Those people also had it on firm authority that the
Devil, given entrance to the body of a victim who (knowingly or not) invites
him, can make that subject do just anything, even to murdering a close friend.
Or it might be, they said (anxious to preserve good feeling), that
Devil-occupied Ethel and Mam Shiller
were out there working together. The upshot of all this earnest thinking was
that nobody cared about scouring the woods even in a party of twenty with dogs.
After
the third day of the so-called search for her, Dasi
Stiles reported seeing Ethel Lyme chased by a big man with horns all the way to
the beach of the Hudson Sea, where she grew fins on her arms and escaped him
under water. Questioned eagerly by Father Rupet and
other experts, Dasi smiled in her sweetest empty manner
and said, why yes, sure, she dreamed it—thus making the public all the more
certain of the vision's truth. There is no means, Confucius said, of persuading
the human race not to believe whatever it chooses to.
Deacon
Zavier announced to his respectable friends and
clients: "You know, after all, there's got to be Something Out
There." Or maybe he said "Something Up
There." The views of a man with that kind of income are invariably sound.
And
speaking of Deacon Zavier, I learned on that third
day after the murder that the deacon had told Sudler's
Dairy Rudi wouldn't be coming to work anymore. He was going to stay home and
read law with his loving father, and go to the University at Nuber in the autumn. This made no sense to me whatever, for
Rudi hated the law as he did his father. Indeed I have never quite understood
why Rudi, almost twenty, detesting his father and stepmother, hadn't struck out
for himself long before. No opportunity to speak of in Nupal,
but all Katskil was available. He could have found
work anywhere and taken care of himself. What bound him? Not Jena Doren—I think girls to him were little more than creatures
to be used. Love along with the hate? He had it too soft there at the Zavier house, three carriages, a butler, and all that bit?
Oh, I do myself no good with these questions now, when Rudi has been dead for gding-on thirty-five years.
After
quitting work that third day I saw them walking together on Main Street, the
deacon marching as usual like a well-fed secretary of the Lord, Rudi slouching
half a pace behind. Rudi gave me a quick headshake, so I only waved to him from
across the street; the deacon didn't even nod—he had to keep his recognition uncon-taminated, for important people. I couldn't read
Rudi, in that glimpse. Captive? Change
of heart? Lying low? I couldn't read him at all.
In
Rudi's place Sudler hired Jon Bright. Jon was rather
big on muscle and short on brain, a nice kid. Like me he was a First Member of
the coven and full of wonder at all Rudi's doings. Jon confirmed what I had
already heard—none of our lot was getting through to
Rudi.
Jena Doren and Jo Makepeace went to the big house
trying to see Rudi and were turned away by the acid old butler: Mister Rudi was
busy with his law books and could not be disturbed, bang!
Jon
and I met with a few of the others on the 3rd of July, a fret session. Without
Rudi our courage softened; we might be dangerous witches, but nobody was about
to take on the Zavier establishment, certainly not
when the town was in a lather about Mam Shiller's escape, Dora's murder, Ethel Lyme's
disappearance. We agreed to keep the meeting date the following night, and
couldn't think beyond that. What we would do if Rudi didn't show we hadn't a
notion.
I
think we were all feeling—Jon and Adam Gantz and Jo
and Anna Hiels and I—that we had been following a
dream, maybe a childish one, into a country of experience where dreams of that
kind can't live. Or we had worn out our old fantasies and needed new.
Dora
Mallon's body had been publicly viewed at the parlor of the Nupal
Mourners' Guild. Father Rupet fancied himself a
scholar of Old-Time lore—he called it Lost Knowledge and I think he sometimes
tiptoed a little bit close to heresy—and somewhere he had happened on the
legend that if a murderer approached the corpse of his victim the dead flesh
would betray him —wounds would open and bleed, and so on. Nothing like that
happened. But we all did file past the bier, practically everyone in Nupal who could walk, including Rudi in his father's
company. We all saw the green-purple bruises on Dora's young throat, and the
terrible mouth. And we of the coven wanted out.
The Fourth of July Night arrived in weeping
darkness, with black overcast and flurries of rain. The time of our
appointment was midnight, and we all came there, all twelve of us, sneaking out
of our houses and groping through the wet woods. Adam Ganz
told me nobody had seen Rudi all day. Adam had brought a pail of coals, so we
started a fire under the tree-cover in spite of the occasional drizzle. It
reddened the clearing and showed us grimacing faces and lewd designs in the
ancient bark of Mafairson's Oak, but we got little
warmth from it because of a coldness inside us. We
talked some, hush-voiced. Adam Ganz tended the fire,
and Jo kept close to him for comfort. My mother, who was a cure-woman from
Tappan, had taught me a little about telling time from the moon—any fool can
read it from the sun—and I had passed on the tricks of it to Rudi. I knew it
was drawing on close to midnight; if Rudi was anywhere about he would know it
too. The actual moment would be told to us by the beautiful voice of Nupal's town bell two miles away across the pastures and
the woods.
"He
won't come," said Anna Hiels. "His Da's got him hog-tied. It's all crap anyway." She
wouldn't have said that, or thought it, two days earlier.
"Maharba!" said Jena Doren,
who never forgot any of the words that Rudi had taught her. "You think
Deacon Zavier's got any power to stop Lucifer if the
god is a-mind to—"
"Hush!"
said Jon Bright. He had the sharpest hearing of any of us, but soon we all
heard it, a dreadful small whimpering sound from deeper in the woods, like a
hurt cat, or a child trying not to snuffle. It came closer by slow intervals.
We couldn't speak or think; we were just suffering ears, and once or twice we
heard a rustling and shifting of underbrush. We had turned our eyes away from
our fire. We tried to pierce the wet forest blackness, and we searched for I
don't know what—gold-green eyes, red eyes maybe, set high above ground and
approaching like certain damnation. But we found nothing except the dark and
the timorous-fluttering shadows of our own small fire. The whimpering ceased,
and the noises of motion too, for the longest silence I have ever endured.
Then the bell. Twelve clear strokes, human and brave, reaching us through the rainy
night—but they were also the signal for Lucifer to come to us; and he was
coming.
He
parted the bushes and stepped forth monstrous toward our fire, his masked head
lifting high the horns, black and inward-pointing, and he led a victim slowly
to the Stone by a cowhide rope. His shoulders bulked huge and shaggy, and his
hairy loins sprouted a prodigious phallus that glinted in the firelight now
dead white, now scarlet.
Painted wood, of course. I knew that. I knew it was Rudi, just Rudi. I knew the horror on his
head was nothing but a pair of woods-buffalo horns, likely, some wall-trophy of
his father's strapped clumsily in place, and the shag at his shoulders and hips
was simply hacked off from a buffalo rug, and the priapus
probably carved and painted by himself—poor Rudi was
never very good with his hands. I knew all that, and so did most of the others.
Why, we knew it and we didn't know it. Proving that an image is a fraud will
not necessarily convince the credulous that the original of the likeness does
not exist, and in this they follow a fair logic.
Lucifer's
victim was Ethel Lyme, what was left of her after three days of captivity and
isolation without food or drink. We learned afterward that she had spent that
time tied and gagged in Mam Shiller's
shanty where no one dared go after Mam Shiller's supernatural liberation. There Ethel had stayed
in misery, probably remembering the sight of her friend's murder, until
Lucifer
came horned and masked and shaggy to lead her to the Stone of Sacrifice. As for
Lucifer, why, he had been detained at home or he might not have left her so,
detained to read law books until he managed his escape on the Fourth of July
Night. Did Luficer's father suspect who he was?—it's
possible. I never held any conversation with Deacon Zavier,
never desired any.
Ethel's wits were totally confused, gone with
shock. She was so dirty and tear-stained, the remnant of her dress so ruined,
that without the birthmark we might not even have recognized her—pinched too,
somehow fallen in on herself. She was reduced to the mindless whimpering we had
heard, and she lurched ahead obediently as Lucifer tugged the rope that was
tied around her hands.
Jo Makepeace said: "No!" He ran to Ethel and struggled at the cowhide
binding her hands. The god Lucifer roared at him in amazed fury and swung his
black sharp horns, and I think little Jo, fighting the
cowhide rope with no help from witless Ethel, was not even aware of it. He knew
well enough who and what Lucifer was, by then.
I can't guess how much further we might have
let it go, but for Jo Makepeace. As it was, his single-handed act of honest
outrage got through to us, shamed us out of witchcraft for good. Whatever
meanness or foolish wickedness we might stumble into in later times, it
wouldn't be that. And then—no blame to Jo, who took no part in it—we went too
far the other way in reaction: savages we were, and one brave kid couldn't
change that.
The
story's really over. I'll write the end as quickly as I can.
Adam Ganz snatched
the other end of the rope out of Lucifer's grasp and shouted to us: "Hell,
it's nothing but
Rudi
dressed up! Who's afraid of him?" I heard Jo say, clear and urgent:
"Ethel, Ethel! Wake up! We're going to take you home." Then he and
Adam were hurrying away with her—as they passed beyond the firelight I saw Adam
scoop her up in his arms—and paying no heed to us, and certainly none to the
mighty god Lucifer, who just stood there.
Anna
Hiels cried: "He killed
Dora Mallon! Look you, who else?"
And someone else yelled: "Stone him! Stone him!"
Someone
else?—why it was Jena Doren who screamed that, over
and over. And still I think that in her own way she never did stop loving him:
it was only the other side of the mirror. Maybe I still loved him too, even
knowing what he had done to Dora Mallon, what he had done and would have done
to Ethel Lyme. And I know (in my age, here in the cellars) that it is a great
human folly to love the image, the aura of glamor
that may hang about someone, instead of searching for the human self that may
be someone altogether different from the dream.
Jena
Doren yelled that; Piet Horver
was the first to obey her, sweeping up a rock in his big fist and howling:
"This in Christ's name! This for a murderer! This in
Abraham's name!"
He hurled it true. It struck and knocked away
the horns of Lucifer, who was Lucifer no more but only terrified Rudi, who
couldn't understand what had happened, who called urgent things to us that our
shouting drowned, and who then made the fearful mistake of running.
There
were stones in all our hands. I saw Jena's arm swing. Hate and love were in us.
Most of all there was fear, finding its voice in Jena's screaming. Rudi was
lost, he was down.
I try to think there was love in me, or at
least pity along with my panic terror, my resentment, my mindless need to make
an end, when the stone left my own hand. For he saw me throw it, and after that
blow he moved no longer.
Piet
Horver became a priest, a good one I suppose, a
missionary to the Salloren savages of the north country. Ethel won back her wits in a year or so, such
as they were, and married a farmer. Jena married too—I think; it would have
been after I left Nupal. Dear Jo Makepeace—ah, he
grew up awhile, and went to the University, and became a poet, and died young.
Pamela Sargent and George Zebrowski
DARKNESS
OF DAY
JENNA
moved through the forest soundlessly, leaning forward from the waist, traveling
swiftly—avoiding the twigs that might snap under her feet and betray her
presence. The morning air was cool and moist on her face.
When
she reached the top of the small hill, she paused. She had seen a metallic
glitter among the trees below. If she were not alone, she would have doubled
back and attacked the creature by now. But it was wiser to avoid being seen.
The
ground under her feet was still hard, but would soon be muddy from the spring
rains. She was glad winter was over. Jenna spent winters with her tribe,
exchanging maps of trails scrawled on pieces of bark for food and shelter. This
winter had been better than most. She had shown her people a field of wild
wheat, and had led scouts to a small river where deer often drank. Food had
been plentiful and only two children had died. But she had left as soon as the
air had grown warmer, not liking to stay in the village longer than necessary.
Jenna was a source of shame to her mother.
When she had reached thirteen summers, she had been married to Woka, the best hunter among her people. But after five
summers of marriage, Jenna remained childless. So she had left him, and Woka took a new wife.
After
that there had been no reason to stay in the village through the year. Jenna's
presence only reminded people of her shame and made it difficult for her
sisters to find husbands. Her past friends, now busy raising their own
children, were uneasy in her presence, as if fearful that her sterility would
somehow pass to them. There were so few humans. Every life was precious, and
her people were wary of even the most distant dangers.
So
Jenna had left, preferring her solitary life in the woods and the company of
her own thoughts, which sometimes seemed unfamiliar and strange even to her.
She returned only in winter to trade her knowledge for food and temporary
shelter. Once she had felt shame before her people, but now she was happy with
her life. She was free to roam and discover new things.
She
still sensed the presence of the other in the forest. It was no longer behind
her, but somewhere to her right and moving ahead of her. Her heart began to
beat quickly. She took a deep breath and started to move back down the hill.
Then she began to run. The sense of danger hammered at her mind and pushed her
past the trees.
But
even as she ran, she was curious about the being who was trailing her. She
always thought of them as beings like herself, and this thought still surprised
her. Her father once told her that the metal beings were the guardians of men,
and that they would strike down those who repeated the errors of the Old Ones.
Those who loved machines and tried to escape the ways of men would be punished.
Most of the village believed this. But Jenna had been told many things that
were not true, and she knew other tribes thought differently.
She
ran down the hillside and splashed across the thawing stream! The water was
cold and fresh. Chunks of ice floated downstream. She stumbled up the other
side and ran for the trees. By now, she thought, her stalker should be
confused. By doubling back and crossing the stream, she could follow her
previous direction, but parallel to and behind her pursuer.
She
went forward slowly, listening to all the sounds of the forest awakening from
winter. Feeling a little more secure now, she wondered about the metal ones
again. She knew that men had been killed by them. Yet once
she had seen one shoot an animal, which soon after had awakened and walked
around as if nothing had happened. She had heard stories of brave men
who mocked the old stories and attacked the metal people in order to obtain their
many parts for use in fashioning hunting tools and other implements. These
would very often be exchanged for food and clothing with other tribes. Her
husband Woka once possessed such a part, which he had
used as a knife. He had been very proud of it until he lost it in the snow. She
had not been permitted to mention it until the day she left him, or as he put
it, the day he put her aside.
Yet
the metal people only fought in self-defense, and otherwise did not seem to pay
attention to the few tribes living in the forests. She had never heard of a
metal one hunting one of her people. Not ever.
But
if that was all true, then why was a metal one tracking her now? She stopped
and listened. She could not sense him, but her heart started to beat faster
again. A shiver went up her spine.
She spun around suddenly and saw him staring
at her with his wide inhuman eyes. He had tricked her! He had done the same
thing that she had. The weapon in his hand was raised, but he seemed to
hesitate.
She
darted to her right. She heard the weapon fire at the same time, and something
entered her side through her deerskin shirt. She fell to the ground. As she
lost consciousness, she saw the metal one coming closer. . . .
She had a dim memory of being carried. A
vague image of the inhuman face seemed to swim in her mind. A series of short
clicking sounds brought her to consciousness. Gradually she opened her eyes.
He
was standing over her. His sturdy metal torso was perched on two slender
silvery legs. His eyes were glassy surfaces, covering almost the entire top
half of his head. And he was directing them at her. She started to scream, but
he took a few steps backward and gestured at her. Then his long arms fell to
his sides and he stood perfectly still.
She
raised herself on one elbow and saw that she was lying on the floor of a room.
On one wall there were five strange-looking nooks with open hatches. Otherwise
the room was gray-walled and featureless. There was a shelf that ran the length
of one wall, but there was nothing on it except the weapon which only a short
time ago had been fired at her.
The
room had one large window and a few smaller ones on each wall. Outside, the
world was still the same, a countryside emerging from winter. The sun was
climbing higher in the sky. Soon it would be midday, and the heat would help
the snow melt to fill the rivers and streams running south to the sea. In the
hillside shadows some of the snow would remain almost till summer, holding out
to the last.
Jenna sat up, and still the metallic figure
did not move. Slowly she stood up and felt her side. There was no pain where
the thing had entered her body. It had only made her sleep.
She
faced the metal creature. Suddenly he started clicking again and gesturing at
her with his arms. There was something pathetic about the gestures. Jenna
thought of the creature as a "he," but now the metal being seemed
like a mother trying to explain something to a wayward child. She shook her
head and opened her hands, wondering if the thing would understand.
The
clicking grew more rapid. The metallic figure moved toward her. She stepped
back, looking around frantically for a door.
Suddenly
she ran past him toward the other wall. A portion of it slid back and she felt
the air from outside rush in. She was outside in a moment, running across soft
melting snow, the sun in her face.
She
turned her head briefly and saw the gleam of the metal one as he raised his
weapon and fired. Again something entered her body and she was drawn down into
darkness. . . .
Ropes bound her when she regained
consciousness. Her captor was kneeling over her, clicking insistently.
"What
do you want?" she cried at the creature in frustration.
The
clicking stopped. The creature stood up and regarded her with empty glassy
eyes.
"I'm
not an animal. I can speak," she said. "All you seem able to do is
click like a fool. Our children make better sounds." She spat on the floor
near his feet. "Let me go!"
There was no clicking this time. Somehow she felt that he was
embarrassed by her words, just as she was puzzled by him. Obviously he had
tied
her up only to keep her from getting away. If he had wanted, he could have
killed her by now or taken her as a captive to his people. He was alone, just
as she was. Perhaps he was like her, tolerated by his people but forever
unaccepted.
He
had been trying to speak to her, but his words and way of speech were
different. It was strange to think of him in the way she would about another
human being. But there was something manlike and intelligent inside that metal
body. For a moment she wondered if it might not be a man wearing a strange
outer garment for protection, but she rejected the thought. A man would have
spoken as she did.
He
left her bound all afternoon. He stood and watched her, listened to her speak
and never once replied with anything more than a series of clicks. He clicked
slowly, he clicked rapidly, but nothing made any sense to Jenna.
Outside,
the progress of spring was halted by the coming night. The pine trees cast
solid shadows across the refrozen snow. Stars began to appear in the darkening
day; cold incandescent points burning in a realm beyond all understanding;
lanterns hung by giant beings in some place beyond the world. She imagined
dark human shapes coming up to the windows and breaking in to rescue her.
The
man-without-flesh suddenly walked up to one of the nooks in the wall, slid
inside and shut the hatch after himself.
She
was alone, helpless in the ropes that bound her. She tried to imagine what the
nooks could be for. Were they for sleep, or some kind of rest? A wolf howled
outside, and she feared that it would come close to the door which opened by
itself, and it would let the animal in.
But
in a moment the hatch in the nook opened and the metal one slid out, slowly, almost
as if he had been changed somehow. He came up to her and started to loosen the
ropes. He was silent as he worked.
"Once
... did .. . you ... rule... the world?" he asked. She
recognized the words, but they were spoken in a way that reminded her of the
clicking. They seemed to whir and clatter as the metal one uttered them.
"I . . . learned . . . from . . . your sounds . . . and my memory vault.. . and from certain remains ...
of information in the mother computer of Central Agency." He was getting
better even as he spoke, she noted. "But . . . you must tell me words when
I need. . . ."
When
the ropes were off, she stood up. "My name is Jenna," she said,
pointing to herself.
". . . Suranov," he replied, ". . . robot. . . ."
The
twinges of liking she had felt for the robot grew stronger in her mind.
"There are stories," she went on, "that metal men were made by
men of flesh, and men of flesh were made by the god of nature, against whom we
sinned. And we were humbled."
"Then
... we are brothers . . .
sisters," Suranov said, "and we should help
you. The old superstitions are false. Men and robot . . . are minds ... in different shapes."
"What did you do in
the hole?"
"Studying . . . how to make your sounds. It has taken
much research and study. My years have been troubled
by thought... of man." He
paused. "It is the challenge
of within . . . knowledge of the past which mother-
computers evade, and Central Agency is fragments
on___ "
She
did not understand what he was saying, but it seemed to make some kind of
sense. He was referring to his kind, to his home and such matters. It was like
what her tribe sometimes said when metal creatures were spoken about around the
night fires.
She
sat down on the floor and Suranov came near. His legs
folded under his broad torso and he squatted next to her. The metal face seemed
almost to hold a look of curiosity.
"I
suffer for this," Suranov said without pausing.
"Others of the robots no longer see me. I have lost . . . promotion. I am
alone with my people."
"Alone?"
"I... travel alone. I am outside other
robots. I seek ... truths of human
beings. I found only pieces. The others are . . . erased."
Jenna
stared at him. Then he was one like her, apart from his tribe. He was closer to
her than the others of her kind, who banded together in fear.
"We
must talk . . . discover," said the robot. "You . . . spring up
elsewhere when killed ... in new
bodies?"
"No," Jenna said,
puzzled. It was a curious question.
"I
thought not. It is not a rational idea. If men were such as our superstitions
say, then the universe would not be rational...
in any way. And you die . . . not only from wooden weapons, but in many
ways?"
She
nodded. Her eyes strayed from him for a moment to the largest window, which
was behind the squatting Suranov.
There
was a face there. A human face, toothless, grinning at her.
She screamed.
The
door slid open and a band of warriors rushed into the lodge. Before Suranov could stand up they were upon him. As she watched,
one man raised an axe. It struck Suranov's back,
toppling him across the floor.
There
were six warriors. She did not recognize any of them. They were not from her
tribe, but of the roving bands who went out in the
spring in search of women and spoils. Her village had killed a few from a band
such as this many summers ago.
She
watched them spreadeagle the metal one on the floor.
One of the men came up to her. It was the one who had leered at her through the
window.
"You were with the
metal demon—what is he to you?"
And
then she realized that Suranov had been distracted
by her, that otherwise he might have noticed the danger and could have closed
the door for the night.
"Suranov!"
she cried, "Suranov, I'm sorry."
The
man hit her across the face, knocking her to the ground. She grabbed at his
legs, bringing him to the floor next to her. She smashed his nose with her
hand, driving bone splinters into his brain. The brute was dead.
She
got up and moved toward Suranov. But before she could
get near, two men grabbed her and started to tie her up with the ropes on the
floor.
Jenna
watched as they clubbed the helpless robot into immobility. After the two men
tied her securely, they rejoined their companions.
First
they took off Suranov's legs, then his arms. And yet
he still seemed to turn his head. She could hear a few clicking sounds. Then
they broke his eyes, tore open his torso, and opened his head, breaking the ringlike cables near what had been his upper torso. By the
time they finished, only the torn torso was left.
She
started to cry. There had been light inside those eyes, someone had lived in
that ruined container on the floor, a person, a being of a kind she had never
known before. If the legends were true, and men had created these creatures,
then they were
the guardians of the world,
the custodians of all that man had lost. It would have been good for her to
know them better. They might have gone back together, to her people and to his.
Perhaps something new might have come into the world as a result.
Now
Suranov would become . . . scrap to be used for
tools.
She
mourned him now, the metal man who, like her, had roamed alone.
Suddenly
the warriors were laughing at her, making fun of her tears. They spoke of what
a fine catch she was and what they would do to her later. And for the first
time in her life she began to despise her own kind, for the beasts they were.
Later, she was sure, she would escape. She would have to. The men would grow
careless in guarding her.
But
she knew that she would never be able to regard the world in the same way
again, not after speaking with Suranov ... gentle, curious, childlike Suranov. His kind did not kill. Suranov
had wanted to know, and he had died at the moment of his success.
She
knew what she would have to do. She would search, until another meeting like
this one became possible. Suranov's work must not be
lost. Then perhaps one day men would rise to something better in the world,
helped by their brothers the robots.
But
as she looked at the killers arguing over the pieces of the dead robot on the
floor, all the horror and sadness of what she had seen this spring overwhelmed
her. She closed her tear-filled eyes, hoping, even though she knew better, that
she might die, if only for a short time.