Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “Stop it!” shrilled Moira. “Stop struggling!” Obediently he relaxed. His fall ended with a bump, on a twilit road sloping gently downward as far as the eye could see. There was a vague, rumbling noise underfoot, as if there were heavy carts on the road.

  He looked up along the road. Something was coming, and it was brutally big. Legless, it rolled along on iron wheels, coming at him. The thing was a flattened ovoid of dark, sharkish grey, and like a shark it had a gruesome, toothy slit of mouth. Growing bigger and bigger, it thundered down the road as he watched, petrified, his own mouth open in childish alarm.

  A shrill scream from his pocket brought him to. “Jump, you dummy!” shrieked Moira. “Jump!” He leaped into the air as the thing, its triangular mouth snapping savagely, teeth clashing, thundered beneath him.

  He watched it go on down the road, still cold with terror.

  “Can it come back?” he asked.

  “Of course not,” said Moira. “Could you roll up-hill?”

  “You’re right,” he said. “Quite right. But what do we do now?” He mopped his brow again.

  “Look,” said the little creature kindly. “I know how you feel, but don’t worry. You’re doing a lot better than you think you are. We’ll be out of this in a minute, if you don’t break down.” She looked sharply into his face.

  “Maybe I won’t,” he said. “I’m not making promises, the way I feel. “What—what in Hades—?”

  He—they—were snatched up by a gigantic wind and were sucked through the air like flies in an air-conditioning plant.

  “Close your eyes,” said Moira. “Close them tight and think of something—anything—except what’s going to happen to you. Because if you think of something else it won’t happen.”

  Almarish squeezed his eyes tight shut as a thunderous droning noise filled his ears. “Ex sub one sub two,” he gabbled, “equals ei square plus two ei plus the square root of bee plus and minus ei square minus two ei bee over two ei.” The droning roar was louder; he jammed his thumbs into his ears.

  He felt a hideous impulse to open his eyes. Little, stinging particles of dusk struck against his neck.

  Flying through the air, turning-over and over, the droning roar became one continual crash that battered against his body with physical force. There was one indescribable, utterly, incomparably violent noise that nearly blew his brain out like an overload of electricity. Then things became more or less quiet, and he tumbled to a marshy sort of ground.

  “All clear?” he asked, without opening his eyes.

  “Yes,” said Moira. “You were magnificent.”

  He lifted his lids warily and saw that he sat on a stretch of forest sward. Looking behind him—

  “My God!” he screamed. “Did we go through that?”

  “Yes,” said Moira. “It’s a ghost—unless you’re afraid of it, it can’t hurt you.”

  Behind them the thousand-foot blades of a monstrous electric fan swirled brilliantly at several hundred r.p.s. The noise reached them in a softening blur of sound. Gently it faded away.

  Almarish of Ellil leaned back quietly.

  “The big calf!” muttered Moira. “Now he faints on me!”

  CHAPTER V

  “NOW,” said Almarish, “what about this happy animal?”

  “Le Bete Joyeux?” asked the little creature.

  “If that’s what its name is. Why this damned nonsense about tears?”

  “It’s a curse,” said Moira grimly. “A very terrible curse.”

  “Then it’ll keep. Who’s in there?” He pointed to a stony hut that blocked the barely defined trail they were following. Moira shaded her tiny eyes and wrinkled her brow as she stared. “I don’t know,” she admitted at last. “It’s something new.” Almarish prepared to detour. The stone door slid open. Out looked a wrinkled, weazened face, horn-rimmed spectacles slid down over the nose. It was whiskered, but not as resplendency as Almarish, whose imposing mattress spread from his chin to his waist. And the beard straggling from the face was not the rich mahogany hue of the sorcerer but a dirty white, streaked with grey and soup-stains.

  “Hello,” said Almarish amiably, getting his fingers around the invincible dirk.

  “Beaver!” shrilled the old man, pointing a dirty-yellow, quavering, derisive finger at Almarish. Then he lit a cigarette with a big, apparently home-made match and puffed nervously.

  “Is there anything,” inquired the sorcerer, “we can do for you? Otherwise we’d like to be on our way.”

  “We?” shrilled the old man.

  Almarish realized that Moira had retreated into his pocket again. “I mean I,” he said hastily. “I was a king once—you get in the habit.”

  “Come in,” said the old man quaveringly. By dint of extraordinarily hard puffing he had already smoked down the cigarette to his yellowed teeth. Carefully he lit another from its butt.

  Almarish did not want to come in. At least he had not wanted to, but there was growing in his mind the conviction that this was a very nice old man, and that it would be a right and proper thing to go in. That happy animal nonsense could wait. Hospitality was hospitality.

  He went in and saw an utterly revolting interior, littered with the big, clumsy matches and cigarette butts smoked down to eighth-inches and stamped out. The reek of nicotine filled the air; ash-trays deep as water-buckets overflowed everywhere onto the floor.

  “Perhaps,” said the sorcerer, “we’d better introduce ourselves. I’m Almarish, formerly of Ellil.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” shrilled the ancient. Already he was chain-smoking his third cigarette. “My name’s Hopper. I’m a geasan.”

  “What?”

  “Geasan—layer-on of geases. A geas is an injunction which can’t be disobeyed. Sit down.”

  Almarish felt suddenly that it was about time he took a little rest. His feet were tired. “Thanks,” he said, sitting in a pile of ashes and burned matches. “But I don’t believe that business about you being able to command people.”

  The geasan started his sixth cigarette and cackled shrilly. “You’ll see. Young man, I want that beard of yours. My mattress needs restuffing. You’ll let me have it, of course.”

  “Of course,” said Almarish. Anything at all for a nice old man like this, he thought. But that business about geases was too silly for words.

  “And I may take your head with it. You won’t object.”

  “Why, no,” said the sorcerer. What in Hades was the point of living anyway?

  Lighting his tenth cigarette from the butt of the ninth, the geasan took down from the wall a gigantic razor.

  A tiny head peeked over the top of the sorcerer’s pocket.

  “Won’t you,” said a little voice, “introduce me, Almarish, to your handsome friend?”

  The eleventh cigarette dropped from the lips of the ancient as Almarish brought out Moira and she pirouetted on his palm. She cast a meaningful glance at the geasan. “Almarish is such a boor,” she declared. “Not one bit like some men . . .”

  “IT WAS THE cigarettes that gave him his power, of course,” decided the sorcerer as he climbed the rocky bluff.

  “My size,” purred Moira, “only a little taller, of course. Women like that.” She began to snore daintily in his pocket.

  Almarish heaved himself over the top of the bluff, found himself on a stony plane or plateau scattered with tumbled rocks.

  “Vials, sir?” demanded a voice next to his ear.

  “Ugh!” he grunted, rapidly sidestepping. “Where are you?”

  “Right here.” Almarish stared. “No—here.” Still he could see nothing.

  “What was that about vials?” he asked, fingering the dirk.

  Something took shape in the air, before his eyes. He picked it out of space and inspected the thing. It was a delicate bottle holding only a few drops, now empty. Golden wires ran through the glass to form a pattern suggestive of murder and sudden death.

  “How much?” he asked.

  “That
ring?” suggested the voice. Almarish felt his hand being taken and one of his rings being twisted off.

  “Okay,” he said. “It’s yours.”

  “Thanks ever so much,” replied the voice gratefully. “Miss Megaera will love it.”

  “Keep away from those Eumenides, boy,” Almarish warned. “They’re tricky sluts.”

  “I’ll thank you to mind your own business, sir,” snapped the voice. It began to whistle an air, which trailed away into the distance.

  From behind one of the great, tumbled cairns of rock slid, with a colossal clashing of scales, a monster.

  “AH, THERE,” said the monster.

  Almarish surveyed it carefully. The thing was a metallic cross amongst the octopus, scorpion, flying dragon, tortoise, ape and toad families. Its middle face smiled amiably, almost condescendingly, down on the sorcerer.

  “You the Bete Joyeux?” asked Almarish.

  “See here,” said the monster, snorting a bit, and dribbling lava from a corner of its mouth. “See here—I’ve been called many things, some unprintable, but that’s a new one. What’s it mean?”

  “Happy animal, I think,” said Almarish.

  “Then I probably am,” said the monster. It chuckled. “Now what do you want?”

  “See this vial? It has to be filled with your tears.”

  “So what?” asked the monster, scratching itself.

  “Will you weep for me?”

  “Out of sheer perversity, no. Shall we fight now?”

  “I suppose so,” said Almarish, heavy-hearted. “There’s only one other way to get your tears that I can think of. Put up your dukes, chum.”

  The monster squared off slowly. It didn’t move like a fighter; it seemed to rely on static fire-power, like a battletank. It reached out a tentacle whose end opened slowly into a steaming nozzle. Almarish snapped away as a squirt of sulfurous matter gushed from the tip.

  With a lively blow the sorcerer slashed off the tentacle, which scuttled for shelter. The monster proper let out a yell of pain. One of its lionlike paws slapped down and sidewise at Almarish; he stood his ground and let the thing run into the dirk its full length, then jumped inside the thing’s guard and scaled its shoulder.

  “No fair!” squalled the monster.

  He replied with a slash that took off an ear. The creature scratched frantically for him, but he easily eluded the clumsy nails that raked past its hide. As he danced over the skin, stabbing and slashing more like a plowman than a warrior, the nails did fully as much damage as he did. Suddenly, treacherously, the monster rolled over.

  Almarish birled it like a log in a pond, harrowing up its exposed belly as it lay on its back.

  Back on its feet again the thing was still suddenly. The sorcerer, catching his breath, began to worry. The squawking pants that had been its inhale and exhale had stopped. But it wasn’t dead, he knew. The thing was holding its breath. But why was it doing that?

  The temperature of the skin began to rise, sharply. So, thought Almarish, it was trying to smoke him off by containing all its heat! He scrambled down over its forehead. The nostril-flaps were tight shut. Seemingly it breathed only by its middle head, the one he was exploring.

  His heels were smoking, and the air was growing superheated. Something had to be done, but good and quick.

  With a muttered prayer Almarish balanced the dirk in his hand and flung it with every ounce of his amazing brawn. Then, not waiting to see, he jumped down and ran frantically to the nearest rock. He dodged behind it and watched.

  The dirk had struck home. The nostril-flaps of the monster had been pinned shut. He chuckled richly to himself as the thing clumsily pawed at its nose. The metallic skin was beginning to glow red-hot, then white.

  He ducked behind the rock, huddled close to it as he saw the first faint hair-line of weakness on the creature’s glowing hide.

  Crash! It exploded like a thunderclap. Parts whizzed past the rock like bullets, bounced and skidded along the ground fusing rocks as they momentarily touched.

  Almarish looked up at last. Le Bete Joyeux was scattered over most of the plateau.

  ALMARISH found the head at last. It had cooled down considerably; he fervently hoped that it had not dried out. With the handle of his dirk he pried up the eyelid and began a delicate operation.

  Finally the dead-white sac was in his hands. Unstoppering the vial, he carefully milked the tear-gland into it.

  “Moira,” he said gently, shaking her.

  “You ox!” she was awake in a moment, ill-tempered as ever. “What is it now?”

  “Your vial,” he said, placing it on his palm beside her.

  “Well, set it down on the ground. Me too.” He watched as she tugged off the stopper and plunged her face into the crystal-clear liquid.

  Then, abruptly, he gasped. “Here,” he said, averting his eyes. “Take my cloak.”

  “Thanks,” said the tall young lady with a smile. “I didn’t think, for the moment, that my clothes wouldn’t grow when I did.”

  “Now—would you care to begin at the beginning?”

  “Certainly. Moira O’Donnel’s my name. Born in Dublin. Located in Antrim at the age of twenty-five, when I had the ill-luck to antagonize a warlock named McGinty. He shrank me and gave me a beastly temper, then, because I kept plaguing him, banished me to these unreal parts.

  “He was hipped on the Irish literary renaissance—Yeats, AE, Joyce, Shaw and the rest. So he put a tag on the curse that he found in one of Lord Dunsany’s stories, about the tears of le Bete Joyeux. In the story it was ‘the gladsome beast’, and Mac’s French was always weak.

  “What magic I know I picked up by eavesdropping. You can’t help learning things knocking around the planes, I guess. There were lots of bits that I filed away because I couldn’t use them until I achieved full stature again. And now, Almarish, they’re all yours. I’m very grateful to you.”

  He stared into her level green eyes. “Think you could get us back to Ellil?”

  “Like that!” she snapped her fingers.

  “Good. Those rats—Pike and the rest—caught me unawares, but I can raise an army anywhere on a week’s notice and take over again.”

  “I knew you could do it. I’m with you Almarish, Packer, or whatever your name is.”

  Diffidently he said: “Moira, you grew very dear to me as you used to snore away in my pocket.”

  “I don’t snore!” she declared.

  “Anyway—you can pick whichever name you like. It’s yours if you’ll have it.”

  After a little while she said, smiling into his eyes, “My size. Only a little taller, of course.”

  Arm-in-arm they walked across the grim, rocky plateau under the three pale moons that shifted in their stately drill.

  The Worlds of Guru

  “Teach me the word,” I said, “the Word that will give me power.” A strikingly different weird tale.

  YESTERDAY, WHEN I was going to meet Guru in the woods a man stopped me and said: “Child, what are you doing out at one in the morning? Does your mother know where you are? How old are you, walking around this late?”

  I looked at him, and saw that he was white-haired, so I laughed. Old men never see; in fact men hardly see at all. Sometimes young women see part, but men rarely ever see at all. “I’m twelve on my next birthday,” I said. And then, because I would not let him live to tell people, I said, “and I’m out this late to see Guru.”

  “Guru?” he asked. “Who is Guru? Some foreigner, I suppose? Bad business mixing with foreigners, young fellow. Who is Guru?”

  So I told him who Guru was, and just as he began talking about cheap magazines and fairy-tales I said one of the words that Guru taught me and he stopped talking. Because he was an old man and his joints were stiff he didn’t crumple up but fell in one piece, hitting his head on the stone. Then I went on.

  EVEN THOUGH I’m going to be only twelve in my next birthday I know many things that old people don’t. And I remember things that
other boys can’t. I remember being born out of darkness, and I remember the noises that people made about me. Then when I was two months old I began to understand that the noises meant things like the things that were going on inside my head. I found out that I could make the noises too, and everybody was very much surprised. “Talking!” they said, again and again. “And so very young! Clara, what do you make of it?” Clara was my mother.

  And Clara would say: “I’m sure I don’t know. There never was any genius in my family, and I’m sure there was none in Joe’s.” Joe was my father.

  Once Clara showed me a man I had never seen before, and told me that he was a reporter—that he wrote things in newspapers. The reporter tried to talk to me as if I were an ordinary baby, I didn’t even answer him, but just kept looking at him until his eyes fell and he went away. Later Clara scolded me and read me a little piece in the reporter’s newspaper that was supposed to be funny—about the reporter asking me very complicated questions and me answering with baby-noises. It was not true, of course. I didn’t say a word to the reporter, and he didn’t ask me even one of the questions.

  I heard her read the little piece, but while I listened I was watching the slug crawling on the wall. When Clara was finished I asked her: “What is that grey thing?”

  She looked where I pointed, but couldn’t see it. “What grey thing, Peter?” she asked. I had her call me by my whole name, Peter, instead of anything silly like Petey. “What grey thing?”

  “It’s as big as your hand, Clara, but soft. I don’t think it has any bones at all. It’s crawling up, but I don’t see any face on the topwards side. And there aren’t any legs.”

  I think she was worried, but she tried to baby me by putting her hand on the wall and trying to find out where it was. I called out whether she was right or left of the thing. Finally she put her hand right through the slug. And then I realized that “she really couldn’t see it, and didn’t believe it was there. I stopped talking about it then and only asked her a few days later: “Clara, what do you call a thing which one person can see and another person can’t?”