Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “An illusion, Peter,” she said. “If that’s what you mean.” I said nothing, but let her put me to bed as usual, but when she turned out the light and went away I waited a little while and then called out softly: “Illusion! Illusion!”

  At once Guru came for the first time. He bowed, the way he always has since, and said: “I have been waiting.”

  “I didn’t know that was the way to call you,” I said.

  “Whenever you want me I will be ready. I will teach you, Peter—if you want to learn. Do you know what I will teach you?”

  “If you will teach me about the grey thing on the wall,” I said, “I will listen. And if you will teach me about real things and unreal things I will listen.”

  “These things,” he said thoughtfully, “very few wish to learn. And there are some things that nobody ever wished to learn. And there are some things that I will not teach.” Then I said: “The things nobody has ever wished to learn I will learn. And I will even learn the things you do not wish to teach.”

  He smiled mockingly. “A master has come,” he said, half-laughing. “A master of Guru.”

  That was how I learned his name. And that night he taught me a word which would do little things, like spoiling food.

  From that day, to the time I saw him last night he has not changed at all, though now I am as tall as he is. His skin is still as dry and shiny as ever it was, and his face is still bony, crowned by a head of very coarse, black hair.

  WHEN I WAS ten years old I went to bed one night only long enough to make Joe and Clara suppose that I was fast asleep. I left in my place something which appears when you say one of the words of Guru and went down the drainpipe outside my window. It always was easy to climb down and up, ever since I was eight years old.

  I met Guru in Inwood Hill Park. “You’re late,” he said.

  “Not too late,” I answered. “I know it’s never too late for one of these things.”

  “How do you know?” he asked sharply. “This is your first.”

  “And maybe my last,” I replied. “I don’t like the idea of it. If I have nothing more to learn from my second than my first I shan’t go to another.”

  “You don’t know,” he said. “You don’t know what it’s like—the voices, and the bodies slick with unguent, leaping flames, mind-filling ritual! You can have no idea at all until you’ve taken part.”

  “We’ll see,” I said. “Can we leave from here?”

  “Yes,” he said. Then he taught me the word I would need to know, and we both said it together.

  The place we were in next was lit with red lights, and I think that the walls were of rock. Though of course there was no real seeing there, and so the lights only seemed to be red, and it was not real rock.

  As we were going to the fire one of them stopped us. “Who’s with you?” she asked, calling Guru by another name. I did not know that he was also the person bearing that name, for it was a very powerful one.

  He cast a hasty, sidewise glance at me and then said: “This is Peter of whom I have often told you.”

  She looked at me then and smiled, stretching out her oily arms. “Ah,” she said, softly, like the cats when they talk at night to me. “Ah, this is Peter. Will you come to me when I call you, Peter? And sometimes call for me—in the dark, when you are alone?”

  “Don’t do that!” said Guru, angrily pushing past her. “He’s very young—you might spoil him for his work.”

  She screeched at our backs: “Guru and his pupil—fine pair! Boy, he’s no more real than I am—you’re the only real thing here!”

  “Don’t listen to her,” said Guru.

  “She’s wild and raving. They’re always tight-strung when this time comes around.”

  We came near the fires then, and sat down on rocks. They were killing animals and birds and doing things with their bodies. The blood was being collected in a basin of stone, which passed through the crowd. The one to my left handed it to me. “Drink,” she said, grinning to show me her fine, white teeth. I swallowed twice from it and passed it to Guru.

  When the bowl had passed ail around we took off our clothes. Some, like Guru, did not wear them, but many did. The one to my left sat closer to me, breathing heavily at my face. I moved away. “Tell her to stop, Guru,” I said. “This isn’t part of it, I know.”

  Guru spoke to her sharply in then own language, and she changed her seat, snarling.

  Then we all began to chant, clapping our hands and beating our thighs. One of them rose slowly and circled about the fires in a slow pace, her eyes rolling wildly. She worked her jaws and flung her arms about so sharply that I could hear the elbows crack. Still shuffling her feet against the rock floor she bent her body backwards down to her feet. Her belly-muscles were bands standing out from her skin, nearly, and the oil rolled down her body and legs. As the palms of her hands touched the ground she collapsed in a twitching heap and began to set up a thin wailing noise against the steady chant and hand-beat that the rest of us were keeping up.

  Another of them did the same as the first, and we chanted louder for her and still louder for the third. Then, while we still beat our hands and thighs, one of them took up the third, laid her across the altar and made her ready with a stone knife. The fires’ light gleamed off the chipped edge of obsidian. As her blood drained down the groove cut as a gutter into the rock of the altar, we stopped our chant and the fires were snuffed out.

  But still we could see what was going on, for these things were, of course, not happening at all—only seeming to happen, really, just as all the people and things there only seemed to be what they were. Only I was real. That must be why they desired me so.

  As the last of the fires died Guru excitedly whispered: “The Presence!” He was very deeply moved.

  From the pool of blood from the third dancer’s body there issued the Presence. It was the tallest one there, and when it spoke its voice was deeper, and when it commanded its commands were obeyed.

  “Let blood!” it commanded, and we gashed ourselves with flints. It smiled and showed teeth bigger and sharper and whiter than any of the others.

  “Make water!” it commanded, and we all spat on each other. It flapped its wings and rolled its eyes, that were bigger and redder than any of the others.

  “Pass flame!” it commanded, and we breathed smoke and fire on our limbs. It stamped its feet, let blue flames roar from its mouth, and they were bigger and wilder than any of the others.

  Then it returned to the pool of blood and we lit the fires again. Guru was staring straight before him; I tugged his arm. He bowed as though we were meeting for the first time that night.

  “What are you thinking of?” I asked. “We shall go now.”

  “Yes,” he said heavily. “Now we shall go.” Then we said the word that had brought us there.

  THE FIRST MAN I killed was Brother Paul, at the school where I went to learn the things that Guru did not teach me.

  It was less than a year ago, but it seems like a Very long time. I have killed so many times since then.

  “You’re a very bright boy, Peter,” said the brother.

  “Thank you, brother.”

  “But there are things about you that I don’t understand. Normally I’d ask your parents but—I feel that they don’t understand either. You were an infant prodigy, weren’t you?”

  “Yes, brother.”

  “There’s nothing very unusual about that—glands, I’m told. You know what glands are?”

  Then I was alarmed. I had heard of them, but I was not certain whether they were the short, thick green men who wear only metal or the things with many legs with whom I talked in the woods.

  “How did you find out?” I asked him.

  “But Peter! You look positively frightened, lad! I don’t know a thing about them myself, but Father Frederick does. He has whole books about them, though I sometimes doubt whether he believes them himself.”

  “They aren’t good books, brother,” I sai
d. “They ought to be burned.”

  “That’s a savage thought, my son. But to return to your own problem—”

  I could not let him go any further knowing what he did about me. I said one of the words Guru taught me and he looked at first very surprised and then seemed to be in great pain. He dropped across his desk and I felt his wrist to make sure, for I had not used that word before. But he was dead.

  There was a heavy step outside, and I made myself invisible. Stout Father Frederick entered, and I nearly killed him too with the word, but I knew that that would be very curious. I decided to wait, and went through the door as Father Frederick bent over the dead monk. He thought he was asleep.

  I went down the corridor to the book-lined office of the stout priest and, working quickly, piled all his books in the center of the room and lit them with my breath. Then I went down to the school-yard and made myself visible again when there was nobody looking. It was very easy. I killed a man I passed on the street the next day.

  THERE WAS a girl named Mary who lived near us. She was fourteen then, and I desired her as those in the Cavern out of Time and Space had desired me.

  So when I saw Guru and he had bowed, I told him of it, and he looked at me in great surprise. “You are growing older, Peter,” he said.

  “I am, Guru. And there will come a time when your words will not be strong enough for me.”

  He laughed. “Come, Peter,” he said. “Follow me if you wish. There is something that is going to be done—” He licked his thin, purple lips and said: “I have told you what it will be like.”

  “I shall come,” I said. “Teach me the word.” So he taught me the word and we said it together.

  The place we were in next was not like any of the other places I had been to before with Guru. It was No-place. Always before there had been the seeming of passage of time and matter, but here there was not even that. Here Guru and the others cast off their forms and were what they were, and No-place was the only place where they could do this.

  It was not like the Cavern, for the Cavern had been out of time and space, and this place was not enough of a place even for that. It was Noplace.

  What happened there does not bear telling, but I was made known to certain ones who never departed from there. All came to them as they existed. They had not color or the seeming of color, or any seeming of shape.

  There I learned that eventually I would join with them; that I had been selected as the one of my planet who was to dwell without being forever in that No-place.

  Guru and I left, having said the word.

  “Well?” demanded Guru, staring me in the eye.

  “I am willing,” I said. “But teach me one word now—”

  “Ah,” he said, grinning. “The girl?”

  “Yes,” I said. “The word that will mean much to her.”

  Still grinning, he taught me the word.

  Mary, who had been fourteen, is now fifteen and what they call incurably mad.

  LAST NIGHT I saw Guru again, and for the last time. He bowed as I approached him. “Peter,” he said warmly.

  “Teach me the word,” said I.

  “It is not too late.”

  “Teach me the word.”

  “You can withdraw—with what you master you can master also this world. Gold without reckoning; sardonyx and gems, Peter! Rich, crushed velvet—stiff, scraping, embroidered tapestries!”

  “Teach me the word.”

  “Think, Peter, of the house you could build. It could be of white marble, and every slab centered by a winking ruby. Its gate could be of beaten gold within and without and it could be built about one slender tower of carven ivory, rising mile after mile into the turquoise sky. You could see the clouds float underneath your eyes.”

  “Teach me the word.”

  “Your tongue could crush the grapes that taste like melted silver. You could hear always the song of the bulbul and the lark that sounds like the dawnstar made musical. Spikenard that will bloom a thousand thousand years could be ever in your nostrils. Your hands could feel the down of purple Himalayan swans that is softer than a sunset cloud.”

  “Teach me the word.”

  “You could have women whose skin would be from the black of ebony to the white of snow. You could have women who would be as hard as flints or as soft as a sunset cloud.”

  “Teach me the word.”

  Guru grinned and said the word. Now, I do not know whether I will say that word, which was the last that Guru taught me, today or tomorrow or until a year has passed.

  It is the word that will explode this planet like a stick of dynamite in a rotten apple.

  Kazam Collects

  Kazam ran a nut cult. Kazam was a Kaidar. Detective Fitzgerald investigated the nut cult and learned what a Kaidar was.

  “HAIL, JEWEL in the lotus,” half whispered the stringy, brown person. His eyes were shut in holy ecstacy, his mouth pursed as though he were tasting the sweetest fruit that ever grew.

  “Hail, jewel in the lotus,” mumbled back a hundred voices in a confused backwash of sound. The stringy, brown person turned and faced his congregation. He folded his hands.

  “Children of Hagar,” he intoned. His voice was smooth as old ivory, had a mellow sheen about it.

  “Children of Hagar, you who have found delight and peace in the bosom of the Elemental, the Eternal, the Un-knowingness that is without bounds, make Peace with me.” You could tell by his very voice that the words were capitalized.

  “Let our Word,” intoned the stringy, brown person, “be spread. Let our Will be brought about. Let us destroy, let us mould, let us build. Speak low and make your spirits white as Hagar’s beard.” With a reverent gesture he held before them two handfuls of an unattached beard that hung from the altar.

  “Children of Hagar, unite your Wills into One.” The congregation kneeled as he gestured at them, gestured as one would at a puppy one was training to play dead.

  The meeting hall—or rather, temple—of the Cult of Hagar was on the third floor of a little building on East 59th Street, otherwise almost wholly unused. The hall had been fitted out to suit the sometimes peculiar requirements of the Unguessable Will-Mind-Urge of Hagar Inscrutable; that meant that there was gilded wood everywhere there could be, and strips of scarlet cloth hanging from the ceiling in circles of five. There was, you see, a Sanctified Ineffability about the unequal lengths of the cloth strips.

  The faces of the congregation were varying studies in rapture. As the stringy, brown person tinkled a bell they rose and blinked absently at him as he waved a benediction and vanished behind a door covered with chunks of gilded wood.

  The congregation began to buzz quietly.

  “Well?” demanded one of another. “What did you think of it?”

  “I dunno. Who’s he, anyway?” A respectful gesture at the door covered with gilded wood.

  “Kazam’s his name. They say he hasn’t touched food since he saw the Ineluctable Modality.”

  “What’s that?”

  Pitying smile. “You couldn’t understand it just yet. Wait till you’ve come around a few more times. Then maybe you’ll be able to read his book—‘The Unravelling.’ After that you can tackle the ‘Isba Kazhlunk’ that he found in the Siberian ice. It opened the way to the Ineluctable Modality, but it’s pretty deep stuff—even for me.”

  They filed from the hall buzzing quietly, dropping coins into a bowl that stood casually by the exit. Above the bowl hung from the ceiling strips of red cloth in a circle of five. The bowl, of course, was covered with chunks of gilded wood.

  BEYOND THE DOOR the stringy brown man was having a little trouble. Detective Fitzgerald would not be convinced.

  “In the first place,” said the detective, “you aren’t licensed to collect charities. In the second place this whole thing looks like fraud and escheatment. In the third place this building isn’t, a dwelling and you’ll have to move that cot out of here.” He gestured disdainfully at an army collapsible that s
tood by the battered rolltop desk. Detective Fitzgerald was a big, florid man who dressed with exquisite neatness.

  “I am sorry,” said the stringy, brown man. “What must I do?”

  “Let’s begin at the beginning. The Constitution guarantees freedom of worship, but I don’t know if they meant something like this. Are you a citizen?”

  “No. Here are my registration papers.” The stringy, brown man took them from a cheap, new wallet.

  “Born in Persia. Name’s Joseph Kazam. Occupation, scholar. How do you make that out?”

  “It’s a good word,” said Joseph Kazam with a hopeless little gesture. “Are you going to send me away—deport me?”

  “I don’t know,” said the detective thoughtfully. “If you register your religion at City Hall before we get any more complaints, it’ll be all right.”

  “Ah,” breathed Kazam. “Complaints?”

  Fitzgerald looked at him quizzically. “We got one from a man named Rooney,” he said. “Do you know him?”

  “Yes. Runi Sarif is his real name. He has hounded me out of Norway, Ireland and Canada—wherever I try to reestablish the Cult of Hagar.”

  Fitzgerald looked away. “I suppose,” he said matter-of-factly, “you have lots of secret enemies plotting against you.”

  Kazam surprised him with a burst of rich laughter. “I have been investigated too often,” grinned the Persian, “not to recognize that one. You think I’m mad.”

  “No,” mumbled the detective, crestfallen. “I just wanted to find out. Anybody running a nut cult’s automatically reserved a place in Bellevue.”

  “Forget it, sir. I spit on the Cult of Hagar. It is my livelihood, but I know better than any man that it is a mockery. Do you know what our highest mystery is? The Ineluctable Modality.” Kazam sneered.

  “That’s Joyce,” said Fitzgerald with a grin. “You have a sense of humor, Mr. Kazam. That’s a rare thing in the religious.”

  “Please,” said Joseph Kazam. “Don’t call me that. I am not worthy—the noble, sincere men who work for their various faiths are my envy. I have seen too much to be one of them.”