Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  Now he wondered no longer.

  But the man made no overt act and Citizen Germyn postponed the raising of the hue and cry. It was not a thing to be done lightly.

  “Gala Tropile is in this house,” the man with Haendl said bluntly.

  Citizen Germyn managed a Quirked Smile.

  “We want to see her, Germyn. It’s about her husband. He—uh—he was with us for a while and something happened.”

  “Ah, yes. The Wolf.”

  The man flushed and looked at Haendl. Haendl said loudly: “The Wolf. Sure he’s a Wolf. But he’s gone now, so you don’t have to worry about that.”

  “Gone?”

  “Not just him, but four or five of us. There was a man named Innison and he’s gone, too. We need help, Germyn. Something about Tropile—God knows how it is, but he started something. We want to talk to his wife and find out what we can about him. So will you get her out of the back room where she’s hiding and bring her here, please?”

  Citizen Germyn quivered. He bent over the ID bracelet that once had belonged to the one PFC Joe Hartman, fingering it to hide his thoughts.

  He said at last: “Perhaps you are right. Perhaps the Citizeness is with my wife. If this be so, would it not be possible that she is fearful of those who once were with her husband?”

  HAENDL laughed sourly. “She isn’t any more fearful than we are, Germyn. I told you about this man Innison who disappeared. He was a Son of the Wolf, you understand me? For that matter—” He glanced at his companion, licked his lips and changed his mind about what he had been going to say next. “He was a Wolf. Do you ever remember hearing of a Wolf being Translated before?”

  “Translated?” Germyn dropped the ID bracelet. “But that’s impossible!” he cried, forgetting his manners completely. “Oh, no! Translation comes only to those who attain the moment of supreme detachment, you can be sure of that. I know! I’ve seen it with my own eyes. No Wolf could pos-silly—”

  “At least five Wolves did,” Haendl said grimly. “Now you see what the trouble is? Tropile was Translated—I saw that with my own eyes. The next day, Innison. Within a week, two or three others. So we came down here, Germyn, not because we like you people, not because we enjoy it, but because we’re scared.

  “What we want is to talk to Tropile’s wife—you, too, I guess; we want to talk to anybody who ever knew him. We want to find out everything there is to find out about Tropile and see if we can make any sense of the answers. Because maybe Translation is the supreme objective of life to you people, Germyn, but to us it’s just one more way of dying. And we don’t want to die.”

  Citizen Germyn bent to pick up his cherished identification bracelet and dropped it absently on a table. There was very much on his mind.

  He said at last: “That is strange. Shall I tell you another strange thing?”

  Haendl, looking angry and baffled, nodded.

  Germyn said: “There has been no Translation here since the day the Wolf, Tropile, escaped. But there have been Eyes. I have seen them myself. It—” He hesitated, shrugged. “It has been disturbing. Some of our finest Citizens have ceased to Meditate; they have been worrying. So many Eyes and. nobody taken! It is outside of all of our experience, and our customs have suffered. Politeness is dwindling among us. Even in my own household—”

  He coughed and went on: “No matter. But these Eyes have come into every home; they have peered about, peered about, and no one has been taken. Why? Is it something to do with the Translation of Wolves?” He stared hopelessly at his visitors. “All I know is that it is very strange and therefore I am worried.”

  “Then take us to Gala Tropile,” said Haendl. “Let’s see what we can find out!”

  Citizen Germyn bowed. He cleared his throat and raised his voice just sufficiently to carry from one room to another. “Citizeness!” he called.

  There was a pause and then his wife appeared in the doorway, looking ruffled and ill at ease with her guest.

  “Will you ask if Citizeness Tropile will join us here?” he requested.

  His wife nodded. “She is resting. I will call her.”

  They called her and questioned her for some time.

  She told them nothing.

  She had nothing to tell.

  X

  ON Earth’s binary, Glenn Tropile had been reprogrammed for a new task.

  The problem was navigation. Earth had been a disappointment to the Pyramids; it was necessary to move rapidly to a more rewarding planet.

  The Pyramids had taken Earth out past Pluto’s orbit with a simple shove, slow and massive. It had been enough merely to approximate the direction in which they would want to go. There would be plenty of time for refinements of course later.

  But now the time for refinements had come, earlier than they might have expected. They had now time to travel, they knew where to—a star cluster reasonably sure to be rich in Componentiferous planets. It was inherent in the nature of Component mines that eventually they always played out.

  There were always more mines, though. If that had not been so, it would have been necessary, perhaps, to stock-breed Components against future needs. But it was easier to work the vein out and move on.

  Now the course had to be computed. There were such variables to be considered as: motion of the star cluster; acceleration of the binary-planet system; gravitational influence of every astronomical object in the island universe, without exception.

  Precise computation on this basis was obviously not practical. That was not an answer to the problem, since the time required would approach eternity as one of its parameters.

  It was possible to simplify the problem. Only the astronomical bodies which were relatively nearby need be treated as individuals. Farther away, the Pyramids began to group them in small bunches, still farther in large bunches, on to the point where the farthest—and the most numerous-bodies were lumped together as a vague gravitational “noise” whose average intensity alone it was required to know and to enter as a datum.

  And still no single Component could handle even its own share of the problem, were the “computer” they formed to be kept within the range of permissible size.

  It was for this that the Component which had once been Tropile was taken out of storage.

  This was all old stuff to the Pyramids; they knew how to handle it. They broke the problem down to its essentials, separated even those into many parts. There was, for example, the subsection of one certain aspect of the logistical problem which involved locating and procuring additional Components to handle the load.

  Even that tiny specialization was too much for a single Component, but fortunately the Pyramids had resources to bring to bear. The procedure in such cases was to hitch several Components together.

  This was done.

  When the Pyramids finished their neuro-surgery, there floated in an oversized nutrient tank a thing like a great sea-anemone. It was composed of eight Components—all human, as it happened—arranged in a circle, facing inward, joined temple to temple, brain to brain.

  At their feet, where sixteen eyes could see it, was the display board to feed them their Input. Sixteen hands each grasped a molded switch to handle their binary-coded Output. There would be no storage of the Output outside of the eight-Component complex itself; it went as control signals to the electrostatic generators, funneled through the single Pyramid on Mount Everest, which handled the task of Component-procurement.

  That is, of Translation.

  The programming was slow and thorough. Perhaps the Pyramid which finally activated the octuple unit and went away was pleased with itself, not knowing that one of its Components was Glenn Tropile.

  NIRVANA. (It pervaded all; there was nothing outside of it.)

  Nirvana. (Glenn Tropile floated in it as in the amniotic fluid around him.)

  Nirvana. (The sound of one hand . . . Floating oneness.) There was an intrusion. Perfection is completed; by adding to it, it is destroyed. Duality struck like a thunde
rbolt. Oneness shattered.

  For Glenn Tropile, it seemed as though his wife were screaming at him to wake up. He tried to.

  It was curiously difficult and painful. Timeless poignant sadness, five years of sorrow over a lost love compressed into a microsecond. It was always so, Tropile thought drowsily, awakening. It never lasts. What’s the use of worrying over what always happens . . .

  Sudden shock and horror rocked him.

  This was no ordinary awakening—no ordinary thing at all—nothing was as it ever had been before!

  Tropile opened his mouth and screamed—or thought he did. But there was only a hoarse, faint flutter in his eardrums.

  It was a moment when sanity might have gone. But there was one curious, mundane fact that saved him. He was holding something in his hands. He found that he could look at it, and it was a switch. A molded switch, mounted on a board, and he was holding one in each hand.

  It was little to cling to, but it at least was real. If his hands could be holding something, then there must be some reality somewhere.

  Tropile closed his eyes and managed to open them again. Yes, there was reality, too. He closed his eyes and light stopped. He opened them and light returned.

  Then perhaps he was not dead, as he had thought.

  Carefully, stumbling—his mind his only usable tool—he tried to make an estimate of his surroundings.

  He could hardly believe what he found.

  Item: he could scarcely move. Somehow he was bound by his feet and his head. How? He couldn’t tell.

  Item: he was bent over and he couldn’t straighten. Why? Again he couldn’t tell, but it was a fact. The great erecting muscles of his back answered his command, but his body would not move.

  Item: his eyes saw, but only in a small area.

  He couldn’t move his head, either. Still, he could see a few things. The switch in his hand, his feet, a sort of display of lights on a strangely circular board.

  The lights flickered and changed their pattern.

  WITHOUT thinking, he moved ™ a switch. Why? Because it was right to move that switch. When a certain light flared green, a certain switch had to be thrown. Why? Well, when a certain light flared green, a certain switch—

  He abandoned that problem. Never mind why; what the devil was going on?

  Glenn Tropile squinted about him like a mollusc peering out of its shell. There was another fact, the oddness of the seeing. What makes it look so queer, he asked himself.

  He found an answer, but it required some time to take it in. He was seeing in a strange perspective. One looks out of two eyes. Close one eye and the world is flat. Open it again and there is a stereoscopic double; the saliencies of the picture leap forward, the background retreats.

  So with the lights on the board—no, not exactly; but something like that, he thought. It was as though—he squinted and strained—well, as though he had never really seen before. As though for all his life he had had only one eye, and now he had strangely been given two.

  His visual perception of the board was total. He could see all of it at once. It had no “front” or “back.” It was in the round. The natural thinking of it was without orientation. He engulfed and comprehended it as a unit It had no secrets of shadow or silhouette.

  I think, Tropile mouthed slowly to himself, that I’m going crazy.

  But that was no explanation, either. Mere insanity didn’t account for what he saw.

  Then, he asked himself, was he in a state that was beyond Nirvana? He remembered, with an odd flash of guilt, that he had been Meditating, watching the stages of boiling water. All right, perhaps he had been Translated. But what was this, then? Were the Meditators wrong in teaching that Nirvana was the end—and yet righter than the Wolves, who dismissed Meditation as a phenomenon wholly inside the skull and refused to discuss Translation at all?

  That was a question for which he could find nothing approaching an answer. He turned away from it and looked at his hands.

  He could see them, too, in the round, he noted. He could see every wrinkle and pore in all sixteen of them . . .

  Sixteen hands!

  THAT was the other moment when sanity might have gone. He closed his eyes. (Sixteen eyes! No wonder the total perception!) And, after a while, he opened them again.

  The hands, were there. All sixteen of them.

  Cautiously, Tropile selected a finger that seemed familiar in his memory. After a moment’s thought, he flexed it. It bent. He selected another. Another—on a different hand this time.

  He could use any or all of the sixteen hands. They were all his, all sixteen of them.

  I appear, thought Tropile crazily, to be a sort of eight-branched snowflake. Each of my branches is a human body.

  He stirred, and added another datum: I appear also to be in a tank of fluid and yet I do not drown.

  There were certain deductions to be made from that. Either someone—the Pyramids?—had done something to his lungs, or else the fluid was as good an oxygenating medium as air. Or both.

  Suddenly a burst of data-lights twinkled on the board below him. Instantly and involuntarily, his sixteen hands began working the switches, transmitting complex directions in a lightninglike stream of on-off clicks.

  Tropile relaxed and let it happen. He had no choice; the power that made it right to respond to the board made it impossible for his brain to concentrate while the response was going on. Perhaps, he thought drowsily, he would never have awakened at all if it had not been for the long period with no lights . . .

  But he was awake. And his consciousness began to explore as the task ended.

  He had had an opportunity to understand something of what was happening. He understood that he was now a part of something larger than himself, beyond doubt something which served and belonged to the Pyramids. His single brain not being large enough for the job, seven others had been hooked in with it.

  But where were their personalities?

  Gone, he supposed; presumably they had been Citizens. Sons of the Wolf did not Meditate and therefore were not Translated—except for himself, he corrected wryly, remembering the Meditation on Rainclouds that had led him to—

  No, wait!

  Not Rainclouds but Water!

  TROPILE caught hold of himself and forced his mind to retrace that thought. He remembered the Raincloud Meditation. It had been prompted by a particularly noble cumulus of the Ancient Ship type.

  And this was odd. Tropile had never been deeply interested in Rainclouds, had never known even the secondary classifications of Raincloud types. And he knew that the Ancient Ship was of the fourth order of categories.

  It was a false memory.

  It was not his.

  Therefore, logically, it was someone else’s memory; and being available to his own mind, as the fourteen other hands and eyes were available, it must belong to—another branch of the snowflake.

  He turned his eyes down and tried to see which of the branches was his old body. He found it quickly, with growing excitement. There was the left great toe of his body. He had injured it in boyhood and there was no mistaking the way it was bent. Good! It was reassuring.

  He tried to feel the one particular body that led to that familiar toe.

  He succeeded, though not easily. After a time, he became more aware of that body—somewhat as conscious” or “heart conscious.” a neurotic may become “stomach But this was no neurosis; it was an intentional exploration.

  Since that worked, with some uneasiness he transferred his attention to another pair of feet and “thought” his way up from them.

  It was embarrassing.

  For the first time in his life, he knew what it felt like to have breasts. For the first time in his life, he knew what it was like to have one’s internal organs quite differently shaped and arranged, buttressed and stressed by different muscles. The very faint background feel of man’s internal arrangements, never questioned unless something goes wrong with them and they start to hurt, was n
ot at all like the faint background feel that a woman has inside her.

  And when he concentrated on that feel, it was no faint background to him. It was surprising and upsetting.

  He withdrew his attention—hoping that he would be able to. Gratefully, he became conscious of his own body again. He was still himself if he chose to be.

  Were the other seven still themselves?

  He reached into his mind—all of it, all eight separate intelligences that were combined within him.

  “Is anybody there?” he demanded.

  No answer—or nothing he could recognize as an answer. He drove harder and there still was none. It was annoying. He resented it as bitterly, he remembered, as in the old days when he had first been learning the subtleties of Ruin Appreciation. There had been a Ruin Master, his name forgotten, who had been sometimes less than courteous, had driven hard—

  Another false memory!

  He withdrew and weighed it. Perhaps, he thought, that was a part of the answer. These people, these other seven, would not be driven. The attempt to call them back to consciousness would have to be delicate. When he drove hard, it was painful—he remembered the instant violent agony of his own awakening—and they reacted with anguish.

  MORE gently, alert for vagrant “memories,” he combed the depths of the eightfold mind within him, reaching into the sleeping portions, touching, handling, sifting and associating, sorting. This memory of an old knife wound from an Amok—that was not the Rain-cloud woman; it was a man, very aged. This faint recollection of a childhood fear of drowning—was that she? It was; it fitted with this other recollection, the long detour on the road south toward the sun, around a river.

  The Raincloud woman was the first to round out in his mind, and the first he communicated with. He was not surprised to find that, early in her life, she had feared that she might be Wolf.

  He reached out for her. It was almost magic—knowing the “secret name” of a person, so that then he was yours to command. But the “secret name” was more than that. It was the gestalt of the person. It was the sum of all data and experience, never available to another person—until now.