by Anthology
“Here, chickie, here, chickie,” called an old woman, beckoning, grinning, offering her a hidey-hole, perhaps at the expense of her hide, for she was still young, and succulent.
“No, no, no,” she panted as she ran. For she was only thirty, and was unique, and to be eaten was all right, for people must exist, but to die was terrible. Plain and simple, she did not want to die. Not now, running for her life, and not ever, when her inevitable time came, but she was immediately concerned with now, and later on would have to take care of itself. Even as she ran, she began to tremble for later on, as if now weren’t severe enough.
Think of it, she conversed in great gasps with herself, leaping over a crevasse where a southbound lane had split off from the main runway. Think of it, she insisted, scarcely having breath left but unable to control her mind, which was galloping faster than her weary legs.
I’m only thirty, I’m unique, there’s no one in this world, this universe, who is me, with my memories:
SNAPSHOT #1
It had snowed. She stood in the sagging doorway, bundled up for winter in her fur leggings, and waited for Marn. They would hunt some animal for the stewpot. She saw things in negative, according to the moonlight: white trees, dark snow pockets. A feather seemed to breathe near her.
“Hey, come on,” Marn said, taking her by the shoulder, and they drifted like two dark flakes onto the powdered grass, toward the woods. “We’ll smoke it,” Marn said confidently, and the water ran into her mouth. The smokehouse was hot and dark, a womb out of which the good things were trundled for distribution. It was her good luck to be headman’s woman. Her children were less cold and hungry. Still, she had a greasy feeling, somewhere, when she heard the cries of other children. Marn said it was because she was young.
Her furs had lateral stripes like those of a tiger. She was a headman’s daughter, and wife of a headman. She was tall, educated, privileged, and at length on the sleeping skins she would burn like fat in Marn’s fire.
“Come on, rest a wee,” a young girl called to her, but she put on a burst of speed, for the girl’s teeth were shining like daggers, and as she went, she sobbed to herself (saving her real breath for the running), No, I can’t die, I’m not ready to. Oh no, no, and it was the same sound she had made that winter when:
SNAPSHOT #2
The orchards had borne no fruit and the deer were famished. Back into the mountains withdrew all animals except those that were slaughtered where open water ran. By solstice there was no open water left. The fish slept at the bottom of the lake. Smelts would not rise to the cold, blue holes cut by the fishers. The leathers cracked and split on their feet, the chimney of the smokehouse stopped breathing, most of the fires were silent.
Into this famine was born her third child, with a bad foot. Holding him up in the air, Marn said, “He is not good,” and snapped his neck.
“Oh no,” she cried, holding her swollen abdomen with both palms and feeling the blood run down her thighs. “No, no,” she cried to the headman, her man, for nine months in the hot dark, waiting, only to come to this? We are all going to come to this?
Marn handed the dead baby to the old woman, who took him out to the smokehouse. She lay in her blood and tears, crying, for the sizzled fat on the baby. Then the eyes dried, hers, and the baby’s, in the fire smoke, and she felt it was all more than could be asked of any woman.
Where the broken concrete split into a fork, one side going south, one west, she would have paused, to determine her advantage, but at the crotch of the fork two youngsters arrived with knives.
She wanted more than anything to stop and rest. There were no alternatives offered her; either she must run and run, or she must stop and be killed. She couldn’t prevent her mind from balancing one against the other, even while she knew it was no choice to make.
“Catch your breath,” the youngsters jeered at her, and she chose the west road without thinking. One of them hurled a chancy knife after her, which split open the skin of her shoulder. Ignoring the pale blood which poured down, she went on. I can’t die now, she thought. I’m not ever going to die. I am the only I in this world. She knew there was too much of her to be lost, much which could never be anyone else, and it was all precious and irreplaceable. Why didn’t they realize how important it was for her to survive? She contained:
SNAPSHOT #3
After the hard winter, the iron world split open and flowers came up. It was so astonishing. She passed the place where Marn’s last bone was buried (only a headman would have his skull buried, intact, the jaws still hinged as if speaking to his community) and went down to the riverbank where the children were bathing. Her Neely stood tall this spring. In spite of food shortages over the winter, he had filled out. At least Daddyporridge had helped to nourish him, and give him this spring strength.
“Ah, spring,” said a lazy voice. There was Tichy, under the willow. He might have been next headman, but was too lazy, and more likely destined for the smokehouse if he didn’t mind himself. Yet several community members had discovered he was quicker and livelier than predicted, and Marn himself had died under Tichy’s hammer.
“Oh yes, it certainly is spring,” she said, walking very slowly, approaching him with great care. For if he had disposed so quickly of her man, and was idling here, watching her son, what next?
Tichy put out an unclenched hand toward her, and she was surprised to take it and find it so warm. Then another surprise followed, for he gave a quick, skillful pull, and she fell full length on his body.
“Oh no,” she said, half smothered in his chin whiskers. “No, Tichy,” for his teeth were at her and she didn’t know, caught in his arms and legs, whether she was going to be loved or eaten or one at a time, or why.
“Hell yes,” Tichy said. “After all, why not?”
He was reasonable. He let her have the best blanket in his hardwood hut, and when she couldn’t find enough flavoring for the stew in the pot, he ate it anyway, without beating her.
Desperately holding the shriek, that siren to call them all out after her, between her teeth, she went on and on, breath rasping in her worn throat.
She would get back to Tichy. She was not going to die. There couldn’t be anything in the world that really demanded her death, could there? Neely had taken the daughter of Gancho, a dark, low-browed girl with a peculiar sense of rightness. Not bad, she thought. Very good for Neely. I must get back before she has the baby. Who else will help her? She mustn’t have the first one alone, only I can help her. I am needed, really, truly, I am needed very much. She’ll be all alone, because:
SNAPSHOT #4
Toward fall, when not even the warmest rains brought up another spear of wild asparagus, Neely and Tichy had a fight on the north slope of the dead orchard. Tichy gave Neely a blow with his hammer which knocked the young one over and might have done for him. Yet Neely got up on his feet once more, with his lips writhen back from his dark gums, showing his five teeth. Watching from the roof of the hardhut, she saw Neely rise up on his toes and split open Tichy’s skull.
“That’s my son!” she cried at the top of her lungs.
Then Neely brought home the dark girl, who snorted when he made love to her, and never got tired, and kept the floor swept. It was all right to have another woman in the hut, and especially a woman who understood the right and traditional. She was, after all, a headman’s daughter, and not to be displaced.
“Gotcha!” yelled a woman, almost falling on her as she swerved along an embankment. She kicked the woman in the belly and heard the anguished groan as she ran on.
“No, you haven’t,” she gasped, not just to the groaning woman, but to all of them, to the world. What made her think she would get back to Tichy, who was dead, skull and all? The grandchildren would welcome her. They were good children, lean and hard as nuts, the likeness of Neely. They’d be glad to see her, who would dandle them, feed them special treats, stir the stewpot for the dark girl while she and Neely went hunting. If the deer ever
came back she would make them a roast. The drought had been so bad all summer the snakes had come. First the copperheads, with their smell of garlic in the mating season, like brown worms on the stones of the old world. Then the rattlers, with their hysterical warning which came too late. Poisoned flesh was worse than no flesh. Moreover, a snake-bitten person was generally dismembered before the poison had a chance to spread.
Now as she ran she saw landmarks of home which echoed in her mind. The country became happily familiar, for she had hunted here, with Marn, and then with Tichy. She wasn’t going to die, not this time, not now, she would of course continue, for she was she, unique, full, splendid.
“I gotcha!” someone screamed in her ear, and she felt the blow, shattering her, and lay stunned by the side of the road, her muscles still running. The snapshots began to flicker in her mind; seasons of the year, people she had known, her sons, her daughters, herself above all, the only one, the only I am I in all the world of stars.
“No, no,” she moaned as the man raised the ax over her forehead.
“Oh yes, yes,” he said, grinning with pleasure. Behind him the rest of the hunting party appeared. It was Neely with the dark girl, and two lean children.
“Neely,” she screamed. “Save me. I’m your mother.”
Neely grinned too, and said, “We’re all hungry.”
The ax fell, breaking her pictures into pieces, and they fell like snowflakes to the ground, where a little dust rose up and began to slowly settle. The small children began to squabble over the thumb bones.
Afterword
Perhaps I wrote the story because sometimes that’s the way the world seems, or perhaps I hope that when my daughter’s generation grows up it won’t need or want to run for its life, or perhaps because, in the seventeenth century, Jeremy Taylor wrote: “. . . when it is enquired whether such a person be a good man or no, the meaning is not what does he believe, or what does he hope, but what he loves.” Amen.
THE HAPPY BREED
John T. Sladek
Introduction
This is the second of two stories I bought from writers whose work I did not know. It came in, one of a pair, from Robert Mills, my own agent. The note accompanying it said simply, “You’ll like the way he thinks.” That, in the trade, is called the undersell. When I was younger, when I worked in a bookstore on Times Square, an area where the hard sell was invented (or at least perfected), I used the undersell—or “mush” as it is called—with only two items. The first was with a book called The Alcoholic Women. It was ostensibly a volume of case histories intended for medical students, dealing with psychiatric aberrations attendant on female alcoholism. But there was one passage, on page 73, if I recall properly, that was extremely steamy. Something about lesbianism, rather graphically reported by the lushed female herself. When we would get in one of the moist-palmed salesmen from Mashed Potato Falls, Wyoming, in search of “lively reading” (because he couldn’t pick up some bimbo in a bar for the evening’s release), we would conduct him to the rear of the shop and hold up the book. It invariably fell open on Page 73. “Here, read anywhere,” we would say, jamming his nose, like a lump of silly putty, right onto that paragraph. His eyes would water. A pair of poached eggs. He would always buy the book. We stiffed them fourteen bucks for the thing. (I think it’s in paperback now, for about half a buck, but them was in the days before Fanny Hill.) Page 73 held the only really “lively” action in the book. The rest was a jungle of electroshock therapy and stomach pumping. But the mush worked marvelously.
The other item was a twelve-inch Italian stiletto in the knife case. When a customer asked for a blade, I would unlock the case and pull out all that steel. I would hold it up, closed, to show it had no switch button on it. Then I would carelessly flip my wrist in a hard, downward movement, and the blade would snap open, quivering. It would usually be about two inches under the customer’s tie knot. Eyes bulge. Poached eggs. Et cetera. Seven-buck sale. Every time.
The only times you can use the mush with any degree of assurance are the times you know for damn dead certain you’ve got a winning item, something that won’t let go of them. Bob Mills was smart to use the mush on me. He knew he had a winner. John T. Sladek’s “The Happy Breed” is a helluva story.
Sladek was born in Iowa on 12/15/37, and attended the University of Minnesota 19 years later as student No. 449731. He studied mechanical engineering, then English literature. He left school to work (Social Security No. 475-38-5320) as a technical writer, bar waiter and for the Great Northern Railway as switchman No. 17728. He thumbed through Europe with passport No. D776097 until he found himself standing in a soup line at Saint-Severin in Paris. He worked as a draftsman in New York, then returned to Europe. He is now living in England, registered as Alien No. E538368. He has been published in New Worlds, Escapade, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and elsewhere. He has just finished his first novel of speculative fiction, The Reproductive System.
The only mushy thing about Sladek or his story is his lousy head for figures. Carry on.
The Happy Breed
A.D. 1987
“I don’t know,” said James, lifting himself from the cushions scattered like bright leaves on the floor. “I can’t say that I’m really, you know, happy. Gin or something phony?”
“Aw, man, don’t give me decisions, give me drink,” said Porter. He lay across the black, tufted chaise that he called James’s “shrink couch.”
“Gin it is, then.” James thumbed a button, and a martini glass, frosty and edible-looking, slid into the wall niche and filled. Holding it by the stem, he passed it to Porter, then raised his shaggy brows at Marya.
“Nada,” she said. She was sprawled in a “chair,” really a piece of sculpture, and one of her bare feet had reached out to touch Porter’s leg.
James made himself a martini and looked at it with distaste. If you broke this glass, he thought, it would not leave any sharp edges to, say, cut your wrists on.
“What was I saying? Oh—I can’t say I’m really happy, but then I’m not—uh—”
“Sad?” volunteered Marya, peering from under the brim of her deerstalker.
“Depressed. I’m not depressed. So I must be happy,” he finished, and hid his confusion behind the glass. As he sipped, he looked her over, from her shapely calves to her ugly brown deerstalker. Last year at this time she’d been wearing a baseball cap, blue with gold piping. It was easy to remember it, for this year all the girls in the Village were wearing baseball caps. Marya Katyovna was always ahead of the pack, in her dress as well as in her paintings.
“How do you know you’re happy?” she said. “Last week I thought I was happy too. I’d just finished my best work, and I tried to drown myself. The Machine pulled the drain. Then I was sad.”
“Why did you try to kill yourself?” James asked, trying to keep her in focus.
“I had this idea that after a perfect work the artist should be destroyed. Dürer used to destroy the plates of his engravings after a few impressions.”
“He did it for money,” muttered Porter.
“All right then, like that architect in Arabia. After he created his magnum opus, the Sultan had him blinded, so he couldn’t do any cheap copies. See what I mean? An artist’s life is supposed to lead toward his masterpiece, not away from it.”
Porter opened his eyes and said, “Exist! The end of life is life. Exist, man, that’s all you gotta do.”
“That sounds like cheap existentialism,” she snarled, withdrawing her foot. “Porter, you are getting more and more like those damned Mussulmen.”
Porter smiled angrily and closed his eyes.
It was time to change the subject.
“Have you heard the one about the Martian who thought he was an Earthman?” James said, using his pleasant-professional tone. “Well, he went to his psychiatrist—”
As he went on with the joke, he studied the two of them. Marya was no worry, even with her dramatic suicide attempts. But Porter was a
mess.
O. Henry Porter was his full adopted name, after some minor earlier writer. Porter was a writer, too, or had been. Up to a few months ago, he’d been considered a genius—one of the few of the twentieth century.
Something had happened. Perhaps it was the general decline in reading. Perhaps there was an element of self-defeat in him. For whatever reason, Porter had become little more than a vegetable. Even when he spoke, it was in the cheapest clichés of the old “hip” of twenty years ago. And he spoke less and less.
Vaguely, James tied it in with the Machines. Porter had been exposed to the Therapeutic Environment Machines longer than most, and perhaps his genius was entangled with whatever they were curing. James had been too long away from his practice to guess how this was, but he recalled similar baby/bathwater cases.
“‘So that’s why it glows in the dark,’” James finished. As he’d expected, Marya laughed, but Porter only forced a smile, over and above his usual smirk of mystical bliss.
“It’s an old joke,” James apologized.
“You are an old joke,” Porter enunciated. “A headshrinker without no heads to shrink. What the hell do you do all day?”
“What’s eating you?” said Marya to the ex-writer. “What brought you up from the depths?”
James fetched another drink from the wall niche. Before bringing it to his lips, he said, “I think I need some new friends.”
As soon as they were gone, he regretted his boorishness. Yet somehow there seemed to be no reason for acting human any more. He was no longer a psychiatrist, and they were not his patients. Any little trauma he might have wreaked would be quickly repaired by their Machines. Even so, he’d have made an extra effort to sidestep the neuroses of his friends if he were not able to dial FRIENDS and get a new set.
