Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  “Immortality goes along with it,” Partagas said. “Now you’re talking!” Columbus said. “Give me that quill. I’m on board.” He paused. “But wait a minute! That Civil War you’re talking about, even though it is in the future, it has already taken place, has it not? So how can you put the cigars into something that has already happened?”

  “You’ll have to ask the Rumanian Science Fiction Collective. But remember, the American Civil War not only has happened, it is always happening. We can insert the cigars where we please. They will bleed through to all the times and places of the war through a process we call temporal percolation.”

  “Well, if you say so,” Columbus said, and signed. And so the cigars appeared on the battlefield at Antietam.

  Unfortunately, our process of Temporal Diffusion was judged bogus by the Supreme World SF Governing Body. Next year we’re going to do it all over again. This time we hope to come up with a really convincing explanation for the three cigars. Meanwhile, trust us, there is an explanation, we only have to find it.

  PANDORA’S BOX—OPEN WITH CARE

  Dear Reader, Go right ahead and read this story . . . but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

  —Cassandra

  IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL PLANET, with balmy breezes, a benevolent ocean, beautiful mountains, cool glades, and grassy meadows. The nicest thing was, there was not a soul there. Or rather, there were only souls there. Souls, but no people. Not a single human being. But there were plenty of spirits.

  Impalpable, transparent, ineffable, ubiquitous, the spirits were everywhere. The soul of the west wind played over the meadows, rustling the grain that had no one to harvest it. The grapes grew heavy on the vine, and the light-hearted spirit of the grape presided over their ripening. There was a spirit for everything, and everything had its spirit. In the distant mountains, volcanoes exploded from time to time, not of their own accord, but due to the whim of the volcano god, who caused the hot lava to burst out and flow down onto the plain. Beneath that fiery surge, the grass died, but it was not forgotten. A god of grass saw that there should be more grass to replace it. Storms swept through in accord with the commands of the storm god. Rocks toppled from high peaks in obedience to the commands of The Trickster. Rivers overflowed their banks and changed their courses when Proteus commanded it.

  Since there was no human there to object, none of it was damaging, in the long run. Everything grew again, and a spirit presided over each thing. There was destruction and there was creation, and all of it was in balance.

  But one day, something different happened, something that had never happened before. There was a flash of light in the early morning sky, a flash not accounted for by any god or spirit. The light burned steady and it hung for a while in the sky, then it disappeared. After a while, an observer, if there had been one, would have seen an object falling from above.

  It fell slowly and settled gently to the ground. It was a metal box.

  The elemental spirits came from all over to look at this box. They took a lively interest in what was going on. They even took on shape to observe more closely. Most of these elementals looked like children, but actually they were very old. They had been around for a long time. But they’d never seen anything like this before.

  A cluster of them gathered around the metal box. They had slender, semi-transparent bodies, and they wavered and glittered in the air.

  “What do you think it is, Ariel?”

  “I don’t know, Puck. Did you ever see anything like it?”

  “No. But look. It has writing on it.”

  “Obviously. But we can’t read writing.”

  “Silly. Proper writing reads itself.”

  Puck touched the lettering. There was a sound as of someone clearing his throat. Then the box said, “I am Pandora Box 2234B second series. Open me with care.”

  “What do you suppose is inside?” Ariel asked. “Maybe it’s toys.”

  “Toys aren’t the only things that come in boxes,” Puck said. “Maybe we should ask Prospero.”

  “You know what he’ll say. He’ll just tell us to forget it.”

  “Maybe that’s what we ought to do.”

  “But this box is new! It’s a new thing! And we haven’t had anything new in a long time!”

  “Let’s ask Psyche. She’ll know what to do.”

  Psyche was a beautiful young girl with long brown hair. She wore a simple white dress and carried a bunch of posies. You could see right through her. She appeared as soon as they mentioned her name.

  “What have you got there?” Psyche asked.

  “It’s a Pandora Box!” Ariel said proudly. “I found it!”

  “It doesn’t matter who found it,” Puck said. “The question is, what, if anything, are we to do with it?”

  Just then, Verna, the goddess of the harvest time, appeared in her russet gown, bearing a cornucopia overflowing with fruits and vegetables. She had the appearance of a gracious, middle-aged woman, but she was no older than the others.

  She looked at the box and exclaimed, “It’s here at last!”

  “Were you expecting this?” Psyche asked.

  “Of course! It’s something I need! As a matter of fact, I sent for this.”

  “What’s in it?” Ariel asked.

  “People,” Verna said.

  “What did you need people for?” Puck asked.

  “I haven’t anyone to make a harvest for,” Verna said. “And when you’re goddess of harvests, that’s not so good.”

  “What do you mean, nobody?” Puck said. “All of us love your harvests, Verna, and we tell you so.”

  “I know you do,” Verna said, “and it’s dear of you. But you, like me and the rest of us, are elemental beings. We don’t eat the fruits of the Earth. What could a harvest really mean to us?”

  “It’s the idea that counts,” Puck said.

  “Sometimes that’s not good enough,” Verna said. “Sometimes you want the real thing: people to eat the harvest you’ve brought them.”

  Tyche, goddess of luck, must have overheard that, because she showed up all of a sudden. She was a tall lady with, white wings, and she was wearing a plum-colored tunic.

  “Verna’s right,” Tyche said. “I’m just wasting my time, because there’s no one around for me to bring luck to.”

  “You can bring me some!” Ariel said.

  “You’re just saying that,” Tyche said. “But you know very well that creatures like us don’t need luck. What would we do with it? We’re eternal qualities, and for us one day is very much like another, and each day brings just what it brings, no more and no less. We have what we need. What would we do with luck?”

  “Maybe luck has brought us this box,” Ariel said. “Come on, let’s open it.”

  There was more discussion, and more elemental creatures came to join in. They talked all day, and when it was the hour of sunset, Puck said, “This talking is all very well. But we’ve done enough of it, don’t you think? What about we open the box now?”

  And so they did it. Puck pried open the lock. Tyche broke the seal. Verna opened the top. They all peered in. And they all disappeared.

  THE BOX STOOD there, a large rectangular object made of some unnatural substance, there on the meadow, with mountains in the background, and at the foot of the meadow, the blue reflection of a stream.

  Something within the box moved. A hand appeared at the edge. Then a head. The head lifted, peered out. Then the man pulled himself out of the box and tumbled to the ground.

  Behind him came a woman. And another behind her.

  Then ten, twenty, a hundred came piling out. Another hundred. And hundreds after that.

  The last man out wore a blue uniform and had a cap with gold leaf on it. In universal symbol language, this meant he was in charge.

  He carried a megaphone. That meant something, too.

  “All right, folks, listen up,” he said to the occupants of the box. “We’ve made it. We’ve escaped the destruction of Earth.
Our Pandora Box has carried us out through space, and has made a safe landing on a friendly world.”

  A woman came up to him. From her confident air, you could tell that she was in charge of everything the captain was not in charge of.

  “It’s a nice-looking place,” she said. “I wonder if it has good vibes.”

  He frowned at her. “Now, Myra, what kind of talk is that? Vibes? How could a new world have any vibes at all?”

  “I thought they might be built in,” she said. “Come with the place, so to speak.”

  “You’re talking about things like gods and demons, and influences, and personified stuff like the Wild West Wind or the Angry Ocean?”

  She nodded. “That’s the sort of stuff I mean.”

  “Forget it. That was part of old Earth. We’re starting over here. The influences haven’t arrived yet. We’re on our own. We make our own luck.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. We all know that the gods are human inventions. We’ll make do without them.”

  The woman nodded. There had never been any use arguing with him. But what if he was wrong? What if the gods came first, and then the humans?

  But if that was the case, where were the gods?

  Where was Ariel, where was Puck, and Verna, and all the others? Where was Good Luck and Bad? Where was the Spirit of Invention, the Soul of Progress, and the Shadow of Death?

  Far away, in an aethereal middle distance, a group of qualities as light as gossamar were flying toward the sun.

  “They’re calling us!” Verna said.

  “Forget them,” Puck said. “These people are determined to make their own luck.”

  MAGIC, MAPLES, AND MARYANNE

  A New Yoikei for most of his life, Robert Sheckley lives in Oregon these days. His recent novels include Godshome and a Babylon 5 novel entitled A Call to Arms, but in the past year he has been focusing mostly on shorter works. This new story marks his third appearance in our pages in the past four months alone and we expect to bring you more in the future.

  Mr. Sheckley’s c.v. indicates that he has held jobs as a pretzel salesman and a tie-painter, and odds are good that he too worked at a department store once. But that’s not to suggest that this delightful fantasy is in any way autobiographical . . .

  A FEW YEARS AGO I WAS working at Sullivan’s department store in Manhattan. In the evenings, I returned to my one room apartment on New York’s Lower East Side and practiced magic.

  Magic exists. But once you write down your methods, magic stops working. And once you start asking for specific things, instead of taking what magic is willing to give, you are letting yourself in for trouble. I kept my secrets to myself.

  It is not a utilitarian thing, this matter of magic. Once you enter it, you move into realms where things happen in accord with a logic that becomes clear only in retrospect. The elusiveness, the contrariness of magic explains what happened to those magicians of old who produced gold and counted kings among their patrons, rose to power and influence, only to be proven frauds and mountebanks and have everything taken away from them.

  But the best of them weren’t frauds. They had compromised their powers by revealing them to kings and learned men, and by asking for wealth for themselves. They had brought the inscrutable wrath of magic down on their heads.

  I had a sense of the purity of the matter, but I wasn’t completely convinced of it. That’s how I got the Donna Karan jackets.

  My job at Sullivan’s was to take the old stuff off the racks and display dummies and put out the new stuff. My researches in magic were going well for me at that time. I had discovered the principle of the temenos; the importance of creating a sacred space. I learned for myself the words and combinations of words, sounds, and gestures that seemed to hold magical possibilities. And sometimes, things appeared overnight in my temenos, my sacred space.

  Once, magic gave me a small elephant carved in mellow old ivory. I was able to sell it to a curio shop for two hundred dollars, even without being able to say where it came from. The productions of magic provide no provenance. But mainly, my investigations didn’t bring me anything tangible.

  I wondered if I could specify something and ask magic to make me a copy of it, or bring me another one like it. That didn’t seem too much to ask.

  Working alone late one night, I set up a portion of the stock room as a sacred space. I drew the magical lines. I put in a Donna Karan jacket for the spirit to look over.

  Early next morning, I was gratified to find four copies of this jacket. That, plus the original, made five. I never knew which was the original. They were all identical, even down to the tiny flaw in an inner seam.

  I didn’t know at the time that magic had plans for me. I didn’t know I was being watched by no less a person than Phil, the floor manager.

  Phil walked in while I was putting away the extra jackets in my backpack. “What have we here?” he asked.

  “These four jackets are mine,” I told him.

  He smiled his superior smile. “Don’t happen to have a sales slip, do you?”

  “You don’t understand,” I said. “These jackets don’t belong to the store. I made them.”

  Phil looked at the jackets more closely. “I know this model. It’s what we have in the display space.”

  “That’s the original,” I said. “These others are my copies.”

  Phil looked them over, frowned, and said, “Well, let’s go to my office and straighten this out.”

  Phil had an office on the mezzanine above Sullivan’s main floor. After checking the floor model, he went to his computer and called up the item number. He was surprised to find it was one of a kind.

  “That must be wrong,” he said. “We must have ordered five of these.”

  But a phone call to our distributor told him he had indeed ordered only one. The other four could not be accounted for.

  “I really don’t understand,” Phil said.

  “It’s my fault,” I said.

  “You? How could that be?”

  “I did it,” I told him. “I’m sorry about this, sir. I don’t want to cause any trouble. I need this job. Look, you can have the jackets. I promise I won’t do it again.”

  “Let me try to follow your reasoning. How did you do it?”

  “I just did it,” I said, still not wanting to tell him about the magic.

  “But what did you do, specifically? You must have done something. These jackets didn’t just fall out of the air.”

  “As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what happened. Or so I believe. I didn’t see it myself. We’re not supposed to.”

  “We?

  “Magicians, sir.” I knew I’d have to come out with it sooner or later.

  Phil looked at me, his eyes narrowed, brows wrinkled. “Explain.”

  “I do magic,” I told him.

  “I see,” Phil said.

  “I do it in a temenos, a sacred space,” I babbled, as if that would make it all clear.

  Phil stared at me and frowned and looked like he was going to fire me on the spot. Then his face took on a thoughtful look, and he stared at the jackets for a while. At last he said, “Can you make something appear here on the table in front of me?”

  “Oh, no! Magic doesn’t work in the open. It doesn’t like anyone watching. It’s not like science, you know. It’s magic, it loves to hide.”

  “So what do you do if you want to get something?”

  “I do the magic, in the temenos. But usually I don’t wish for anything specific. I don’t think magic likes that.”

  “Okay, sure, whatever. But when you do this magic of yours, something always turns up in your sacred space?”

  “Not every time. But surprisingly often.”

  Phil stared at me for a long time. Finally he said, “This is crazy, you know.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “But I’m interested. I’d like you to demonstrate for me.”

  “I could do that,”
I said, “but not here in the store. I don’t think magic liked me doing that. But in my own apartment . . .”

  “Sure. I don’t care where you do it. I just want to see it.”

  We met two nights later. Phil was good enough not to sneer outright at my small, cramped slummy apartment. But I knew what he was thinking: this guy can do magic? I must be crazy to be here.

  Still, here he was. He had brought something for me to duplicate. A very small gold coin. Phil said it wasn’t worth much—just twenty dollars.

  “It’s not a good idea to ask magic for any particular thing,” I said.

  “Then how do we know it works?” he said.

  I couldn’t answer that.

  “I’ll want it back,” he said, handing me the coin. “Hopefully, with a couple of others like it.”

  “You’ll probably get it back. As for getting more, we’ll have to see what magic decides.”

  I put the coin in the sacred space I had created in my closet. I asked Phil to stay in the front room while I did the formulas and gestures. I don’t like people to see me doing magic. I think it works against the success of the enterprise.

  Phil sat down on the bed while I went into the closet and closed the door. In magic, moments are not all alike. You have to guess which kind of Power you’re working with, and what its mood is. I did what I thought would work for that particular moment.

  When I came out, Phil asked, “So what happens now?”

  “Tomorrow night at this same time,” I said, “I open the door to the temenos.”

  “You mean the closet?”

  “For now, it’s a temenos.”

  “Couldn’t we take a peek now? Maybe whatever it’s sending is there already.”

  I shook my head. “I won’t open that door until tomorrow evening. Impatience is very bad form when you’re dealing with magic. You can’t rush the Powers. Twenty-four hours is a minimum time. A couple of days would be better.”

  Phil looked like he had a few things to say about that, but finally he shrugged and said, “See you here tomorrow,” and left.