Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  “No, I dare not destroy it, Diego. But I have heard that Tezcatlipoca is indifferent to who is sacrificed to him. Perhaps someone else . . .” He set the mirror down carefully at the base of the pyramid.

  “It is a pretty object, my lord. A great souvenir. If you don’t want it . . .”

  “I don’t! And I advise all of you to have nothing to do with it!”

  The soldiers muttered among themselves. It would make a lovely souvenir. But they had plenty of loot back at the camp. And there was something uncanny about this cloudy mirror.

  Leaving the mirror behind, they made their way back to the camp . . .

  Suddenly, compulsively, Juanito stood up from his chair. The mirror had told him too much! Was there any relationship between him and his ancestor, Juanito Guzman? He didn’t know, didn’t want to know. The dream that the mirror had induced was too strange, uncanny, compelling . . .

  With a single compulsive he threw the damned thing against the stone wall of the house—it shattered, and a single knife-shaped fragment bounced back, and with uncanny accuracy pierced him to the heart. Juanito fell into cloudy darkness, aware that he had taken part in an ancient sacrifice long postponed, finally completed, the final sacrifice of an innocent man to a cruel and impersonal god who perhaps never existed and now no longer needed to exist.

  ON AN EXPERIENCE IN A CORNFIELD

  And Its Bearing On Some Fragments Of Heraclitus

  I have done a lot of things in this lifetime. But the strangest of them is what I am doing now. I am going to be to be your reporter on one of the great current mysteries perplexing mankind.

  You all know how fields all over the world are turning up, apparently overnight, to have patterns cut into them; sometimes very complicated patterns that have been compared to Julia sets, and to even stranger mathematical notions.

  Always the questions: are these peculiar and painstaking patterns in fields the work of hoaxers, human beings who, perhaps out of love of inflicting mystification on others have been doing this secretly? Or are they the work of extraterrestrial intelligences, seeking perhaps to tell us something?

  The crop mystery seems to have started in England, but it swiftly began to happen worldwide. The conjectures are endless. People have set up with cameras and sound recording equipment, trying to capture what is happening. The results haven’t been convincing.

  I decided to look into it myself, and come to my own conclusions. I expected to be believed no more than the others who had looked into the mystery. But at least I would be able to satisfy my own curiosity. I decided to set out my findings in the form of a story, a fictional story, and let the reader make of it what he wished.

  I went to Otis, Iowa, for the purpose of witnessing what was happening in a field of corn. The field in question, owned by Mr. Salton Ames, had never been disturbed by such a manifestation, though other farms in the area had. I figured Ames was due.

  Farmer Ames put me up at Bed and Breakfast rates. He gave me a comfortable second floor room. My bed had a gingham bedspread, a rocking chair in one corner, a small closet, a bed and a chair. Although this farm was not far from Des Moines, its look and atmosphere put it close to the English Glastonbury, with its ancient, mystical associations.

  The English breakfast they served me was pretty good. That first day I wandered around the land, and selected my first site for the coming night.

  That night, around midnight, I left the house and walked slowly down the lane to the cornfields.

  It was a dark and misty night, with a hint of rain in it. There was a thin new moon, hanging in the air like a symbol of Islam. It was all in all a spooky sort of a night. When I passed the barns nearby, I could hear the soft movement of cows. Mr. Ames’ collie came running up, sniffed me, and went back to his kennel. We had met earlier. Apparently I was OK in his view.

  I went down the lane, and came out on one side of the field.

  I stood very still for a while and listened. For a while I could hear nothing but the soft voice of the wind. Then, after a while, I heard someone or something moving around. I heard the corn rustling. I knew I was going to find something.

  Very quietly I entered the field, walking down one of the rows toward the middle. For a while I could see nothing but corn on all sides of me. And then, suddenly, I saw someone moving through the rows of corn. Careless of my own safety, I hurried to catch up with him. In a rush I came on him, coming up behind him.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  He straightened and turned. He was very tall and skinny, and he was wearing what looked like shiny nylon clothing. His face had the usual number of noses, eyes and mouth, but it wasn’t a human face.

  “I am bending down these stalks,” he said.

  I watched. He walked slowly forward down the row, waving his hand at the corn, his fingers set in a particular way. The corn bent. His hand gestures cut a wide swath through the field. He didn’t actually touch the corn.

  The first question had been easy. The second one required some thought. Finally I asked, “What are you doing this for?”

  “I was assigned to it.”

  He continued moving. I had a feeling this field was almost complete. I was sure he would vanish on me suddenly, leaving me with a story, but not the story I had come for.

  “Hey, look,” I said, “I’d like to get some answers to this thing. Why are you or your people doing this? Why do you keep your activities secret? And what makes this time different from other times?”

  He straightened and looked at me. “Why not ask, instead, why I should answer any of your questions? Why not ask why I have allowed you to find me? Why not ask what I want you to know rather than insisting on what you want to know?”

  “I’d like to know that very much,” I said. “Why are you talking to me?”

  “Every once in a while,” he said, “we decide it’s time for us to talk to someone on the planet where we’re doing this sort of thing. We tell some simple home truths to someone, in the sure knowledge that they won’t be believed when they tell it to others of their kind. But at least some things will have been stated. If no one else, at least the person we talk to will know. Something. Not that he can be certain of his knowledge. It doesn’t work that way. Deceit and truth are thin alternating layers. Furthermore, the purpose of things is never simple, plain, obvious, and unequivocal. That’s not how it works. A while back I talked with one of your fellow humans. His name was Heraclitus. He said, ‘You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.’ Don’t take intentions for truth.”

  “But why are you doing this?” I asked.

  “Maybe this whole thing was for the purpose of supplying you with a story. Maybe the reason for that story is no business of yours. Your purpose is to write the story. And keep some food in your stomach.”

  “They’ll never believe me. How can I expect anyone to believe that I met an alien who quoted Heraclitus?”

  “Whether people believe you or not is not your concern. Truth is not your necessity.”

  “Then what is?”

  “Your concern is trying to find out what is your concern. Your job is not even to find it, it is to keep on searching. It is not even that. It is to keep on, to continue.”

  “Until I’m dead?”

  “Who ever said that death is the end of searching?”

  He moved on in the field. I followed.

  He said, “The great process can do anything. It is not bound by rules of reason. It is not tied to human ideas of how things ought to be. I appear before you in this form. But who is to say this is my true form, or that what I do is my true work?”

  I had no answer for that. After a while he said, “No truth holds for all circumstances. Nothing explains the peculiarity of life, its apparent determination not to be bound by human reason. The world is not only stranger than you think it is, it is even stranger than you can imagine.”

  I looked up Heraclitus when I got home. He said a nu
mber of good things. Among them, “Most men do not understand such things as they are wont to meet with; nor by learning do they come to know them, though they think they do.”

  And he said, “The Lord at Delphi neither speaks nor conceals, but gives a sign.”

  He made other good utterances. Check them out for yourself.

  As for me, I have done what it was given me to do. I have written this story, the truth of which I neither affirm nor deny.

  2003

  PRIVILEGE OF AGE

  That morning at the Crystal Sands Home for Assisted Living near Roseburg, Oregon, was different. Mr. Anderson didn’t know what it was, but he noticed it at as he got out of bed, dressed, and put on his thick glasses.

  What was different? For one thing, Ed Simmons was walking up and down the hallways, calling out, “Come on out! Everybody out!”

  Simmons was a burly black man, in charge of Sports and Physical Education at the Home. He was invariably cheerful. But this morning he seemed to be bubbling over with some unusual energy. “Everybody out!” he was calling. “This is the big day!”

  What day could that be, I wondered. All days were the same at the Rest Home, where you came to die with dignity, out of sight of your friends and family. Had Simmons acquired a new croquet set for us? It scarcely seemed worth such enthusiasm. Was there apple pie with Miracle Whip for lunch? But it was still too early for lunch. Had a state senator come to call, to remind us that we were what America was all about?

  “Come on, Mr. Anderson,” my nurse, Miss McGinnis, said. “Stop thinking! It’s time for doing!”

  Do what? What on Earth was the staff so excited about?

  I decided to find out. Usually I lounge around in my bathrobe half the morning, but today I came out of my room, with the help of my aluminum walker. I got down the hall just fine, and then down the broad steps that led to the main recreation area. My legs weren’t so bad this morning. Everyone else was there, too. Even Margie Boynton was there, and she had seemed on the verge of death last night when her cancer kicked up.

  She peered at me with her big blue bloodshot eyes. “What’s happening, Mr. Anderson? What on earth is going on?”

  “Don’t know, expect we’ll find out soon.”

  We went down the hall, past the cooking area, with its smell of turnips, and out the big wooden doors and onto the porch. We were all there—the men mostly in old, highly pressed suits of an unfashionable cut, their black plastic spectacles perched on their noses, the women in their voluminous dresses in pale blues, whites and yellows, wearing their bone-colored orthopedic shoes, most of them with purses, some of them wheeling their oxygen bottles, others clutching their drip stacks, with the needles still in their arms.

  “This is it!” Simmons was crying. “Oh, Lordie, the day has come! Praise the Lord, it’s here at last!”

  “What is the fool talking about?” Mr. Smith asked me.

  “No idea,” I said. “He’s probably drunk.”

  We followed their cries and gestures, down the steps, down the paved sidewalk, and walking faster than we usually do, limping along with our canes and walkers, down to the end of the sidewalk and onto the lawn, and then across the lawn toward the little group of maples at the end of the property.

  We got there, most of us out of breath, forcing ourselves to move on tired legs and ailing bodies.

  Margie peered at me with her big blue bloodshot eyes. “What’s happening, Mr. Anderson?”

  “Don’t know, expect we’ll find out soon.”

  “This is it!” Simmons was shouting. “It’s the big day, the one you’ve been waiting for!”

  “What is the fool talking about?” Mr. Smith asked me.

  “No idea. Doubt he knows.”

  All of the staff were skipping around, filled with an energy we had never seen before. I wondered if they had been granted a pay increase. The only thing worse than the way the elderly are treated around here is the way those who care for them are treated.

  Beyond the clump of trees there had always been a high masonry wall that marked the limits of the Rest Home property. There was no wall there now. The meadowland, greener than I remember it and covered with bright little flowers, ran on until it reached distant dim blue mountains. Where had they come from? Was this what they had called us out for? To see this extension of the Rest Home property?

  We stopped where the wall had been, uncertain if we should proceed.

  “Keep on going!” Mr. Simmons called out. “The best is yet to come!”

  “Hadn’t that been a line from some old poem? I hadn’t known Mr. Simmons knew any poetry. Only calisthenics. And wasn’t that Nurse Quinlan reciting lines from a Tennyson poem? “Here are cool mosses deep, and through the moss the ivy creeps, and from the rocky cliff the poppy hangs in sleep.”

  It was then I became aware of the music. I don’t know when it began. Maybe when I got outdoors, or when I came out of my room, or even earlier, it might have started in my sleep. You know how a song can just turn over and over in your mind, and you’re not even aware of it for a long time? That’s what this was like. But this was no simple song. This was a symphony of voices, a male chorus and a female chorus, and they were singing or chanting at each other, and sometimes both choruses sang together.

  And at the same time, they weren’t voices at all. They were instruments, and they were playing a great song of joy and praise. You had to smile to hear that music. It made all of your fears and doubts seem foolish indeed.

  I became aware that the others were listening to something, too. The faces of those old people were ecstatic and beautiful, and maybe my face was, too.

  I don’t know when the first moment of doubt began. Maybe it was when we noticed Mr. Simmons lying on the grass. His face was twisted and he was crying. “It isn’t fair,” he was saying. “We should be allowed to go, too! What’ll they do without us?” One of the nurses was trying to comfort him, but he appeared inconsolable.

  That told us something was not right. But was it not right with him, or with the situation in general?

  Or maybe my doubt began when the great chorus began to go sour, when we began to hear false notes, disharmonies, when strange little rhythms began to appear in the stately forward marching beat of the main theme.

  Whatever it was, the foremost man—that was me—came to a sudden stop. The others all stopped behind me.

  “What’s the matter, Mr. Anderson?” a woman asked me.

  I didn’t turn to face her. But I said, “This whole situation is screwy. Someone’s fooling around with us. It’s another defeat. Another broken promise.”

  “Who is doing it, Mr. Anderson?”

  “It’s got to be the government again, and all the helpful organizations. They’ve decided to help us again. They’ve prepared this little outing for us. Only they didn’t get it quite right, did they? The song has gone bad. Even the lighting is wrong.

  The fine day had turned dark, with storm clouds rising, and a lurid yellow band around the horizon.

  “He’s right,” the woman said, and others nodded. I must have been speaking in a loud voice. One by one they began to turn away, to start walking back to the Rest Home. Some of them were crying.

  I realized then that I had said the wrong thing. I had killed hope. Even if what I said was true, I should never have said it. What was there back in the sanitarium but death and television? At least by going on we had a chance.

  “Hey!” shouted. “I was only kidding!”

  “They hesitated, not sure what to make of what I was saying.

  “You folks going back to your Oreos and milk? I’m going on. Even if it’s false, this is the best thing that ever happened to me.”

  I marched toward the end of the meadow.

  Glancing over my shoulder, I saw that all the old-timers were coming with me. The Rest home staff were waving at us. We waved back, but we kept on going.

  I stepped off the Rest Home property.

  I guess you think I’m going t
o tell you it was all a dream? Wrong. What I’m going to tell you is that after I left the property, I found myself in a small plain room with a table, a chair and a computer. On the computer screen were the words: “Write what happened to you. Then exit to your left.”

  So now I’ve told you what happened to me. And now I’m going to exit to my left. If I ever get a chance to write you about what happens next, rest assured you’ll be the first to hear about it.

  LEGEND OF THE CONQUISTADORS

  At a writers’ conference in New Mexico, your editor met a poet whose first response to the words “science fiction” was to say, “The thing of it is, either they come to us or we go to them.” (Perhaps this poet greets mystery writers by saying, “Either the villains get away or the cops get ’em.” ?) We haven’t run many alien invasion stories recently, but Mr. Sheckley’s take on the subject seems like a fresh one. What would the aforementioned poet make of it? More to the point, what do you think!

  EARTH CB122XA IS ONE OF the alternate Earths spilling out of the matrix of quantum mechanical points of possibility that make up this part of the multiverse. They do things differently here.

  Earth CB122XA, or “Earth,” as the locals called it, was a quiet place. A single king ruled the entire planet. It had its cyclones, floods, forest fires, and its plagues and epidemics, just like most of the other Earths. But these came in moderation, especially when compared with elsewhere.

  And, just as their people and planets and conditions of Earth came out of the cosmic foam, so did their gods.

  This Earth had its own god, generated out of the endless quantum-mechanical possibilities. The locals called him “God.” He didn’t involve himself in the day-to-day workings of the planet or its people. He preferred not to work miracles, considering them a cheap effect. This god liked to see his people work out things for themselves. But sometimes, when an important point was at issue, or when the life of the entire planet hung in the balance, he had been known to give a hint or two.