The COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works 1911-1987

by C. L. Moore

  Hale said, "It's impossible."

  "The Companies had their forts, didn't they?"

  "It took gangs of technicians to keep the jungle out. And the animals. We had to keep waging a continual war against landside. Besides, the forts—there isn't much left of them now."

  "Pick one out and rebuild it"

  "But—then what?"

  "Maybe you can be top man," the Logician said quietly. "Maybe you can get to be top man—on Venus."

  The silence drew on and on. Hale's face changed.

  "Good enough," the Logician said, getting up. He put out his hand, "My name's Ben Crowell, by the way. Come see me if you run into trouble. Or I might even drop in to see you. If I do, don't let on I'm the great brain." He winked.

  He shambled out, sucking at his pipe.

  -

  Life in the Keeps was very much like a game of chess. In the barnyard, among fowls, social precedence is measured by length of tenancy. Extension in time is wealth. Pawns have a low life-expectancy; knights and bishops and castles have more. Socially, there was a three-dimensional democracy and a temporal autocracy. There was a reason why the long-lived Biblical patriarchs achieved power. They could hold power.

  In the Keeps, the Immortals simply knew more than the non-Immortals. Psychologically a curious displacement became evident. Immortals weren't worshiped as gods in those practical days, but there was definite displacement. Parents have one faculty a child cannot have: maturity. The plus factor. Experience. Age.

  So there was displacement. Unconsciously the short-lived peoples of the Keeps began to look with dependence upon the Immortals. They knew more, of course. And, too, they were older.

  Let George do it.

  Besides, it is a regrettably human trait to disclaim unpleasant responsibilities. For centuries the trend had been away from individualism. Social responsibility had been carried to the point where everyone, theoretically, was his brother's keeper.

  Eventually they all formed a circle and collapsed gracefully into one another's arms.

  The Immortals, who knew what long, empty centuries were ahead of them, took pains to insure that those centuries would not be so empty. They learned. They studied. They had plenty of time.

  As they gained in knowledge and experience, they began to take the responsibilities easily delegated to them by the collapsing multitudes.

  It was a stable enough culture—for a moribund race.

  -

  He was always getting into mischief.

  Anything new was fascinating to him. The Harker chromosomes took care of that. His name, though, was Sam Reed.

  He kept fighting the invisible bars that he knew prisoned him. There were fourscore and ten of them. Something in his mind, something illogical and inherited, kept rebelling, seeking expression. What can you do in ninety years?

  Once he tried to get a job in the great hydroponic gardens. His blunt, coarse face, his bald head, his precocious mind—these made it possible for him to lie convincingly about his age. He managed it for a while, till his curiosity got the better of him, and he began experimenting with botanical forced cultures. Since he knew nothing about it, he spoiled a good-sized crop.

  Before that, though, he had discovered a blue flower in one of the tanks, and it reminded him of the woman he had seen at carnival. Her gown had been exactly the same color. He asked one of the attendants about it

  "Blasted weeds," the man said. "Can't keep 'em out of the tanks. Hundreds of years, and they still show up. We don't have much trouble with these, though. It's the crab grass that's worst." He pulled up the weed and tossed it aside. Sam rescued it and asked more questions later. It was, he learned, a violet. The unobtrusive, pretty little plant was a far cry from the glamorous hybrid flowers grown in other sections of Hydroponics. He kept it till it broke into dust. He kept its memory after that, as he kept the memory of the woman in the violet-blue gown.

  One day he ran away to Canada Keep, far across the Sea of Shallows. He had never been outside a Keep before, and was fascinated as the great, transparent globe drove upward through the bubbling water. He went with a man whom he had bribed—with stolen money—to pretend to be his father. But after he reached Canada Keep he never saw the man again.

  He was ingenious at twelve. He worked out various ways to earn a living. But none satisfied him. They were all too dull. Blaze Harker had known what he was doing when he had left the boy's mind untouched in a stunted, warped body.

  It was warped only by the aesthetic standards of the time. The long-limbed, tall Immortals had set the standard of beauty. There came to be a stigma of ugliness attached to the stocky, blunt-featured, thick-boned, short-lived ones.

  There was a tough, violent seed of unfulfillment within Sam. It drove him. It couldn't develop normally, for it was seed of the Immortals, and he obviously was no Immortal. He simply could not qualify for work that might take training of a hundred years or more. Even fifty years training—!

  He did it the hard way, and the inevitable way. He got his mentor, his Chiron-Fagin, after he met the Slider.

  -

  The Slider was a fat, wicked old man without any name. He had bushy white hair, a carbuncled red nose, and a philosophy of his own. He never proffered advice, but he gave it when it was asked.

  "People want fun," he told the boy. "Most of 'em. And they don't want to look at a thing that hurts their tender feelings. Use your head, kid. Thieving's out. Best to make yourself useful to people who've got power. Now you take Jim Sheffield's gang. Jim caters to the right people. Don't ask questions; do what you're told—but first get the right connections."

  He sniffled and blinked his watery eyes at Sam.

  "I spoke to Jim about you. Go see him. Here's the place." He thrust a plastic disk at the boy. "I wouldn't of got you out of that scrape if I hadn't seen something in you. Go see Jim."

  He stopped Sam at the door.

  "You'll get along. Likewise, you won't forget old Slider, eh? Some people have. I can make trouble as easy as I can do favors."

  Sam left the fat, malignant old man sniffling and chuckling.

  -

  He went to see Jim Sheffield. He was fourteen then, strong, short, scowling. He found Sheffield stronger and larger. Sheffield was seventeen, a graduate of the Slider's twisted school, an independent, shrewd businessman whose gang was already becoming known. The human factor was vital for Keep intrigue. It wasn't merely politics; the mores of the era were as punctilious and complicated as the social life of Machiavelli's Italy. The straight thrust of the knife was not only illegal but in poor taste. Intrigue was the thing. In the continually shifting balance of power, the man who could outwit an opponent, wind him in webs of his own spinning, and force him to ruin himself—that was the game.

  Sheffield's gang free-lanced. Sam Reed's—he didn't know the name Harker except to identify it with one of the great Families of his old Keep—first job was to go undersea, with one more experienced companion, and collect some specimens of bluish algae, illegal within the Keeps. When he got back through the secret lock, he was surprised to find the Slider waiting, with a portable ray-mechanism already set up. The little room had been sealed off.

  The Slider was wearing protective armor. His voice came through a diaphragm.

  "Stay right there, boys. Catch this." He tossed a spray-gun to Sam. "Now spray that plastibulb. It's sealed, isn't it? Right. Spray it all over—fine. Now turn around slowly."

  "Wait a minute—" said the other boy.

  The Slider sniffled. "Do what I tell you or I'll break your skinny neck," he said conversationally. "Raise your arms. Turn slowly, while I use the ray on you ... that's it."

  Afterward, the three of them met Jim Sheffield. Jim was subdued but angry. He tried to argue with the Slider.

  The Slider sniffled and rumpled his white hair.

  "You shut up," he said. "Too big for your boots, you're getting to be. If you'd remember to ask me when you get into something new, you'd save yourself trou
ble." He tapped the black-painted globe Sam had set on the table. "This algae—know why it's forbidden in the Keeps? Didn't your patron tell you to be careful when he commissioned you to get the stuff?"

  Sheffield's broad mouth twisted. "I was careful!"

  "The stuff's safe to handle under lab conditions," the Slider said. "Only then. It's a metal-eater. Dissolves metal. Once it's been treated with the right reagents, it's innocuous. But raw like this, it could get loose and cause a lot of trouble here—and it'd be traced back to you, and you'd land in Therapy. See? If you'd come to me first, I'd have told you to have this ultraviolet set up, to burn the daylights out of any algae the boys might bring in stuck to their suits. Next time I won't be so easy on you. I don't want to go to Therapy, Jim."

  The old man looked innocuous enough, but Sheffield's rebellious stare wavered and fell. With a word of agreement he rose, picked up the globe and went out, beckoning to the other boys. Sam waited for a moment.

  The Slider winked at him.

  "You make a lot of mistakes when you don't get advice, kid," he said.

  -

  These were only episodes among many like them along the course of his outward life. Inwardly too he was precocious, amoral, rebellious. Above all, rebellious. He rebelled against the shortness of life, that made learning seem futile to him when he thought of the Immortals. He rebelled against his own body, thick and stocky and plebeian. He rebelled obscurely, and without knowing the reasons himself, against all that he had irrevocably become in that first week of his life.

  There have always been angry men in the world. Sometimes the anger, like Elijah's, is the fire of God, and the man lives in history as a saint and a reformer whose anger moved mountains to improve the lot of mankind. Sometimes the anger is destructive, and great war-leaders rise to devastate whole nations. Angers like that find outward expression and need not consume their hosts.

  But Sam Reed's anger was a rage against intangibles like time and destiny, and the only target it could find to explode against was himself. Granted that such anger is not normal in a man. But Sam Reed was not normal. His father before him could not have been normal, or he would never have taken such disproportionate vengeance on his son. A flaw somewhere in the Harker blood was responsible for the bitter rage in which father and son alike lived out their days, far separate, raging against far different things, but in armed rebellion all their lives, both of them, against life itself.

  Sam went through many inward phases that would have astonished the Slider and Jim Sheffield and the others with whom he worked in those days. Because his mind was more complex than theirs, he was able to live on many more levels than they, and able to conceal it. From the day he first discovered the great libraries of the Keeps he became a passionate reader. He was never an intellectual man, and the unrest in him prevented him from ever mastering any one field of knowledge and so rising above his station by the one superiority he possessed—his mind.

  But he devoured books as fire devours fuel, as his own discontent devoured himself. He raced through whole courses of reading on any subject that caught his quick, glancing fancy, and emerged with knowledge of that subject stored uselessly away in a chamber of the uselessly capacious brain. Sometimes the knowledge helped him to promote a fraud or consummate a murder. More often it simply lay dormant in the mind that had been meant for the storage of five hundred years' experience, and was doomed to extinction in less than a century.

  One great trouble with Sam Reed was that he didn't know what really ailed him. He had long struggles with his own conscience, in which he tried to rationalize his mind out of its own unconscious knowledge of its lost heritage. For a time he hoped to find among books some answer ...

  In those early days he sought and found in them the respite of escapism which he later tried in so many other forms—drugs among them, a few women, much restless shifting from Keep to Keep—until he came at last to the one great, impossible task which was to resolve his destiny and which he faced with such violent reluctance.

  For the next decade and a half he read, quietly and rapidly, through the libraries of whichever Keep he found himself in, as a smooth undercurrent to whatever illicit affair he might currently be involved with. His profound contempt for the people he victimized, directly or indirectly, was one with the contempt he felt for his associates. Sam Reed was not in any sense a nice man.

  Even to himself he was unpredictable. He was the victim of his own banked fire of self-hatred, and when that fire burst forth, Sam Reed's lawlessness took very direct forms. His reputation became tricky. No one trusted him very far—how could they, when he didn't even trust himself?—but his hand and his mind were so expert that his services were in considerable demand among those willing to take the chance that their careful plans might blow up in bloody murder if Sam Reed's temper got the better of him. Many were willing. Many found him rather fascinating.

  -

  For life in the Keeps had leveled off to an evenness which is not native to the mind of man. In many, many people something like an unrecognized flicker of the rebellion which consumed Sam Reed burned restlessly, coming to the surface in odd ways. Psychological projective screens took strange forms, such as the wave of bloodthirsty ballads which was sweeping the Keeps on a high tide of popularity when Sam was in his formative years. Less strange, but as indicative, was the fad for near-worship of the old Free-Companion days, the good old days of man's last romantic period.

  Deep in human minds lies the insistence that war is glamorous, although it never can have been except to a select few, and for nearly a thousand years now had been wholly terrible. Still the tradition clung on—perhaps because terror itself is perversely fascinating, though most of us have to translate it into other terms before we can admire it.

  The Free Companions, who had been serious, hard-working men operating a warfare machine, became swaggering heroes in the public fancy and many a man sighed nostalgically for a day he thought he had missed by a period of heartbreaking briefness.

  They sang the wailing ballads the Free Companions had carried over, in changed forms, from the pioneer days on Venus, which in turn had derived from the unimaginably different days on Old Earth. But they sang them with a difference now. Synthetic Free Companions in inaccurate costumes performed for swaying audiences that followed their every intonation without guessing how wrong they were.

  The emphasis was off, in words and rhythm alike. For the Keeps were stagnant, and stagnant people do not know how to laugh. Their humor is subtle and devious, evoking the snigger rather than the guffaw. Slyness and innuendo was the basis of their oblique humor, not laughter.

  For laughter is cruel and open. The hour was on its way when men would sing again the old bloodthirsty ballads as they were meant to be sung, and laugh again with the full-throated heartiness that comes from the need to laugh—at one's own misfortunes. To laugh because the only alternative is tears—and tears mean defeat. Only pioneers laugh in the primitive fullness of the sense. No one in the Keeps in those days had so much as heard real laughter in its cruelty and courage, except perhaps the very eldest among them, who remembered earlier days.

  Sam Reed along with the rest accepted the Free Companions—extinct almost as Old Earth's dinosaurs, and for much the same reason—as the epitome of glamorous romance. But he understood the reasons behind that emotional acceptance, and could jeer at himself for doing it. It was not Free Companionship but free endeavor which, in the last analysis, enchanted them all.

  They didn't want it, really. It would have terrified and repelled most of these people who so gracefully collapsed into the arms of anyone willing to offer them moral and mental support. But nostalgia is graceful too, and they indulged themselves in it to the full.

  Sam read of the pioneer days on Venus with a sort of savage longing. A man could use all of himself against an adversary like the ravening planet the newcomers had fought. He read of Old Earth with a burning nostalgia for the wider horizons it had offered. He
hummed the old songs over to himself and tried to imagine what a free sky must have looked like, terrifyingly studded with the visible worlds of space.

  His trouble was that his world was a simple place, made intricate only artificially, for the sake of intricate intrigue, so that one couldn't hurl oneself wholeheartedly into conflict against a barrier—because the barrier was artificial and would collapse. You had to support it with one hand while you battered it with the other.

  The only thing that could have offered Sam an opponent worthy of his efforts was time, the long, complex stretch of centuries which he knew he would never live. So he hated men, women, the world, himself. He fought them all indiscriminately and destructively for lack of an opponent he could engage with in a constructive fight

  He fought them for forty years.

  -

  One pattern held true through all that time, though he recognized it only dimly and without much interest. Blue was a color that could touch him as nothing else could. He rationalized that, in part, by remembering the stories of Old Earth and a sky inconceivably colored blue.

  Here water hemmed one in everywhere. The upper air was heavy with moisture, the clouds above it hung gravid with moisture and the gray seas which were a blanket above the Keeps seemed scarcely wetter than clouds and air. So the blueness of that lost sky was one in his mind with the thought of freedom ...

  But the first girl he took in free-marriage was a little dancer from one of the Way cafes, who had worn a scanty costume of blue feathers when he saw her first. She had blue eyes, not so blue as the feathers or the unforgotten skies of Earth, but blue. Sam rented a little apartment for them on a back street in Montana Keep, and for six months or so they bickered no more than most domestic couples.

  One morning he came in from an all-night job with the Sheffield gang and smelled something strange the moment he pushed the door open. A heavy sweetness in the air, and a sharp, thick, already familiar acridness that not many Keep men would recognize these effete days.