The COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works 1911-1987

by C. L. Moore

  "He wouldn't have been, at first?"

  "Oh, no. Not Tenning's type. He's one of the dangerous group. Not creative, but influential. You see, the creators and the technicians were with us from the start. They saw this was the only possible safe solution.

  "But the Tennings, the fellows with a little talent and a lot of aggressiveness—imagine what damage he might have done in nineteen forty-five, yawping his emotional reactions over the air. Undisciplined, immature emotions, veering in all directions.

  "It's normal, of course—everybody was veering in nineteen forty-five. That was what we had to put a stop to, before chaos set in. Tenning was one of the unfortunate in-betweens, guys with too much influence to run around free, and too little intelligence to come in constructively with us.

  "We couldn't reason with his kind. We couldn't even tell him the truth. Tenning Duplicate has done a lot of good—under control. All our key men have. We need guys like Tenning to steer people in the right direction."

  "Under control," Jerry said.

  -

  THE red-haired man laughed. "We're not the bosses. Don't start out with that idea even in the back of your mind, Jerry. People with dictator impulses are reconditioned— fast. Here's the answer—we could never be bosses in this set-up, even if we wanted to be. The change is taking place too slowly.

  "That was our whole concept, of course, and the very slowness of the thing is the check and balance system that works on us. The minute any of us got dictatorship impulses, we'd have to change the social set-up.

  "And the people won't accept quick change. They've had enough of that. There'd be chaos, and one lone dictator wouldn't stand a chance. He'd have too many opponents. All we're working for—and don't you forget it, Jerry—is to focus the veering. That's job enough for any organization right now."

  "What about Tenning? Now that he's free, he's harmless?"

  "Perfectly harmless. Mellhorn gave him token-money enough to cover the transition period, and he'll adjust like everyone else— if he can."

  "Pretty hard on him, isn't it, tossed out into a strange world?"

  "It's not that strange. He'll learn. That is, he'll learn now if he ever would have. I'm not so sure. Some just don't adjust. It takes a certain flexibility and self-confidence to be able to' make changes as your environment changes.

  "People like Tenning—I don't know. It's a funny thing, Jerry, there's a whole new class sinking to the bottom of the social setup now. People who can't or won't adapt to the new things. It happens after every major social upheaval, of course, but this time we're getting a new group of misfits.

  "In the long run, a much higher percentage benefits, of course. It's too bad about the maladjusted group, but there isn't much we can do. I don't know about Tenning. We'll keep an eye on him, help if we can.

  "But these men with half a talent and a taste for public adulation have got a bad weak spot to begin with. I hope he makes out all right. I hope he does."

  "I don't get it, Dave," Mary said. "Whom do you want to fight?"

  He gripped the leatheroid folder savagely.

  "The big boys, the ones who built the psych-phones and started this screwy system of Fish decem seventh. All this—this stuff. You ought to know."

  "But what do you want?" she asked. "What do you think you're fighting for?"

  He looked at her. And, in the warm dimness of the air, the wave of the future stirred as an alien quickening that he sensed very dimly, and hated.

  "I'll fight," he promised. "I'll—stop all this."

  He swung around and went out. The waiter paused at Mary's table. "Highball," she said.

  He sent a questioning glance after Tenning.

  "One?"

  "Just one."

  "He isn't coming back?"

  She didn't answer for a moment as she listened to the offbeat rhythm of the music that had gone on beyond her.

  "Not tonight," she said. "But he'll be back. There's nothing out there for him. Not any more. Sure, he'll be back—some day."

  The End

  DAEMON

  Famous Fantastic Mysteries - October 1946

  Padre, the words come slowly. It is a long time now since I have spoken in the Portuguese tongue. For more than a year, my companions here were those who do not speak with the tongues of men. And you must remember, padre, that in Rio, where I was born, I was named Luiz o Bobo, which is to say, Luiz the Simple. There was something wrong with my head, so that my hands were always clumsy and my feet stumbled over each other. I could not remember very much. But I could see things. Yes, padre, I could see things such as other men do not know.

  I can see things now. Do you know who stands beside you, padre, listening while I talk? Never mind that. I am Luiz o Bobo still, though here on this island there were great powers of healing, and I can remember now the things that happened to me years ago. More easily than I remember what happened last week or the week before that. The year has been like a single day, for time on this island is not like time outside. When a man lives with them, there is no time.

  The ninfas, I mean. And the others ...

  I am not lying. Why should I? I am going to die, quite soon now. You were right to tell me that, padre. But I knew. I knew already. Your crucifix is very pretty, padre. I like the way it shines in the sun. But that is not for me. You see, I have always known the things that walk beside men—other men. Not me. Perhaps they are souls, and I have no soul, being simple. Or perhaps they are daemons such as only clever men have. Or perhaps they are both these things. I do not know. But I know that I am dying. After the ninfas go away, I would not care to live.

  Since you ask how I came to this place, I will tell you if the time remains to me. You will not believe. This is the one place on earth, I think, where they lingered still—those things you do not believe.

  But before I speak of them, I must go back to an earlier day, when I was young beside the blue bay of Rio, under Sugar Loaf. I remember the docks of Rio, and the children who mocked me. I was big and strong, but I was o Bobo with a mind that knew no yesterday or to morrow.

  Minha avó, my grandmother, was kind to me. She was from Ceará, where the yearly droughts kill hope, and she was half blind, with pain in her back always. She worked so that we could eat, and she did not scold me too much. I know that she was good. It was something I could see; I have always had that power.

  One morning my grandmother did not waken. She was cold when I touched her hand. That did not frighten me for the—good thing—about her lingered for a while. I closed her eyes and kissed her, and then I went away. I was hungry, and because I was o Bobo, I thought that someone might give me food, out of kindness ...

  In the end, I foraged from the rubbish-heaps.

  I did not starve. But I was lost and alone. Have you ever felt that, padre? It is like a bitter wind from the mountains and no sheepskin cloak can shut it out. One night I wandered into a sailors' saloon, and I remember that there were many dark shapes with eyes that shone, hovering beside the men who drank there. The men had red, wind-burned faces and tarry hands. They made me drink 'guardiente until the room whirled around and went dark.

  I woke in a dirty bunk. I heard planks groaning and the floor rocked under me.

  Yes, padre, I had been shanghaied. I stumbled on deck, half blind in the dazzling sunlight, and there I found a man who had a strange and shining daemon. He was the captain of the ship, though I did not know it then. I scarcely saw the man at all. I was looking at the daemon.

  Now, most men have shapes that walk behind them, padre. Perhaps you know that, too. Some of them are dark, like the shapes I saw in the saloon. Some of them are bright, like that which followed my grandmother. Some of them are colored, pale colors like ashes or rainbows. But this man had a scarlet daemon. And it was a scarlet beside which blood itself is ashen. The color blinded me. And yet it drew me, too. I could not take my eyes away, nor could I look at it long without pain. I never saw a color more beautiful, nor more frightening. It
made my heart shrink within me, and quiver like a dog that fears the whip. If I have a soul, perhaps it was my soul that quivered. And I feared the beauty of the color as much as I feared the terror it awoke in me. It is not good to see beauty in that which is evil.

  Other men upon the deck had daemons too. Dark shapes and pale shapes that followed them like their shadows. But I saw all the daemons waver away from the red, beautiful thing that hung above the captain of the ship.

  The other daemons watched out of burning eyes. The red daemon had no eyes. Its beautiful, blind face was turned always toward the captain, as if it saw only through his vision. I could see the lines of its closed lids. And my terror of its beauty, and my terror of its evil, were nothing to my terror of the moment when the red daemon might lift those lids and look out upon the world.

  -

  The captain's name was Jonah Stryker. He was a cruel man, dangerous to be near. The men hated him. They were at his mercy while we were at sea, and the captain was at the mercy of his daemon. That was why I could not hate him as the others did. Perhaps it was pity I felt for Jonah Stryker. And you, who know men better than I, will understand that the pity I had for him made the captain hate me more bitterly than even his crew hated him.

  When I came on deck that first morning, because I was blinded by the sun and by the redness of the scarlet daemon, and because I was ignorant and bewildered, I broke a shipboard rule. What it was, I do not know. There were so many, and I never could remember very clearly in those days. Perhaps I walked between him and the wind. Would that be wrong on a clipper ship, padre? I never understood.

  The captain shouted at me, in the Yankee tongue, evil words whose meaning I did not know, but the daemon glowed redder when he spoke them. And he struck me with his fist so that I fell. There was a look of secret bliss on the blind crimson face hovering above his, because of the anger that rose in him. I thought that through the captain's eyes the closed eyes of the daemon were watching me.

  I wept. In that moment, for the first time, I knew how truly alone a man like me must be. For I had no daemon. It was not the simple loneliness for my grandmother or for human companionship that brought the tears to my eyes. That I could endure. But I saw the look of joy upon the blind daemon-face because of the captain's evil, and I remembered the look of joy that a bright shape sometimes wears who follows a good man. And I knew that no deed of mine would ever bring joy or sorrow to that which moves behind a man with a soul.

  I lay upon the bright, hot deck and wept, not because of the blow, but because I knew suddenly, for the first time, that I was alone. No daemon for good or evil would ever follow me. Perhaps because I have no soul. That loneliness, father, is something not even you could understand.

  The captain seized my arm and pulled me roughly to my feet. I did not understand, then, the words he spoke in his Yankee tongue, though later I picked up enough of that speech to know what men were saying around me. You may think it strange that o Bobo could learn a foreign tongue. It was easy for me. Easier, perhaps, than for a wiser man. Much I read upon the faces of their daemons, and there were many words whose real sounds I did not know, but whose meaning I found in the hum of thoughts about a man's head.

  The captain shouted for a man named Barton, and the first mate hurried up, looking frightened. The captain pushed me back against the rail so that I staggered, seeing him and the deck and the watching daemons through the rainbows that tears cast before one's eyes.

  There was loud talk, and many gestures toward me and the other two men who had been shanghaied from the port of Rio. The first mate tapped his head when he pointed to me, and the captain cursed again in the tongue of the foreigners, so that his daemon smiled very sweetly at his shoulder.

  I think that was the first time I let the captain see pity on my face when I looked at him.

  That was the one thing he could not bear. He snatched a belaying pin from the rail and struck me in the face with it, so that I felt the teeth break in my mouth. The blood I spat upon the deck was a beautiful color, but it looked paler than water beside the color of the captain's daemon. I remember all the daemons but the red one leaned a little forward when they saw blood running, snuffing up the smell and the brightness of it like incense. The red one did not even turn his blind face.

  The captain struck me again because I had soiled his deck. My first task aboard the Dancing Martha was to scrub up my own blood from the planking.

  Afterward they dragged me to the galley and threw me into the narrow alley at the cook's feet. I burned my hands on the stove. The captain laughed to see me jump back from it. It is a terrible thing that though I heard his laughter many times a day, I never heard mirth in it. But there was mirth on his daemon's face.

  Pain was with me for many days thereafter, because of the beating and the burns, but I was glad in a way. Pain kept my mind from the loneliness I had just discovered in myself. Those were bad days, padre. The worst days of my life. Afterward, when I was no longer lonely, I looked back upon them as a soul in paradise might look back on purgatory.

  No, I am still alone. Nothing follows me as things follow other men. But here on the island I found the ninfas, and I was content.

  I found them because of the Shaughnessy. I can understand him today in a way I could not do just then. He was a wise man and I am o Bobo, but I think I know some of his thoughts now, because today I, too, know I am going to die.

  The Shaughnessy lived many days with death. I do not know how long. It was weeks and months in coming to him, though it lived in his lungs and his heart as a child lives within its mother, biding its time to be born. The Shaughnessy was a passenger. He had much money, so that he could do what he willed with his last days of living. Also he came of a great family in a foreign land called Ireland. The captain hated him for many reasons. He scorned him because of his weakness, and he feared him because he was ill. Perhaps he envied him too, because his people had once been kings and because the Shaughnessy was not afraid to die. The captain, I know, feared death. He feared it most terribly. He was right to fear it. He could not know that a daemon rode upon his shoulder, smiling its sweet, secret smile, but some instinct must have warned him that it was there, biding its time like the death in the Shaughnessy's lungs.

  I saw the captain die. I know he was right to fear the hour of his daemon ...

  Those were bad days on the ship. They were worse because of the great beauty all around us. I had never been at sea before, and the motion of the ship was a wonder to me, the clouds of straining sail above us and the sea all about, streaked with the colors of the currents and dazzling where the sun-track lay. White gulls followed us with their yellow feet tucked up as they soared over the deck, and porpoises followed too, playing in great arcs about the ship and dripping diamonds in the sun.

  I worked hard, for no more wages than freedom from blows when I did well, and the scraps that were left from the table after the cook had eaten his fill. The cook was not a bad man like the captain, but he was not a good man, either. He did not care. His daemon was smoky, asleep, indifferent to the cook and the world.

  It was the Shaughnessy who made my life worth the trouble of living. If it had not been for him, I might have surrendered life and gone into the breathing sea some night when no one was looking. It would not have been a sin for me, as it would be for a man with a soul.

  But because of the Shaughnessy I did not. He had a strange sort of daemon himself, mother-of-pearl in the light, with gleams of darker colors when the shadows of night came on. He may have been a bad man in his day. I do not know. The presence of death in him opened his eyes, perhaps. I know only that to me he was very kind. His daemon grew brighter as the man himself grew weak with the oncoming of death.

  He told me many tales. I have never seen the foreign country of Ireland, but I walked there often in my dreams because of the tales he told. The foreign isles called Greece grew clear to me too, because the Shaughnessy had dwelt there and loved them.

  And he
told me of things which he said were not really true, but I thought he said that with only half his mind, because I saw them so clearly while he talked. Great Odysseus was a man of flesh and blood to me, with a shining daemon on his shoulder, and the voyage that took so many enchanted years was a voyage I almost remembered, as if I myself had toiled among the crew.

  He told me of burning Sappho, and I knew why the poet used that word for her, and I think the Shaughnessy knew too, though we did not speak of it. I knew how dazzling the thing must have been that followed her through the white streets of Lesbos and leaned upon her shoulder while she sang.

  He told me of the nereids and the oceanids, and once I think I saw, far away in the sun-track that blinded my eyes, a mighty head rise dripping from the water, and heard the music of a wreathed horn as Triton called to his fish-tailed girls.

  -

  The Dancing Martha stopped at Jamaica for a cargo of sugar and rum. Then we struck out across the blue water toward a country called England. But our luck was bad. Nothing was right about the ship on that voyage. Our water-casks had not been cleaned as they should be, and the drinking water became foul. A man can pick the maggots out of his salt pork if he must, but bad water is a thing he cannot mend.

  So the captain ordered our course changed for a little island he knew in these waters. It was too tiny to be inhabited, a rock rising out of the great blue deeps with a fresh spring bubbling high up in a cup of the forested crags.

  I saw it rising in the dawn like a green cloud on the horizon. Then it was a jewel of green as we drew nearer, floating on the blue water. And my heart was a bubble in my chest, shining with rainbow colors, lighter than the air around me. Part of my mind thought that the island was an isle in Rio Bay, and somehow I felt that I had come home again and would find my grandmother waiting on the shore. I forgot so much in those days. I forgot that she was dead. I thought we would circle the island and come in across the dancing Bay to the foot of the Rua d'Oporto, with the lovely city rising on its hills above the water.