A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  But the melody swelled, and the boy sank under the green waves. The sea stank of seaweed and fish . . . Carried along by the currents, the little cripple felt light and free. Banks of rustling diatoms parted for him; a blue phosphorescence haloed the medusas and starfish, and pearly blue anemones formed a forest. Grazed by a transparent jellyfish, Jacky felt a nettle-like burning. The shadow of a hammerhead shark went by, and scattered a twinkling cloud of smelt. Farther down, the shadow grew denser, more opaque and mysterious—caverns gaped in a coral reef. The tentacle of an octopus lashed the water, and the cripple shuddered.

  He found himself thrown back against the hull of a ship, half buried in the sand. A little black-and-gold siren, garlanded with barnacles, smiled under the prow; and he fell, transported, against a breach that spilled out a pirate treasure, coffers full of barbaric jewels. Heaps of bones were whitening at the bottom of the hold, and a skull smiled with empty sockets. This must be an amateur film, Jacky thought: a little too realistic. He freed himself, pushed away as hard as he could with his hooks, rose to the surface at last—and almost cried out.

  The sky above him was not that of Earth. North had told him how that other dark ocean looked—the sub-ether. The stars were naked and dazzling, Reefs, that were burning meteors, sprang up out of nowhere. And the planets seemed to whirl near enough to touch—one was ruby, another orange, still another a tranquil blue; Saturn danced in its airy ring.

  Jacky thrust his hooks out before him to push away those torches. In so doing, he slipped and rolled across the landing. The door opened a second later—he hadn’t had time to fall three steps, but this time he wasn’t diving alone: beside him, in the hideously reddened water, whirled and danced the body of a disjointed puppet, with gullied features in a face of wax.

  Jacky raised his head. North stood on the sill, terrible, pale as a statue of old ivory; the black bandage cut his face in two. He called, “Who’s there? Answer me, or I’ll call the militia!”

  His voice was loud and angry. North, who always spoke so softly to Jacky . . .

  “It’s me—Jack,” said the boy, trembling. “I was coming back, and I missed a step . . .”

  (“I told a lie,” said Jacky later, to the militiamen who were questioning him. And he stared into their eyes with a look of open defiance. “That’s right, sure, I told a lie. Because I knew he’d kill me.”)

  The next morning there was no blood and no corpse on the landing. Only a smell of seaweed . . .

  Jacky was filling the coffee cups, in the back of the shop, while the television news broadcast was on. Toward the end, the announcer reported that the body of a drowned man had been taken from the harbor. The dead man’s face appeared on the tiny screen, at the moment North came into the shop.

  “Hey, look at that!” called the cripple. “Your five thousand credits are done for.”

  “What’s that?” asked his brother, picking up his china cup and his buttered bread with delicate accuracy.

  “The character with the pet. They’ve just fished him out of the channel. Guess what, they don’t know who he is: somebody swiped his wallet.”

  “A dead loss,” said the older. “You’re certain he’s the one?”

  “He’s still on the screen. He isn’t a pretty sight.”

  An indefinable expression passed over North’s mobile features. “You’d think he was relieved,” Jacky told himself. Aloud, he asked, “What do we do with the animal?”

  “Does it bother you?” asked North, a little too negligently.

  “Me, old man?” said the cripple in a clownish tone, imitating a famous fat actor. “As long as there’s nc wrinkles in my belly! Where did he come from?”

  “He talked about the Aselli,” said North, reaching with a magician’s deftness for another slice of bread. “And a lot of other things, too. What are you up to this morning? Got any work to do?”

  “Not much! The Stimpson order to send out. A crate of lunar bells coming in. I ought to go to the Re-education Center, too.”

  “Ckay. Can you bring me back a copy of the weekly news disc?”

  “Sure.”

  But Jacky didn’t go to the Re-education Center that morning, nor to his customers. With his carriage perched on the slidewalk, he rode to Astronautics Headquarters, a building among others, and had some difficulty getting upstairs in the elevator, amid the students’ jibes. Some of them asked, “You want to do the broad jump in a rocket?” And others, “He thinks these are the good old days, when everybody was hunting for round-bottoms to send to the Moon!” It was not really spiteful, and Jacky was used to it He felt a touch of nostalgia, not for himself but for North—he knew North would never come here again. The walls were covered with celestial charts, microfilm shelves rose from one floor to the next, and in all the glass cases there were models of spaceship engines, from the multistage rockets and sputniks all the way up to the great ships that synthesized their own fissionables. Jacky arrived all out of breath in front of the robot card-sorter, and handed it his card.

  “The Aselli,” spat the robot. “Asellus Borealis? Asellus Australis? Gamma Cancri or Delta Cancri?”

  “Nothing else out there?”

  “Yes, Al-Phard, longitude twenty-six degrees nineteen minutes. Alpha Hydrae.”

  “Hydra, that’s an aquatic monster? Is it a water planet? Read me the card.”

  “There is little to tell,” crackled the robot. “The planet is almost unexplored, its surface being composed of oceans.”

  “Fauna? Flora?”

  “Without evidence to the contrary, those of oceans in general.”

  “Intelligent life?”

  The robot made a face with its revolving spheres. “Without evidence to the contrary, none. Nor any human beings. Nothing but sea Hons and manatees.”

  “Manatees? What are they?” asked Jacky, suddenly apprehensive.

  “Herbivorous sirenian mammals which live on Earth, along the shores of Africa and America. Manatees sometimes grow as long as three meters, and frequent the estuaries of rivers.”

  “But—‘sirenians’ ?”

  “A genus of mammals, related to the cetaceans, and comprising the dugongs, manatees, and so on.”

  Jacky’s eyebrows went up and he cried, “I thought it came from ‘siren’ !”

  “So it does,” said the robot laconically. “Fabulous monsters, half woman, half bird or fish. With their sweet singing, they lured voyagers onto the reefs—”

  “Where did this happen?”

  “On Earth, where else?” said the robot, offended. “Between the isle of Capri and the coast of Italy. Young man, you don’t know quite what you mean to ask.”

  But Jacky knew.

  On his return, as he expected, he found the shop closed and a note tacked to the door: “The pilot is out.” Jacky hunted in his pockets for the key, slipped inside. All was calm and ordinary, except for the smell which ruled now like the mistress of the house, the smell that you breathe on the beaches, in little coves, in summer: seaweed, shells, fish, perhaps a little tar. Jacky set the table, set to work in the kitchenette and prepared a nice little snack, lobster salad and ravioli. Secretive and spiteful, imprisoned among the yellowing antiques of the shop, the young cripple really loved them all. When everything was ready—fresh flowers in the vases, the ravioli hot, ice cubes in the glass—Jacky rang three times, according to custom. No one answered. Everything was a pretext for a secret language between the two mutilated brothers, who adored each other; the first stroke of the bell meant: “The meal is ready, his lordship may come down,” the second: “I’m hungry,” and the third: “I’m hungry, hungry!” The fourth had almost the sense of: “Have you had an accident?”

  Jacky hesitated a moment, then pressed the button. The silence was deep among the crystallized plants and the gems of seven planets. Did this mean that North was really away? The cripple hoisted himself into the dumb-waiter and rode up to the penthouse.

  On the upper landing, the scent had changed; it had flo
wered now into unknown spices, and it would have taken a more expert observer than Jacky to recognize the aromatics of the fabulous past: nard, aloes, and benzoin, the bitter thyme of Shelba’s Belkis, the myrrh and olibanum of Cleopatra.

  In the midst of all this, the music was real, almost palpable, like a pillar of light, and Jacky asked himself how it could be that the others, on the floors below, didn’t hear it.

  That morning, North Ellis had closed the door of the dark room behind him, turned the key, and shot the bolt. His blind man’s hands, strong and slender, executed these movements with machine-like precision, but he was panting a little, and in spite of old habit, had almost missed the landing. He was so pressed . . . but he had to foresee everything. Jacky . . . Resting his back against the door, North gave a moment’s thought to the idea of sending Jacky to Europe. Their aunt, their mother’s sister, lived somewhere in a little village with a musical name. He felt responsible for Jacky.

  He swept away these preoccupations like dead leaves, and walked toward the dark comer where the chest lay under a black cloth. His fingers crept over the porous wood which scented his palms.

  “You’re there,” he said in a cold, harsh voice. “You’ve been waiting for me, you!”

  The being that crouched at the heart of the shadows did not immediately answer, but the concentric waves of the music swelled out. And the man who had tumbled to earth with broken wings, awaited neither by his mother, dead of leukemia, nor by a Russian girl who had laughed, turning her primrose face beside a white neck . . . the blind pilot felt himself neither deprived nor unhappy.

  “You’re beautiful, aren’t you? You’re very beautiful! Your voice . . .”

  “What else would you like to know?” responded the waves, growing stronger. “You are sightless, I faceless. I told you, yesterday when you opened the strong room: I am all that streams and sings. The glittering cascades, the torrents of ice that break on the columbines, the reflections of the multiple moons on the oceans . . . And I am the ocean. Let yourself float on my wave. Come . . .”

  “You made me kill that man, yesterday.”

  “What is a man? I speak to you of tumbling abysses, dark and luminous by turns, of the crucibles where new life is forged, and you answer me with the death of a spaceman! Anyhow, he deserved it: he captured me, imprisoned me, and he had come back to separate us!”

  “Separate us . . .” said North. “Do you think that’s possible?”

  “No—if you follow me.”

  The central melody grew piercing. It was like a spire, or a bridge over a limitless space. And the unconscious part of the human soul darted out to encounter that harmony. The wheeling abyss opened, it was peopled with trembling nebulae, with diamonds and roses of fire . . .

  North toppled into it.

  . . . It was strange to recognize, in this nth dimension, the crowds of stars he had encountered in real voyages—the glacial scintillation of Polaris, the scattered pearls of Orion’s Belt. North marveled to find himself again in this night, weightless and free, without spacesuit or rocket. Jets of photons bore him on immense wings. The garret, the mutants’ building, the Earth? He laughed at them. The Boreal Dragon twisted its spirals in a spray of stars. He crossed in one bound an abyss streaming with fire—Berenice’s Hair—and cut himself on the blue sapphire of Vega in the Lyre. He was not climbing alone: the living music wound him in its rings.

  “Do you think to know the Infinite?” said the voice enfolded in the harmonies. “Poor Earthlings, who claim to have discovered everything! Because you’ve built heavy machines that break all equilibrium, that burst into flame and fall, and martyr your vulnerable human flesh? Come, I’ll show you what we can see, we obscure and immobile ones, in the abysses, since what is on high is also down below . . .”

  The star-spirals and the harmonies surged up. In the depths of his night, North gazed upon those things which the pilots, constrained by their limited periscopic screens, never saw: oceans of rubies, furnaces of emeralds, dark stars, constellations coiled like luminous dragons. Meteorites were a rain of motionless streaks, Novas came to meet him; they exploded and shattered in. sidereal tornadoes, the giants and dwarfs fell again in incandescent cascades. Space-time was nothing but a flaming chalice,

  “Higher! Faster!” sang the voice.

  All that passed beyond vertigo and the tipsiness of the flesh. North felt himself tumbled, dissolved in the astral foam, he was nothing but an atom in the infinite.

  “Higher! Faster!”

  Was it at that moment, among the dusty arcs, far down at the bottom of the abyss, at the heart of his being, that he felt that icy breath, that sensation of horror? It was more than unclean. It was as if he had leaped over the abysses and the centuries, passed beyond all human limits—and ended at this. At nothingness, the void. He was down at the bottom of a well, in utter darkness, and his mouth was full of blood. Rhythmic blows were shaking that closed universe. Trying to raise himself, he felt under his hands the porous, wrinkled wood. A childish voice was crying, “North! Oh! North! Don’t you hear me? Let me in, let me in!”

  North came back to himself, numbed, weak as if he had bled to death. For a little, he thought himself in the wrecked starship, out in the Pleiades. He hoisted himself up on his elbows and crawled toward the door. He had strength enough left to draw the bolt, turn the key, and then he fainted on the sill.

  (“It was those trips, you know . . .”) Jacky looked up at the Spacial Militiamen who were taking their turn opposite him. They were not hardhearted; they had given him a sandwich and a big quilt. But how much could they understand? “I never knew when North started getting unhappy. Me, I never went on a trip farther away than the coast. Ever since he’s been blind, he always seemed to be so calm! I thought he was like me. When I was around him, I felt good, I never wanted to go anywhere. Sometimes, to try and be the same as him, I’d put a bandage around my eyes, and try to see everything in sounds instead of colors. Sure, the switchboard operator, and the night watchman—not the robot, the other one—they said this was no life for two boys. But North was blind and I was crippled. Who would have wanted us?”

  . . . The next day was a day of trouble; North pulled an old spacesuit out of a pile of scrap iron and began to polish the plates, whistling. He explained to Jacky that he was going to put it at the entrance of the shop. Toward noon, Jacky took a phone message for North: he was told that the board of directors of a famous sanatorium hesitated to accept a boarder mutated to that extent. He accepted their excuses and hung up, silently.

  So that was what it was all about: North wanted to get rid of him. He was crazy—it was as if he had gone blind all over again! During a miserable lunch, the idea came to him to put the building’s telephone line out of commission; that way, the outer world would leave them alone. But first he wanted to call up Dr. Evers, their family doctor, and the telephone did not respond. Jacky understood that North had got ahead of him.

  After that, he made himself small, rolled his carriage behind some crates, and installed himself on a shelf of the bookcase. It was his favorite hiding place. There were still in the shop some volumes bound in blond leather, almost golden, which smelled of incense or cigars, with yellowing pages and the curious printing of the twentieth century. They had quaint pictures, not even animated. Without looking, he stumbled upon the marvelous story of the navigator who sailed the wine-dark sea. The sail was purple, and the hull of sandalwood. Off the mythological coasts, a divine singing arose, inviting the sailors to more distant flights. The reefs were fringed with pearls; the white moon rose high above the fabulous mountains. Ulysses stopped up their ears with wax and tied himself to the mast. But he himself heard the songs of the sirens . . .

  “North,” the boy asked later, forgetting all caution, “is there such a thing as sirens?”

  “What?” asked the blind man, with a start.

  “I mean, the sailors in the olden days, they said—”

  “Crud,” said North. “Those guys went
out of their heads, sailing across the oceans. Just think, it took them longer between Crete, a little island, and Ithaca than it takes us to get to Jupiter, They went short of food, and their ships were walnut shells. And on top of even thing else, for months on end they’d see nobody except a few shipmates, as chappid and hairy as they were. Well, they’d start to go off their rockers, and the first woman pirate was Circe or Calypso to them, and the first cetacean they met was an ocean princess.”

  “A manatee,” said Jacky.

  “That’s right, a manatee. Have you ever seen one?”

  “No.”

  “Sure, that’s right, I don’t think there is one in the Zoo. Maybe in the exotic specimens. Take down the fourth book from the left, on the ‘Nat. Sciences’ shelf. Page seven hundred ninety-two. Got it?”

  Jacky found it. It was a big beast with a round head and mustaches, and a thick oily skin. The female was giving suck to a little tar-baby. They all had serious expressions, Jacky was overcome with mad laughter.

  “Ridiculous, isn’t it?” North asked in an unrecognizable dived into the water on account of that! I think they must dived into the water, on account of that! I think they must have been sick.”

  But that evening, he offered Jacky a ticket to the planetarium and a trip to the amusement park. Jacky refused politely; he was content to stay on his shelf. Again he plunged into the volume bound in blond leather, discovering for the first time that life has always been mysterious and that destiny puts on many masks. The isles with the fabulous names flickered past to the rhythm of strophes; the heroes sailed for the conquest of the Golden Fleece, or perhaps they led a pale well-beloved out of Hades. Some burned their wings in the sun and fell.

  North walked around cat-footed, closing the shutters, arranging the planetary knickknacks. He disappeared so quietly that Jacky was not aware of it, and it was only when the boy wanted to ask him for some information about sailing ships that his absence became a concrete fact. Suddenly afraid, Jacky slipped to the floor, and discovered that his carriage had also disappeared. He crawled then, with the aid of his hooks, among the scattered pieces of iron, and it was then that he stumbled over a horrible viscous thing: the wet billfold of the dead spaceman. The five thousand credits were still inside.