“The past… But where in the future?”
“To a place you will know, Agamemnon. Wait no longer. Do this now.”
Agamemnon got up and walked in the direction Teiresias had indicated. When he looked back, the magician was gone. Had he been there in the first place? Agamemnon wasn’t sure. The indirections of the lottery were bad enough. But when you added magic…
He saw something light-colored, almost hidden beneath shrubbery. It was the entrance to a tube burrowing down into the earth. Wide enough so he could get into it. A tube of some light-colored metal, aluminum, perhaps, and probably built by the lottery people, since aluminum hadn’t been used in the ancient world.
Was he really supposed to climb through it? He hesitated, and then saw that there was a woman standing close to the tube. From the look of her, he knew it could only be one woman.
“Helen!”
“Hello, Agamemnon. I don’t believe we ever got to meet properly before. I have come to thank you for sending me home to Menelaus. And to offer you my hospitality here in the Elysian Fields.”
“You are too kind, Queen Helen. But I must go home now.”
“Must you?”
Agamemnon hesitated. Never had he been so sorely tempted. The woman was the epitome of all his dreams. There could be nothing as wonderful as to be loved by Helen.
“But your new husband, Achilles—”
“Achilles has a great reputation, but he is dead, Agamemnon, just as I am. A dead hero does not even compare to a live dog. You are alive. Alive and in hell! Such a wonderful circumstance is rare. When Hercules and Theseus were here, they were only passing through. Besides, I was not here then. Things might have been different if I had!”
“I am alive, yes,” Agamemnon said. “But I will not be allowed to stay here.”
“I’ll talk Hades into it. He likes me—especially with his wife Persephone gone for half a year at a time.”
Agamemnon could glimpse the future. It thrilled him and frightened him. But he knew what he wanted. To stay here with Helen—as much of Helen as he could get….
She held out her hand. Her reached toward her—
And heard voices in the distance.
And then he saw shapes in the sky. One was a tall, handsome, thickset middle-aged woman, with long loose dark hair. The other was young, tall, slim, with fair hair piled up on her head and bound with silver ornaments.
The women seemed to be walking down the sky toward him, and they were in vehement discussion.
“You must tell him to his face what he did!” the older woman was saying.
“Mummy, there’s no reason to make a scene.”
“But he had you killed, can’t you understand that? Your throat cut on the altar! You must tell him so to his face.”
“Mummy, I don’t want to accuse Daddy of so gross a crime. Anyhow, there’s another version that says that Artemis rescued me and carried me to the Taurians, where I served as high priestess.”
“Agamemnon killed you! If not literally, then figuratively, no matter which version of the story you’re following. He’s guilty in either version.”
“Mummy, calm down, I don’t want to accuse him.”
“You little idiot, you’ll do as I tell you. Look, we’re here. There he is, the great killer. Ho, Agamemnon!”
Agamemnon could listen no longer. Letting go of Helen’s hand, aware that he was forsaking the good things of death for the pain and uncertainty of life, he plunged into the underbrush and hurled himself into the white metal tube.
Agamemnon had been prepared for a precipitous passage downward, but not for the circling movement he underwent as the tube spiraled in its descent. It was dark, and he could see no light from either end. He was moving rapidly, and there seemed nothing he could do to hasten or slow his progress. He was carried along by gravity, and his fear was that his wife and daughter would enter the tube in pursuit of him. He thought that would be more than he could bear.
He continued to fall through the darkness, scraping against the sides of the tube. The ride came to an abrupt end when he suddenly fell through the end of it. He had a heart-stopping moment in the air, then he was in the water.
The shock of that cold water was so great that he found himself paralyzed, unable to make a move.
And he came out on a corner of a small South Texas town. There was Jose, standing beside the pickup parked in front of the general store. Jose gasped when he saw Chris. For a moment he was frozen. Then he hurried over to him. “Senor Chrees! Is it you?”
There were hugs, embraces. When he’d left for the lottery and distant places, he’d left them to run the ranch. Make what they could out of it. But it was still his ranch, and he was home.
Maria said, “I make your favorite, turkey mole tonight!”
And then talk about their cousins in Mexico, some of whom he’d known as a boy.
There was more shopping, and then they were driving down the familiar dirt road with its cardboard stretches, to the ranch.
Jose drove them to the ranch in his old pickup. The ranch looked a little rundown, but very good. Chris lounged around in the kitchen. Chris dozed in the big old sofa, and dreamed of Greece and Troy. And then dinner was served.
After dinner, Chris went into the front room and lay down on the old horsehair sofa. It was deliciously comfortable, and the smells were familiar and soothing. He drifted into sleep, and knew that he was sleeping. He also knew when the dream began: it was when he saw the tall, robed figure of Teiresias.
Teiresias nodded to him and sat down on the end of the couch. It crossed Chris’s mind that he might be in danger from a dream-figure, but there was nothing he could do about it.
“I came here to make sure you got home all right. When you enter the river of time, you can never be too sure.”
“Yes, I am back where I ought to be. Tell me, Teiresias, is there a danger of Clytemnestra finding me here?”
“She will not find you here. But punishment will. It is inescapable.”
“What am I to be punished for? I didn’t do anything!”
“When you were Agamemnon, you killed your daughter. For that deed, you owe Necessity a death.”
“But the version I’m going by—”
“Forget such puerile nonsense. A young woman has been killed. In Homer, whose rules we’re going by, there is no guilt. But there is punishment. Punishment is symbolic of the need for guilt, which still hadn’t been invented in Homer’s time. We learn through guilt. Thus we return to innocence.”
“I thought, if I came home, I’d be free of all that. And anyhow, Artemis—”
“Forget such specious nonsense. It shows why Plato hated sophists. No one learns anything by making the worse case the better. The Agamemnon situation is a curse, and it goes on and on, gathering energy through expiation and repetition. The Greeks had a predilection for creating these situations—Oedipus, Tantulus, Sisyphus, Prometheus, the list is endless. One character after another falls into a situation that must be solved unfairly. The case is never clear, but punishment always follows.”
“Does it end here?”
“The expiation for mythic conditions never ends. Opening into the unknowable is the essence of humanity.”
Then Chris dreamed that he sat up on his couch, opened his shirt, and said, “Very well, then—strike!”
“A truly Agamemnon-like gesture, Chris. But I am not going to kill you.”
“You’re not? Why are you here then?”
“At these times, a magician is always present to draw the moral.”
“Which is?”
“It is an exciting thing to be a human being.”
“You’re here to tell me that? So Clytemnestra gets her revenge!”
“And is killed in turn by Orestes. Nobody wins in these dramas, Chris.”
“So that’s what you came here to tell me.”
“That, and to take care of some loose ends. Goodbye, Chris. See you in hell.”
And with
that, Teiresias was gone.
Chris woke up with a start. The dream of Teiresias had been very real. But it was over now, and he was back in his Texas ranch. He sat up. It was evening. It had gotten cold after the sun went down. He got up. Hearing his footsteps,
Maria came running in from the kitchen. She was carrying his old suede jacket.
“You put this on, Mr. Chris,” she said, and threw the jacket around his shoulders.
The jacket was curiously constricting. Chris couldn’t move his arms. And then Jose was there, and somehow they were bending his head back.
“What are you doing?” Chris asked, but he really didn’t have to be told when he caught the flash of steel in Jose’s hand.
“How could you?” he asked.
“Hey, Mr. Chris, we join the lottery, me and Maria!” Jose said. “I’m going to be the new Agamemnon, she’s Clytemnestra, but we take care of the trouble before it begins. We kill the old Agamemnon, so it doesn’t have to happen again!”
Chris thought it was just like Jose to get things mixed up, to try to solve a myth before it began. He wondered if Cassandra had hinted at this outcome, and if he had ignored her, since that was her curse. He sank to the floor. The pain was sharp and brief, and he had the feeling that there was something he had left undone, though he couldn’t remember what it was…
He couldn’t know it, not at that time, that a man in a yellow buffalo-hide coat had gone to the local branch of Thomas Cook and put in a payment. He had it directed to the Infernal Account. The clerk had never heard of that account, but when he checked with the manager, there it was.
The payment ensured that Chris wouldn’t be left for eternity on the wrong shore of the Styx, and that his four companions were paid for, too.
It was a little nicety on the part of Teiresias. He hadn’t had to do it, but he did it anyhow. Those old magicians had class. And anyhow, that’s what a good magician does—he ties up loose ends.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Introduction, copyright © 2003 by Robert Sheckley
“A Trick Worth Two of That,” copyright © 2001 by Robert Sheckley. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 2001.
“Mind-Slaves of Manitori,” copyright © 1989 by Robert Sheckley. First published in Pulphouse: The Hardback Issue Magazine, #4.
“Pandora’s Box—Open With Care,” copyright © 2000 by Robert Sheckley. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 2001.
“Dream of Misunderstanding,” copyright © 2002 by Robert Sheckley. First published in BIGnews.
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Copyright © 1984 by Robert Sheckley
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Uncanny Tales Page 22
