“I doubt that you could understand the answers,” Aeaea warned. “I see now that you are a common simpleminded man, and we maintain a very high intellectual average here. It will be difficult to communicate.”
“Who is the ‘we’ that maintains so high an average, girl?”
“Only myself now. My father has been dead these last several centuries.”
“It should be easy to maintain a high average with only one entity.”
“It is. I am mistress of all the sciences. I go so far beyond all else that my work is called magic. I manipulate noumena, regarding monads as points of entry tangential to hylomorphism. As to the paradox of Primary Essence being contained in Quiddity, the larger in the smaller, I have my own solution. The difficulty is always in not confusing Contingency with Accidence. Do you understand me?”
“Sure. You’re a witch.”
“Exactly, but I frown on the name. Very unscientific. But I am no ordinary witch. I studied in Salamanca the hidden.”
“Salamanca, the underground witchcraft school? But that was on World, in the Indias, in the New Latin Lands.”
“There are entrances to it on World, Road-Storm, but do you not know that the underground lands are shared by many worlds? It is all one underground, a vast place, and it is but a trick on which globe one will surface on coming out. This is the reason that the inside of every world is so much vaster than the outside. You are fooled by the shape of these little balls on which things live and crawl; you see the universe inside-out; you see the orbs as containing and not contained. I will teach you to see it right if you please me.”
“On with it, witch, on with it.”
“I am the consummate scientist, Road-Storm. Science has suffered in having her name applied to mechanics, an ugly stepchild of hers. Matter itself is a humiliation to the serious. We cannot make it vanish forever, but can make it seem to. For my purpose that is even better. All matter can be modified as long as it is kept subjective. Let us keep it so.”
“Yes. Let’s do that, Aeaea.”
“Those who fail to understand my science may call it magic or hypnotism or deception. But it is only my projection of total subjectivity. I will bring one of my creatures and you will see what I mean.”
“Bring it on, gay girl! Hey, I feel as lively as a monkey here,” Roadstrum laughed.
Aeaea left him then, and her singing filled the halls when she was gone. They were fine halls of marble, polished travertine. No crack or grain at all in their walls. But if one took a total subjective view and wished them to be less perfect? Yes, they were not really travertine, but an inferior marble; not marble really, but ordinary limestone; not that either, but adobe, mud really. Roadstrum kicked holes in the walls, and a great part of them fell down.
“Why hokey!” he said. “I can make marble halls myself. I wonder how many others know how? A thing like that could come in handy.”
Then he formed them to travertine marble again, being very subjective about it. He heard Aeaea coming again, her wonderful singing drawing nearer, and he was a little leery of her. She would know many tricks, and he had only partly learned one of them.
She came singing, and she brought a pet raccoon with her. Roadstrum guffawed to see the thing. This was real art! You would practice a long time before you made a thing as comic and clownish as that, and yet at the same time calling out all compassion and sympathy. A coon would no more be only a coon to Roadstrum; this one was really a person. A burlesque, of course, a caricature and a perfect one, a simulacrum with a soul. It was a solid cartoon of a little animal made by a real master.
“It’s good, Aeaea,” Roadstrum said heartily. “I never saw anything better even in the Natural Arts Museum on Camiroi. Has he seen it? You really take him off with that?”
“Has who seen it, Road-Storm? Of whom does it remind you?”
Roadstrum chuckled with real amusement. “It looks just like Puckett. I might almost say that it is Puckett. What other animal but a coon would he look like? Was it live to begin with, Aeaea? Did it really look like that, or have you only made it look like that?”
“I have explained to you, Road-Storm, that there is no difference between appearing and being, so long as we keep matter subjective. You have not paid attention.”
Ah, the angry and at the same time pathetic eyes on that coon!
“Just like Puckett himself, Aeaea,” Roadstrum mused. “Even the tail is the sort of tail he’d have if he had one. This is a new art that surpasses anything. You are a genius, Aeaea.”
“I have always thought so, Road-Storm. He is so sweet, the little raccoon, but if he bites me one more time I’ll break out every cute tooth he has.”
“Let’s get Puckett here to look at this. Will he recognize himself in caricature?”
“Mighty Road-Storm, do you not understand yet?”
“Understand what? Would Puckett be offended?”
“Of course he is offended. That is why he bites me.”
“What? What? I don’t believe it. This is not Puckett.”
“It is. There is no Puckett anywhere except here. This is High-Captain Puckett, commander of hornets. This is your friend and companion in his new form. You see him like this, I see him like this, he sees himself like this, and therefore—”
“Oh shut up, witch! I don’t believe you. I’ll find him.”
Roadstrum went roaring through the halls to find High-Captain Puckett. Aeaea sang behind him and all around and laughed as she sang. Roadstrum found Crewman Humphrey.
“When did you last see Puckett, Humph?” he demanded of him.
“I don’t know,” Humphrey fluttered oddly from his upper lip. “He went with the lady, I think. He looked kind of funny.”
“Puckett looked funny! Look at yourself, you straddling kaymo! What’s happened to you?
“I don’t know,” Humphrey fluttered with that rubbery lip. Humphrey did look funny. Humphrey had always looked funny, but this was different. Roadstrum would think of the difference in a minute.
“There goes Puckett now,” Crewman Eseldon brayed suddenly. “See him there climbing up that plant.”
“You ass, that’s a coon!” Roadstrum roared. “Was there ever such an ass?”
There never was. The horrible truth swept over Roadstrum in waves while the weird singing of Aeaea rose and fell. It had happened to all those men. The likeness had been so good, and he himself so upset, that Roadstrum had not noticed it happening.
Humphrey had looked funnier than usual. Humphrey had turned into a camel. That’s enough to make anyone look funny. “But what right has she to turn my men into camels and coons?” Roadstrum asked angrily. “They are persons inviolate and should not be subverted to animals. Aeaea, Aeaea, come here and give an accounting!”
Crewman Eseldon was now an ass. He had always been one, but now he was one physically. The change seemed to have got all the men. “Hollering won’t do it,” Roadstrum hollered. “It’s time I did some rapid and dynamic thinking about this thing. Come you together here, men, creatures, animals, pseudomorphs, companions of my bosom. Come together here and we will hold congress on this affair.”
They came, they came. Was this only group hypnosis? Or had they actually changed? Aeaea said that seeming and being were the same thing. Roadstrum attempted to fight her on her own ground. He became very subjective about it all. He had been able to turn travertine marble to clay-mud and back to marble, but he could not turn these things back to man-form.
Crewman Septimus was now a rabbit. With that cleft upper lip and those pink eyes he could not say anything else. Crewman Swinnert was a hog, a good solid hog, the kind you’d like to be if you had to be one. Ursley was a bear. Margaret the houri was an alley cat (that was the first mistake that Aeaea made; it was not a metamorphosis for Margaret to become an alley cat, that was her true form).
Crewmen Clamdigger and Threefountains and Trochanter, three tall stags, great horny wild stags. Those boys had always had a lot of spring to them,
and now they were ranging and leaping wildly. Deep John was a polecat. “I always did like folks to treat me with a certain decent reserve,” he said. Crewman Bramble was a fox. He had always been the smartest of them, but if he was so smart how come he was taken in this?
“If any of you have any ideas, tell them to me,” Roadstrum begged. “Fortunately for you all, the lady Aeaea has an imperfect idea of animals. I believe that she has led a secluded life, that she has never seen real animals. She leaves you with the powers of human speech, for an instance, and that is rare in animals. But I at least have remained a man, and out of my great mind I will fabricate some device to free you from all this.”
And they laughed at him. They who had been captain and crewmen and hobo and houri laughed at the Captain Roadstrum, laughed foolish giggly gobbly animal laughs. And he was furious.
“Ah, she left you your men’s voices, but she took away your men’s brains. Foolish gibbering things hardly worth saving. But for the great love I bear you in your real forms I will find a way to save you yet. I am a man yet, and I will find the way to lead you back to the man context.”
They laughed and giggled yet. You have heard stags laughing? You have heard donkeys and polecats laughing? Yes, but have you ever heard a kinkajou laughing? It runs down your spine like an idiot, that laughing. That was Crewman Lawrence in his new form.
“There has to be a converse to all this,” Roadstrum maintained, but he was full of doubt now. “I’ll break the spell or the science of her singing yet. As the only man left it devolves to me to do it.”
There was high laughter in the singing now, and Aeaea came to them assembled there. They all gathered around her, except Margaret, and were completely charmed by her. Animals! Animals!
But Roadstrum was more than surprised when Aeaea swung him up under her arm and set him astride her shoulders. It was pleasant but puzzling. Either she had become very large or he had become very small.
The reflection in the polished wall gave him the answer. Mighty Roadstrum had become a very small ape. Angrily he leaped down. He didn’t like it.
“Many men have become the pet apes of beautiful women,” he gibbered in monkey voice, “but I will not have it happen to me literally. And I was small ape all the time that I trumpeted I was the only man left? No wonder that the animals laughed.”
But it had happened; it had happened to all of them. How does one accustom himself to being an animal? Roadstrum refused, and held apart. But Aeaea became the center of the lives of the rest of them, and in a day or two she had them hooked.
They were her animals. She maintained their jealousies, fondling one and then the other, keeping them subservient to her. They were her creatures, and she gloried in them.
It would seem that she must be injured or crashed or slashed to death or ground to death, and Aeaea did not seem the durable type. Half a ton of camel in her lap was no great thing, perhaps, but when she went into her frolicking wrestle with Ursley the bear it was a fearful thing. When she went for canters with Eseldon the ass she bore him on her back as often as he bore her on his, and he was quite a big donkey, yet they seemed to have a gay, galloping time of it. The coon and the kinkajou slashed her with teeth, the three great horny stags leaped all over her. Stag-man Trochanter learned to balance with all four feet on her shoulders, and he was big as a horse.
“It is all in being subjective, Apie Road-Storm,” she explained. “But of course I am slashed and I bleed, and I am crushed and ground down and broken. I want to be. I have a passion for these things. It is the animal in myself. And yet all these things are in my mind only. They are private fantasies of mine, as are you, most wonderful of apes. You all love me, you know. If you did not, I would make new fantasies.”
All loved her except Margaret the alley cat. And Margaret was a violation of Aeaea’s thesis. It was axiomatic that all her creatures should love her, said Aeaea; therefore the alley cat loved her also. But Margaret had hateful ways of showing her love.
But Roadstrum still plotted for freedom. He plotted with Margaret the alley cat, with Deep John the polecat, with Puckett the raccoon, and with Bramble the fox.
But had not Bramble died and been eaten by the Polyphemians? No, he had not, it only seemed that he had. He was always too much of a fox to be taken and eaten, but the trick by which he evaded it will not be given here.
Something was working in Roadstrum’s little ape head. When he had been a man he had always known when it was time for action; particularly he had always known the last moment when action was still possible. He knew now that that moment was come very near. He was sinking deeper in his animalness every hour.
Puckett the coon resisted, but with entirely too much deference. “We should let the lady know that we do not always wish to remain animals,” he said. “We must present this protest firmly to the lady. We must take the bull by the tail, as the ancient adage has it, and tell the lady that we are not entirely pleased with our state.”
Then a blinding light burst on Roadstrum, and he saw the truth of the situation. Many things Roadstrum was not, and it was sometimes wondered why he was the natural leader of all the men. He was their leader because he was a man on whom the blinding light sometimes descended.
“I’ve got it, I’ve got it,” he shouted. He gibbered it like an ape? No, he shouted it like a man. He had his man’s voice back again. “I’ve got it, guys, I’ve got it! We have been taking the bull by the wrong organ. The witch has played a semantic trick on us. We were already pretty salty animals when we came here! It is toy animals she has turned us into. We have been working against ourselves, trying to be men again, but to be her idea of men, since we live in her context. But she does not know real animals, or men.
“Listen, listen; what we must do now is become more animal, and not less animal. Assemble, assemble all.
“Toy creatures, puppets, tame things!” he thundered. “Be real animals! Raise it up in you! Show the witch what real animals are. Resurrect the old beast!”
“No, no,” they twittered. “Aeaea has already turned us into animals with her singing. Someday, but not today or tomorrow, we will become men again for a little while, if she will permit it. But we are animals now, Ape. Your words are mixed.”
“Hear my man words, hear my animal words!” Roadstrum bellowed. “Be you not toys any longer! Stir up the wild business in you. You have to be real animals before you can be men. How could Roadstrum be the tame ape of any woman? Puckett, be you a real boar coon while you are a coon! Humphrey, be you a cob camel at least! Ye three great stags, be rampant and musky stags! Ursley, let out the great growl, be a bear and not a toy bear! Septimus! Swinnert! Eseldon! All! Raise it up in you!”
The arty singing of Aeaea turned into a scream, but a sincere one. Reality, raw murderous reality broke into her contrived world. Terror had come to the planet Aeaea, and it would never be the same again. The lady Aeaea had become a sniffling screaming old lady now, and only Eseldon the ass remained with her. An ass is all she deserved.
No, no, it cannot be given here! The blood would be all over you, on your hands and in your heart, and you would never be able to get rid of it. It was horrifying, animal, human slaughter, the brutish murder of a concept and a person. It would sear your eyes to watch it.
Of what did the great revolt consist? Some say that it was a cosmic gang-shag that left the lady near dead and in terror for the rest of her life, never again to dabble in toy animals. But most agree that she was left dead indeed, though perhaps not from her own viewpoint. And some say that it was an elemental surge, so much more horrifying than a mere attack that it cannot safely be put into words.
Margaret, of course, was in the middle of it. Nobody had ever doubted her animality.
“I’ll shred that lark; I’ll shred her yet,” she had sworn. And Margaret grew to be a larger and larger cat. “I see myself as a very large cat, you all see me as a very large cat, she will see me as one, and therefore I will be one.” Margaret had become bobcat
sized, leopard sized. Her tail twitched and her whiskers vibrated. She’d have that songbird; for Aeaea, in her terror, had begun to look very like a bird. Ape and cat and coon and fox had been practicing at seeing her as a bird, and it worked.
Margaret went for Aeaea, and they all went for her. She was torn open in throat and breast, she was rent apart, she was ground down, she was trampled and stomped, she was bitten and clawed, she was defaced (that Margaret took the face clear off of her with a final sweep of her tigress claws), she was annihilated. She was dead.
Dead, dead, nothing left, except the song that had turned into a scream that still hung in the air. And the bloody pulp that had almost no resemblance to a body. She was stubborn, though, that Aeaea, and she had her own philosophy.
“I am as I have always been,” said Aeaea. “You can all see that there is no blood on me.” Well, there was quite a bit of blood around, much of it on the cat Margaret. She reveled in the feathers and blood on her paws and face, quite a bit of blood.
“I see myself as unhurt,” Aeaea continued (there was the broken remnant of a body on the ground, and there was the voice in the air). “Surely you all see me as unhurt. Therefore I am unhurt even though (as it happens) I have just died horribly. Now you had better all be gone. I hate sticky farewells, and what is left of me has become very sticky.”
“Aeaea, whichever is you, the voice in the air, or the bloody thing on the ground, there is a flaw in your philosophy. You really are dead, you know. You begin to fade away, and so does your world. Hey, we’d better get off this thing while there’s still something left to get off!” Roadstrum trumpeted.
“Would you sing for us once more,” asked Humphrey the apprehensive camel, who was becoming uncameled.
“Yes, do,” said Margaret. She was back in her human or houri form now. “How about ‘Mouth Full of Feathers’? That’s a good boogie song. Or the ‘Dying Canary.’ I always did like the ‘Dying Canary.’ ” Margaret was a little cruel.
“I can sing no more,” said Aeaea. “I fade, I fade. But do I not carry it all off well?”
Space Chantey Page 12
