Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley

by Robert Sheckley

  “That’s how you’d put it, huh?” Jackson said.

  “Sure, I would,” Erum said defiantly. “These forms are for adults, aren’t they? So why not come right out and call a spigler a spey? Everybody dunfiglers voc some of the time, and so what? No one’s feelings are ever hurt by it, for heaven’s sake. I mean, after all, it simply involves oneself and a twisted old piece of wood, so why should anyone care?”

  “Wood?” Jackson echoed.

  “Yes, wood. A commonplace, dirty old piece of wood. Or at least that’s all it would be if people didn’t get their feelings so ridiculously involved.”

  “What do they do with the wood?” Jackson asked quickly.

  “Do with it? Nothing much, when you come right down to it. But the religious aura is simply too much for our so-called intellectuals. They are unable, in my opinion, to isolate the simple primordial fact—wood—from the cultural volturneiss which surrounds it at festerhiss, and to some extent at uuis, too.”

  “That’s how intellectuals are,” Jackson said. “But you can isolate it, and you find—”

  “I find it’s really nothing to get excited about. I really mean that. I mean to say that a cathedral, viewed correctly, is no more than a pile of rocks, and a forest is just an assembly of atoms. Why should we see this case differently? I mean, really, you could elikate mushkies forsically without even using wood! What do you think of that?”

  “I’m impressed,” Jackson said.

  “Don’t get me wrong! I’m not saying it would be easy, or natural, or even right. But still, you damned well could! Why, you could substitute cormed grayti and still come out all right!” Erum paused and chuckled. “You’d look foolish, but you’d still come out all right.”

  “Very interesting,” Jackson said.

  “I’m afraid I became a bit vehement,” Erum said, wiping his forehead. “Was I talking very loudly? Do you think perhaps I was overheard?”

  “Of course not. I found it all very interesting. I must leave just now, Mr. Erum, but I’ll be back tomorrow to fill out that form and buy the property.”

  “I’ll hold it for you,” Erum said, rising and shaking Jackson’s hand warmly. “And I want to thank you. It isn’t often that I have the opportunity for this kind of frank no-holds-barred conversation.”

  “I found it very instructive,” Jackson said. He left Erum’s office and walked slowly back to his ship. He was disturbed, upset, and annoyed. Linguistic incomprehension irked him, no matter how comprehensible it might be. He should have been able to figure out, somehow, how one went about elikating mushkies forsically.

  Never mind, he told himself. You’ll work it out tonight, Jackson baby, and then you’ll go back in there and cannonball through them forms. So don’t get het up over it, man.

  He’d work it out. He damned well had to work it out, as he had to own a piece of property.

  That was the second part of his job.

  Earth had come a long way since the bad old days of naked, aggressive warfare. According to the history books, a ruler back in those ancient times could simply send out his troops to seize whatever the ruler wanted. And if any of the folks at home had the temerity to ask why he wanted it, the ruler could have them beheaded or locked up in a dungeon or sewn up in a sack and thrown into the sea. And he wouldn’t even feel guilty about doing any of those things because he invariably believed that he was right and they were wrong.

  This policy, technically called the droit de seigneur, was one of the most remarkable features of the laissez-faire capitalism which the ancients knew.

  But, down the slow passage of centuries, cultural processes were inexorably at work. A new ethic came into the world; and slowly but surely, a sense of fair play and justice was bred into the human race. Rulers came to be chosen by ballot and were responsive to the desires of the electorate. Conceptions of Justice, Mercy, and Pity came to the forefront of men’s minds, ameliorating the old law of tooth and talon and amending the savage bestiality of the ancient time of unreconstruction.

  The old days were gone for ever. Today, no ruler could simply take; the voters would never stand for it.

  Nowadays one had to have an excuse for taking.

  Like for example a Terran citizen who happened to own property all legal and aboveboard on an alien planet, and who urgently needed and requested Terran military assistance in order to protect himself, his home, his means of a legitimate livelihood ...

  But first he had to own that property. He had to really own it, to protect himself from the bleeding-hearts Congressmen and the soft-on-aliens newsmen who always started an investigation whenever Earth took charge of another planet.

  To provide a legal basis for conquest—that was what the contactors were for.

  “Jackson,” Jackson said to himself, “you gonna git yourself that li’l ole bromicaine factory tomorrow and you gonna own it without let or hindrance. You heah me, boy? I mean it sincerely.”

  On the morrow, shortly before noon, Jackson was back in the city. Several hours of intensive study and a long consultation with his tutor had sufficed to show him where he had gone wrong.

  It was simple enough. He had merely been a trifle hasty in assuming an extreme and invariant isolating technique in the Hon use of radicals. He had thought, on the basis of his early studies, that word meaning and word order were the only significant factors required for an understanding of the language. But that wasn’t so. Upon further examination, Jackson found that the Hon language had some unexpected resources: affixation, for example, and an elementary form of reduplication. Yesterday he hadn’t even been prepared for any morphological inconsistencies; when they had occurred, he had found himself in semantic difficulties.

  The new forms were easy enough to learn. The trouble was, they were thoroughly illogical and contrary to the entire spirit of Hon.

  One word produced by one sound and bearing one meaning—that was the rule he had previously deduced. But now he discovered eighteen important exceptions—compounds produced by a variety of techniques, each of them with a list of modifying suffixes. For Jackson, this was as odd as stumbling across a grove of palm trees in Antarctica.

  He learned the eighteen exceptions, and thought about the article he would write when he finally got home.

  And the next day, wiser and warier, Jackson strode meaningfully back to the city.

  4

  In Erum’s office, he filled out the Government forms with ease. That first question—“Have you, now or at any past time, elikated mushkies forsically?”—he could now answer with an honest no. The plural “mushkies” in its primary meaning, represented in this context the singular “woman.” (The singular “mushkies” used similarly would denote an uncorporeal state of femininity.)

  Elikation was, of course, the role of sexual termination, unless one employed the modifier “forsically.” If one did, this quiet term took on a charged meaning in this particular context, tantamount to edematous polysexual advocation.

  Thus, Jackson could honestly write that, as he was not a Naian, he had never had that particular urge.

  It was as simple as that. Jackson was annoyed at himself for not having figured it out on his own.

  He filled in the rest of the questions without difficulty, and handed the paper back to Erum.

  “That’s really quite skoe,” Erum said. “Now, there are just a few more simple items for us to complete. The first we can do immediately. After that, I will arrange a brief official ceremony for the Property Transferral Act, and that will be followed by several other small bits of business. All of it should take no more than a day or so, and then the property will be all yours.”

  “Sure, kid, that’s great,” Jackson said. He wasn’t bothered by the delays. Quite the contrary, he had expected many more of them. On most planets, the locals caught on quickly to what was happening. It took no great reasoning power to figure out that Earth wanted what she wanted, but wanted it in a legalistic manner.

  As for why she wanted it
that way—that wasn’t too hard to fathom, either. A great majority of Terrans were idealists, and they believed fervently in concepts such as truth, justice, mercy, and the like. And not only did they believe, they also let those noble concepts guide their actions—except when it would be inconvenient or unprofitable. When that happened, they acted expediently, but continued to talk moralistically. This meant that they were “hypocrites” —a term which every race has its counterpart of.

  Terrans wanted what they wanted, but they also wanted that what they wanted should look nice. This was a lot to expect sometimes, especially when what they wanted was ownership of someone else’s planet. But in one way or another, they usually got it.

  Most alien races realized that overt resistance was impossible and so resorted to various stalling tactics.

  Sometimes they refused to sell, or they required an infinite multiplicity of forms or the approval of some local official who was always absent. But for each ploy the contactor always had a suitable counterploy.

  Did they refuse to sell property on racial grounds? The laws of Earth specifically forbade such practices, and the Declaration of Sentient Rights stated the freedom of all sentients to live and work wherever they pleased. This was a freedom that Terra would fight for, if anyone forced her to.

  Were they stalling? The Terran Doctrine of Temporal Propriety would not allow it.

  Was the necessary official absent? The Uniform Earth Code Against Implicit Sequestration in Acts of Omission expressly forbade such a practice. And so on and so on. It was a game of wits Earth invariably won, for the strongest is usually judged the cleverest.

  But the Naians weren’t even trying to fight back. Jackson considered that downright despicable.

  The exchange of Naian currency for Terran platinum was completed, and Jackson was given his change in crisp fifty-Vrso bills. Erum beamed with pleasure and said, “Now, Mr. Jackson, we can complete today’s business if you will kindly trombramcthulanchierir in the usual manner.”

  Jackson turned, his eyes narrowed, and his mouth compressed into a bloodless downward-curving line.

  “What did you say?”

  “I merely asked you to—”

  “I know what you asked! But what does it mean?”

  “Well, it means—it means—’ Erum laughed weakly. “It means exactly what it says. That is to say—ethybolically speaking—”

  Jackson said in a low, dangerous voice, “Give me a synonym.”

  “There is no synonym,” Erum said.

  “Baby, you better come up with one anyhow,” Jackson said, his hand closing over Erum’s throat.

  “Stop! Wait! Ulp!” Erum cried. “Mr. Jackson, I beg of you! How can there be a synonym when there is one and only one term for the thing expressed—if I may so express it?”

  “You’re putting me on!” Jackson howled. “And you better quit it, on account of we got laws against willful obfuscation, intentional obstructionism, implicit superimposition, and other stuff like you’re doing. You hear me?”

  “I hear you.” Erum trembled.

  “Then hear this: stop agglutinating, you devious dog! You’ve got a perfectly ordinary run-of-the-mill analytical-type language, distinguished only by its extreme isolating tendency. And when you got a language like that, man, then you simply don’t agglutinate a lot of big messy compounds. Get me?”

  “Yes, yes,” Erum cried. “But believe me, I don’t intend to numniscaterate in the slightest! Not noniskakkekaki, and you really must debruchili that!”

  Jackson drew back his fist, but got himself under control in time. It was unwise to hit aliens if there was any possibility that they were telling the truth. Folks on Terra didn’t like it. His pay could be docked; and if, by some unlucky chance, he killed Erum, he could be slapped with a six-month jail sentence.

  But still ...

  “I’ll find out if you’re lying or not!” Jackson screamed, and stormed out of the office.

  He walked for nearly an hour, mingling with the crowds in the slum quarters of Grath-Eth, below the gray, evil-smelling Ungperdis. No one paid any attention to him. To all outward appearances, he could have been a Naian, just as any Naian could have been a Terran.

  Jackson located a cheerful saloon on the corner of Niis and Da Streets and went in.

  It was quiet and masculine inside. Jackson ordered a local variety of beer. When it was served, he said to the bartender, “Funny thing happened to me the other day.”

  “Yeah?” said the bartender.

  “Yeah, really,” Jackson said. “I had this big business deal on, see, and then at the last minute they asked to trombramcthulanchierir in the usual manner.”

  He watched the bartender’s face carefully. A faint expression of puzzlement crossed the man’s stolid features.

  “So why didn’t you?” the bartender asked.

  “You mean you would have?”

  “Sure I would have. Hell, it’s the standard cathanpriptiaia, ain’t it?”

  “Course it is,” one of the loungers at the bar said. “Unless, of course, you suspected they was trying to numniscaterate.”

  “No, I don’t think they were trying anything like that,” Jackson said in a flat low, lifeless voice. He paid for his drink and started to leave.

  “Hey,” the bartender called after him, “you sure they wasn’t noniskakkekaki?”

  “You never know,” Jackson said, walking slump-shouldered into the street.

  Jackson trusted his instincts, both with languages and with people. His instincts told him now that the Naians were straight and were not practicing an elaborate deception on him. Erum had not been inventing new words for the sake of wilful confusion. He had been really speaking the Hon language as he knew it.

  But if that were true, then Na was a very strange language. In fact, it was downright eccentric. And its implications were not merely curious. They were disastrous.

  5

  That evening Jackson went back to work. He discovered a further class of exceptions which he had not known or even suspected. That was a group of twenty-nine multivalued potentiators. These words, meaningless in themselves, acted to elicit a complicated and discordant series of shadings from other words. Their particular type of potentiation varied according to their position in the sentence.

  Thus, when Erum had asked him “to trombramcthulanchierir in the usual manner,” he had merely wanted Jackson to make an obligatory ritual obeisance. This consisted of clasping his hands behind his neck and rocking back on his heels. He was required to perform this action with an expression of definite yet modest pleasure, in accordance with the totality of the situation, and also in accord with the state of his stomach and nerves and with his religion and ethical code, and bearing in mind minor temperamental differences due to fluctuations in heat and humidity, and not forgetting the virtues of patience, similitude, and forgiveness.

  It was all quite understandable. And all completely contradictory to everything Jackson had previously learned about Hon.

  It was more than contradictory; it was unthinkable, impossible, and entirely out of order. It was as if, having discovered palm trees in frigid Antarctica, he had further found that the fruit of these trees was not coconuts, but muscatel grapes.

  It couldn’t be—but it was.

  Jackson did what was required of him. When he had finished trombramcthulanchieriring in the usual manner, he had only to get through the official ceremony and the several small requirements after it.

  Erum assured him that it was all quite simple, but Jackson suspected that he might somehow have difficulties.

  So, in preparation, he put in three days of hard work acquiring a real mastery of the twenty-nine exceptional potentiators, together with their most common positions and their potentiating effect in each of these positions. He finished, bone-weary and with his irritability index risen to 97.3620 on the Grafheimer scale. An impartial observer might have noticed an ominous gleam in his china-blue eyes.

  Jackson had had it
. He was sick of the Hon language and of all things Naian. He had the vertiginous feeling that the more he learned, the less he knew. It was downright perverse.

  “Hokay,” Jackson said, to himself and to the universe a large. “I have learned the Naian language, and I have learned a set of completely inexplicable exceptions, and I have also learned a further and even more contradictory set of exceptions to the exceptions.”

  Jackson paused and in a very low voice said: “I have learned an exceptional number of exceptions. Indeed, an impartial observer might think that this language is composed of nothing but exceptions.

  “But that,” he continued, “is damned well impossible, unthinkable, and unacceptable. A language is by God and by definition systematic, which means it’s gotta follow some kind of rules. Otherwise, nobody can’t understand nobody. That’s the way it works, and that’s the way it’s gotta be. And if anyone thinks they can horse around linguisticwise with Fred C. Jackson—”

  Here Jackson paused and drew the blaster from his holster. He checked the charge, snapped off the safety, and replaced the weapon.

  “Just better no one give old Jackson no more double-talking,” old Jackson muttered. “Because the next alien who tries it is going to get a three-inch circle drilled through his lousy, cheating guts.”

  So saying, Jackson marched back to the city. He was feeling decidedly lightheaded, but absolutely determined. His job was to steal this planet out from under its inhabitants in a legal manner, and in order to do that he had to make sense out of their language. Therefore, in one way or another, he was going to make sense. Either that, or he was going to make some corpses.

  At this point, he didn’t much care which.

  Erum was in his office, waiting for him. With him were the mayor, the president of the City Council, the borough president, two aldermen, and the director of the Board of Estimates. All of them were smiling—affably, albeit nervously. Strong spirits were present on a sideboard, and there was a subdued air of fellowship in the room.