It was an orgy of absolution that ended with a maximum of fifteen deaths a year, instead of the thousands or hundreds of thousands that would occur on the battlefields if they themselves fought.
It was a solution to war, this Annual Sport. Only then did I realize it fully. Besides purging the emotions, it was a way of settling disputes that were matters of honor transcending the courts. Once a year the disputes were settled on the gamesward, the miniature battleground, a concentration of blood and death that permitted them to avoid the greater vulgarity of war.
And I was part of their mass catharsis, one of the hired instruments of their annual exorcism. For an instant I saw the tiers of humanity as a great analyst’s couch, and the gamesward as the unlocked unconscious where ugly passion was set free.
This fancy passed and I found myself staring at a woman in a box at the edge of the field near me. Her face was contorted and almost unrecognizable as that of a charming hostess whose guest I twice had been—and whose guest I would be tonight at a fashionable, dignified reception if I lived. Fiendish delight now twisted her usually serene features and I had a quick lash of her thoughts projected into mine, urging me to kill the enemy, kill, kill, and in doing so to rend his body most abominably.
But then the great cymbals clashed and her face receded to a blur in the crowd. It was time for me to kill or be killed.
I strode forward confidently, giving no sign that one of my legs was false. I held my head high and tilted slightly to the right so that my good left eye could do part of the work of its missing fellow.
At the edge of the Circle of Death I stopped and bowed stiffly to my opponent from Tara. I studied him as he returned my bow. I had never seen him fight and didn’t know if any of his limbs were false, like mine.
But then I knew. The left forearm of the man of Tara was prosthetic and it would be useless to try to draw blood from it. I knew because Joro was in my mind now, directing my thoughts, just as the noble from Tara was in the mind of my opponent, directing his. Now Joro would live every blow, feel the pain of wounds, smell the blood and sweat and experience the exhilaration of battle, even as I. But if I lost I would die, not Joro. He would withdraw and live to fight another time, in another hired body.
Yet while he guided and directed me he would have the same urgency to live, the same fear of death.
I stepped into the circle now and there was an animal roar from the crowd. Tara’s man did a vicious little dance step and kicked. As I leaped aside his left hand slashed at my face. I dodged the blow and blocked the right that followed it. There was a tinkle of steel on steel as our fingers met.
We circled then, each of us seeking a weakness in the other. I had a glimpse of Joro, tense in concentration at the edge of his high seat. It was odd to see him at a distance and at the same time to know he was inside me, fighting my fight.
I felt the power of his mind and doubled over to avoid a slash that had been aimed at my eye. Then, with my opponent off balance, Joro directed a blow at his shoulder. I felt my claws dig into the man’s flesh and he went down on one knee. Quickly I kicked and saw my steel hoof slice his ear so that it dangled by a thread of flesh. Before I could follow though for the kill Tara’s man was up with a thrust that sought to disembowel me. I stepped back in time.
But I was shaken. His sharp claws had brushed my belly. An inch more and I would have been bleeding my life out, red on the green of the gamesward. I felt nauseated. The noise of the crowd was like the surf, rolling in over me, but dirty, filled with garbage.
Barbarians! I thought.
Suddenly I didn’t want to win. I didn’t want to die, either, but the price for that was to kill this other man with whom I had no quarrel.
He was facing me again, his ear hanging down grotesquely, and throwing a series of orthodox feints with his left to set me up for a right cross. He had a strange expression on his contorted face.
“…television,” I heard him grunt.
It was clearly that word—that Earth-word. I had to give him a word he’d recognize in turn as non-Uru.
“What channel?” I said. “What channel was that on?”
He looked at me in surprise.
“Any channel that had one,” he said. “I was telling myself how I used to scream for blood when I watched fights on television. Crazy. Who the hell are you?”
I swung a slow-motion left that missed by eight inches. He sent out an uppercut that missed by as much.
“New York,” I said. “I wish I was back.”
“Me too, pal,” he said. “Chicago was never like this.”
“Rome was, though,” I said, doing fancy footwork and throwing punches at the air. “And one of us is going to be carried out.”
“I was looking for yage on South State Street.” He weaved and shadow-boxed, not touching me.
“And they gave you uru. The big fix. We’re fixed, all right.”
“It’s the least, Dad,” he said. “Believe me.”
There was a voice inside my skull. “Boru!” it said. It was Joro’s, or Jones’s.
“The Man is complaining,” I said to Chicago. “The Man named Jones, an uru pusher. Thinks we’re not giving the customers their money’s worth.” I crouched and tapped him lightly on the chest.
“Bleed on the bleeding customers,” he said, nudging me gently on the shoulder. “English expression.”
“Boru!” the voice in my skull said again. “Barry! What has happened? Fight, man, for the honor of Urula!”
“He wants me to kill you,” I told Chicago. “But maybe he can’t make me.” I had thought Jones was in complete control.
“Mine, too,” Chicago said. “Pusher name of Robinson. He’s popping his cork but I think I can stand him off.” I got a light punch in the ribs and retaliated with a caress to the jaw.
“Sorry about the ear,” I said.
“Forget it. Where do we go from here? We can’t waltz forever.”
The crowd was catching on. I’d heard boos like that in the Garden and Ebbets Field. They must have known by now that the big fight was a fake and that the boys in the ring were a couple of bums anxious to get to the showers.
The crowd might not have known exactly what was up but Chicago’s manager and mine did. I could feel Jones probing around in my mind, trying to re-establish control and rekindle the blood lust.
But apparently he had no power to direct my actions except when I cooperated. He could still read my mind and communicate with it. He could cajole, threaten and curse, but he couldn’t make me kill Chicago.
Jones came down from his high seat and started toward me. I stepped back to the edge of the circle and Chicago did the same. His man was also on the way over. The crowd was having a fit.
Chicago winked at me. “I guess it’s a draw. The customers are going to start tearing up the seats.”
Joro-Jones and his opposite number met near the circle and bowed stiffly to each other. They said nothing, but from the expressions on their faces I gathered that they were having a rip-roaring telepathic conversation. Finally they bowed again and Jones took my elbow to lead me back to the sidelines.
“So long, Chicago,” I called. “Good luck.”
“Thanks,” he said. “Same to you. See you around, maybe.”
* * * *
One of the officials was trying to make an announcement to the outraged crowd as Jones and I went under the stands to the dressing room.
Sorrow and shame seemed to be Jones’s chief emotions as he helped me off with my steel claws and the other lethal paraphernalia.
“I suppose this is worse than if I got killed,” I said.
“Infinitely,” he said. “Never before has cowardice besmirched the Sport.”
“You know it wasn’t cowardice,” I told him. “Your honor would have been intact if you hadn’t run in one of my own people to the slaugh
ter. I’d always done your dirty work before.”
“You knew the rules,” he said sadly. “The traditions, the hazards, the rewards. You accepted them. But now, by having rejected them, you’ve put yourself in limbo. You are no longer Boru the Fighting Man. You can never achieve the nobility that your prowess could have brought you. Now you are Barry the Alien, and there is no place in our world for you.”
“Then I’m fired?” I asked.
“A man in disgrace should be less facetious. There should be a penalty for what you have done, but it was unprecedented. There is only one thing to do. You must be deported.”
“To Earth?” All at once this was what I wanted.
“Yes,” he said. “To the ugly planet from which you came. It is no more than you deserve. I sorrow that you were not worthy of us.”
I felt like making a speech then, about my land and my people. About the Earth being a thousand Earths—a million—two billion—meaning a different thing to ever individual whose home it was. How Jones, with his uru drug, roaming the underworld of one city, had naturally seen only the dregs of its society—the users and pushers, the grifters and dreamers, the seekers after the big deal, the short cut, the unearned reward, the big fix. He hadn’t seen the Earth I’d known once, the clean and straight world where you earned your way with dignity and integrity…
I didn’t make the speech. I didn’t have to, of course, because he read it all in my mind. I doubt if it meant anything to him.
“Here,” he said.
He handed me a bowl of pungent green liquid. I didn’t ask what it was. It was bitter and sickeningly warm but I drank every last drop. Jones watched me sadly. For just a moment I felt ashamed for having let him down.
Then the whirling rushing took me up and flung me into space and the stars ran together as before.
* * * *
I suppose Earth is the same as it ever was. Yet it seems to me now to be an infinitely better place than I remembered.
Of course my viewpoint is different. Though I see out of only one eye now, I see much more. It is possible to look beyond the petty circle of addicts that had been my world. I am ashamed that I once was one of those poor deluded creatures, the cravers of the quick kick and the brief relief. They are no-place, going nowhere.
They still talk of yage, the unreachable pie in their murky sky. They want to be up there, out and away, anywhere but here. They are fools. Uru taught me that. There is no real escape from here and now. Therefore that is the thing to embrace. The inner propinquity of the here, the time-extended everlastingness of the now.
Crazy, Jack?
No. I’ve gone scientific. I’ve gone back along the dreamy trail and found the place where I took the wrong fork. I’d followed that fork a little way but then turned back without giving it a fair shake.
Peyote’s what I’m talking about, friend. The thing Jones ran down. Mescaline. That’s right, back to the Indians.
Only it’s gone respectable since I’ve been away. They don’t call it a fix, big or otherwise. Not the serious group of investigators I work with. It’s called the Huxley effect.
It’s the study of isness, if you know what I mean; the hereness and nowness that is the all of everywhere within. It’s the slowing of time’s rush to a standstill so you can spend a century studying the intricate truth-in-beauty of a detail in the wallpaper or the eloquent message of a rose petal.
And if that’s good enough for Aldous, Jack, it’s good enough for me.
I look and describe, and my one eye becomes a thousand. I talk and they tape-record. They publish and compare the perceptions with those of other subjects in other groups.
Once I saw the blue-white sun of Uru in a delft vase. This excited them because there had been a similar perception by a subject in Chicago. It excited me too. I’m glad he got back all right.
THE CARNIVORE, by Katherine MacLean
Originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, October 1953, under the pseudonym G. A. Morris.
The beings stood around my bed in air suits like ski suits, with globes over their heads like upside-down fishbowls. It was all like a masquerade, with odd costumes and funny masks.
I know that the masks are their faces, but I argue with them and find I think as if I am arguing with humans behind the masks. They are people. I recognize people and whether I am going to like this person or that person by something in the way they move and how they get excited when they talk; and I know that I like these people in a motherly sort of way. You have to feel motherly toward them, I guess.
They all remind me of Ronny, a medical student I knew once. He was small and round and eager. You had to like him, but you couldn’t take him very seriously. He was a pacifist; he wrote poetry and pulled it out to read aloud at ill-timed moments; and he stuttered when he talked too fast.
They are like that, all fright and gentleness.
I am not the only survivor—they have explained that—but I am the first they found, and the least damaged, the one they have chosen to represent the human race to them. They stand around my bed and answer questions, and are nice to me when I argue with them.
All in a group they look half-way between a delegation of nations and an ark, one of each, big and small, thick and thin, four arms or wings, all shapes and colors in fur and skin and feathers.
I can picture them in their UN of the Universe, making speeches in their different languages, listening patiently without understanding each other’s different problems, boring each other and being too polite to yawn.
They are polite, so polite I almost feel they are afraid of me, and I want to reassure them.
But I talk as if I were angry. I can’t help it, because if things had only been a little different… “Why couldn’t you have come sooner? Why couldn’t you have tried to stop it before it happened, or at least come sooner, afterward…?”
If they had come sooner to where the workers of the Nevada power pile starved slowly behind their protecting walls of lead—if they had looked sooner for survivors of the dust with which the nations of the world had slain each other—George Craig would be alive. He died before they came. He was my co-worker, and I loved him.
We had gone down together, passing door by door the automatic safeguards of the plant, which were supposed to protect the people on the outside from the radioactive danger from the inside—but the danger of a failure of politics was far more real than the danger of failure in the science of the power pile, and that had not been calculated by the builders. We were far underground when the first radioactivity in the air outside had shut all the heavy, lead-shielded automatic doors between us and the outside.
We were safe. And we starved there.
“Why didn’t you come sooner?” I wonder if they know or guess how I feel. My questions are not questions, but I have to ask them. He is dead. I don’t mean to reproach them—they look well meaning and kindly—but I feel as if, somehow, knowing why it happened could make it stop, could let me turn the clock back and make it happen differently. If I could have signaled them, so they would have come just a little sooner.
They look at one another, turning their funny-face heads uneasily, moving back and forth, but no one will answer.
The world is dead… George is dead, that thin, pathetic creature with the bones showing through his skin that he was when we sat still at the last with our hands touching, thinking there were people outside who had forgotten us, hoping they would remember. We didn’t guess that the world was dead, blanketed in radiating dust outside. Politics had killed it.
These beings around me, they had been watching, seeing what was going to happen to our world, listening to our radios from their small settlements on the other planets of the Solar System. They had seen the doom of war coming. They represented stellar civilizations of great power and technology, and with populations that would have made ours seem a small vill
age; they were stronger than we were, and yet they had done nothing.
“Why didn’t you stop us? You could have stopped us.”
A rabbity one who is closer than the others backs away, gesturing politely that he is giving room for someone else to speak, but he looks guilty and will not look at me with his big round eyes. I still feel weak and dizzy. It is hard to think, but I feel as if they are hiding a secret.
A doelike one hesitates and comes closer to my bed. “We discussed it…we voted…” It talks through a microphone in its helmet with a soft lisping accent that I think comes from the shape of its mouth. It has a muzzle and very soft, dainty, long nibbling lips like a deer that nibbles on twigs and buds.
“We were afraid,” adds one who looks like a bear.
“To us the future was very terrible,” says one who looks as if it might have descended from some sort of large bird like a penguin. “So much—Your weapons were very terrible.”
Now they all talk at once, crowding about my bed, apologizing. “So much killing. It hurt to know about. But your people didn’t seem to mind.”
“We were afraid.”
“And in your fiction,” the doelike one lisped, “I saw plays from your amusement machines which said that the discovery of beings in space would save you from war, not because you would let us bring friendship and teach peace, but because the human race would unite in hatred of the outsiders. They would forget their hatred of each other only in a new and more terrible war with us.” Its voice breaks in a squeak and it turns its face away from me.
“You were about to come out into space. We were wondering how to hide!” That is a quick-talking one, as small as a child. He looks as if he might have descended from a bat—gray silken fur on his pointed face, big night-seeing eyes, and big sensitive ears, with a humped shape on the back of his air suit which might be folded wings. “We were trying to conceal where we had built, so that humans would not guess we were near and look for us.”
The Alien MEGAPACK® Page 29
