The Best of Margaret St. Clair

by Margaret St. Clair

  Early in December, when the vintage was over and the new wine was quietly doing the last of its fermentation in the storage containers, he awoke to the steady drumming of rain on his roof. Well. He’d get caught up on his bookkeeping. He hoped the rain wouldn’t be too hard. Eight of his acres were on a hillside, and after every rain he had to do some reterracing.

  About eleven, when he was adding up a long column of figures, he felt a sort of soundless jarring in the air. He couldn’t tell whether it was real or whether he had imagined it. Probably the latter. His hearing wasn’t any too good these days. He shook his head to clear it, and poured himself a glass of the unvintaged Zinfandel.

  After lunch the rain stopped and the sky grew bright. He finished his noon-time glass of wine and started out for a breath of air. As he left the house he realized that he was just a little, little tipsy. Well, that wasn’t such a bad way for a vintner to be. He’d go up to the hillside acres and see how they did.

  There had been very little soil washing, he saw, inspecting the hillside. The reterracing would be at a minimum. In fact, most of the soil removal he was doing himself, on the soles of his boots. He straightened up, feeling pleased.

  Ahead of him on the slope four young people were standing, two men and two girls.

  Da Valora felt a twinge of annoyance and alarm. What were they doing he re? A vineyard out of leaf isn’t attractive, and the hillside was well back from the road. He’d never had any trouble with vandals, only with deer. If these people tramped around on the wet earth, they’d break the terracing down.

  As he got within speaking distance of them, one of the girls stepped forward. She had hair of an extraordinary copper-gold, and vivid, intensely turquoise eyes. (The other girl had black hair, and the two men were dark blonds.) Something about the group puzzled da Valora, and then he located it. They were all dressed exactly alike.

  “Hello,” the girl said.

  “Hello,” da Valora answered. Now that he was near to them, his anxiety about the vines had left him. It was as if their mere proximity—and he was to experience this effect during all the hours they spent with him—as if their mere proximity both stimulated and soothed his intellect, so that cares and pettinesses dropped away from him, and he moved in a larger air. He seemed to apprehend whatever they said directly, in a deeper way than words are usually apprehended and with a wonderful naturalness.

  “Hello,” the girl repeated. “We’ve come from”—somehow the word escaped Joe’s hearing—“to see the vines.”

  “Well, now,” said Joe, pleased, “have you seen enough of them? This planting is Zinfandel. If you have, we might go through the winery. And then we might sample a little wine.”

  Yes, they would like to. They would all like that.

  They moved beside him in a group, walking lightly and not picking up any of the wet earth on their feet. As they walked along they told him about themselves. They were winegrowers themselves, the four of them, though they seemed so young, in a sort of loose partnership, and they were making a winegrowers’ tour of—of—Again Joe’s hearing failed him. but he had the fancy that there would never be any conflict of will among the four of them. Their tastes and wishes would blend like four harmonious voices, the women’s high and clear, the men’s richer and more deep. Yet it seemed to him that the copper-haired girl was regarded with a certain deference by her companions, and he thought, wisely, that he knew the reason. It was what he had so often told his wife—that when a lady really likes wine, when she really has a palate for it, nobody can be at her judgment, so the others respected her.

  He showed them through the winery without shame, without pride. If there were bigger wineries than his in the Napa valley, there were smaller ones too. And he knew he made good wine.

  Back in the house he got out a bottle of his vintaged Zinfandel, the best Zinfandel he had ever made, for them. It wasn’t only that they were fellow growers, he also wanted to please them. It was the ’51.

  As he poured the dark, fragrant stuff into their glasses he said, “What did you say the name of your firm was? Where did you say you were from?”

  “It isn’t exactly a firm,” the dark-haired girl said, laughing. “And you wouldn’t know the name of our home star.”

  Star? Star? Joe da Valora’s hand shook so that he dribbled wine outside the glass. But what else had he expected? Hadn’t he known from the moment he had seen them standing on the hillside? Of course they were from another star.

  “And you’re making a tour…?” he asked, putting down the bottle carefully.

  “Of the nearer galaxy. We have only a few hours to devote to Earth.”

  They drank. Joe da Valora wasn’t surprised when only one of the men, the darker blond, praised the wine with much vigor. No doubt they’d tasted better. He wasn’t hurt; they’d never want to hurt him—or at least not much hurt.

  Yet as he looked at the four of them sitting around his dining table—so young, so wise, so kind—he was fired with a sudden honorable ambition. If they were only going to be here a few hours, then it was up to him, since nobody else could do it—it was up to him to champion the wines of Earth.

  “Have you been to France?” he asked.

  “France?” the dark-haired girl answered. So he knew the answer to the question.

  “Wait,” he told them, “wait. I’ll be back.” He went clattering down the cellar stairs.

  In the cellar, he hesitated. He had a few bottles of the best Pinot Noir grown in the Napa Valley; and that meant—nobody could question it—the best Pinot Noir grown in California. But which year should he bring? The ’43 was the better balanced, feminine, regal, round, and delicate. The ’42 was a greater wine, but its inherent imbalance and its age had made it arrive at the state that winemakers call fragile. One bottle of it would be glorious, the next vapid, passe and flat.

  In the end, he’d settle on the ’42. He’d take his chances. Just before he left the cellar, he picked up another bottle and carried it up with him. It was something his son had given him a couple of years ago; he’d been saving it for some great occasion. After all, he was championing the wines of Earth.

  He opened the ’42 anxiously. It was too bad he hadn’t known about their coming earlier. The burgundy would have benefited by longer contact with the air. But the first whiff of the wine’s great nose reassured him; this bottle was going to be all right.

  He got clean glasses, the biggest he had, and poured an inch of the wine into them. He watched wordlessly as they took the wine into their mouths, swished it around on their palates, and chewed it, after the fashion of winetasters everywhere. The girl with copper hair kept swirling her glass and inhaling the wine’s perfume. He waited tensely for what she would say.

  At last she spoke. “Very sound. Very good.”

  Joe da Valora felt a pang of disappointment whose intensity astonished him. He looked at the girl searchingly. Her face was sad. But she was honest. “Very sound, very good.” was all that she could say.

  Well, he still had an arrow left in his quiver. Even if it wasn’t a California arrow. His hands were trembling as he drew the cork out of the bottle of Romanée-Conti ’47 his son had given him. (Where had Haro ld got it? The wine, da Valora understood, was rare even in France. But the appellation of origin was in order. Harold must have paid a lot for it.) More glasses. The magnificent perfume of the wine rose to his nose like a promise. Surely this…

  There was a long silence. The girl with the dark hair finished her wine and held out her glass for more. At last the other girl said, “A fine wine. Yes, a fine wine.”

  For a moment Joe da Valora felt he hated her. Her, and the others. Who were these insolent young strangers, to come to Earth, drink the flower, the cream, the very pearl, of Earth’s vintages, and dismiss it with so slight a compliment? Joe had been drinking wine all his life. In the hierarchy of fine wines, the Zinfandel he made was a petty princeling; the Pinot ’42 was a great lord; but the wine he had just given them to drink wa
s the sovereign, unquestioned emperor. He didn’t think it would be possible to grow a better wine on Earth.

  The girl with the copper-gold hair got up from the table. “Come to our ship,” she said. “Please. We want you to taste the wine we make.”

  Still a little angry, Joe went with them. The sun was still well up, but the sky was getting overcast. It would rain again before night.

  The ship was in a hollow behind the hillside vineyard. It was a big silver sphere, flattened at the bottom, that hovered a few feet above the rows of vines. The copper-haired girl took his hand, touched a stud at her belt, and they rose smoothly through the flattened bottom into a sort of foyer. The others followed them.

  The ship’s interior made little impression on Joe da Valora. He sat down on a chair of some sort and waited while the copper-haired girl went into a pantry and came back with a bottle.

  “Our best wine,” she said, holding it out for him to see.

  The container itself was smaller and squatter than an Earth bottle. From it she poured a wine that was almost brownish. He was impressed by its body even in the glass.

  He swirled the wine glass. It seemed to him he smelled violets and hazelnuts, and some other perfume, rich and delicate, whose name he didn’t know. He could have been satisfied for a half hour only inhaling the wine’s perfume. At last he sipped at it.

  “Oh,” he said when he had swished it in his mouth, let it bat he his palate, and slowly trickle down his throat. “Oh.”

  “We don’t make much of it,” she said, pouring more into his glass. “The grapes are so hard to grow.”

  “Thank you,” he said gratefully. “Now I see why you said, ‘A fine wine.’”

  “Yes. We’re sorry, dear Earth man.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” he said smiling. He felt no sting of inferiority, no shame for Earth. The distance was too great. You couldn’t expect Earth vines to grow the wine of paradise.

  They were all drinking now, taking the wine in tiny sips, so he saw how precious it was to them. But first one and then the other of them would fill his glass.

  The wine was making him bold. He licked his lips, and said, “Cuttings? Could you… give me cuttings? I’d take them to, to the University. To Davis.” Even as he spoke he knew how hopeless the words were.

  The darker blond man shook his head. “They wouldn’t grow on Earth.”

  The bottle was empty. Once or twice one of the four had gone to a machine and touched buttons and punched tapes on it. He knew they must be getting ready to go. He rose to leave.

  “Goodby,” he said. “Thank you.” He held out his hand to them in leave-taking. But all of them, the men too, kissed him lightly and lovingly on the cheek.

  “Goodby, dear human man,” the girl with the copper hair said. “Goodby, goodby.”

  He left the ship. He stood at a distance and watched it lift lightly and effortlessly to the height of the trees. There was a pause, while the ship hovered and he wondered anxiously if something had gone wrong. Then the ship descended a few feet and the copper-haired girl jumped lightly out of it. She came running toward him, one of the small, squat bottles in her hand. She held it out to him.

  “I can’t take it—” he said.

  “Oh, yes. You must. We want you to have it.” She thrust it into his hands.

  She ran back to the ship. It rose up again, shimmered, and was gone.

  Joe da Valora looked at where the ship had been. The gods had co me and gone. Was this how Dionysus had come to the Greeks? Divine, bearing a cargo that was divine? Now that they were gone, he realized how much in love with them he had been.

  At last he drew a long sigh. He was where he had always been. His life would go on as it always had. Taxes, licenses, a mountain of paperwork, bad weather, public indifference, the attacks of local-optionists—all would be as it had been. But he had the bottle of wine they had given him. He knew there would never, in all his fore seeable life (he was sixty-five), be an event happy enough to warrant his opening it. But they had given him one of their last three bottles.

  He was smiling as he went back to the house.

  1967

  THE INVESTED LIBIDO

  Dentautasen has a rather dubious reputation even in Martian psycho-pharmacology. Conservative medical opinion frowns on its use except in the desperate cases, for people who already feel so bad that any change one can produce in them is an improvement. The drug’s action is drastic and unpredictable. But, Mars being Mars, there are no restrictions on its exportation from the planet. And the short-sighted skullduggery Mars runs to has been known to result in its being substituted for senta beans, which it somewhat resembles.

  This batch of dentautasen got into commerce as senta beans via an unscrupulous herb collector, a bribed inspector, and a customs official, on Earth, who was thinking of something else at the time. The pharmaceutics manufacturer who bought it tasted it perfunctorily—dentautasen is much like senta chemically except that it has a short chained radical at one side of its elaborate molecule—and then used it in a syrup of senta beans. The syrup was labelled, “a grand old Martian remedy for relief of functional intestinal irregularity (bowel stasis)”, and duly went on the drugstore shelves. It was the irony of fate that Wilmer Bellows, who was loaded to the gills with psychiatric drugs already, should have bought a bottle of it thinking it was something like castoria.

  Wilmer’s psycho-therapist was on vacation, or Wilmer would have asked him about the syrup before taking it. As it was, Wilmer swallowed a tablespoonful of the syrup, took four neuroquel tablets and a deutapromazine capsule, and got into bed. He got out again immediately. He had forgotten to practice libidinal investment with his machine.

  The therapist had diagnosed Wilmer’s difficulty, which he referred to as “depersonalization,” as proceeding from Wilmer’s lack of libidinal investment in Wilmer’s own self. What Wilmer experienced was a feeling of being entirely detached from his person and personality. His ego seemed to hover impersonally over his body and watch it, clockwork-wise, going through its daily tricks; he would look at his hand and wonder whose hand it was, or speculate numbly as to who the person was who sat in Wilmer’s chair. It was a horrid feeling, though only intermittent, and Wilmer had spent a lot of time and money trying to get rid of it. He had not had much success.

  The machine for practicing libidinal investment was something like a stroboscope. Discs rotated, slots shot in and out across them, lights flashed. Wilmer looked in at the eyehole and tried to feel libidinally involved with himself.

  After fifteen minutes of eyestrain, he was ready for bed. He got between the sheets. The neuroquel and the deutapromazine made him sleepy; the dentautasen opposed their action. Wilmer felt feverish. When he got to sleep, he dreamed about Dr. Adams, his therapist.

  He woke, however, feeling much better. He had none of the hideous moments of depersonalization while he was shaving, his breakfast tasted pretty good. He decided he would visit the city aquarium after breakfast. Looking at marine life was one of the few things he enjoyed.

  It was a fine sunny day. He did feel better. Maybe the therapy was beginning to help at last. He walked toward the aquarium feeling positively benevolent toward life. It wasn’t such a bad world, after all—if only they’d put muzzles on those god-damned snakes on the street corners.

  Snakes? Wilmer stopped walking so suddenly that the man behind him bumped into him. What was the matter with him? Was he going psycho? And yet for a moment he’d had the definite impression that big snakes had been gliding effortlessly along the curbing. He hadn’t been particularly afraid of them.

  He was sweating. He looked about himself wildly. For a moment his ego seemed to hover bee-like in the air above him—above the little girl with the pink parasol, above the brown paper parcel the brisk old lady was carrying, above the wide furry dog who was irrigating a lamp post. He was all of them, he was none of them. Who was he?

  His eye fell on a manure bun in the street, relic of one of the horse-drawn
carriages that were currently fashionable. No. No. Not it. He wasn’t, he wouldn’t. He recalled himself into his body desperately. He was Wilmer Bellows, that’s who he was. Wilmer Bellows. He made the rest of the distance to the aquarium almost at a run.

  The echoing, wet-smelling building soothed him. Early as it was, there were quite a few people looking into the greenish light of the cases, and that soothed him too.

  He looked at a case with sea horses, sea stars, and a lobster. He looked at a case with sea roses and sea anemones. He looked at a case with a flat fish and two ugly, poisonous Scorpaena. He looked at a case wi—Suddenly the hovering depersonalization descended on him crashingly. Descended? No, he was being sucked up into it. He was being drawn up a varnished staircase into a hideous vacuum, a spiral of emptiness.

  He had to stop somewhere, he couldn’t go on. The little girl, the parcel, the dog, the manure bun? He must be one of them, he must be somebody, he—His eyes were fixed wildly on the glass of the tank before him. His hand had gone to the knot of his tie. He didn’t know who he was any longer, but he was aware of sweat pouring down his back. If he had had enough ego left for prayer, he would have prayed.

  Lib—invesnt—if he could lov—There was a sort of click and a feeling of pressure released in his ears. He drew a long, shaky breath. A weak smile of gratitude spread over his face. He knew who he was at least, at last he loved himself. It was the squid in the tank before him. He loved the squid. Because he was the squid.

  The green water slid over his back. He sucked in deliriously salty water, pushed it on out, and jetted backward silkily. A frond of tentacles moved to his beak and then away again.