The 34th Golden Age of Science Fiction: C.M. Kornbluth

by C. M. Kornbluth

  A witch, Orsino thought.

  “It kept going underground until the Troubles.”

  “A filthy business—human sacrifices twice a year.”

  She approached him and, like the shifting of a kaleidoscope, the group fell into a new pattern of which she was still the focus. Charles thought he had never seen a face so humorlessly conscious of power. The petty ruler of a few barbarians, she carried herself as though she were empress of the universe. Nor did a large gray louse that crawled from her hairline across her forehead and back again affect her in the slightest. She wore a greasy animal hide as though it were royal purple. It added up to either insanity or a limitless pretension to religious authority. And her eyes were not mad.

  “You,” she said coldly. “What about the jeep and the guns? Do they go?”

  He laughed suddenly and idiotically at these words from the mouth of a stone-age goddess. A raised spear sobered him instantly. “Yes,” he said.

  “Show my men how,” she said, and squatted regally on the turf.

  “Please,” he said, “could I have something to eat first?”

  She nodded indifferently and one of the men loped off into the brush.

  * * * *

  His hands untied and his face greasy with venison fat, Charles spent the daylight hours instructing six savages in the nomenclature, maintenance and operation of the jeep and the twin-fifty machine gun.

  They absorbed it with utter lack of curiosity. They more or less learned to start and steer and stop the jeep. They more or less learned to load, point and fire the gun.

  Through the lessons the girl sat absolutely motionless, first in shadow, then in noon and afternoon sun and then in shadow again. But she had been listening. She said at last: “You are telling them nothing new now. Is there no more?”

  Charles noted that a spear was poised at his ribs. “A great deal more,” he said hastily. “It takes months.”

  “They can work them now. What more is there to learn?”

  “Well, what to do if something goes wrong.”

  She said, as though speaking from vast experience: “When something goes wrong, you start over again. That is all you can do. When I make death-wine for the spear blades and the death-wine does not kill, it is because something went wrong—a word or a sign or picking a plant at the wrong time. The only thing to do is make the poison again. As you grow in experience you make fewer mistakes. That is how it will be with my men when they work the jeep and the guns.”

  She nodded ever so slightly at one of the men and he took a firmer grip on his spear.

  Death swooped low.

  “No!” Charles exploded. “You don’t understand! This isn’t like anything you do at all!” He was sweating, even in the late afternoon chill. “You’ve got to have somebody who knows how to repair the jeep and the gun. If they’re busted they’re busted and no amount of starting over again will make them work!”

  She nodded and said: “Tie his hands. We’ll take him with us.” Charles was torn between relief and wonder at the way she spoke. He realized that he had never, literally never, seen any person concede a point in quite that fashion. There had been no hesitation, there had been no reluctance in the voice, not a flicker of displeasure in the face. Simply, without forcing, she had said: “We’ll take him with us.” It was as though—as though she had re-made the immediate past, un-making her opposition to the idea, nullifying it. She was a person who was not at war with herself in any respect whatever, a person who knew exactly who she was and what she was—

  The girl rose in a single flowing motion, startling after her day spent in immobility. She led the way, flanked by two of the spearmen. The other four followed in the jeep, at a crawl. Last of all came Charles, and nobody had to urge him. In his portable trap his hours would be numbered if he got separated from his captors.

  Stick with them, he told himself, stumbling through the brush. Just stay alive and you can outsmart these savages. He fell, cursed, picked himself up, stumbled on after the growl of the jeep.

  Dawn brought them to a collection of mud-and-wattle huts, a corral enclosing a few dozen head of wretched diseased cattle, a few adults and a few children. The girl was still clear-eyed and supple in her movements. Her spearmen yawned and stretched stiffly. Charles was a walking dead man, battered by countless trees and stumbles on the long trek. With red and swollen eyes he watched while half-naked brats swarmed over the jeep and grownups made obeisances to the girl—all but one.

  This was an evil-faced harridan who said to her with cool insolence: “I see you claim the power of the goddess now, my dear. Has something happened to my sister?”

  “The guns killed a certain person. I put on the skull. You know what I am; do not say ‘claim to be.’ I warn you once.”

  “Liar!” shrieked the harridan. “You killed her and stole the skull! St. Patrick and St. Bridget shrivel your guts! Abaddon and Lucifer pierce your eyes!”

  An arena formed about them as the girl said coldly: “I warn you the second time.”

  The harridan made signs with her fingers, glaring at her; there was a moan from the watchers; some turned aside and a half-grown girl fainted dead away.

  The girl with the skull on her pate said, as though speaking from a million years and a million miles away: “This is the third warning; there are no more. Now the worm is in your backbone gnawing. Now the maggots are at your eyes, devouring them. Your bowels turn to water; your heart pounds like the heart of a bird; soon it will not beat at all.” As the eerie, space-filling whisper drilled on the watchers broke and ran, holding their hands over their ears, white-faced, but the harridan stood as if rooted to the earth. Charles listened dully as the curse was droned, nor was he surprised when the harridan fell, blasted by it. Another sorceress, aided it is true by pentothal, had months ago done the same to him.

  The people trickled back, muttering and abject.

  Just stay alive and you can outsmart these savages, he repeated ironically to himself. It had dawned on him that these savages lived by an obscure and complicated code harder to master than the intricacies of the Syndic or the Government.

  A kick roused him to his feet. One of the spearmen grunted: “I’m putting you with Kennedy.”

  “All right,” Charles groaned. “You take these cords off me?”

  “Later.” He prodded Charles to a minute, ugly block house of logs from which came smoke and an irregular metallic clanging. He cut the cords, rolled great boulders away from a crawl-hole and shoved him through.

  The place was about six by nine feet, hemmed in by ten-inch logs. The light was very bad and the smell was too. A few loopholes let in some air. There was a latrine pit and an open stone hearth and a naked brown man with wild hair and a beard.

  Rubbing his wrists, Charles asked uncertainly: “Are you Kennedy?”

  The man looked up and croaked: “Are you from the Government?”

  “Yes,” Charles said, hope rekindling. “Thank God they put us together. There’s a jeep. Also a twin-fifty. If we play this right the two of us can bust out—”

  He stopped, disconcerted. Kennedy had turned to the hearth and the small, fierce fire glowing on it and began to pound a red-hot lump of metal. There were spear heads and arrow heads about in various stages of completion, as well as files and a hone.

  “What’s the matter?” he demanded. “Aren’t you interested?”

  “Of course I’m interested,” Kennedy said. “But we’ve got to begin at the beginning. You’re too general.” His voice was mild, but reproving.

  “You’re right,” Charles said. “I guess you’ve made a try or two yourself. But now that there are two of us, what do you suggest? Can you drive a jeep? Can you fire a twin-fifty?”

  The man poked the lump of metal into the heart of the fire again, picked up a black-scaled spear head and began to file an edge into it. “Le
t’s get down to essentials,” he suggested apologetically. “What is escape? Getting from an undesirable place to a desirable place, opposing and neutralizing things or persons adverse to the change of state in the process. But I’m not being specific, am I? Let’s say, then, escape is getting us from a relatively undesirable place to a relatively desirable place, opposing and neutralizing the aborigines.” He put aside the file and reached for the hone, sleeking it along the bright metal ribbon of the new edge. He looked up with a pleased smile and asked: “How’s that for a plan?”

  “Fine,” Charles muttered. Kennedy beamed proudly as he repeated: “Fine, fine,” and sank to the ground, born down by the almost physical weight of his depression. His hoped-for ally was stark mad.

  CHAPTER XIII

  Kennedy turned out to have been an armorer-artificer of the North American Navy, captured two years ago while deer-hunting too far from the logging-camp road to New Portsmouth. Fed on scraps of gristle, isolated from his kind, beaten when he failed to make his daily task of spear heads and arrow points, he had shyly retreated into beautifully interminable labyrinths of abstraction. Now and then, Charles Orsino got a word or two of sense from him before the rosy clouds closed in. When attempted conversation with the lunatic palled, Charles could watch the aborigines through chinks in the palisade. There were about fifty of them. There would have been more if they hadn’t been given to infanticide—for what reason, Charles could not guess.

  He had been there a week when the boulders were rolled away one morning and he was roughly called out. He said to Kennedy before stooping to crawl through the hole: “Take it easy, friend. I’ll be back, I hope.”

  Kennedy looked up with a puzzled smile: “That’s such a general statement, Charles. Exactly what are you implying—”

  The witch girl was there, flanked by spearmen. She said abruptly: “I have been listening to you. Why are you untrue to your brothers?”

  He gawked. The only thing that seemed to fit was: “That’s such a general statement,” but he didn’t say it.

  “Answer,” one of the spearmen growled.

  “I—I don’t understand. I have no brothers.”

  “Your brothers in Portsmouth, on the sea. Whatever you call them, they are your brothers, all children of the mother called Government. Why are you untrue to them?”

  He began to understand. “They aren’t my brothers. I’m not a child of the government. I’m a child of another mother far away, called Syndic.”

  She looked puzzled—and almost human—for an instant. Then the visor dropped over her face again as she said: “That is true. Now you must teach a certain person the jeep and the guns. Teach her well. See that she gets her hands on the metal and into the grease.” To a spearman she said: “Bring Martha.”

  The spearman brought Martha, who was trying not to cry. She was a half-naked child of ten!

  The witch girl abruptly left them. Her guards took Martha and bewildered Charles to the edge of the village where the jeep and its mounted guns stood behind a silly little museum exhibit rope of vine. Feathers and bones were knotted into the vine. The spearmen treated it as though it were a high-tension transmission line.

  “You break it,” one of them said to Charles. He did, and the spearmen sighed with relief. Martha stopped scowling and stared.

  The spearman said to Charles: “Go ahead and teach her. The firing pins are out of the guns, and if you try to start the jeep you get a spear through you. Now teach her.” He and the rest squatted on the turf around the jeep. The little girl shied violently as he took her hand, and tried to run away. One of the spearmen slung her back into the circle. She brushed against the jeep and froze, white-faced.

  “Martha,” Charles said patiently, “there’s nothing to be afraid of. The guns won’t go off and the jeep won’t move. I’ll teach you how to work them so you can kill everybody you don’t like with the guns and go faster than a deer in the jeep—”

  He was talking into empty air as far as the child was concerned. She was muttering, staring at the arm that had brushed the jeep: “That did it, I guess. There goes the power. May the goddess blast her—no. The power’s out of me now. I felt it go.” She looked up at Charles, quite calmly, and said: “Go on. Show me all about it. Do a good job.”

  “Martha, what are you talking about?”

  “She was afraid of me, my sister, so she’s robbing me of the power. Don’t you know? I guess not. The goddess hates iron and machines. I had the power of the goddess in me, but it’s gone now; I felt it go. Now nobody’ll be afraid of me any more.” Her face contorted and she said: “Show me how you work the guns.”

  * * * *

  He taught her what he could while the circle of spearmen looked on and grinned, cracking raw jokes about the child as anybody anywhere, would about a tyrant deposed. She pretended to ignore them, grimly repeating names after him and imitating his practiced movements in loading drill. She was very bright, Charles realized. When he got a chance he muttered, “I’m sorry about this, Martha. It isn’t my idea.”

  She whispered bleakly: “I know. I liked you. I was sorry when the other outsider took your dinner.” She began to sob uncontrollably. “I’ll never see anything again! Nobody’ll ever be afraid of me again!” She buried her face against Charles’ shoulder.

  He smoothed her tangled hair mechanically and said to the watching, grinning circle: “Look, hasn’t this gone far enough? Haven’t you got what you wanted?”

  The headman stretched and spat. “Guess so,” he said. “Come on, girl.” He yanked Martha from the seat and booted her toward the huts.

  Charles scrambled down just ahead of a spear. He let himself be led back to the smithy block house and shoved through the crawl hole.

  “I was thinking about what you said the other day,” Kennedy beamed, rasping a file over an arrowhead. “When I said that to change one molecule in the past you’d have to change every molecule in the past, and you said, ‘Maybe so.’ I’ve figured that what you were driving at was—”

  “Kennedy,” Charles said, “please shut up just this once. I’ve got to think.”

  “In what sense do you mean that, Charles? Do you mean that you’re a rational animal and therefore that your being rather than essense is—”

  “Shut up or I’ll pick up a rock and bust your head in with it!” Charles roared. He more than half meant it. Kennedy hunched down before his hearth looking offended and scared. Charles squatted with his head in his hands.

  I have been listening to you.

  Repeated drives of the Government to wipe out the aborigines. Drives that never succeeded.

  I’ll never see anything again.

  The way the witch girl had blasted her rival—but that was suggestion. But—

  I have been listening to you. Why are you untrue to your brothers?

  He’d said nothing like that to anybody, not to her or poor Kennedy.

  He thought vaguely of psi force, a fragment in his memory. An old superstition, like the id-ego-superego triad of the sick-minded psychologists. Like vectors of the mind, exploded nonsense. But—

  I have been listening to you. Why are you untrue to your brothers?

  Charles smacked one fist against the sand floor in impotent rage. He was going as crazy as Kennedy. Did the witch girl—and Martha—have hereditary psi power? He mocked himself savagely: that’s such a general question!

  Neurotic adolescent girls in kerosene-lit farmhouses, he thought vaguely. Things that go bump—and crash and blooie and whoo-oo-oo! in the night. Not in electric lit city apartments. Not around fleshed-up middle-aged men and women. You take a hyperthyroid virgin, isolate her from power machinery and electric fields, put on the pressures that make her feel alone and tense to the bursting point—and naturally enough, something bursts. A chamberpot sails from under the bed and shatters on the skull of stepfather-tyrant. The wide-gilt-framed p
ortrait of thundergod-grandfather falls with a crash. Sure, the nail crystallized and broke—who crystallized it?

  Neurotic adolescent girls speaking in tongues, reading face-down cards and closed books, screaming aloud when sister or mother dies in a railroad wreck fifty miles away, of cancer a hundred miles away, in a bombing overseas.

  Sometimes they made saints of them. Sometimes they burned them. Burned them and then made saints of them.

  A blood-raw hunk of venison came sailing through one of the loopholes and flopped on the sand.

  I was sorry when the other outsider took your dinner.

  Three days ago he’d dozed off while Kennedy broiled the meat over the hearth. When he woke, Kennedy had gobbled it all and was whimpering with apprehension. But he’d done nothing and said nothing; the man wasn’t responsible. He’d said nothing, and yet somehow the child knew about it.

  His days were numbered; soon enough the jeep would be out of gas and the guns would be out of ammo or an unreplaceable part lost or broken. Then, according to the serene logic that ruled the witch girl, he’d be surplus.

  But there was a key to it somehow.

  He got up and slapped Kennedy’s hand away from the venison. “Naughty,” he said, and divided it equally with a broad spearblade.

  “Naughty,” Kennedy said morosely. “The naught-class, the null-class. I’m the null-class. I plus the universe equal one, the universe-class. If you could transpose—but you can’t transpose.” Silently they toasted their venison over the fire.

  * * * *

  It was a moonless night with one great planet, Jupiter he supposed, reigning over the star-powdered sky. Kennedy slept muttering feebly in a corner. The hearthfire was out. It had to be out by dark. The spearmen took no chance of their trying to burn down the place. The village had long since gone to sleep, campfires doused, skin flaps pulled to across the door holes. From the corral one of the spavined, tick-ridden cows mooed uneasily and then fell silent.