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

by C. M. Kornbluth

  The Parsees said that this High Pamir was the cradle of human life, that from here had sprung the primals who proliferated into white, yellow, black and brown. To the southwest, at the same thirteen-thousand elevation, was the Valley of the Oxus, a green ribbon in the steel gray and bone white of the plateau. To the northeast were the great peaks—Everest, Kinchinjunga, K-4—that started where other mountains ended, shooting from seventeen thousand up to unthinkable heights, sky-piercing.

  Night and day scarcely interrupted the flow of his thoughts. His waking fantasies and his dreams alike were brutish, longing for warmth and comfort, bespelled remembrance of palmier days. He woke to find an ear frostbitten, dead, marble white, without sensation, killed by cold.

  It came to him slowly, the idea forcing its way through the numbed machinery of his brain, that he was following a path. This easier way across the plateau could be nothing but one of the historic caravan routes. Over this trail had gone a billion feet of beasts and men, and his own had found their way into the ancient grooves. Colt was content with that; going by the sun and stars was good, compass better, but best of all were the ways that men had taken and found well suited.

  There were animal droppings before him now and then, once a fragment of broken crockery. He doubled his pace, from a slow plod to a loping, long-strided walk that took much of his husbanded wind. Finally he saw the print in a snowbank that spelled man. It was a shod foot’s mark, light and side-stepping. As he watched, a puff of wind drifted it over with dry, gleaming snow.

  Colt found a splash of milk against a rock, then the smell of camel clinging about a wiry shrub.

  He saw them at last, the tail of a great caravan, and fell fainting into the arms of tall, curious Kirghiz camel drivers.

  They carried him in a litter until he awoke and could eat, for nothing was so important or unexpected that it could be allowed to break the schedule of the march. Colt opened his eyes to grunts of satisfaction from his bearers. He accepted the hunks of dried meat and bottle of warm tea they gave him, trying to catch enough of the language to offer thanks.

  Coming down the line of the caravan was a large Hindu on one of the small Mongolian ponies. He reined beside Colt and asked in French, “How are you? They passed me word. Can you march with us?”

  “But yes! It’s like life out of death to find you people here. What can I do to help?”

  The Hindu dismounted to walk the pony beside him. “Keep up spirits. Our few Europeans are tired of each other’s company. In case of bandit raiding—highly improbable, of course—you’ll fight. I’m Raisuli Batar, merchant of the Punjab. I’m caravan master, whose word is law. Not that it’s necessary—the boys are well behaved and we have enough food.”

  “Where are we headed?” asked Colt, gnawing on the hunk of meat.

  “We started for Bokhara. Come up the line to meet the better sort with me. They’re agog with excitement, of course, don’t dare break line without my permission, which I don’t choose to grant. By way of payload we have crates of soap on the camels and drums of flavoring essence on the ponies.”

  Colt sniffed, finding wintergreen and peppermint on the air. “May you find a good price,” he said respectfully.

  Raisuli smiled and the American was pleased. The caravan master was big and solid, with a grim, handsome face. It was good to please a man like that, Colt thought.

  They quickened their pace, overtaking a hundred plodding bearers and a herd of sheep. Colt was introduced to a pale, thoughtful man named McNaughton, a reader in history at the University of Glasgow, who said he had been doing field work in Asia for three years.

  Farther on were Lodz and wife, two young Poles from Galicia who were hoping for government work in Bokhara. The man was quiet, his English heavily accented. The wife spoke French only, but with the vivid dash of a Parisienne. Her lips were touched with scarlet; here in the wilderness of the High Pamir she wore a freshly pressed riding habit. Colt was enchanted.

  Raisuli cast a glance at the sky. “Bedding down,” he snapped. “Excuse me—c’est l’heure.”

  He left Colt with the Poles, mounting his pony again to gallop down the line barking orders to the various Hindus, Tajiks, Chinese, Abyssinians, Kirghiz and Kroomen who made up the crew. It took no more than a quarter hour to bring the unwieldy line to a halt; in another quarter hour a thousand felt tents were pitched and pegged, fires lighted and animals staked out.

  “He times well, that one,” smiled M. Lodz. Colt looked up and saw the sky already deepening into black. He shuddered a little and drew nearer to the fire.

  “I think,” said McNaughton absently, “that I could take a little refreshment.” Lodz looked up from under his brows, then clapped his hands. A native boy came running.

  “Bring food—some of that cold joint, wallah.”

  “Yes, sahib.”

  “Such a night this will be, perhaps,” said M. Lodz softly, “as it was in August.”

  “Just such a night,” said McNaughton. “Will you join us, Mr. Colt?”

  “Not I,” said the American with a sense of guilt. “I was fed when I came to after fainting. Is it safe—may I look about?”

  He got no answer. The boy had returned with a great haunch of meat; silently the Occidentals gathered about it, taking out knives. Colt watched in amazement as the dainty Frenchwoman hacked out a great slab of beef and tore at it, crammed it down her throat. Before it was swallowed she was cutting away again.

  “Ah—I asked if I ought to look about.…”

  Lodz shot him a sidewise glance, his mouth crammed with meat, his jaws working busily. Then, as though Colt had never spoken, he returned to the serious business of feeding, with the same animal quality as his wife and McNaughton showed.

  “I’ll look about then,” said Colt forlornly. He wandered away from the fire in the direction of a yellow felt tent. There he was delighted to catch words of Cantonese.

  “Greetings, son of Han,” he said to the venerable speaker.

  The fine old Mongol head turned; Colt felt himself subjected to a piercing, kindly scrutiny by two twinkling little black eyes. The ruddy little mouth smiled. “Sit down, son. It’s a long time between new friends.”

  Colt squatted by the fire obediently; the venerable one took a long pull from a bottle of suntori, a vile synthetic Japanese whisky. Wiping his mouth with the back of a wrinkled, yellow hand, he announced, “I’m Grandfather T’ang. This is my son, T’ang Gaw Yat. If you let him he’ll talk you deaf about the time he was on the long march with the Eighth Route Army. He claims General Chuh Teh once ate rice with him.”

  T’ang Gaw Yat smiled obediently and a little tolerantly at his father’s whimsy. He was a fine-looking Chinese, big-headed and straight-faced, with little wrinkles of laughter playing about his mouth. “What my father says,” he confided, “is strictly true. It was a full thousand miles from—”

  “What did I tell you?” broke in the old man. “The slave is his wife, and the smartest one of the lot.” He indicated a small Chinese woman of the indeterminate age between twenty and fifty.

  She said in English hardly accented, “Hello. You do speak English, don’t you? These barbarians don’t know anything but their village jargon and Canton talk.” The smile took the edge from her harsh words.

  Colt introduced himself, and answered endless questions on the state of China, military, political and economic.

  “Hold off,” ordered the woman at last. “Let him have his turn. Want to know anything, Mr. Colt?”

  “Wouldn’t mind knowing how long you’ve been traveling.”

  “Stupid question,” broke in Grandfather Han. “Just what one expects from a foreign devil. The splendor of the night closes about him and he would know how long we’ve been on the march! Have a drink—a small one.” He passed the bottle; Colt politely refused.

  “Then maybe you’d like a little game—”
There clicked in his palm two ivory cubes.

  “Please, Father,” said T’ang Gaw Yat. “Put those away.”

  “Pattern of ancient virtue!” sneered the old man. “O you child of purity!”

  “Grandfather is very lucky,” said the woman quietly. “He started on the caravan with nothing but those dice and many years of gambling experience. He is now one of the richest men on the line of march. He owns two herds of sheep, a riding camel of his own and the best food there is to be had.”

  “And drink,” said the son somberly.

  “Tell you what,” said the old man. “You can have some of my V.S.O. stock—stuff I won from a Spaniard a month back.” He rummaged for a moment in one of the tent pockets, finally emerged with a slender bottle which caught the firelight like auriferous quartz. “Danziger Goldwasser—le véritable,” he gloated. “But I can’t drink the stuff. Doesn’t bite like this Nipponese hellbroth.” He upended the bottle of suntori again; passed the brandy to Colt.

  The American took it, studied it curiously against the fire. It was a thin, amber liquid, at whose bottom settled little flakes. He shook them up into the neck of the bottle; it was like one of the little globular paperweights that hold a mimic snowstorm. But instead of snow there were bits of purest beaten gold to tickle the palate and fancy of the drinker.

  “Thanks,” he said inadequately. “Very kind of you.”

  “Curious, isn’t it,” said the woman, “how much the caravan life resembles a village? Though the wealth, of course, is not in land but in mercantile prospects—” She stopped as Colt caught her eye. Why, he wondered, had she been rattling on like that?

  “The wisdom of the slave is the folly of the master,” said Grandfather T’ang amiably. “He is happy who learns to discount the words of a woman.”

  “Suppose,” said the woman slowly and quietly, “you learn to mind your own business, you poisonous old serpent?”

  “They can’t stand common sense,” confided the old man.

  Colt felt, painfully, that he had wandered into a family quarrel. He bolted with a mumbled excuse, hanging onto the bottle of brandy. He stood for a moment away from the trail and stared down the long line of fires. There were more than a thousand, snaking nearly out of sight. The spectacle was restful; the fires were a little blue, being kindled largely out of night-soil briquettes.

  The sky was quite black; something had overcast the deep-ranked stars of the plateau. No moon shone.

  Colt settled against the lee of a rock in a trance. He heard winds and the hiss of voices, soft in the distance. It was the quiet and complaining Tajiki dialect. He could hear it and understand it. It was absurdly simple, he thought abstractedly, to pick out the meanings of words and phrases.

  “Such a night,” one was saying, “as in August. You remember?”

  “I remember.” Then, dark and passionate, “The limping, bloody demon! Let him come near and I’ll tear his vitals!”

  “Surely you will not. He is the tearer in his evil work. We are the torn—”

  Colt sat up with a start. What the hell! He couldn’t understand Tajiki, not one little word of it! He had been dreaming, he thought. But it didn’t melt away as a dream should. The memory of the overheard conversation was as sharp and distinct as it could be, something concrete and mysterious, like a joke that hadn’t been explained to him.

  Then there was a sort of heavenly grumbling, like a megatherial word or more. Colt twisted and stared at the zenith; could see nothing at all. The rumbling ended. Colt saw black little fingers all down the line rise and attend, twisting and staring and buzzing to each other.

  2

  He hurried to the fire of his European friends. They were sprawled on blankets, their bodies a little swollen from the enormous meal they had eaten. Colt saw the bare bone of the joint, scraped by knife edges. The Occidentals were unconcernedly smoking.

  “What was that racket?” he asked, feeling a little silly. “What was it—do you know?”

  “Thunder,” said McNaughton noncommittally.

  “Oui,” agreed M. Lodz, puffing a long, tip-gilt cigarette. “Did it frighten you, the thunder?”

  Colt pulled himself together. There was something evasive here, something that sought to elude him. “It was peculiar thunder,” he said with glacial calm. “There was no lightning preceding it.”

  “The lightning will come soon,” said Lodz furtively. “I tell you so you will not be alarmed.”

  “You have your lightning after your thunder here? Odd. In my country it’s the other way around.” He wasn’t going to break—he wasn’t going to swear—

  “But how boring,” drawled the Pole’s wife. “Never a change?”

  He wasn’t going to break—

  Then the peculiar lightning split the skies. Colt shot one staggered, incredulous glance at it, and was dazzled.

  It was a word, perhaps a name, spelled out against the dead-black sky. He knew it. It was in some damned alphabet or other; fretfully he chided himself for not remembering which of the twenty-odd he could recognize it could be.

  Colt realized that the Occidentals were staring at him with polite concern. He noticed a shred of meat between the teeth of Mme. Lodz as she smiled reassuringly—white, sharp teeth, they were. Colt rubbed his eyes dazedly. He knew he must be a haggard and unseemly figure to their cultured gaze—but they hadn’t seen the words in the sky—or had they—?

  Politely they stared at him, phrases bubbling from their lips:

  “So frightfully sorry, old man—”

  “Wouldn’t upset you for the world—”

  “Hate to see you lose your grip—”

  Colt shook his head dazedly, as though he felt strands of sticky silk wind around his face and head. He turned and ran, hearing the voice of Raisuli Batar call after him, “Don’t stray too far—”

  He didn’t know how long he ran or how far he strayed. Finally he fell flat, sprawled childishly, feeling sick and confused in his head. He looked up for a moment to see that the caravan fires were below some curve of rock or other—at any rate, well out of sight. They were such little lights, he thought. Good for a few feet of warm glow, then sucked into the black of High Pamir. They made not even a gleam in the night-heavy sky.

  And there, on the other side of him and the caravan, he saw the tall figure of another human being. She stood on black rock between two drifts of snow.

  Colt bit out the foil seal of the brandy bottle and pulled the cork with his fingers. After a warm gulp of the stuff, he rose.

  “Have a drink?”

  She turned. She was young in her body and face, Mongoloid. Her eyes were blue-black and shining like metal. Her nose was short, Chinese, yet her skin was quite white. She did not have the eyefold of the yellow people.

  Silently she extended one hand for the bottle, tilted it high. Colt saw a shudder run through her body as she swallowed and passed him the tall flask with its gold-flecked liquor.

  “You must have been cold.”

  “By choice. Do you think I’d warm myself at either fire?”

  “Either?” he asked.

  “There are two caravans. Didn’t you know?”

  “No. I’m just here—what’s the other caravan?”

  “Just here, are you? Did you know that you’re dead?”

  Colt thought the matter over slowly; finally declared, “I guess I did. And all those others—and you—?”

  “All dead. We’re the detritus of High Pamir. You’ll find, if you look, men who fell to death from airplanes within the past few years walking by the side of Neanderthalers who somehow strayed very far from their tribes and died. The greatest part of the caravans comes, of course, from older caravans of the living who carried their goods from Asia to Europe for thousands of years.”

  Colt coughed nervously. “Have another drink,” he said. “Then let’
s see this other caravan. I’m not too well pleased with the one I fell into.”

  She took his hand and guided him across the snow and black rock to back within sight of his own caravan. He stared, eager and hungry to see. As she pointed with one tapering finger it seemed that many things were clearer than they ever had been before. He saw that the long line of lights was not his caravan but another in the opposite direction, paralleling his.

  “There you will see their caravan master,” she said, putting her face next to his. He looked and saw a pot-bellied monster whose turban was half as high as its wearer. Its silhouette, as it passed before a fire, was indescribably unpleasant.

  “Evening prayer,” said his guide, with a faint tone of mockery.

  He studied them as they arranged flares before a platform flung together out of planks and trestles; he also saw them assemble a sort of idol, fitting the various parts together and bolting them securely. When the thing was perhaps two-thirds assembled he turned away and covered his face, repelled.

  “I won’t look at the rest of it now,” he said. “Perhaps later, if you wish me to.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “It isn’t a thing to look at calmly. But you will see the rest of it one time or another. This is a very long caravan.”

  She looked down and said, “Now they are worshiping.”

  Colt looked. “Yes,” he said flatly. They were worshiping in their own fashion, dancing and leaping uglily while some dozen of them blew or saw fantastic discords from musical instruments. Others were arranged in a choir; as they began to sing Colt felt cold nausea stirring at the pit of his belly.

  Their singing was markedly unpleasant; Colt, who enjoyed the discords of Ernest Bloch and Jean Sibelius, found them stimulatingly revolting. The choir droned out a minor melody, varying it again and again with what Colt construed to be quarter-tones and split-interval harmonies. He found he was listening intently, nearly fascinated by the ugly sounds.