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

by C. M. Kornbluth

  Blame nobody, he told himself, lightheadedly.

  And then it was in front of him, terminating a vista of weeds and bomb rubble—Milles’ Orpheus Fountain.

  It took a man, he thought. Esthetikon circuits couldn’t do it. There was a gross mixture of styles, a calculated flaw that the esthetikon couldn’t be set to make. Orpheus and the souls were classic or later; the three-headed dog was archaic. That was to tell you about the antiquity and invincibility of Hell, and that Cerberus knows Orpheus will never go back into life with his bride.

  There was the heroic, tragic central figure that looked mighty enough to battle with the gods, but battle wasn’t any good against the grinning, knowing, hateful three-headed dog it stood on. You don’t battle the pavement where you walk or the floor of the house you’re in; you can’t. So Orpheus, his face a mask of controlled and suffering fury crashes a great chord from his lyre that moved trees and stones. Around him the naked souls in Hell start at the chord, each in its own way: the young lovers down in death; the mother down in death; the musician, deaf and down in death, straining to hear.

  Halvorsen, walking uncertainly toward the fountain, felt something break inside him, and a heaviness in his lungs. As he pitched forward among the weeds, he thought he heard the chord from the lyre and didn’t care that the three-headed dog was grinning its knowing, hateful grin down at him.

  VI

  When Halvorsen awoke, he supposed he was in Hell. There were the young lovers, arms about each others’ waists, solemnly looking down at him, and the mother was placidly smoothing his brow. He stirred and felt his left arm fall heavily.

  “Ah,” said the mother, “you mustn’t.” He felt her pick up his limp arm and lay it across his chest. “Your poor finger!” she sighed. “Can you talk? What happened to it?”

  He could talk, weakly. “Labuerre and I,” he said. “We were moving a big block of marble with the crane—somehow the finger got under it. I didn’t notice until it was too late to shift my grip without the marble slipping and smashing on the floor.”

  The boy said in a solemn, adolescent croak: “You mean you saved the marble and lost your finger?”

  “Marble,” he muttered. “It’s so hard to get. Labuerre was so old.”

  The young lovers exchanged a glance and he slept again. He was half awake when the musician seized first one of his hands and then the other, jabbing them with stubby fingers and bending his lion’s head close to peer at the horny callouses left by chisel and mallet.

  “Ja, ja,” the musician kept saying.

  Hell goes on forever, so for an eternity he jolted and jarred, and for an eternity he heard bickering voices: “Why he was so foolish, then?” “A idiot he could be.” “Hush, let him rest.” “The children told the story.” “There only one Labuerre was.” “Easy with the tubing.” “Let him rest.”

  Daylight dazzled his eyes.

  “Why you were so foolish?” demanded a harsh voice. “The sister says I can talk to you now, so that is what I first want to know.”

  He looked at the face of—not the musician; that had been delirium. But it was a tough old face. “Ja, I am mean-looking; that is settled. What did you think you were doing without coveralls and way over your exposure time?”

  “I wanted to die,” said Halvorsen. There were tubes sticking in his arms.

  The crag-faced old man let out a contemptuous bellow.

  “Sister!” he shouted. “Pull the plasma tubes out before more we waste. He says he wants to die.”

  “Hush,” said the nurse. She laid her hand on his brow again.

  “Don’t bother with him, Sister,” the old man jeered. “He is a shrinking little flower, too delicate for the great, rough world. He has done nothing, he can do nothing, so he decides to make of himself a nuisance by dying.”

  “You lie,” said Halvorsen. “I worked. Good God, how I worked! Nobody wanted my work. They wanted me, to wear in their buttonholes like a flower. They were getting to me. Another year and I wouldn’t have been an artist any more.”

  “Ja?” asked the old man. “Tell me about it.”

  Halvorsen told him, sometimes weeping with self-pity and weakness, sometimes cursing the old man for not letting him die, sometimes quietly describing this statuette or that portrait head, or raving wildly against the mad folly of the world.

  At the last he told the old man about Lucy.

  “You cannot have everything, you know,” said his listener.

  “I can have her,” answered the artist harshly. “You wouldn’t let me die, so I won’t die. I’ll go back and I’ll take her away from that fat-head Malone that she ought to marry. I’ll give her a couple of happy years working herself to skin and bones for me before she begins to hate it—before I begin to hate it.”

  “You can’t go back,” said the old man. “I’m Cerberus. You understand that? The girl is nothing. The society you come from is nothing. We have a place here.… Sister, can he sit up?”

  The woman smiled and cranked his bed. Halvorsen saw through a picture window that he was in a mountain-rimmed valley that was very green and dotted with herds and unpainted houses.

  “Such a place there had to be,” said the old man. “In the whole geography of Europe, there had to be a Soltau Valley with winds and terrain just right to deflect the dust.”

  “Nobody knows?” whispered the artist.

  “We prefer it that way. It’s impossible to get some things, but you would be surprised how little difference it makes to the young people. They are great travelers, the young people, in their sweaty coveralls with radiation meters. They think when they see the ruined cities that the people who lived in them must have been mad. It was a little travel party like that which found you. The boy was impressed by something you said, and I saw some interesting things in your hands. There isn’t much rock around here; we have fine deep topsoil. But the boys could get you stone.

  “There should be a statue of the Mayor for one thing, before I die. And from the Rathaus the wooden angels have mostly broken off. Soltau Valley used to be proud of them—could you make good copies? And of course cameras are useless and the best drawings we can do look funny. Could you teach the youngers at least to draw so faces look like faces and not behinds? And like you were saying about you and Labuerre, maybe one younger there will be so crazy that he will want to learn it all, so Soltau will always have an artist and sculptor for the necessary work. And you will find a Lucy or somebody better. I think better.”

  “Hush,” warned the nurse. “You’re exciting the patient.”

  “It’s all right,” said Halvorsen eagerly. “Thanks, but it’s really all right.

  THE WORDS OF GURU

  Originally published in Stirring Science Stories, 1941.

  Yesterday, when I was going to meet Guru in the woods a man stopped me and said: “Child, what are you doing out at one in the morning? Does your mother know where you are? How old are you, walking around this late?”

  I looked at him, and saw that he was white-haired, so I laughed. Old men never see; in fact men hardly see at all. Sometimes young women see part, but men rarely ever see at all. “I’m twelve on my next birthday,” I said. And then, because I would not let him live to tell people, I said, “and I’m out this late to see Guru.”

  “Guru?” he asked. “Who is Guru? Some foreigner, I suppose? Bad business mixing with foreigners, young fellow. Who is Guru?”

  So I told him who Guru was, and just as he began talking about cheap magazines and fairy-tales I said one of the words that Guru taught me and he stopped talking. Because he was an old man and his joints were stiff he didn’t crumple up but fell in one piece, hitting his head on the stone. Then I went on.

  Even though I’m going to be only twelve on my next birthday I know many things that old people don’t. And I remember things that other boys can’t. I remember being born out
of darkness, and I remember the noises that people made about me. Then when I was two months old I began to understand that the noises meant things like the things that were going on inside my head. I found out that I could make the noises too, and everybody was very much surprised. “Talking!” they said, again and again. “And so very young! Clara, what do you make of it?” Clara was my mother.

  And Clara would say: “I’m sure I don’t know. There never was any genius in my family, and I’m sure there was none in Joe’s.” Joe was my father.

  Once Clara showed me a man I had never seen before, and told me that he was a reporter—that he wrote things in newspapers. The reporter tried to talk to me as if I were an ordinary baby, I didn’t even answer him, but just kept looking at him until his eyes fell and he went away. Later Clara scolded me and read me a little piece in the reporter’s newspaper that was supposed to be funny—about the reporter asking me very complicated questions and me answering with baby-noises. It was not true, of course. I didn’t say a word to the reporter, and he didn’t ask me even one of the questions.

  I heard her read the little piece, but while I listened I was watching the slug crawling on the wall. When Clara was finished I asked her: “What is that grey thing?”

  She looked where I pointed, but couldn’t see it. “What grey thing, Peter?” she asked. I had her call me by my whole name, Peter, instead of anything silly like Petey. “What grey thing?”

  “It’s as big as your hand, Clara, but soft. I don’t think it has any bones at all. It’s crawling up, but I don’t see any face on the topwards side. And there aren’t any legs.”

  I think she was worried, but she tried to baby me by putting her hand on the wall and trying to find out where it was. I called out whether she was right or left of the thing. Finally she put her hand right through the slug. And then I realized that she really couldn’t see it, and didn’t believe it was there. I stopped talking about it then and only asked her a few days later: “Clara, what do you call a thing which one person can see and another person can’t?”

  “An illusion, Peter,” she said. “If that’s what you mean.” I said nothing, but let her put me to bed as usual, but when she turned out the light and went away I waited a little while and then called out softly. “Illusion! Illusion!”

  At once Guru came for the first time. He bowed, the way he always has since, and said: “I have been waiting.”

  “I didn’t know that was the way to call you,” I said.

  “Whenever you want me I will be ready. I will teach you, Peter—if you want to learn. Do you know what I will teach you?”

  “If you will teach me about the grey thing on the wall,” I said, “I will listen. And if you will teach me about real things and unreal things I will listen.”

  “These things,” he said thoughtfully, “very few wish to learn. And there are some things that nobody ever wished to learn. And there are some things that I will not teach.”

  Then I said: “The things nobody has ever wished to learn I will learn. And I will even learn the things you do not wish to teach.”

  He smiled mockingly. “A master has come,” he said, half-laughing. “A master of Guru.”

  That was how I learned his name. And that night he taught me a word which would do little things, like spoiling food.

  From that day, to the time I saw him last night he has not changed at all, though now I am as tall as he is. His skin is still as dry and shiny as ever it was, and his face is still bony, crowned by a head of very coarse, black hair.

  * * * *

  When I was ten years old I went to bed one night only long enough to make Joe and Clara suppose I was fast asleep. I left in my place something which appears when you say one of the words of Guru and went down the drainpipe outside my window. It always was easy to climb down and up, ever since I was eight years old.

  I met Guru in Inwood Hill Park. “You’re late,” he said.

  “Not too late,” I answered. “I know it’s never too late for one of these things.”

  “How do you know?” he asked sharply. “This is your first.”

  “And maybe my last,” I replied. “I don’t like the idea of it. If I have nothing more to learn from my second than my first I shan’t go to another.”

  “You don’t know,” he said. “You don’t know what it’s like—the voices, and the bodies slick with unguent, leaping flames; mind-filling ritual! You can have no idea at all until you’ve taken part.”

  “We’ll see,” I said. “Can we leave from here?”

  “Yes,” he said. Then he taught me the word I would need to know, and we both said it together.

  The place we were in next was lit with red lights, and I think that the walls were of rock. Though of course there was no real seeing there, and so the lights only seemed to be red, and it was not real rock.

  As we were going to the fire one of them stopped us. “Who’s with you?” she asked, calling Guru by another name. I did not know that he was also the person bearing that name, for it was a very powerful one.

  He cast a hasty, sidewise glance at me and then said: “This is Peter of whom I have often told you.”

  She looked at me then and smiled, stretching out her oily arms. “Ah,” she said, softly, like the cats when they talk at night to me. “Ah, this is Peter. Will you come to me when I call you, Peter? And sometimes call for me—in the dark—when you are alone?”

  “Don’t do that!” said Guru, angrily pushing past her. “He’s very young—you might spoil him for his work.”

  She screeched at our backs: “Guru and his pupil—fine pair! Boy, he’s no more real than I am—you’re the only real thing here!”

  “Don’t listen to her,” said Guru. “She’s wild and raving. They’re always tight-strung when this time comes around.”

  We came near the fires then, and sat down on rocks. They were killing animals and birds and doing things with their bodies. The blood was being collected in a basin of stone, which passed through the crowd. The one to my left handed it to me. “Drink,” she said, grinning to show me her fine, white teeth. I swallowed twice from it and passed it to Guru.

  When the bowl had passed all around we took off our clothes. Some, like Guru, did not wear them, but many did. The one to my left sat closer to me, breathing heavily at my face. I moved away. “Tell her to stop, Guru,” I said. “This isn’t part of it, I know.”

  Guru spoke to her sharply in their own language, and she changed her seat, snarling.

  Then we all began to chant, clapping our hands and beating our thighs. One of them rose slowly and circled about the fires in a slow pace, her eyes rolling wildly. She worked her jaws and flung her arms about so sharply that I could hear the elbows crack. Still shuffling her feet against the rock floor she bent her body backwards down to her feet. Her belly-muscles were bands nearly standing out from her skin, and the oil rolled down her body and legs. As the palms of her hands touched the ground, she collapsed in a twitching heap and began to set up a thin wailing noise against the steady chant and hand beat that the rest of us were keeping up. Another of them did the same as the first, and we chanted louder for her and still louder for the third. Then, while we still beat our hands and thighs, one of them took up the third, laid her across the altar and made her ready with a stone knife. The fire’s light gleamed off the chipped edge of obsidian. As her blood drained down the groove, cut as a gutter into the rock of the altar, we stopped our chant and the fires were snuffed out.

  But still we could see what was going on, for these things were, of course, not happening at all—only seeming to happen, really, just as all the people and things there only seemed to be what they were. Only I was real. That must be why they desired me so.

  As the last of the fires died Guru excitedly whispered: “The Presence!” He was very deeply moved.

  From the pool of blood from the third da
ncer’s body there issued the Presence. It was the tallest one there, and when it spoke its voice was deeper, and when it commanded its commands were obeyed.

  “Let blood!” it commanded, and we gashed ourselves with flints. It smiled and showed teeth bigger and sharper and whiter than any of the others.

  “Make water!” it commanded, and we all spat on each other. It flapped its wings and rolled its eyes, which were bigger and redder than any of the others.

  “Pass flame!” it commanded, and we breathed smoke and fire on our limbs. It stamped its feet, let blue flames roar from its mouth, and they were bigger and wilder than any of the others.

  Then it returned to the pool of blood and we lit the fires again. Guru was staring straight before him; I tugged his arm. He bowed as though we were meeting for the first time that night.

  “What are you thinking of?” I asked. “We shall go now.”

  “Yes,” he said heavily. “Now we shall go.” Then we said the word that had brought us there.

  The first man I killed was Brother Paul, at the school where I went to learn the things that Guru did not teach me.

  It was less than a year ago, but it seems like a very long time. I have killed so many times since then.

  “You’re a very bright boy, Peter,” said the brother.

  “Thank you, brother.”

  “But there are things about you that I don’t understand. Normally I’d ask your parents but—I feel that they don’t understand either. You were an infant prodigy, weren’t you?”