...sedation until his fifteenth year, when for sexual reasons it became no longer practicable. While the advisers and medical staff hesitated, he killed a girl of the group by violence.
And farther down:
The solution finally adopted was threefold.
1. A sanction—the only sanction possible to our humane, permissive society. Excommunication; not to speak to him, touch him willingly, or acknowledge his existence.
2. A precaution. Taking advantage of a mild predisposition to epilepsy, a variant of the so-called Kusko analogue technique was employed, to prevent by an epileptic seizure any future act of violence.
3. A warning. A careful alteration of his body chemistry was effected to make his exhaled and exuded wastes emit a strongly pungent and offensive odor. In mercy, he himself was rendered unable to detect this smell.
Fortunately, the genetic and environmental accidents which combined to produce this atavism have been fully explained, can never again...
The words stopped meaning anything, as they always did at that point. I didn’t want to read any farther; it was all nonsense, anyway. I was the king of the world.
I got up and went away, out into the night, blind to the dulls who thronged the rooms I passed.
Two squares away was the commerce area. I found a clothing outlet and went in. All the free clothes in the display cases were drab: Those were for worthless floaters, not for me. I went past them to the specials and found a combination I could stand—silver and blue, with a severe black piping down the tunic. A dull would have said it was “nice.” I punched for it. The automatic looked me over with its dull glassy eye, and croaked. “Your contribution book, please.”
I could have had a contribution book, for the trouble of stepping out into the street and taking it away from the first passerby, but I didn’t have the patience. I picked up the onelegged table from the refreshment nook, hefted it, and swung it at the cabinet door. The metal shrieked and dented opposite the catch. I swung once more to the same place, and the door sprang open. I pulled out clothing in handfuls till I got a set that would fit me.
I bathed and changed, and then went prowling in the big multioutlet down the avenue. All those places are arranged pretty much alike, no matter what the local managers do to them. I went straight to the knives, and picked out three in graduated sizes, down to the size of my fingernail. Then I had to take my chances. I tried the furniture department, where I had had good luck once in a while, but this year all they were using was metal. I had to have seasoned wood.
I knew where there was a big cache of cherry wood, in goodsized blocks, in a forgotten warehouse up north at a place called Kootenay. I could have carried some around with me—enough for years—but what for, when the world belonged to me?
It didn’t take me long. Down in the workshop section, of all places, I found some antiques—tables and benches, all with wooden tops. While the dulls collected down at the other end of the room, pretending not to notice, I sawed off a good oblong chunk of the smallest bench, and made a base for it out of another.
As long as I was there, it was a good place to work, and I could eat and sleep upstairs, so I stayed.
I knew what I wanted to do. It was going to be a man, sitting, with his legs crossed and his forearms resting down along his calves. His head was going to be tilted back, and his eyes closed, as if he were turning his face up to the sun.
In three days it was finished. The trunk and limbs had a
shape that was not man and not wood, but something in between: something that hadn’t existed before I made it.
Beauty. That was the old word.
I had carved one of the figure’s hands hanging loosely, and the other one curled shut. There had to be a time to stop and say it was finished. I took the smallest knife, the one I had been using to scrape the wood smooth, and cut away the handle and ground down what was left of the shaft to a thin spike. Then I drilled a hole into the wood of the figurine’s hand, in the hollow between thumb and curled finger. I fitted the knife blade in there; in the small hand it was a sword.
I cemented it in place. Then I took the sharp blade and stabbed my thumb and smeared the blade.
I hunted most of that day and finally found the right place—a niche in an outcropping of striated brown rock, in a little triangular half-wild patch that had been left where two, roads forked. Nothing was permanent, of course, in a community like this one that might change its houses every five years or so, to follow the fashion, but this spot had been left to itself for a long time. It was the best I could do.
I had the paper ready: it was one of a batch I had printed up a year ago. The paper was treated, and I knew it would stay legible a long time. I hid a little photo capsule in the back of the niche and ran the control wire to a staple in the base of the figurine. I put the figurine down on top of the paper and anchored it lightly to the rock with two spots of all-cement. I had done it so often that it came naturally; I knew just how much cement would hold the figurine steady against a casual hand, but yield to one that really wanted to pull it down.
Then I stepped back to look, and the power and the pity of it made my breath come short, and tears start to my eyes.
Reflected light gleamed fitfully on the dark-stained blade that hung from his hand. He was sitting alone in that niche that closed him in like a coffin. His eyes were shut and his head tilted back, as if he were turning his face up to the sun.
But only rock was over his head. There was no sun for him.
Hunched on the cool bare ground under a pepper tree, I was looking down across the road at the shadowed niche where my figurine sat.
I was all finished here. There was nothing more to keep me, and yet I couldn’t leave.
People walked past now and then—not often. The community seemed half deserted, as if most of the people had flocked off to a surf party somewhere, or a contribution meeting, or to watch a new house being dug to replace the one I had wrecked... There was a little wind blowing toward me, cool and lonesome in the leaves.
Up the other side of the hollow there was a terrace, and on that terrace, half an hour ago, I had seen a brief flash of color—a boy’s head, with a red cap on it, moving past and out of sight.
That was why I had to stay. I was thinking how that boy might come down from his terrace and into my road, and passing the little wild triangle of land, see my figurine. I was thinking he might not pass by indifferently, but stop and go closer to look, and pick up the wooden man: and read what was written on the paper underneath.
I believed that sometime it had to happen. I wanted it so hard that I ached.
My carvings were all over the world, wherever I had wandered. There was one in Congo City, carved of ebony, dustyblack; one on Cyprus, of bone; one in New Bombay, of shell; one in Changteh, of jade.
They were like signs printed in red and green in a colorblind world. Only the one I was looking for would ever pick one of them up and read the message I knew by heart.
TO YOU WHO CAN SEE, the first sentence said. I OFFER YOU A WORLD...
There was a flash of color up on the terrace. I stiffened. A minute later, here it came again, from a different direction: it was the boy, clambering down the slope, brilliant against the green, with his red sharp-billed cap like a woodpecker’s’ head.
I held my breath.
He came toward me through the fluttering leaves, ticked off by pencils of sunlight as he passed. He was a brown boy, I could see at this distance, with a serious thin face. His ears stuck out, flickering pink with the sun behind them, and his elbow and knee pads made him look knobby.
He reached the fork in the road and chose the path on my side. I huddled into myself as he came nearer. Let him see it, let him not see me, I thought fiercely.
My fingers closed around a stone.
He was nearer, walking jerkily with his hands in his pockets, watching his feet mostly..
When he was almost opposite me, I threw the stone.
It
rustled through the leaves below the niche in the rock. The boy’s head turned. He stopped, staring. I think he saw the figurine then: I’m sure he saw it.
He took one step.
“Risha!” came floating down from the terrace.
And he looked up. “Here,” he piped.
I saw the woman’s head, tiny at the top of the terrace. She called something I didn’t hear; I was standing up, squeezed tight with anger.
Then the wind shifted. It blew from me to the boy. He whirled around, his eyes big, and clapped a hand to his nose.
“Oh, what a stench!” .
He turned to shout, “Corning!” and then he was gone, hurrying back up the road, into the unstable blur of green.
My one chance, ruined. He would have seen the image, I knew, if it hadn’t been for that damned woman, and the wind shifting... They were all against me, people, wind, and all.
And the figurine still sat, blind eyes turned up to the rocky sky.
There was something inside me that told me to take my disappointment and go away from there and not come back.
I knew I would be sorry. I did it, anyway: took the image out of the niche, and the paper with it, and climbed the slope. At the top I heard his clear voice laughing.
There was a thing that might have been an ornamental mound, or the camouflaged top of a buried house. I went around it, tripping over my own feet, and came upon the boy kneeling on the turf. He was playing with a brown-and-white puppy.
He looked up, with the laughter going out of his face. There was no wind, and he could smell me. I knew it was bad. No wind, and the puppy to distract him—everything about it was wrong. But I went to him blindly, anyhow, and fell on one knee, and shoved the figurine at his face.
“Look—” I said.
He went over backwards in his hurry; he couldn’t even have seen the image, except as a brown blur coming at him. He scrambled up, with the puppy whining and yapping around his heels, and ran for the mound.
I was up after him, clawing up moist earth and grass as I rose. In the other hand I still had the image clutched, and the paper with it.
A door popped open and swallowed him and popped shut again in my face. With the flat of my hand I beat the vines around it until I hit the doorplate by accident and the door opened. I dived in, shouting, “Wait,” and was in a spiral passage, lit pearl-gray, winding downward. Down I went, headlong, and came out at the wrong door—an underground conservatory, humid and hot under the yellow lights, with dripping rank leaves in long rows. I went down the aisle raging, overturning the tanks, until I came to a vestibule and an elevator.
Down I went again to the third level and a labyrinth of guest rooms, all echoing, all empty. At last I found a ramp leading upwards, past the conservatory, and at the end of it voices.
The door was clear vitrin, and I paused on the near side of it, looking and listening. There was the boy, and a woman old enough to be his mother, just—sister or cousin, more likely—and an elderly woman in a hard chair holding the puppy. The room was comfortable and tasteless, like other rooms.
I saw the shock grow on their faces as I burst in; it was always the same; they knew I would like to kill them, but they never expected that I would come uninvited into a house. It was not done.
There was that boy, so close I could touch him, but the shock of all of them was quivering in the air, smothering, like a blanket that would deaden my voice. I felt I had to shout.
“Everything they tell you is lies!” I said. “See here—here, this is the truth!” I had the figurine in front of his eyes, but he didn’t see.
“Risha, go below,” said the young woman quietly. He turned to obey, quick as a ferret.
I got in front of him again. “Stay,” I said, breathing hard. “Look—”
“Remember, Risha, don’t speak,” said the woman.
I couldn’t stand any more. Where the boy went I don’t know; I ceased to see him. With the image in one hand and the paper with it, I leaped at the woman. I was almost quick enough; I almost reached her, but the buzzing took me in the middle of a step, louder, louder, like the end of the world.
It was the second time that week. When I came to, I was sick and too faint to move for a long time.
The house was silent. They had gone, of course... the house had been defiled, having me in it. They wouldn’t live here again, but would build elsewhere.
My eyes blurred. After a while I stood up and looked around at the room. The walls were hung with a gray closewoven cloth that looked as if it would tear, and I thought of ripping it down in strips, breaking furniture, stuffing carpets and bedding into the oubliette... But I didn’t have the heart for it. I was too tired.
At last I stooped and picked up the figurine and the paper that was supposed to go under it—crumpled now, with the forlorn look of a message that someone has thrown away unread.
I smoothed it out and read the last part.
YOU CAN SHARE THE WORLD WITH ME. THEY CAN’T STOP YOU. STRIKE NOW—PICK UP A SHARP
THING AND STAB, OR A HEAVY THING AND CRUSH. THAT’S ALL. THAT WILL MAKE YOU FREE. ANYONE CAN DO IT.
Anyone. Anyone.
<
* * * *
THE PUBLIC HATING
by
Steve Allen
I can hardly presume to tell the American public anything about Steve Allen—except to point with delight (being an Allen fan anyhow) and say: “Look, maw! He can write!”
This story follows the Knight because it is also about hate, and because it is not at all about Utopia.
* * * *
The weather was a little cloudy on that September 9, 1978, and here and there in the crowds that surged up the ramps into the stadium people were looking at the sky and then at their neighbors and squinting and saying, “Hope she doesn’t rain.”
On television the weatherman had forecast slight cloudiness but no showers. It was not cold. All over the neighborhood surrounding the stadium, people poured out of street-cars and busses and subways. In ant-like lines they crawled across streets, through turnstiles, up stairways, along ramps, through gates, down aisles.
Laughing and shoving restlessly, damp-palmed with excitement, they came shuffling into the great concrete bowl, some stopping to go to the restrooms, some buying popcorn, some taking free pamphlets from the uniformed attendants.
Everything was free this particular day. No tickets had been sold for the event. The public proclamations had simply been made in the newspapers and on TV, and over 65,000 people had responded.
For weeks, of course, the papers had been suggesting that the event would take place. All during the trial, even as early as the selection of the jury, the columnists had slyly hinted at the inevitability of the outcome. But it had only been official since yesterday. The television networks had actually gotten a slight jump on the papers. At six o’clock the government had taken over all network facilities for a brief five-minute period during which the announcement was made.
“We have all followed with great interest,” the Premier had said, looking calm and handsome in a gray double-breasted suit, “the course of the trial of Professor Ketteridge. Early this afternoon the jury returned a verdict of guilty. This verdict having been confirmed within the hour by the Supreme Court, in the interests of time-saving, the White House has decided to make the usual prompt official announcement. There will be a public hating tomorrow. The time: 2:30 p.m. The place: Yankee Stadium in New York City. Your assistance is earnestly requested. Those of you in the New York area will find. . . . .”
The voice had gone on, filling in other details, and in the morning, the early editions of the newspapers included pictures captioned, “Bronx couple first in line,” and “Students wait all night to view hating” and “Early birds.”
By one-thirty in the afternoon there was not an empty seat in the stadium and people were beginning to fill up a few of the aisles. Special police began to block off the exits and word was sent down to the stree
t that no more people could be admitted. Hawkers slipped through the crowd selling cold beer and hot-dogs.
Sitting just back of what would have been first base had the Yankees not been playing in Cleveland, Frederic Traub stared curiously at the platform in the middle of the field. It was about twice the size of a prize-fighting ring. In the middle of it there was a small raised section on which was placed a plain wooden kitchen chair.
To the left of the chair there were seating accommodations for a small group of dignitaries. Downstage, so to speak, there was a speaker’s lectern and a battery of microphones. The platform was hung with bunting and pennants.
The crowd was beginning to hum ominously.
The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 1 - [Anthology] Page 33
