Universe 15

by Terry Carr

  “The Israelis!” Mengele made a noise of disgust. “They would not find me here. Tell them if you wish. I will give you proof.” He opened a drawer in the end of the table and from it removed an ink bottle and a sheet of paper; he poured a few drops of ink onto the paper, and after a moment pressed his thumb down to make a print; then he blew on the paper and slid it toward me. “Show that to the Israelis and tell them I am not afraid of their reprisals. My work will go on.”

  I picked up the paper. “I suppose you’ve altered your prints, and this will only prove to the Israelis that I’m a madman.”

  “These fingerprints have not been altered.”

  “Good.” I folded the paper and stuck it into my shirt pocket. Knife in hand, I stood and walked along the table toward him. I am certain he knew my intention, yet his bemused expression did not falter; and when I reached his side he looked me in the eyes. I wanted to say something, pronounce a curse that would harrow him to hell; his calm stare, however, unnerved me. I put my left hand behind his neck to steady him and prepared to draw the blade across his jugular. But as I did, he seized my wrist in a powerful grip, holding me immobile. I clubbed him on the brow with my left hand, and his head scarcely wobbled. Terrified, I tried to wrench free and managed to stagger a few paces away, pulling him after me. He did not attack; he only laughed and maintained his grip. I battered him again and again, I clawed at his face, his neck, and in so doing I tore the buttons from his shirt. The two halves fell open, and I screamed at what I saw.

  He flung me to the floor and shrugged off the torn shirt. I was transfixed. Though he was still hunched, his torso was smooth-skinned and powerfully muscled, the torso of a young man from which a withered neck had sprouted; his arms, too, bulged with muscle and evolved into gnarled, liver-spotted hands. There was no trace of surgical scarring; the skin flowed from youth to old age in the way a tributary changes color upon merging with the mainstream. “Why not?” he had answered when I asked why he did not avail himself of his treatments. Of course he had, and—in keeping with his warped sensibilities—he had transformed himself into a monster. The sight of that shrunken face perched atop a youthful body was enough to shred the last of my rationality. Ablaze with fear, I scrambled to my feet and ran from the room, bursting through the main doors and down the piney slope, with Mengele’s laughter echoing behind.

  Night had fallen, a three-quarter moon rode high, and as I plunged along the path toward the river, in the slants of silvery light piercing the boughs I saw the villagers standing by the doors of their cottages. Some moved after me, stretching out their arms… whether in supplication or aggression, I was unable to tell. I did not stop to take note of their particular deformities, but glimpsed oblate heads, strangely configured hands, great bruised-looking eyes that seemed patches of velvet woven into their skins rather than organs with humors and capillaries. Breath shrieked in my throat as I zigzagged among them, eluding their sluggish attempts to touch me. And then I was splashing through the shallows, past the wreckage of my plane, past those godforsaken slopes, panicked, falling, crawling, sending up silvery sprays of water that were like shouts, pure expressions of my fear.

  Twenty-five kilometers along the Rio Pilcomayo. Fifteen miles. Twelve hours. No measure could encompass the terrors of that walk. Mengele’s creatures did, indeed, abound. Once, while pausing to catch my breath, I spotted an owl on a branch that overhung the water. A jet-black owl, its eyes glowing faintly orange. Once a vast bulk heaved up from midstream, just the back of the thing, an expanse of smooth dark skin: it must have been thirty feet long. Once, at a point where the Pilcomayo fell into a gorge and I was forced to go overland, something heavy pursued me through the brush, and at last, fearing it more than the rapids, I dove into the river; as the current bore me off, I saw its huge misshapen head leaning over the cliff, silhouetted against the stars. All around I heard cries that I did not believe could issue from an earthly throat. Bubbling screeches, grinding roars, eerie whistles that reminded me of the keening made by incoming artillery rounds. By the time I reached the village of which Mengele had spoken, I was incoherent and I remember little of the flight that carried me to Asuncion.

  The authorities questioned me about my accident. I told them my compass had malfunctioned, that I had no idea where I had crashed. I was afraid to mention Mengele. These men were his accomplices, and besides, if his creatures flourished along the Pilcomayo, could not some of them be here? What had he said? “The deformed are ever with us, Mr. Phelan.” True enough, but since my experiences in his house it seemed I had become sensitized to their presence. I picked them out of crowds, I encountered them on street corners, I saw the potential for deformity in every normal face. Even after returning to New York, every subway ride, every walk, every meal out brought me into contact with men and women who hid their faces—all having the gray city pallor—yet who could not quite disguise some grotesque disfigurement. I suffered nightmares; I imagined I was being watched. Finally, in hopes of exorcizing these fears, I went to see an old Jewish man, a colleague of Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Nazi hunter.

  His office in the East Seventies was a picture of clutter, with stacks of papers and folios teetering on his desk, overflowing file cabinets. He was as old a man as Mengele had appeared, his forehead tiered by wrinkles, cadaverous cheeks, weepy brown eyes. I took a seat at the desk and handed him the paper on which Mengele had made his thumbprint. “I’d like this identified,” I said. “I believe it belongs to Josef Mengele.”

  He stared at it a moment, then hobbled over to a cabinet and began shuffling through papers. After several minutes he clicked his tongue against his teeth and came back to the desk. “Where did you get this?” he asked with a degree of urgency.

  “Does it match?”

  He hesitated. “Yes, it matches. Now where did you get it?”

  As I told my story, he leaned back and closed his eyes and nodded thoughtfully, interrupting me to ask an occasional question. “Well,” I said when I had finished. “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. There may be nothing I can do.”

  “What do you mean?” I said, dumbfounded. “I can give you the exact position of the village. Hell, I can take you there myself!”

  He let out a weary sigh. “This”—he tapped the paper—“this is not Mengele’s thumbprint.”

  “He must have altered it,” I said, desperate to prove my case. “He is there! I swear it! If you would just…” And then I realized something. “You said it matched?”

  The old man’s face seemed to have sagged further into decay. “Six years ago a man came to the office and told me almost verbatim the story you have told. I thought he was insane and threw him out, but before he left he thrust a paper at me, one that bore a thumbprint. That print matches yours. But it does not belong to Mengele.”

  “Then it is proof!” I said excitedly. “Don’t you see? He may have altered it, but this proves that he exists, and the existence of the village where he lives.”

  “Does he live there?” he asked. “I’m afraid there is another possibility.” I was not sure what he meant at first; then I remembered Mengele’s description of the village. “… what you see here, the villagers, the house, everything, is a memorial to my work. It has the reality of one of those glass baubles that contain wintry rural scenes and when shaken produce whirling snowstorms.” The key word was “everything.” I had likened the way he had paused before giving answers to rummaging through a file, but it was probably more accurate to say he had been recalling a memorized biography. It had been a stand-in I had met, a young man made old or the reverse. Mengele was many years gone from the village, gone God knows where and in God knows what disguise, doing his work. Perhaps he was once again the fleshy, smiling man whose photograph I had seen as a child.

  The old man and I had little else to say to one another. He was anxious to be rid of me; I had, after all, shed a wan light on his forty years of vengeful labor. I asked if he had an address for
the other man who had told him of the village; I thought he alone might be able to offer me solace. The old man gave it to me—an address in the West Twenties—and promised to initiate an investigation of the village; but I think we both knew that Mengele had won, that his principle, not ours, was in accord with the times. I was hopeless-feeling, stunned, and on stepping outside I became aware of Mengele’s victory in an even more poignant way.

  It was a gray, blustery afternoon, a few snowflakes whirling between the drab facades of the buildings; the windows were glinting blackly, reflecting opaque diagonals of the sky. Garbage was piled in the gutters, spilling onto the sidewalks, and wedges of grimy, crusted snow clung to the bumpers of the cars. Hunched against the wind, holding their coat collars closed over their faces, pedestrians struggled past. What I could see of their expressions was either hateful or angry or worried. It was a perfect Mengelian day, all underpinnings visible, everything pared down to ordinary bone; and as I walked along, I wondered for how much of it he was directly responsible. Oh, he was somewhere turning out grotesques, working scientific charms, but I doubted his efforts were essential to that gray principle underlying the factory air, the principle he worshipped, whose high priest he was. He had been right. Good was eroding into evil, bright into dark, abundance into uniformity. Everywhere I went I saw that truth reflected. In the simple shapes and primary colors of the cars, in the mad eyes of the bag ladies, in the featureless sky, in the single-minded stares of businessmen. We were all suffering a reduction to simpler forms, a draining of spirit and vitality.

  I walked aimlessly, but I was not surprised to find myself some time later standing before an apartment building in the West Twenties; nor was I any more surprised when shortly thereafter a particularly gray-looking man came down the steps, his face muffled by a scarf and a wool hat pulled low over his brow. He shuffled across the street toward me, unwrapping the scarf. I knew I would be horrified by his deformity, yet I was willing to accept him, to listen, to hear what comforts deformity bestowed; because, though I did not understand Mengele’s principle, though I had not dissolved in it or let it rule me, I had acknowledged it and sensed its inevitability. I could almost detect its slow vibrations ringing the changes of the world with—like the syllables of Mengele’s name—the sullen, unmusical timbre of a deadened bell.

  Most of us, according to the polls, believe that science will give us wondrous lives in the future. But the nature of the human beast is such that no matter how much our lives may improve, they’ll never be totally satisfactory to us. Consider a future in which everyone can have everything he or she wants—well, nearly everything. What might be missing? What will we long for?

  The individual’s own achievements, in such a world, will become of paramount importance. But what will “individual achievement” mean then?

  “Originals” is in its own way—which is quite different from that of “Mercurial”—a science fiction detective story. But the problem is not murder, and the solution has more to do with society of the future than with “clues.” Nonetheless, this is a science fiction detective story.

  Pamela Sargent contributed a fine story to Universe 2, thirteen years ago, when she was just starting her career. Since then she has published nine novels and four anthologies, three of them in the Women of Wonder series.

  PAMELA SARGENT - ORIGINALS

  Lora dipped her spoon into the soup, then lifted it to her lips. The broth was clear, with a faint lemony taste; the vegetables, as always, were slightly crispy. Bits of parsley floated on top of the soup. Lora swallowed.

  “Superb,” she said, trying to smile. Antoine, the chef, stood near the table, searching her face with his morose brown eyes. “Really, it’s delicious. You are an artist, Antoine.” Antoine tilted his head; his chef’s hat slipped a little.

  Geraldo, Lora’s partner, was slurping softly. “Good soup,” he said. The rest of Lora’s family was gazing at her expectantly, perhaps wondering why she had not been more effusive in her praise. Her three sons put down their spoons almost at the same moment, while her two little girls fidgeted, tugging at their gown straps. At the other end of the table, Junia was staring directly at Lora.

  “I think it’s one of the finest soups I’ve ever tasted,” Junia announced. Antoine bowed.

  Lora could not control herself any longer. Releasing a sigh, she dropped her spoon next to her bowl. “Oh,” she murmured, giving the word all the misery she could muster. She covered her eyes for a moment. “You’ll all find out soon enough.” She leaned back in her chair. “Another disk was stolen, it seems. It was the one for this cauliflower soup.”

  “That is too much,” her son Roald muttered as his brothers, Rex and Richard, nodded their heads. “I don’t understand it. It just goes on and on.” The three brothers scowled in unison. Rina tugged at her strap again, then brushed back a lock of blond hair; her sister, Celia, planted her elbows on the table. One of Celia’s loose, dark tresses narrowly missed her bowl of soup. Junia sat back, folding her hands. Geraldo continued to eat. “A pity,” Antoine said in tragic tones.

  “It’s unbearable,” Lora said in an unusually harsh voice. “I imagine that, at this very moment, millions of people are enjoying this same soup. What is the point of having our own chef and our own exclusive recipe disks if we can’t keep them to ourselves and our invited guests?”

  “I am most sorry, madame,” Antoine said, gazing heavenward. “I shall create another soup, never fear. And there are still all the disks that remain. They far outnumber the purloined ones.”

  Lora glanced at him, suddenly irritated with his unhappy face. Gretchen Karell’s chef was a cheerful Chinese gentleman who could barely contain his joy at the sight of his sumptuous dishes, while Antoine’s seemed to bring him to the verge of tears. It was Gretchen who had left the message that morning, telling Lora that various food fanciers had suddenly acquired disks labeled Antoine Laval’s Cauliflower Soup. Lora had longed to reach toward the screen and slap Gretchen’s smug image. “Still tastes good,” Geraldo said as he finished.

  “Really!” Lora gazed balefully at her partner’s handsome but chubby face. “I simply can’t understand how you can so blithely enjoy a soup that anyone can have now. I’ve always prided myself on our unique cuisine, and now it seems that it’s becoming as common as dirt.”

  “I don’t know how the disk could have been stolen,” Junia said in her clear, sharp voice. “No one’s been in this house except us for at least a month, and the house would have warned us of any intrusion. You always had guests here when the others were taken.”

  Lora winced. She had done her best to get along with Junia, who was soon to be the partner of her son Roald, but the young woman was tactless. Junia had just pointed out what no one else at the table had wanted to mention—namely, that one of those present had to be the thief. That was the worst of it; Lora would have to be suspicious of her own family. Already, she was peering at each face, searching for signs of guilt, wondering who would be capable of such a deed. Her three sons stared back with the same bland look in their identical blue eyes. Her two daughters were once again plucking at their gowns and she nearly burst out with a reprimand, wanting to tell them to be still.

  Geraldo signaled to Antoine, who departed for the kitchen to prepare the next course. Geraldo could not have stolen the disk. He had a hearty appetite, but at the same time, he didn’t seem to care what he ate; it was one of his more disagreeable qualities. Lora tensed. Maybe that indifference made him more likely to steal. The treasured recipes did not mean that much to him, and he would enjoy them just as much no matter how many people had access to them. He was, she thought sadly, only a man of leisure at heart.

  Lora covered her eyes again, waiting for someone to take pity and blurt out a confession. She would forgive the lapse, she decided, but only after a truly abject apology. But when she looked up, the robots were already clearing away the soup bowls in preparation for the next course, and no one had spoken.

  “
I’d like to speak to you,” Lora said to the screen in her room. “Alone, please.”

  “Certainly,” the house replied. An image formed on the screen; a kindly, gray-bearded man was now staring out at her, a personification of the mind that ran the house. Lora had always been uneasy whenever she spoke to the disembodied voice of her house cybermind and preferred the friendly, human image.

  “We are now on a closed channel,” the house said as the man’s lips moved. “Please do go on.”

  “Who stole that disk?”

  “You know I can’t answer that. If I had known, I would have informed you of the fact.”

  “I thought you might have some ideas.”

  “I am completely in the dark.” The house chuckled at that; it was night outside. “I don’t watch the kitchen, you know.”

  “Show me the kitchen.”

  The man disappeared. She was now gazing at the kitchen, knowing that Antoine, who hated to be observed at work, was asleep in his bedroom.

  The room looked like any well-equipped kitchen. Inside one pantry shelf, thousands of disks were concealed behind the polished wood doors. Each disk, when inserted into the kitchen’s duplicator, would produce meat, fish, poultry, fresh fruits, vegetables, or other raw materials for Antoine to use in preparing a dish. Another shelf held disks with the patterns for wine and other beverages, and a third held spice and herb disks. There were cheese disks, cooking oil disks, butter disks. But in one corner, inside one special shelf, were Antoine’s own recipe disks, each containing the pattern for one of his creations.

  The duplicator itself, a tall, transparent column with metallic shelves jutting out from its sides, stood near one wall next to a disposal chute. Inside the chute, carried to it from other passages throughout the house’s walls, sat much of the household’s cast-off clothing, worn-out artifacts, garbage, trash, and dust—all of the materials needed for transmutation. When a disk was inserted into one of the duplicator’s slots, the chute would drop the necessary amount of debris into the column. The duplicator would glow as energy created by fusion poured into it and the debris, broken down into its constituent atoms, would be transformed, becoming a bottle of wine, a roasted chicken, or some other food, depending on the pattern stored on the disk. One could also imprint a pattern on a blank disk by slipping the small round platter into a slot above the shelf holding the object one intended to store.