by Jack Vance
Chrystal, looking amused and aloof, said, “I don’t know what’s going on either.”
They lifted the dekabrach, lowered him into the tank.
The water was about six inches deep, rising too slowly to suit Fletcher.
“Oxygen,” he called. Damon ran to the locker. Fletcher looked at Chrystal. “So you don’t know what I’m talking about?”
“Your pet fish dies; don’t try to pin it on me.”
Damon handed Fletcher a breather-tube from the oxygen tank; Fletcher thrust it into the water beside the dekabrach’s gills. Oxygen bubbled up; Fletcher agitated the water, urged it into the gill openings. The water was nine inches deep. “Sodium carbonate,” Fletcher said over his shoulder. “Enough to neutralize what’s left of the acid.”
Bevington asked in an uncertain voice, “Is it going to live?”
“I don’t know.”
Bevington squinted sidewise at Chrystal, who shook his head. “Don’t blame me.”
The water rose. The dekabrach’s arms lay limp, floating in all directions like Medusa locks.
Fletcher rubbed the sweat off his forehead. “If only I knew what to do! I can’t give it a shot of brandy; I’d probably poison it.”
The arms began to stiffen, extend. “Ah,” breathed Fletcher, “that’s better.” He beckoned to Damon. “Gene, take over here—keep the oxygen going into the gills.” He jumped to the floor where Murphy was flushing the area with buckets of water.
Chrystal was talking with great earnestness to Bevington. “I’ve gone in fear of my life these last three weeks! Fletcher is an absolute madman; you’d better send up for a doctor—or a psychiatrist.” He caught Fletcher’s eye, paused. Fletcher came slowly across the room. Chrystal returned to the inspector, whose expression was harassed Zand uneasy.
“I’m registering an official complaint,” said Chrystal. “Against Bio-Minerals in general and Sam Fletcher in particular. As a representative of the law, I insist that you place Fletcher under arrest for criminal offenses against my person.”
“Well,” said Bevington, cautiously glancing at Fletcher. “I’ll certainly make an investigation.”
“He kidnapped me at the point of a gun,” cried Chrystal. “He’s kept me locked up for three weeks!”
“To keep you from murdering the dekabrachs,” said Fletcher.
“That’s the second time you’ve said that,” Chrystal remarked ominously. “Bevington is a witness. You’re liable for slander.”
“Truth isn’t slander.”
“I’ve netted dekabrachs, so what? I also cut kelp and net coelacanths. You do the same.”
“The deks are intelligent. That makes a difference.” Fletcher turned to Bevington. “He knows it as well as I do. He’d process men for the calcium in their bones if he could make money at it!”
“You’re a liar!” cried Chrystal.
Bevington held up his hands. “Let’s have order here! I can’t get to the bottom of this unless someone presents facts.”
“He doesn’t have facts,” Chrystal insisted. “He’s trying to run my raft off of Sabria—can’t stand the competition!”
Fletcher ignored him. He said to Bevington, “You want facts. That’s why the dekabrach is in that tank, and that’s why Chrystal poured acid in on him.”
“Let’s get something straight,” said Bevington, giving Chrystal a hard stare. “Did you pour acid into that tank?”
Chrystal folded his arms. “The question is completely ridiculous.”
“Did you? No evasions now.”
Chrystal hesitated, then said firmly, “No. And there’s no vestige of proof that I did so.”
Bevington nodded. “I see.” He turned to Fletcher. “You spoke of facts. What facts?”
Fletcher went to the tank, where Damon still was swirling oxygenated water into the gills. “How’s he coming?”
Damon shook his head dubiously. “He’s acting peculiar. I wonder if the acid got him internally?”
Fletcher watched the long pale shape for a half minute. “Well, let’s try him. That’s all we can do.”
He crossed the room, wheeled the model dekabrach forward. Chrystal laughed, turned away in disgust. “What do you plan to demonstrate?” asked Bevington.
“I’m going to show you that the dekabrach is intelligent and is able to communicate.”
“Well, well,” said Bevington. “This is something new, is it not?”
“Correct.” Fletcher arranged his notebook.
“How did you learn his language?”
“It isn’t his—it’s a code we worked out between us.”
Bevington inspected the model, looked down at the notebook. “These are the signals?”
Fletcher explained the system. “He’s got a vocabulary of fifty-eight words, not counting numbers up to nine.”
“I see.” Bevington took a seat. “Go ahead. It’s your show.”
Chrystal turned. “I don’t have to watch this fakery.”
Bevington said, “You’d better stay here and protect your interests; if you don’t, no one else will.”
Fletcher moved the arms of the model. “This is admittedly a crude setup; with time and money we’ll work out something better. Now, I’ll start with numbers.”
Chrystal said contemptuously, “I could train a rabbit to count that way.”
“After a minute,” said Fletcher, “I’ll try something harder. I’ll ask who poisoned him.”
“Just a minute!” bawled Chrystal. “You can’t tie me up that way!”
Bevington reached for the notebook. “How will you ask? What signals do you use?”
Fletcher pointed them out. “First, interrogation. The idea of interrogation is an abstraction which the dek still doesn’t completely understand. We’ve established a convention of choice, or alternation, like, ‘which do you want?’ Maybe he’ll catch on what I’m after.”
“Very well—‘interrogation’. Then what?”
“Dekabrach—receive—hot—water. (‘Hot water’ is for acid.) Interrogation: Man—give—hot—water?”
Bevington nodded. “That’s fair enough. Go ahead.”
Fletcher worked the signals. The black eye-area watched.
Damon said anxiously, “He’s restless—very uneasy.”
Fletcher completed the signals. The dekabrach’s arms waved once or twice, gave a puzzled jerk.
Fletcher repeated the set of signals, added an extra ‘interrogation—man?’
The arms moved slowly. “‘Man’,” read Fletcher. Bevington nodded. “Man. But which man?”
Fletcher said to Murphy, “Stand in front of the tank.” And he signaled, “Man—give—hot—water—interrogation.”
The dekabrach’s arms moved. “‘Null-zero’,” read Fletcher. “No. Damon—step in front of the tank.” He signaled the dekabrach. “Man—give—hot—water—interrogation.”
“‘Null’.”
Fletcher turned to Bevington. “You stand in front of the tank.” He signaled.
“‘Null’.”
Everyone looked at Chrystal. “Your turn,” said Fletcher. “Step forward, Chrystal.”
Chrystal came slowly forward, “I’m not a chump, Fletcher. I can see through your gimmick.”
The dekabrach was moving its arms. Fletcher read the signals, Bevington looking over his shoulder at the notebook.
“‘Man—give—hot—water.’”
Chrystal started to protest. Bevington quieted him. “Stand in front of the tank, Chrystal.” To Fletcher: “Ask once again.”
Fletcher signaled. The dekabrach responded. “‘Man—give—hot—water. Yellow. Man. Sharp. Come. Give—hot—water. Go.’”
There was silence in the laboratory.
“Well,” said Bevington flatly, “I think you’ve made your case, Fletcher.”
“You’re not going to get me that easy,” said Chrystal.
“Quiet,” rasped Bevington. “It’s clear enough what’s happened—”
“It’s cl
ear what’s going to happen,” said Chrystal in a voice husky with rage. He was holding Fletcher’s gun. “I secured this before I came up here—and it looks as if—” he raised the gun toward the tank, squinted, his big white hand tightened on the trigger. Fletcher’s heart went dead and cold.
“Hey!” shouted Murphy.
Chrystal jerked. Murphy threw his bucket; Chrystal fired at Murphy, missed. Damon jumped at him, Chrystal swung the gun. The white-hot jet pierced Damon’s shoulder. Damon, screaming like a hurt horse, wrapped his bony arms around Chrystal. Fletcher and Murphy closed in, wrested away the gun, locked Chrystal’s arms behind him.
Bevington said grimly, “You’re in trouble now, Chrystal, even if you weren’t before.”
Fletcher said, “He’s killed hundreds and hundreds of the deks. Indirectly he killed Carl Raight and John Agostino. He’s got a lot to answer for.”
The replacement crew had moved down to the raft from the LG-19. Fletcher, Damon, Murphy and the rest of the old crew sat in the mess hall, six months of leisure ahead of them.
Damon’s left arm hung in a sling; with his right he fiddled with his coffee cup. “I don’t quite know what I’ll be doing. I have no plans. The fact is, I’m rather up in the air.”
Fletcher went to the window, looked out across the dark scarlet ocean. “I’m staying on.”
“What?” cried Murphy. “Did I hear you right?”
Fletcher came back to the table. “I can’t understand it myself.”
Murphy shook his head in total lack of comprehension. “You can’t be serious.”
“I’m an engineer, a working man,” said Fletcher. “I don’t have a lust for power, or any desire to change the universe—but it seems as if Damon and I set something into motion—something important—and I want to see it through.”
“You mean, teaching the deks to communicate?”
“That’s right. Chrystal attacked them, forced them to protect themselves. He revolutionized their lives. Damon and I revolutionized the life of this one dek in an entirely new way. But we’ve just started. Think of the potentialities! Imagine a population of men in a fertile land—men like ourselves except that they never learned to talk. Then someone gives them contact with a new universe—an intellectual stimulus like nothing they’d ever experienced. Think of their reactions, their new attack on life! The deks are in that same position—except that we’ve just started with them. It’s anybody’s guess what they’ll achieve—and somehow I want to be part of it. Even if I didn’t, I couldn’t leave with the job half-done.”
Damon said suddenly, “I think I’ll stay on, too.”
“You two have gone stir-crazy,” said Jones. “I can’t get away fast enough.”
The LG-19 had been gone three weeks; operations had become routine aboard the raft. Shift followed shift; the bins began to fill with new ingots, new blocks of precious metal.
Fletcher and Damon had worked long hours with the dekabrach; today would see the great experiment.
The tank was hoisted to the edge of the dock.
Fletcher signaled once again his final message. “Man show you signals. You bring many dekabrachs, man show signals. Interrogation.”
The arms moved in assent. Fletcher backed away; the tank was hoisted, lowered over the side, submerged.
The dekabrach floated up, drifted a moment near the surface, slid down into the dark water.
“There goes Prometheus,” said Damon, “bearing the gift of the gods.”
“Better call it the gift of gab,” said Fletcher grinning.
The pale shape had vanished from sight. “Ten gets you fifty he won’t be back,” Caldur, the new superintendent, offered them.
“I’m not betting,” said Fletcher, “just hoping.”
“What will you do if he doesn’t come back?”
Fletcher shrugged. “Perhaps net another, teach him. After a while it’s bound to take hold.”
Three hours went by. Mists began to close in; rains blurred the sky.
Damon, peering over the side, looked up. “I see a dek. But is it our dek?”
A dekabrach came to the surface. It moved its arms. “Many—dekabrachs. Show—signals.”
“Professor Damon,” said Fletcher, “your first class.”
Afterword to “The Gift of Gab”
I don’t want [the early stories] to disappear, exactly, but I wish I wasn’t reminded of them. They represent a process of learning the trade, so to speak. A good analogy might be this: suppose you were trying to learn oil painting. You’d start in by making lots of botches. You might come up with a recognizable tree, maybe, or a cat, or something of that sort…and then later in your life someone would rummage among these early productions and perhaps remark, for lack of anything better to say: “What a charming cat that is!” or “This particular thing has a nice airy quality about it.”
Of course by this time you’d be trying something more advanced, and you’d only be conscious of the flaws in the early pieces…how crooked the cat’s tail is…I re-read one of my early stories the other day, and the style now seems rather—well, journalistic.
—Jack Vance 1977
The Miracle Workers
Chapter I
The war party from Faide Keep moved eastward across the downs: a column of a hundred armored knights, five hundred foot soldiers, a train of wagons. In the lead rode Lord Faide, a tall man in his early maturity, spare and catlike, with a sallow dyspeptic face. He sat in the ancestral car of the Faides, a boat-shaped vehicle floating two feet above the moss, and carried, in addition to his sword and dagger, his ancestral side weapons.
An hour before sunset a pair of scouts came racing back to the column, their club-headed horses loping like dogs. Lord Faide braked the motion of his car. Behind him the Faide kinsmen, the lesser knights, the leather-capped foot soldiers halted; to the rear the baggage train and the high-wheeled wagons of the jinxmen creaked to a stop.
The scouts approached at breakneck speed, at the last instant flinging their horses sidewise. Long shaggy legs kicked out, padlike hooves plowed through the moss. The scouts jumped to the ground, ran forward. “The way to Ballant Keep is blocked!”
Lord Faide rose in his seat, stood staring eastward over the gray-green downs. “How many knights? How many men?”
“No knights, no men, Lord Faide. The First Folk have planted a forest between North and South Wildwood.”
Lord Faide stood a moment in reflection, then seated himself, pushed the control knob. The car wheezed, jerked, moved forward. The knights touched up their horses; the foot soldiers resumed their slouching gait. At the rear the baggage train creaked into motion, together with the six wagons of the jinxmen.
The sun, large, pale and faintly pink, sank in the west. North Wildwood loomed down from the left, separated from South Wildwood by an area of stony ground, only sparsely patched with moss. As the sun passed behind the horizon, the new planting became visible: a frail new growth connecting the tracts of woodland like a canal between two seas.
Lord Faide halted his car, stepped down to the moss. He appraised the landscape, then gave the signal to make camp. The wagons were ranged in a circle, the gear unloaded. Lord Faide watched the activity for a moment, eyes sharp and critical, then turned and walked out across the downs through the lavender and green twilight. Fifteen miles to the east his last enemy awaited him: Lord Ballant of Ballant Keep. Contemplating tomorrow’s battle, Lord Faide felt reasonably confident of the outcome. His troops had been tempered by a dozen campaigns; his kinsmen were loyal and single-hearted. Head Jinxman to Faide Keep was Hein Huss, and associated with him were three of the most powerful jinxmen of Pangborn: Isak Comandore, Adam McAdam and the remarkable Enterlin, together with their separate troupes of cabalmen, spellbinders and apprentices. Altogether, an impressive assemblage. Certainly there were obstacles to be overcome: Ballant Keep was strong; Lord Ballant would fight obstinately; Anderson Grimes, the Ballant Head Jinxman, was efficient and highly respected. There
was also this nuisance of the First Folk and the new planting which closed the gap between North and South Wildwood. The First Folk were a pale and feeble race, no match for human beings in single combat, but they guarded their forests with traps and deadfalls. Lord Faide cursed softly under his breath. To circle either North or South Wildwood meant a delay of three days, which could not be tolerated.
Lord Faide returned to the camp. Fires were alight, pots bubbled, orderly rows of sleep-holes had been dug into the moss. The knights groomed their horses within the corral of wagons; Lord Faide’s own tent had been erected on a hummock, beside the ancient car.
Lord Faide made a quick round of inspection, noting every detail, speaking no word. The jinxmen were encamped a little distance apart from the troops. The apprentices and lesser spellbinders prepared food, while the jinxmen and cabalmen worked inside their tents, arranging cabinets and cases, correcting whatever disorder had been caused by the jolting of the wagons.
Lord Faide entered the tent of his Head Jinxman. Hein Huss was an enormous man, with arms and legs heavy as tree trunks, a torso like a barrel. His face was pink and placid, his eyes were water-clear; a stiff gray brush rose from his head, which was innocent of the cap jinxmen customarily wore against the loss of hair. Hein Huss disdained such precautions: it was his habit, showing his teeth in a face-splitting grin, to rumble, “Why should anyone hoodoo me, old Hein Huss? I am so inoffensive. Whoever tried would surely die, of shame and remorse.”
Lord Faide found Huss busy at his cabinet. The doors stood wide, revealing hundreds of mannikins, each tied with a lock of hair, a bit of cloth, a fingernail clipping, daubed with grease, sputum, excrement, blood. Lord Faide knew well that one of these mannikins represented himself. He also knew that should he request it Hein Huss would deliver it without hesitation. Part of Huss’ mana derived from his enormous confidence, the effortless ease of his power. He glanced at Lord Faide and read the question in his mind. “Lord Ballant did not know of the new planting. Anderson Grimes has now informed him, and Lord Ballant expects that you will be delayed. Grimes has communicated with Gisborne Keep and Castle Cloud. Three hundred men march tonight to reinforce Ballant Keep. They will arrive in two days. Lord Ballant is much elated.”
