Sci Fiction Classics Volume 3

by Vol 3 (v1. 2) (epub)

  And question for question, each completes an Omni on the other. Theoretically, that places each in an equal position of knowledge and appraises bargaining power on an above-the-board basis. Actually, since we designed it, along with the stock answers, and have refined the Staff Evaluation procedure from an art down to a science, we always come out on top. Equity is a pretty concept, but depth psychology, followed by military analysis and augmented by power on any level—from religious through economic—gives us our small advantages without disturbing the senates.

  Like a bad connection on hyperphone came the ambisexual answers:

  Good morning. We are servants. We serve. Our owners/rulers lay eggs. We are omnivorous. We are intelligent. We do not need anything. Our owners/rulers give us all. What do you want?

  And on it rolled. To all our key questions: We do not do that/know that/need that. Our owners/rulers do that/know that/do not need that.

  They told us all about themselves. A dedicated entomologist would have been in a Moslem paradise of the mind over the interview, as was our dedicated entomologist, Dave Bolton.

  "Please," said he, "ask them if they see this polaroid flash—"

  "Shh!" said I, who supervised. "Later."

  Was I detecting a beartrap in the flowerbed of their cooperation?—We want to be helpful, but darn it! sir, we just do not know the answer to that one. Etc.

  Do not suggest, I wrote on a slip of paper, that we speak with their masters. Wait and see if they offer.

  I placed the note before Scarle, hoping that the act of reading it would keep him from transmitting the thought. I waited to see.

  They offered.

  Scarle turned to me.

  "Tell them we must confer," I answered. "Ask where the masters are, what they are like, why they did not come themselves—and ask if they suggested we send you."

  "Me?"

  "You."

  He asked, and they told us they would have to confer.

  Yes, they finally acknowledged, as a matter of fact their rulers (who lived in eternal night) had mentioned that we could send them our only paraling if anything needed clarification. Did we care to?

  "Tell them yes," I said, "but not today. We need to confer some more."

  That afternoon we Staff Evaluated a very sketchy Omni.

  We decided, after an intrepid imaginative foray, that the rulers were similar to ant queens and did not like to leave the nest. Our mission was to get an Omni on the Butcher, evaluate it, and write a recommendation, so we had to go see them if they would not come to us. We wanted to set up safeguards, though, so Scarle spent the night learning the depressive neuroses Hale said he could retreat into to protect his sanity if the going got rough.

  "Quite against the rules, we also armed ourselves to the teeth," I said to Hale, "and then armed our teeth with the little glass capsules I almost got to taste. You didn't know about those."

  "I had guessed, of course," he snorted. "There was nothing wrong with my neuroses, though. I gave him the best ones I had in stock."

  "I'm sure he appreciated that," I answered, pouring him a drink. "Do you believe the legend of King Solomon's ring?"

  "Well, archetypically—"

  "Archetypes, hell! Do you believe the story?"

  "Yes, it has many levels of non-conscious meaning."

  "Well, step over to my level for a minute and answer the question. Forget the psych-structure stuff. Can one intelligence control another by non-physical means?"

  "Charisma," he stated, "is a peculiar phenomenon. Many factors are generally operative."

  "Have another drink and swallow your charisma along with it. I'm talking about parapsych stuff. If a paraling can send and receive thoughts and feelings, why not more than that?"

  "Commands?" he asked. "Parahypnotics? That can be accomplished, under special circumstances."

  "I was thinking more along the lines of a lightning bolt fusing sand in its own image."

  I started to pour again.

  "No," he declined it, "psychologists just get drunk, but psychiatrists get drunk and break things. What are you driving at with all this?"

  "The Ring works both ways."

  It does, Lisa. More than just translation. That first dim day in the caves Scarle ended a thirty-second exchange, and the steno threw down his transcriber.

  "I cannot record," he said.

  "What's wrong?" I asked.

  "The hum-box isn't working right. I'm not getting voices, or even concepts."

  "What are you getting?"

  "A very beautiful humming sound—it's like a piece of music—an emotional synopsis of something. Don't ask me what."

  I didn't. I asked Scarle. Angry at having been lulled into a pleasant lethargy myself, I shook off the spell and called out.

  "What's going on?"

  "Shh!"

  I groped for his shoulder in the murk, but his whisper had no direction, and he was nowhere near the machine.

  "Lights!" I called. But before I called it, I thought it.

  There was a sound like someone scrubbing concrete with a hard-bristled brush, and our beams exploded in all directions.

  We humans were alone, and Scarle. He leaned against the wall of the tunnel about ten feet in advance of our party, and he was smiling. I repeated my question.

  "Nothing," he answered. "Nothing's going on now. I wish you hadn't turned on the lights. You broke the agreement."

  "I was not anxious to become anything's breakfast," I told him. "What were you doing?"

  "I was telling her how I looted the Moonstone in mid-flight."

  "You pulled that one."

  "I did."

  "Why were you telling them about it?"

  "Because I was asked. It was in my memory, and a fuller explanation of the principle of illicit appropriation was desired."

  I remember that I whistled then—in order to keep myself from doing anything else.

  "That is not exactly Omni material," I said softly.

  "No, but I was asked …"

  "Why?"

  "She was curious as to the pleasure linked with the thoughts."

  "She?"

  "Yes, a female. You were right about queens."

  "An ant?"

  "I guess so."

  "Why won't she let us see her?"

  "I believe the light bothers her eyes."

  "The whole thing smells. I want a full report on this X after we get back to the ship, but let's get back fast. I don't like it here."

  He smiled and shrugged, and I checked the ampule, but he had not taken an overdose.

  Later, I asked him again.

  "They want to know how to loot a spaceship?"

  "No." He leaned back in a recliner, blowing smoke rings. "She only wondered about the pleasure associations."

  "So what did you tell her?"

  "Nothing. I just let her look at my mind."

  "Then what did she say?"

  "Nothing, she seemed satisfied."

  "Why were the pleasure associations there?"

  He smiled slightly.

  "I enjoy stealing. Especially when I can get away with it."

  "Unfortunately," I replied, "that tells me more about you than it does about the ants."

  "You asked me a question. I answered it."

  "What came next?"

  "That's all. You turned on the lights."

  "That's not much."

  "I didn't turn on the lights."

  "Okay," I growled. "How come Brown couldn't record?"

  "We were using a form of mental shorthand."

  "Where did you learn it?"

  "I just sort of fell into it today. They're natural paralings."

  "That, in itself, is a valuable commodity. We'll have to investigate it, along with the Omni stuff."

  "I agree. Next time don't turn on the lights, though."

  "All right, mister. But no more professional advice on space piracy."

  "No more," he promised.

  So we went back i
nto the underground cities of the Butcher, guided by belt sonar and five-watt flicker buttons, to mine the minds of the ants.

  Brown was still unable to record anything; under hypnosis he could recall the transmission sensations, but nothing else. We had to rely on Scarle for the reports, and after about a week and a half I was no longer sure we were getting them.

  "Scarle, have you been editing your reports?"

  "No."

  "Would you care to verify that under drugs?"

  "You calling me a liar?"

  "Perhaps."

  "Okay, give me some drugs," he laughed.

  Then the thought occurred to me (maybe he had sent it when he laughed) that the drugs would not prove anything. He had built up a resistance to most of the hypnotics while in training; they just made his mind shift gears.

  "Forget it," I told him.

  "I already have," he agreed.

  What we really needed was another paraling to check on the paraling we already had.

  Scarle's reports showed us the picture of a giant ant-colony ruled in the classic monolithic manner. Its structure seemed one of low workers, middle workers, upper workers, warriors, consorts, and queens. It was an agrarian culture which had never developed a single tool, relying rather upon classes of physically specialized individuals for the accomplishment of work. It was based on a matriarchal concept which permeated its religion in a manner similar (I think) to the old Egyptian notion of the Pharoahs' divine descendency.

  I emptied the little coffee pot into the tiny cups, motioned to the waiter to bring us another, and looked out across the sunken gardens of Luna at the mossy ball shaping the Americas above the great dome: Europe rolling away, Andalusia teasing memories from my mind, and the Gulf beginning to drip salt on sore places, Lisa. By the way, by the time you receive this billy-do, my dear, I will no longer be here, but there, and winging guess where?

  "Both ways?" Hale asked me, a perplexed expression dodging about the Eiffel Tower.

  I turned back, nodding.

  "Yes, I suspected it after Scarle's reports started sounding as if I were reading the same report over and over. I asked myself what he could possibly be covering up, or stalling for. Then I decided maybe he wasn't."

  "That's why you wanted to X it yourself?"

  "Correct," I acknowledged. "Which is why I requisitioned a paraling drug kit from your cabin."

  "Which is why our pinochle game got interrupted by a bellyache."

  "Yes, I paid the comm man to get sick."

  "An unsupervised X by a non-p.l. is never without its dangers."

  "So I'd heard, but that's why Personnel is full of ex-Guardsmen—to sponge up the puddles of trouble before someone steps in them."

  "Or turn them into lakes," he reflected. "So what about Scarle? What did happen?"

  "Like the report says, he went off his rocker and tried to kill us all. I had to shoot him in self-defense."

  "Do you remember doing it?"

  "Sort of … Anyway, that's what the report says."

  He surrounded me.

  "You were inside his mind." Each word weighed equal to its neighbor.

  "Yes, it's all in the report."

  "And you were with him at the time he became unbalanced."

  "That's right."

  "And you came away thinking you were Scarle, after you had killed him."

  "That also is correct. The report said it was a neurotic identification brought on because I was cathecting at the onset of trauma."

  "I know; I wrote it. But I'm seldom happy just to stick a label on something, and that's what I did. It's been over two months now, and I may not see you again for a long while. I'd like to reexamine my diagnosis before we say good-bye."

  "Okay, we're both in a condition where I can tell you what really happened and blame it on the drinks if you ever ask me again."

  So I told him. Do you remember that water cruise we took a couple of years ago, on Jansen, and that one island we stopped at, the one where you talked me into playing a limbo game with the kids? I was bending over backwards to please, and I fell flat on my backside in the process, but I made a more memorable impression than if I had succeeded. I know Hale did not believe the entire story—I could hear his gears grinding—but he was impressed. More than I had anticipated.

  I told him how I had accompanied Scarle back into the lands beneath the land that day, swinging along to a monomaniac Guard marching tune calculated to assure mental privacy. I had washed out of Circle training in the second month myself, because of a concept-blurring tendency. I am sure you are not aware that I had even attempted it (I probably did it because of the name), and I could see Hale recalling my personnel record and seizing upon it as an explanation for my story—an explanation for what had really saved me. He was wrong, but it did not matter. He still believed much of what I said.

  Nearly anybody can achieve a percentage of X under optimum conditions; I always can, and it is higher than average. This time it was sufficient.

  The nimbus of our flicker-lights was not a far-reaching thing, consequently the Queried (?), as always, remained a part of the darkness. Like a shaded Medusa, she hovered before us, and we could feel her presence and sense her exchanges with Scarle. The voices of winds and grasses and the sounds of cellars and the cries of high cables and the monotonous commenting of seashells buzzed at the bottom of our auditory threshold and worked occasional fractured multiwords, without genuine context. An illicit and indefinable feeling of not being wanted crept through me as I prepared the injection.

  "… Not take … les nourritures (?) … sadly … and stealing, Romany (?) … go … all things-pause-corpus meum … why? Brigand from the stars … perhaps—"

  And my head swam and I was inside and no one had noticed and the night was cool.

  I stood there feeling like a photographic negative of Scarle. Object rained upon subject, a plethora of stimuli waterfall upon my mind, but I kept my mind quiet. Perhaps it was the intensity of the communication that caused them to overlook my presence. I eased into Scarle's mind and read there the fascination with what is impossible.

  Whatever it was in the tunnel, it was not a giant ant in Scarle's mind/my mind. We were talking with a lovely, yellow-tressed young lady who reminded me of yourself, Lisa, and she was obviously fascinated with our person. We were linked with a host of criminal concepts only recently learned in the society of the tunnels and never before encountered on an intimate basis. She was in love with Scarle/me/us, and her sadness was great.

  "I cannot do to you," she said, "what I did with the others; and you, more than any of them, are that which threatens us. If Earth prevails here, as it has on Malmson, Bareth, and the other worlds you have visited, we will be as doomed as they. Yet, you have lived by their principle of thievery, and I cannot hate you for it. Let us talk of other things and postpone our final conflict. Tell me again of your looting days …"

  It was not then that the part of Scarle that was me suddenly got the shakes and was noticed. It was a moment later, when my nervous introspecting revealed that we/I(?) returned the creature's sentiments. Then it was all over in a surrealistic kaleidoscope that I watched through more eyes than I care to count.

  The Ring works both ways. Or Rings. She wore the stronger one. Ours was a candybox imitation.

  Communication was an incidental virtue of Solomon's ring, remember? Its main function was the controlling of malevolent entities, of bending their actions to the wearer's will, of impressing their wills with commands like hot irons …

  She seized Scarle's/my/our mixed emotions, backing the assault.

  "Kill them all!" came the order.

  I guess Brown was the first to sense what was happening, because he flicked on a light beam.

  And she stood there, flinching at the light—a gigantic, rainbow-winged gargoyle, with antennae like black seaweed surfaced on a stormlit ocean crest.

  That is doubtless what saved us all. Despite the command, Scarle and I were frozen by
the shock of seeing—of seeing the truth that your symbol had concealed, as the music was torn from our mind by the light, and the order roaring again after the flash, like a thunder-clap:

  "Kill them!"

  That was when we went mad. I saw Scarle through my eyes and the cathedral windows of her eyes, and myself through that same colored glass and Scarle's eyes, and I/we saw her, both, and we obeyed the command.

  There was gunfire, and I dropped down the pipe of a titanic organ, vibrating to something that I might have been able to recognize if I had had the time to listen.

  The time passed, and one day I could hear again.

  The command had worked divisively. Although Scarle and I had been one in mind, the ordered "Kill them!" had affected two separate nervous systems, and I beat him to the draw. It was that simple, although I do not remember doing it.

  I collapsed from the psychic drain before I could kill anyone else; or possibly it had been the light that slowed her, or the sudden death of Scarle. She lost her control, retreated; and the crew retreated, both bearing their casualties.

  In that brief time when our mind(s) were flooded, refuge for sanity was found in the mental foxholes Hale had dug. I crouched beneath neurotic breakwalls, communicating with Oedipus of things long ago and far away in the streets of Fenster. I was alternately depressed or elated as my fathers beat me or bought me candy, and always resentful, and always Scarle, and always wanting to know what they were thinking so I could know which way to jump, and always wanting to make them like me even though I hated their guts, and always, Lisa, I remembered mother and the thirteenth card of the Major Arcana—the Bony Reaper, Death—whom I feared most of all but had to challenge every day in order to be big and not need anybody, and he was the navigator of the Steel Eel, but I was the captain.

  It took more than a month for me to begin being myself again, but differently. Scarle, the man who had enjoyed stealing whenever he could get away with it, would have been pleased with his last theft. He had stolen part of my mind and left me a portion of his, in passing. He took with him a measure of my devotion to the policies of the Circle, and he left me with a calculated, antisocial quality which I have decided is a virtue.